@TeaandCopy sure does and he was unhappy that Dominos weren’t rising to his pizza pun challenge. When it did finally take off, I was glad to see @Sainsburys join in with this cheesy effort:
It’s kinda what I do, albeit in a slightly more streamlined efficient way. Reading it, I was perplexed. Was this a clever satire of the social media manager? Or was it really a piece about how digital design and advertising firm Huge goes about ‘doing social’ for brands like President and Audi?
@a_little_wine was quick to point out that, yep, that is a genuine article, no sarcasm, irony or parody intended. Here’s the author, Aaron Taube, confirming that it is in fact a straight report rather than genius satire.
There are many things that got t’Interwebs giggling about this story, one of them was The Tweet That Took Two Months: at the time of writing, it had zero retweets and two favourites.
(Twitter loves a bit of irony and the Tweet now has achieved a bit more traction. President will be chuffed.)
My summary of this glorious event will never come close to that of @adcontrarian. So sit back, grab that fresh cup of coffee and enjoy his fantastic three-parter:
The thing to remember: not all social media managers are like this. Most of us can sort out a Tweet in, like, a month. Easy.
Pizza on a motherflippin train
Hungry funny man @IAmChrisRamsey found himself on a train to Newcastle with a hankering for pizza. Sadly, East Coast Trains don’t provide pizza on their trains. But, if you have over 270,000 followers on Twitter, standard menus don’t apply.
For a detailed look at how it all went down, Digital Spy have you covered. However, I couldn’t resist sharing these two tweets: Just look at how happy he is!
And of course, HUGE kudos to Dominos for making it happen.
Google’s self-driving car. This was all over the news. In case you missed it, here’s their video showing it off. Me? I’m still waiting for my hoverboard, dammit.
Wall’s new idea cream ad wants politicians to say goodbye to serious. How appropriate…
Coke makes people work together if they want to enjoy their drink by creating a coke bottle that can only be opened by combining it with another coke bottle.
Too brilliant for the ‘and finally’ section, so I break with tradition and give you this bit of pure, unadulterated genius. Hats off to the DJ.
Haven’t laughed this hard in a long time.
Are those Reebok or Nike?
The one with the dodgy banana
A tale of woe, customer service and, finally, redemption and happiness told through the eyes of Sainsbury’s customer @HBChapple and Chris from the @Sainsburys Careline team.
I love a burger. Dirty or posh, van or fancy restaurant. Breakfast, lunch or dinner. It doesn’t matter. A burger sorts me right out and I’ve had a few over the years. They come in all different sizes, combinations and tastes. And it is a very rare occasion indeed, where I come across a bad burger (fries are a different ballgame entirely. So much can go wrong with fries. But that’s for another day).
Now, making your own burger at home is not particularly difficult, but not something that I tend to do very much. But what if you could digitally build your burger, have all your friends vote for it and the one with the most votes gets added to McDonald’s menu?
There you have the simple, yet brilliant premise of McD’s latest #MyBurger campaign.
After careful deliberation, clicking and scrolling, I am proud to give you my BCG Burger: Bacon (because everything with bacon is just better), Cheese (two slices of black pepper cheese to make the beef pop and add some stability to the construction) and Guacamole (equal parts cashing in on the oh-so-trendy Mexican food craze, and also, guac is just so goooood) burger. Perfected by a generous sprinkling of jalapeño peppers for that extra oomph, rocket to give it even more of a peppery freshness, and held together with a brioche bun and OMG JUST GET ME A BURGER ALREADY.
The BCG now takes it’s place amongst all the other delicious creations, which you can drool over in the gallery section of McDonald’s My Burger site.
As you salivate over sooo much beefy goodness (on that, why the heck can you only make a beef burger?), you also get your fair share of burger stats. And which PR person doesn’t like a survey?!
over 46,000 burgers made since the site launched this week
over 100,000 votes cast
at just 2%, pineapple the nation agrees that pineapple has no place on a burger (or on a pizza for that matter)
pickles aren’t much better off, finding their way into only 9% of burgers flipped
the must-have ingredient, next to glorious meat of course, turns out to be cheese – layered into over 43,000 burgers coming
Voting for a burger is simple. But what I really love about the voting process is McDonald’s reinvention of the Captcha. Rather than some strange maths question or indecipherable characters to prove that you are, in fact, a hungry human, you are asked to pick two items from McD’s menu by this prompt:
A gloriously simple and fun campaign, one that get’s McDonald’s customers actively involved in the brand by creating a burger that could end up in restaurants nationwide. And who doesn’t like sharing something tasty with their friends saying: “Look! I created this! Isn’t it great?”
