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.

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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Flowtown – Social Media Marketing Application

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!

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 … Stop trashing your own desirable product that you have been lovingly worked on to develop, design, assemble, produce and distribute. The energy you’ve put into it DOES resemble value. People DO want to pay for it.

The fact that people have to pay to get it makes it rewardable and therefor will automatically raise the value of the product.

In the new economy pushed by the internet where almost everything is ‘free’ or at least cheaper, the consumer reached the level of disbelieve and mistrust towards this way of ‘selling’ a product. It’s either “low quality” or “Somebody has to pay for this and it’ll probably me.”

Trust and desire comes with the payment.

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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!

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?

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:

1 Listen
First of all, I learned to listen to my client. He IS actually in the middle of his target group. He knows them best, has all the facts and figures and knows all about his own product. Difficult but good is to bear in mind that you (me) do not know everything. Adding a direction or solution that is awkward to the branch does make a difference –and not just literally– but 99 out of 100 will fail just because of that.

2 Believe
Second. I used to promote the opposite: make it as difficult as can be to reach a higher engagement. People (consumers alike) want to solve things. If there’s a puzzle people want to know the pieces and put it back together. It’s natural. Once solved they don’t want to throw it away but keep it and show it to everybody.

Why did I and Where did I start to believe this was not the only solution?

With the extending usage of digital information there’s a significant increase of capacity to memorize things like phone numbers, addresses or even the names of your friends children. Names of cities and states, the amount of inhabitants of Moscow, the freezing point of Helium, the year that Kennedy got killed; we like to Google it. We use navigation to get home, and translators to speak a foreign language.

Though this is quite human; we don’t like to work physically but apparently neither do we like to work mentally.

This lecture by David Rock is a true eye opener. In the first 5 minutes he already shows you why you should put effort in K.I.S.S.. People don’t want to find out themselves, they want to dream on and do absolutely nothing to obtain information. Even the word ‘obtaining’ makes them step back. “Ufff, is that –like– a verb? Do I have to –like– do something?” Presenting everything on a silver plate and servicing your client to the max is what will make them happy.

Is this new Marketing? No – it’s quite old, ancient almost. But due to the speed of the progress Marketing has to find new ways to service and with this service make new ways of income.

Kiss the principle – embrace simplicity – help people to stop thinking is what makes the money.

Marco de Boer

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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