Lovely bit of experiential marketing > A DRAMATIC SURPRISE ON A QUIET SQUARE by turnerbenelux via @lakey @ysekand
While shopping on Facebook is still uncommon, with only 1.5 million of the social network’s total 850 million members buying something via the site each month, the “overwhelming majority” of those who do are women.
Christian Taylor, the co-founder and chief executive of Silicon Valley start-up Payvment, the most popular commerce platform on Facebook – which powers 80 per cent of all shopping on the site, told The Telegraph that most shoppers tend to be stay-at-home mothers shopping for “cute things” for their children.
“The majority of people shopping on Facebook are women and most of them are stay-at-home mums. The most popular items bought on Facebook are by far baby clothes and little things like bows for children’s hair.
“I think Facebook has created an outlet for mothers to talk to other mums about what to buy for their children and share parenting tips. I imagine being a stay-at-home parent was an incredibly lonely job before social networks. The people shopping on Facebook are an incredibly similar crowd to those who play social games, such as Farmville.”
Taylor said that of the men who have shopped on the site, they tended to buy t-shirts and the most popular t-shirts were often cause-based shirts, such as tops raising money for cancer charities.
He also told The Telegraph that the number of people shopping on Facebook was growing by 20 per cent every month and there are currently more than three million items for sale on the world’s most popular social network.
Commerce on Facebook is still small, with most vendors tending to be small to medium-sized businesses – rather than the major brands – who usually have a fan page on the site instead.
CHIPOTLE REPURPOSES THEIR BILLBOARD ADS INTO REUSABLE LUNCH BAGS
In keeping with Chipotle’s commitment to finding more sustainable solutions, the lunch bags are made from recycled billboards sourced directly from Chipotle’s outdoor advertisements to create a ultra-durable, one-of-a-kind product. Each lunch bag purchased through April 14 will include an eco-friendly card with a unique barcode that a customer can redeem for a free menu item on Earth Day. The cards are printed on tree-free stone paper that is made from limestone salvaged from construction sites and quarry waste.
Sales from the lunch bags will go to the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation, which funds initiatives that support sustainable agriculture, family farming, and culinary education.
via PSFK: http://www.psfk.com/2012/03/chipotle-billboard-lunch-bags.html#ixzz1qVsUGrfL
Brands are being increasingly successful in social media by using humorous mascots, according to the WSJ. We’ve seen plenty of evidence of that in the UK with Dulux recently reinstating its dog and how brands as diverse as Burger King’s “The King”, Compare the Market (Meerkat) and Go Compare with its opera-singing mascot, Gio Compario, have used them.
The report says that ad executives believe consumers on Facebook are more likely to bond with a character than the traditional company page on the social-media website pumping out company and product news.
The piece cites US brands such as eBay-owned ticket-resale website StubHub, which uses a 25-foot-high animatroni tree, insurance firm Progressive with a sales agent called Flo (played by comedienne Stephanie Courtney, Spam with Sir Can A-Lot, Diageo with its live action Captain Morgan rum pirate not to mention the Old Spice guy and Geico’s popular talking gecko.
“Consumers are less likely to have a conversation with a logo or a PR guy on social media,” said Jeff Charney, chief marketing officer for auto insurer Progressive Corp. Since 2008, Progressive’s TV ads have centered on a perky sales clerk named Flo, who touts the insurer’s rates. She now has 3.5 million fans on Facebook, where she posts comments about new Progressive products.
Characters also offer a softer way to sell a product, which is important on social media where executives fear that blatant selling or promotion can turn people off.
“You can put fairly bald product benefits into the mouth of a mascot and it doesn’t come off as hard sell,” said Parker Channon, partner at Duncan/Channon, a San Francisco ad firm that crafted the StubHub pitch, from the WSJ.
More at: http://wallblog.co.uk/2012/03/26/does-your-brand-need-a-mascot-to-be-successful-in-social-media/
Whether on a smartphone, tablet or laptop, using a second screen to tweet about TV is becoming a common occurrence - and it is called “chatterboxing”.
