Eristoff Vodka - The Wolves Of London

Eristoff Vodka just wrapped up a nice guerilla marketing campaign for their UK launch.  The campaign developed by Us London and pd3 has been ongoing since early November.  It kicked off with 'the arrival of a mysterious circus from Georgia coincides with videos surfacing online that appear to show wolves at large around the capital. Meanwhile, a battered Dakov Circus van is seen and heard on the streets of London, strange growls and howls emanating from inside. But all was not quite as it seems…'

The guys at Popsop described it better than I can in the following except (see full article here):


In the first week of November, a website for the fictional circus (www.DakovCircus.com) appeared, promoting it’s ‘Circus Freak Out’ event in East London, as did listings in Time Out and London blogs.  But an announcement on the site alluded to the ‘Wolves of Vale’ act being postponed due to “unforeseen circumstances.”


Faux-UGC Videos were then seeded across sharing sites and social networks, purporting to show sightings of wolves across South and East London, with supporting Twitter activity to drive interest and excitement.


In the last phase of the campaign a Dakov-branded van, complete with bespoke sound installation, was taken around high-footfall areas of South and East London after dark, complete with eerie howls, growls and bangs emanating from within. ‘Dakov Circus Freakout’ posters appeared in the same areas, and online activity made connections between the ‘Wolf’ videos and the Dakov Circus van and site.
....
The goal was to create some mystery and intrigue, a moment of ‘maybe…just maybe’. Eristoff’s target audience of 18-24 urbanites are media savvy and quick to spot marketing tricks. Some called it, some didn’t…and a few people (but only a few) spotted that Dakov is an anagram of Vodka.

Supporting Articles: PSFK | The Inspiration Room

Turtle Beach - Mission Iraq

Fiveight are the distributors of Turtle Beach gaming headsets.  They wanted to "show a tough, discerning market that Turtle Beach gaming headsets don’t just make the gaming experience sound real – it feels real."  So how are they going about doing this?  They've chosen a hardcore FPS gamer, Phil (handle: StatiC) from New Zealand and are bringing him into a real war zone...Iraq.  "Gamers play in virtual warzones every day and night, and they want the immersive feeling of combat, so we thought we’d take that experience one step further" says Fiveight’s Ben Ward.

Developed by Droga5, Mission Iraq is a five part mini series that will follow Phil's journey and experiences in Iraq.  Definitely a new take on an immersive experience, but not without controversy.  Regardless it'll be interesting to see how his adventure plays out.

Supporting Articles: Adverblog | National Business Review

BONUS: YouTube Challenge - I Gave My Kids a Terrible Present

This isn't advertising related, but it just cracked me up.  Jimmy Kimmel asked the parents of America to play a holiday trick on their children (he did something similar for Halloween)...tell their kids they could open one present a few weeks early.  The catch was the present had to be terrible.  Kimmel then asked parents to upload the videos to Youtube, which he then compiled into a show segment.  Check it out below.

via my colleague Eric Skunke

IKEA - Catch The Swedish Light

Traditionally summer is a relatively slow time of year for IKEA (at least in Belgium).  So Forsman & Bodenfors created a genius campaign for IKEA to introduce the Swedish mid-summer to the Belgian consumer and show off the latest summer offers from IKEA.

The resulting campaign 'Catch the Swedish Light,' consisted of 48 Youtube videos featuring IKEA products with light dancing around them and a rolling seven digit code in the upper right hand corner of each video.  The challenge for users was to find the one exact frame in each video where the light catches the product perfectly.  On that frame the code in the upper right hand corner of the videos changed to yellow.  The first user to find the correct code for each video then went to the campaign site, entered the code and won that specific product.  A very clever use of video for this competition and it proved extremely effective as IKEA's summer sales in Belgium reached an all-time high for summer sales.  See if you can spot the code in the video below or check out the case study above.



Supporting Articles: PSFK | Creativity Online | Digital Buzz Blog

Old Spice - Manta Claus

He's back.  After taking a post-Fabio battle break, Isaiah Mustafa is back for the new Old Space 'Manta Claus' campaign developed by Wieden + Kennedy.  This time he's promising to give all 7 billion people of the world a holiday gift...one at a time.

Old Spice is going back to the well and the successful real-time response format they established in 'The man your man could smell like' campaign.'  This time Old Spice Guy is recording video responses to specific users (as well as cities and continents) and will be creating a series of gifting videos over the next five days.  See below for the campaign intro...



Stay tuned to the Old Spice Youtube channel for daily updates and uploads.  See below for the Day One Progress Report...

Norton Stuff Theater

Here's a nice piece of branded content from Norton Securities, the maker of various utilities and antivirus software.  Their overall messaging has been around 'Protect Your Stuff With Norton,' demonstrating how Norton protects your valuable content and data.  According to Leo Burnett ECD Jon Wyville, Stuff Theater is an effort to 'put your social-media stuff on a pedestal and treat it with the importance it deserves, even if it’s as mundane as a Facebook update.'  While it's not the most concrete tie in, I love the idea (developed by Leo Burnett and Arc Worldwide).  So what was it exactly? A live, unscripted, unrehearsed 24-hour performance on November 30th in which sixty actors brought to life over 1,000 Facebook posts on the Norton Facebook page.  Facebook users could submit their post to be performed over the 24-hour period that Stuff Theater was live.

