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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.

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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 …

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:

The Avatar Effect

Image via CrunchBase

Online communication is focused on getting people to click, participate and –in the end– buy our product. With this old school approach we fail to use the knowledge on click behavior. This click behavior makes the online user leaving a digital footprint which is larger than life, countable and reliable. I call it the Avatar Effect.

So what is the Avatar Effect and how can we use it?

To answer the last question first; how can we use it? Officially we can’t but for sure bright people can build in tracking systems, secret click counts, by-passes and hacks to research and use this ending source of information.
I even used it once in a silly little DM mailing to potential clients in the fashion industry. They received a DVD with a promo on how to become a better and stronger brand in 6 essential questions. The last screen was built to send us a hidden message notifying our sales manager that this client was watching the DVD. Only because we were the answer to that last question. Six out of the ten we called  invited Artmiks for a talk.

Listed

Image by Toni Barros via Flickr

Being in a social network is no longer enough: being listed is the new thing.

We came from push content in web 1.0 and power to the user in 2.0. With ‘lists’ we’re kinda going back to the content phase. With the rapid growth of useless information the user is urging to find relative content. Try to find: Dolly (Parton) on Google and you’ll be able to search for years through the 21 million results. Do the same at Delicious.com and you will not only have less results (only 4,000+) you will also be able to downsize those results by sharpening the search by adding tags. Users are getting fed up with search even though they don’t want anything else. As using Semantic Search does make it easier to find better results users are not finding their way to these engines since they require some basic knowledge and –mind you– will power to find what you want.

Transfering Conventional

Browsing through the net I hit the NZ blog called WhoisJohnLai.com talking about U2 streaming Youtube collaboration. Apparently there was a live broadcast in New Zealand of a U2 show.

Does Conventional Television still play a part in our society ?

Image by eqqman via Flickr

He asks his readers. My question would be: What are we looking at here? It’s still a screen. It’s still a linear story  with a start and an end. It’s still not clickable. The only new thing here is I’m not comfortably hanging on the sofa with my partner crawling against me or feeling the Mega Bass beating my ears at the stadium. Isn’t it only a transfer of conventional Television?

The New Human

I gave a 5 minute update at one of the IPAN (Interactive Professionals Association Netherlands) evenings. The evening –led by Jacqueline Smit (Microsoft)– was about the continuous conflict between online and traditional agencies.

To explain the situation I introduced the New Human. The New Human is NOT hanging in front of a TV watching a continuous stream of mindless soaps. The Old Human has evolved.

You can clearly recognize four characteristics of the New Human in the following four leading web concepts.

Banner Insights

Image by oddsock via Flickr

You think anno 2009 ad agencies would know how to communicate online. But – this week’s experience – it’s far from reality. Art directors of ad agencies really have no clue of online marketing communication and the insights of visitor behaviours. Personally I feel they should either get educated or be banned from this responsibility. I almost smashed my iPhone against my table of anger.

Therefore I came up with the idea to write some basic rules and behaviours for a good banner after a clash with a ‘world famous’ agency, although this blog is meant to be about online marketing above online communication. SO – Here they are …

Buying Platforms

Image via Wikipedia

Been presenting on line concepts to several bigger clients like Nike Europe, Tommy Hilfiger and Kluwer. I talked about the impact of a free use of the internet and how to infiltrate existing platforms like Twitter.  The confusion is the same with all marketers: “How do we reach our potential target group with no money?” I reply with the same question: “How much money do you spend on traditonal media like tv and print?” The key is not to spend it on split seconds of attention but on full minutes or even hours of engagement.

I’ve found this interesting and extremely good explanation by Seth Godin. The new way of marketing is not to rent eyeballs but to get people on board of our platform. For this we need to 1) buy a platform, and to 2) make sure people join. Read his full story on his great blog.

Compared to the cost of renting eyeballs, buying a platform is cheap. Filling it with people eager to hear from you… that’s the expensive part. But if you don’t invest in the platform, you’ll be at a disadvantage, now and forever. The smart way to build a brand today is to invest in the elements of the platform… the product, the technology, the websites (plural) and the systems you need to make it easy for people to show up at your very own trade show. And then embrace these people and shoot for 90% conversion, not .5%.

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