According to a survey conducted byTV Licensing, those aged 18-24 are the biggest uptakers of chatterboxing, with 46% of people who use social media taking part.
But the 25-34s are catching up - with 43% now chatterboxing, and in the 35-44 age range, 31% are already using second screens.
Communications manager Dan McLoughlin has been chatterboxing for months.
He said: “It makes TV such a social experience. We don’t often sit with family or friends to watch TV any more, so it makes it social.
The way that people choose to entertain themselves now, is not just listening to the radio during the day and watching the television in the evening. It’s far more about getting their news online, some on television, talking about it, recording it.
Emma Mulqueeny, from developer network Rewired State“On these panel shows like X Factor or Strictly (Come Dancing), I value the comments of my friends and other people tweeting - and celebrities - more than the actual people on the panels themselves.
“I’m more excited by what happens on Twitter than what’s on the programme itself.”
Broadcasters are getting wise to this. They have realised if many people are tweeting about a programme while it is on air, more people will read about it, then tune in.
Social TV applications have been developed specifically for second screens.
On apps like Zeebox, Miso or Getglue you can tweet next to a live TV feed.
This is where money can be made because some of these apps have “click to buy” options, so users can directly purchase products advertised on TV.
Emma Mulqueeny, from developer networkRewired State,said: “With adverts, people can now pause and fast-forward.
“So advertising through television needs to become more clever and more directive marketing, bearing in mind what people are talking about.
“It’s difficult to guess what this is going to be like in two or even three years’ time.
More at: http://news.sky.com/home/technology/article/16189017
List of company name etymologies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_company_name_etymologies
People tell you who they are, but we ignore them because we want them to be who we want them to be” - Don Draper
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So Target started sending coupons for baby items to customers according to their pregnancy scores. Duhigg shares an anecdote — so good that it sounds made up — that conveys how eerily accurate the targeting is. An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager:
Target knows before it shows.
“My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”
The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.
(Nice customer service, Target.)
On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.”
Target’s Andrew Pole (from LinkedIn)
What Target discovered fairly quickly is that it creeped people out that the company knew about their pregnancies in advance.
“If we send someone a catalog and say, ‘Congratulations on your first child!’ and they’ve never told us they’re pregnant, that’s going to make some people uncomfortable,” Pole told me. “We are very conservative about compliance with all privacy laws. But even if you’re following the law, you can do things where people get queasy.”
Bold is mine. That’s a quote for our times.
So Target got sneakier about sending the coupons. The company can create personalized booklets; instead of sending people with high pregnancy scores books o’ coupons solely for diapers, rattles, strollers, and the “Go the F*** to Bed” book, they more subtly spread them about:
“Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.
“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”
So the Target philosophy towards expecting parents is similar to the first date philosophy? Even if you’ve fully stalked the person on Facebook and Google beforehand, pretend like you know less than you do so as not to creep the person out.
Tweets sent by Rio Ferdinand and Katie Price promoting Snickers are to be formally investigated by the Advertising Standards Authority.
Following complaints, the ASA will look into whether the tweets were in breach of advertising rules by failing to adequately inform the public they were part of a marketing campaign.
When Sky News contacted Snickers earlier this week, a spokesperson said a series of “teaser tweets” had been sent out to “comply with social media regulations” to “ensure Twitter users knew they were enjoying promotional tweets”.
But the ASA will investigate whether it was clear the celebrity was getting paid to advertise the product.
Katie Price also tweeted a picture with a Snickers bar
In a statement the regulator said: “The ASA has launched a formal investigation into tweets by Katie Price and Rio Ferdinand to establish whether Mars’ @SnickersUK#hungry#spon campaign is in breach of the Advertising Codes.
“We are investigating two points: (a) whether it should have been stated in the ‘teaser’ tweets that they were marketing communications and (b) whether the hashtag “#spon” in the final ‘reveal’ tweet made it clear enough that that tweet was a marketing communication.”
More at: http://news.sky.com/home/showbiz-news/article/16157569