To celebrate the launch of their delicious new menu item ‘The Wing Roulette’, the clever chaps at Nando’s have come up with a spicy campaign centred around user generated content.
Customers are encouraged to not only brave the fiery madness that is the selection of 10 chicken wings dipped in peri peri sauce of unknown strength (ranging from the tangy mango and lime to the teeth-melting extra hot) but to then use their napkins and sauce covered fingers to produce some tweetable art along with the hashtag #wingroulette.
Nando’s have also added a Wingroulette companion game to their iPhone app that tells you which of your friends gets to eat which chicken wing (and here I was planning to order the 10 wings for myself…).
To keep the campaign going, Nando’s are relying heavily on the TV guide, creating finger puppet versions of popular shows like Game of Thrones and 24
There’s many more #Wingroulette finger selfies on Twitter – a lot of people are keen to win their year’s supply of free Nando’s!
Bits and bytes
Greg, a security guard for Arcadia sends an email asking his manager to approve holiday. Line manager accidentally forwards Greg’s request to all the company’s 3,500 employees. Hilarity and a trending hashtag #GiveGregtheHoliday is born (HT @CiaranM_). And yes, he finally did get his two days leave approved – and he also donated all the free stuff he received to charity. #GoodGuyGreg
The Roman Catholic Church issued its 10 digital commandments this week and they’re actually not that bad (HT @a_little_wine). If you fancy a slightly less preachy, more practical take on keeping The Big Guy virtually happy, you could also choose to follow the Church of England’s 9 digital commandments (1 less than the Catholics. So chill.)
Missed out on the London Marathon ballot? No worries, for next year’s race, you’ll be able to run the race in a virtual reality environment: on a treadmill that controls your avatar as it completes the 26.2 mile course
Videos of the week
I’m conflicted about this one. Adweek calls Coke’s latest commercial the first ever TV ad made completely from user generated content, which, as we all know, is complete and utter bollocks. Sainsbury’s did that with Christmas in a Day, thank you very much, next question, you utter muppets. But then again, Adweek also called this the best corporate apology ever posted to Twitter. Damnit. Anyway, just watch the clip.
Dutch drink Vifit either helps you concentrate on studying in the uni library while an attractive blonde does a strip tease or drinking too much of it causes blindness. I suspect the people behind this ad were going for the former.
Another update on a Sunday – mainly due to being pre-occupied with Arsenal finally ending its 9-year-wait for silverware. And how brilliant is it to then have them win The Wenger Double of the FA Cup AND Champions League Qualification? The Gunner’s cup truly runneth over…
Right is pink, left is blue
On Wednesday this week, the image above popped up in my Facebook newsfeed. Posted with nothing more than a mysterious smiling emoticon by a good friend who works at Puma, it caught my attention.
Was it a way to help footballers remember which boot goes on which foot? I suspected there was more to it.
The article had some images of Arsenal players Giroud and Flamini wearing mismatched boots, where the left one was blue and the right one was pink.
Source: Mail Online
While an assault on the eyes, it did quite quickly then solve the mystery of why Puma had decided to give its flagship store in London’s Carnaby street a bit of a make-over ahead of the FA Cup Final.
Source: Mail Online
Also embedded in the Mail Online article, the video celebrating the release of Puma’s new evoPower and evoSpeed boots.
Replete with international superstars Fabregas, Reus, Aguero and Balotelli, a rousing speech about believing in yourself as said stars are cheered on their walk through pink and blue coloured smoke – lots of smoke – into a stadium in their new boots, the clip takes a rather different approach than Nike’s action packed #RiskEverything approach that launched last month.
But back to Puma’s effort – the clip ends on the hashtag #StartBelieving – which, when I pulled it up on Twitter, delivered messages by the stars of the film as well as other Puma footballers.
— Gianluigi Buffon (@gianluigibuffon) May 14, 2014
No mean feat to get anybody to stick to the script, not to mention an embargo – no matter if it’s a journo of footballer. So kudos to the Puma marketing team for pulling that off.
To complete my brief look at Puma’s superbly executed, multi-channel launch of their new boots, I’ll finish on Puma’s campaign page where you’re driven to purchase the new boots as well as other Puma kit as well as voice your social media support for the different Puma-kitted players and nations.
Well played, Puma.
Agile marketing
A cheeky case study on Econsultancy about how Cancer Research UK went about reacting to the recent #nomakeupselfie to drive a huge increase in text donations caught my eye this week. It talks a bit about how they are set up to make it happen and mentions two rather nifty techniques used in agile software development that help teams deal with change and by enabling them to reprioritise and shift resources quickly and effectively.