They're currently pulling together the best of video, but the teaser videos are hilarious (see below).  It's somewhat reminiscent of the CP+B created Kraft Mac & Cheese TV (where tweets were turned into TV spots within 24 hours), though more ambitious in some ways (a 24 hour live performance) and less ambitious in other ways (turning around a TV spot within 24 hours).

And of course it would be been fantastic to see this as a livestream on Youtube as well.

Supporting Articles: New York Times | Brand Channel

How do you kill off a spokespuppet? Air New Zealand & Ford Focus

Sadly all spokesmen (or in this case spokespuppets) eventually come to the end of their marketing usefulness.  What's I've found interesting is how both Ford & Air New Zealand have gone about retiring their respective characters, Rico & Ford Focus Doug.

For those of you unfamiliar with Rico, Air New Zealand introduced their raunchy spokespuppet about a year ago to promote the new airline livery and seats (see below for the first spot)

The Rico campaign (developed by New Zealand agency .99) includes a series of online-only videos where Rico interacts with passengers, as well as celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan, Snoop Dogg, & Richard Simmons.  The campaign has been controversial, but ultimately successful.  Over the course of the year, Rico amassed more than 4.5 million Youtube views and 45,000+ Facebook fans(check out the Rico section of the Air New Zealand Youtube channel for the entire series).

Air New Zealand has decided to kill Rico (in a somewhat literal sense).  Rather than immediately moving onto the next campaign, they've created 'Cluedo,' a Clue-like competition for users to solve the mystery of Rico's murder.  Interestingly, even though the character was controversial, the competition is presented in partnership with the game maker Hasbro.  In any case, the user who finds the clues and solves the mystery wins an all expense paid trip to either LA or New Zealand.

All in all a nice way to wring a bit more usefulness out of an already successful campaign.  The competition is ongoing at the Bye Bye Rico site.  See the contest intro video below:


In Ford's case, they introduced Doug back in March (see his Youtube channel here if you're unfamiliar with the campaign) and it's been a big success over the past 6+ months.  According to Brand Channel:

Doug is being retired from active duty as a branded entertainment experiment for the brand, after a phenomenal run of webisodes. Ford targeted the generation of 10,000 Facebook fans for Doug; he now has 43,000. According to Monty, people have engaged with Doug on Facebook at a rate three times greater than for the vehicle itself. About 40 percent of online "conversation" about Focus has been about Doug.

And yet, as disappointed as Doug might be at being put back on the shelf, the campaign hasn't all been about "Doug," as much as his obnoxious persona would have it.

Talk about a Focus group — Monty tells us that 77 percent of people who saw the 48 Focus Doug videos to date said their favorability toward Focus has risen, and Doug's adventures have prompted a 61 percent increase in Focus consideration.

"We've even had a handful of people say that they bought a Focus just because of Doug," Monty said.

Rather than just quietly retiring the campaign, Ford created a penultimate video where we see Doug ditching his companion.  This was shortly followed by a farewell/retrospective video looking back at the high points of the various webisodes.

In both cases I like the idea using online video to extending the campaign lifecycle a little bit longer and going out with a bit of a bang rather than a whimper.  

Supporting Articles: Brand Channel | PSFK | The Drum

Google+: Circles Love Story

One of the key features of Google+ is the power to share and interact with people dynamically via Circles.  While most sharing and social network relationships today are a somewhat awkward and often static (ie. I put all of my friends in a generic 'friends' bucket).  The fact is that not all friends are created equal and our relationships on social networks evolve much as they would in real life.  Circles is one of the key features of Google+ that bridges that sharing/relationship gap that exists in our real world relationships vs. our online relationships.  So how do you convey this in TV commercial?  See the latest Google+  spot below which does a great job showing the power of circles through the evolution of a relationship between Kyle & Lisa.

BONUS: Address Is Approximate

OK, this isn't a campaign, but it's beautifully done and well worth sharing (though it's already made the rounds on the internets):

Google Street View stop motion animation short made as a personal project by director Tom Jenkins. 


Story: A lonely desk toy longs for escape from the dark confines of the office, so he takes a cross country road trip to the Pacific Coast in the only way he can -- using a toy car and Google Maps Street View.


Music by the wonderfull Cinematic Orchestra (cinematicorchestra.com) and the track is Arrival of the Birds - please buy the fantastic album: itunes.apple.com/gb/album/the-crimson-wing-mystery-flamingos/id297787201


All screen imagery was animated - there are no screen replacements.

Apologies for the lack of posts recently...

...been slammed with work.  Expect a new update later today/early tomorrow as well as next week.


Stay tuned!