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Japanese toilet paper includes QR codes

Who though you could place advertisement on any printable surface is right. We’ve seen ads on toilet paper, napkins, table cloth, even that dirty bit of fake nylon tissue on your air plane seat is used to communicate the benefits of a travel insurance. But that’s not all. Media agencies, ad agencies, and apparently airlines push the boundaries to sell any surface to the highest bidder. And they recently sold your ticket.

Ryanair is currently experimenting with adding advertisement to your home printed airline ticket. Not a big deal maybe… it’s nothing more than just something like a web banner. A small square next to the barcode BUT there IS actually more to it.

They are not JUST adding advertisement but they’ll add customized advertisement based on your profile. Your travel information will give the airline the power to adjust the advertisement to your ‘needs’ so to say. Whether you are a boy or a girl, whether you fly to London or Oslo, whether you are 18 or 43. This personal data will be shared and sold.

It’s a very smart way of offering your data to the market. “And since you are cheap flying with us, you will be more willing to buy whatever we offer”, Ryanair must have been thinking, selling your info. Shouting BUY ME, VALUE FOR MONEY or NEW AND IMPROVED on the plane ticket will increase any sales … right? Or might it make us more and more blind to any commercial message? Does an overkill on advertisement evoke a blind spot?

Blind spots on Time Square

Unless they are smart … so please mr. ad campaign use that ticket well …

The better creative ads you can find here.

The End of the Homepage

Image by budcaddell via Flickr

The first public homepage back in 1992 must have looked a bit like this W3C page. This new way of publishing your message brought us a complete shift in information culture. But will Social Media eventually kill the homepage?

Recently serious publications dare to announce the end of the brand website as we know them. We quote Graham Hodge, branded content director at digital agency LBi:

Within budgetary constraints, marketers should not perceive an ‘either-or’ situation. ‘There is certainly plenty of life in brand websites, especially if you enjoy a transactional relationship with your customers,’ he adds. ‘However, it is naive to invest a lot of money in a destination website and not support it with activity that engages audiences out there, where they spend the bulk of their time online.

Should this be a sign to all developers? If Coca Cola, Nike, Audi are putting less effort in trying to get people to their branded content sites, why make your own little information isles? Are they about to be extinct? Forgotten by the on line consumers and neglected by content developers?

A fact of life is that anybody can only hold up some many websites and information channels. Companies struggle to feed their company website, campaign websites, blog posts, twitter feeds, facebook pages with up-to-date and relevant content. It is no more than logical that the static website will lose. Or do you still see the social media as a hype?

Based on the latest news from Brand Republic.

Related articles

• The Sweet Success Of A Facebook Campaign [Ogilvy Interview] (thenextweb.com)
• Youtube Homepage As It Was Meant To Be Userscript (ghacks.net)
• Social Media Tracking Made Simple (socialmediatoday.com)

How Marketers use Social Media in 2010

Below an overview of what marketers do with social media in this year. How will it be in 2011?

Flowtown – Social Media Marketing Application

The days of using a mouse and keyboard are coming to an end!

Image via Wikipedia

When i first saw a mouse it was at an office equipent exhibition in Amsterdam (many of you weren’t even born then). I remember it well. It was on the Xerox stand and we all stared in awe. Most of us had no idea that we were watching the future and that soon it would be the default part of any personal computer. The video i have included may be just a similar moment in time. Showing us the new concept of interfacing with computers in a three dimensional way. View it and some time you may reminisce like i did above!

Free Value

Image by marc0047 via Flickr

Products that are ‘free’ or ‘gratis’ have no value to the consumer. It’s a trial, a one-off that is not interesting, not appealing and too easy to get. Being given or handed out to the consumer makes it even more ludicrous.

Still …

Clients want to give their product away. ‘Free sample’, ‘Free entrance’, ‘Free newspaper’.

I’m the last to fight the fact that free stuff does work in some occasions but please …

Who needs screens anyway!

Image by antjeverena via Flickr

Light Touch by Light Blue Optics.

We might not want screens in the near future. Great for augmented reality. Now what can we do with this technology fellow marketing monkeys? Every day a new challenge, yessss!

Home telepresence

CES: Cisco shows home telepresence.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

You better not wear your PJ’s when you pick up the “phone” next year.

The next step is holograms of the people we talk to. Or can we use our avatar in case we look like sh*t?

Kiss the principle

Image by “lapolab” via Flickr

Every 1 out of 5 clients offer you a brief and end it with the acronym: K.I.S.S.. Likely they add words like result, target, goal. and ROI. “OMG – There we go again, headache!”

Reading K.I.S.S. in the brief used to put me off … “Excuse me! You don’t want my fantastic new and never-seen-before ideas? You don’t want me to be truly creative and rock the consumer’s world?” It feels like the worst repulsive thing to tell a creative director to keep it simple and STUPID. When a brief said explicitly K.I.S.S. I replied: “my ass. “I didn’t want the job. Simply because I didn’t believe K.I.S.S. would lead to better results. I believe in Engagement in Discovery. I want to treat the consumer as smart, able to think, and digest a message.

Maybe it’s age or weariness. Since a year or so I’m following K.I.S.S. as well without rebellion. Two mandatory reasons:

Budget redesign

Image via Wikipedia

Social media, search engine optimization, e-mail marketing, adwords,……… What is the impact on your business? But another question is, What impact does it have on the allocation of funds within your budget? Just adding people to use the new technologies in your favor is probably not an option. Something has to give. In most organizations the amount that can be invested in marketing communication and in other marketing responsibilities (research, product development) will not be allowed to grow. What will the marketing department have to give up in order to invest in the future? You can’t have it all mister marketing manager!

Again the necessity of spending a lot of attention on accountability of everything marketing is investing money on will be key to deciding on what to keep and what to cut or spend less on. A redistribution of funds, for people and the rest, is necessary.

Try to define for your own organization what is the least successful investment and swap it for new, more innovative ways of creating value and letting people know about it.

Gert-Jan Scheers