Stand up meetings: daily meetings where everyone stands up (no surprise there) and update on what they did yesterday and what they’re doing today. The fact that you’re standing up keeps meetings short and you have a good idea of what people around you have achieved and what they’re working on next
Source: Econsultancy
Kanban boards: a just-in-time business process originally from Japan that visualises workflow to show what is coming up, what is in progress, and what is done
Source: Wikipedia
The golden age of bullshit
Marvellous talk by @AdContrarian Bob Hoffman positing that everything you’ve heard about advertising in the last decade is baloney. He states quite clearly that he intends to achieve three things: contradict everything you’ve heard about advertising; annoy you; and to leave the listener a little less comfortable and a little more skeptical.
He doesn’t mince his words either. To the people who think that consumers are in love with brands, or who have things like ‘I’m passionate about brands’ in their Twitter profile and actually believe that people on social media are there to talk about their brands, he says: “What? Dude, get a fucking girlfriend.”
So please, take some time out to listen to Bob and his eloquent rant against bullshit and his plea for all of us to return to the facts.
Bits and bytes
Stanford and Facebook have published a study called ‘Rumor Cascades‘ full of advice for public bodies on how stop the spread of misinformation on Facebook. @HelReynolds wrote a great summary in the Guardian and the full study is available for download via Facebook Publications
New to Twitter? The lovely @girllostincity has a fabulous guide to Twitter etiquette
To launch their new album “Ghost Stories” Coldplay’s marketing team launched a good old treasure hunt to win some exclusive memorabilia
Snapchat’s USP of being able to send images to friends that disappear from the ether after looking at them, um, disappeared this week, when the company was forced to admit that images as well as other information like usernames and locations were being saved indefinitely. Also, Snapchat’s non-apology really is quite something: rather than apologising and fix the problem, they’ve ‘improved the wording of their privacy policy’
The crazy shit people search for on Google: from how to hide a body, whether or not Lady Gaga is a man, to people using Google to search for the phrase “how do I use Google”. The mind boggles
Videos of the week
David Beckham, Sainsbury’s Active Kids ambassador, made a surprise visit to his old primary school in East London for first time since leaving 30 years ago. He meets the school football team who are off to play at Wembley, joins in at lunch time and catches up with lots of very excited kids.
Crass marketing or genuine gesture? To give labourers in the UAE a few extra minutes of happiness, Coca-Cola created the Hello Happiness Phone Booth — a special phone booth that accepts Coca-Cola bottle caps instead of coins for a free 3-minute international phone call, helping them connect with their families back home more often.
Viewed in isolation, a heart-warming clip – but knowing even a little about the working conditions of labourers in the UAE and the decision to use them as a marketing hook does look like a ballsy (silly?) move. The campaign has been met with strong criticism in the the comments below the film on Coke’s YouTube and on Twitter (via @richmelton).
I watched the Eurovision last night. Accidentally. I’d never planned on doing it. I was at a friend’s place, celebrating his birthday with some fellow Germans (yes, there was much potato salad, see point 24 for why that is) and some Aussies and suddenly the telly was tuned to BBC1.
Been a while since my last update – holidays and life got in the way, but I did finish the London Marathon. It didn’t go to plan, but I managed to cross the line regardless. An absolutely brilliant day with seemingly all of London out to support the runners.
Less than 24 hours to go until the London Marathon – no better way to get my mind off the 26.2 miles that lie in wait than write my weekly bits and bytes.
This week I’m looking at the biggest threat to the Internet since the Y2K bug, how banning a journalist from a media dinner is a recipe for disaster, how Costa Coffee did a great job with engaging bloggers (but then forgot to tie that good work back into their social profiles), and the new Twitter profiles that will be coming to a screen near you.
Welcome to a slightly tweaked version to my bits and bytes. I realised that my weekly rant – while therapeutic for me – isn’t particularly good for finding things. Ideally, the little segments in here should be posts in and of themselves. But that would mean taking up blogging full time and, well, I love my day job a bit too much to do that. So, from now on, expect a summary at the top of each post and links to the sections in the post below to make it easier to browse.
Oculus Facebook: The Zuck got out the chequebook again this week, signing off $2bn for a virtual reality headset called Occulus Rift (for those trying to keep their .com acquisition exchange rate up to date, that’s two Instagrams, but only a 5th of WhatsApp).
Essentially, the Oculus Rift is an IMAX theatre squeezed into giant, blacked out ski-goggles. Particularly popular with gamers, the goggles allow you to immerse yourself fully into a 3D game landscape, where your movements in real-life are mapped to the pile of pixels you’re using to destroy other pixels with.
Sainsbury’s Little Stories: The lovely Rachel from Internal Comms Consultancy AllThingsIC contacted me to say she really loved Sainsbury’s ongoing Switch the Fish campaign and how we were using colleagues to bring the campaign to life.
Bits and Bytes 