I’ve seen great videos produced by boutique agencies last year in 2011, including two of my favorites both by John St.’s Catvertising and Pink Ponies.
Buzzman, a French interactive agency just created an amazing piece, a case study styled video highlighting Mayans versus Egyptians as 2 competing brands and their tactics to dominate the market by launching the “end of the world” campaign.

Youtube is often seen as a channel for hosting videos, and what clients like to call – “viral videos”. Most brands, however, have underestimated the power of putting creativity to branded Youtube channel. Perrier’s new campaign is a perfect example of a great use of Youtube channel.

Perrier has been positioning themselves as sexy, edgy, playful, and fun. After the interactive Dita von Teese Perrier mansion campaign they built last year, Ogilvy Paris recently launched another interesting campaign for Perrier again, and this time, they use video content to tease for actions. Below is the channel journey for this campaign.

1) You will see the video below shared by your friends or blogs, with annotation button on video that takes you to Perrier’s Youtube page.

2) You land on Perrier’s branded Youtube page, showing you the amount of people who have viewed the first video.

3) “Sexier” videos will be unlocked for certain number of views, therefore, the more you share it, the faster you will see the content.

4) Your friends will see you sharing it, and they will do the same from step 1.

This is a very clever mechanism connected to their Facebook fanpage, it’s quite obvious that they’ve been working quite closely with Youtube to develop the page.

Agency: Ogilvy & Mather Paris

Often times when people talk about location based services, there is always a crowd at the corner that goes, “I still don’t get why people would want to check in!” Ask these Brooklyn developers, they recently coded a hack for Foursquare that basically allows user the unlock doors with a Foursquare checkin.
They will host a party on New Year’s Eve when anyone can check-in there to open that door themselves.

This innovation will open up location based services to become other even more useful utilities, for both personal and business promotion. (e.g. foursquare as car key, foursquare check-in for hotels)
I imagine this apartment door is connected to certain Foursquare usernames so the door only opens when these users check-in, but when this technology becomes more common, there could be a huge security risk.

Working in an agency, and being in the leading social media team in Asia Pacific, there are a few common questions that I always get. “How to make my video viral” is one of the most popular ones that comes up all the time, clients even tried to pay us for a “formula” to make things viral. I’m about to give you the answer, for free, which might not answer your question.

The word “viral video”

I was in a discussion with Thomas Crampton and John Stauffer few weeks ago about viral videos, they both made a really good point about how people slowly think that “viral video” is a noun or a category of video, videos that get easily spread around the Internet. Truth is it’s the other way around, they are called viral videos because they went viral, not because they were produced viral. “Viral” is the adjective used to describe a video that went popular.

My Formula

I don’t have the formula to create viral effect, no one does. Videos don’t go viral by luck, but no one can promise “viralness” before it happens. It’s like parents wanting their child to be the world’s champion for swimming, they could do whatever to try, spend tons of money to get the best trainer in the world, but the trainer can not say that he’s training a “World’s Champion Child” until he actually becomes the world champion.

Although I don’t have a formula…

Below are some of the important elements I found in previous videos that went viral for your reference:

Unexpected (but at the same time viewers can relate to their daily lives): Popcorn with Cellphones

Extremely Cute: Bob Marley Baby

Extremely Funny: The Sneezing Baby Panda

Doing certain things that viewers can’t/ wouldn’t do: Will it Blend

Stealing fame: Re: @aplusk | Old Spice

Cool or sexy or Environmental – helping viewers to reflect the personalities they want to become: Agent Provocateur

Fox Sports just announced that all their commercial spots for Super Bowl next year are all sold out. Super Bowl starts around first week of February every year, commercial airtime from previous years was sold out around December or even January.

We’ve been hearing companies shifting their marketing budgets from tradition marketing/ advertising to social media, Pepsi made huge buzz last year when they decided to skip Super Bowl ads and went for new media. Last year’s ads cost around USD 2-3 million per 30-second slot, companies could do highly viral and effective campaigns with the similar amount of investment. Does it mean social media didn’t give high business impact for companies like Pepsi? What’s the reason for them to get back to advertising this year?

My view:

I’m expecting there will be more social media integrated TVCs in this coming Super Bowl, meaning companies are likely to try and use tradition media/ marketing to drive online engagement activities, such as a Facebook campaign. But of course, the sex and humour in the ads will still be as good as usual.

What do you think?

I wasn’t too impressed by the movie Inception, maybe I set the expectation too high because of all the great buzz online and offline. This movie, however, reminded me about how social networks are structured these days.

Many people said that the Internet is like their second life, they can’t live without it and it’s nothing eventful for them to be on it.

What social networking sites do are actually designing a layer beneath the Internet, to try and group the most Internet users in one place, they do so by planting the idea and make users believe that everything on this layer allows us to do certain things like how we do traditionally, or sometimes, better than offline communications, very similar to the first layer of dream in the movie Inception.

More interesting thing is how more and more “designers” are actually trying to create another layer under the social network layer. These “designers” do not have the ability to create a layer with a scale as big as the first layer (like Facebook), but they still try to group as many users as possible under that layer.

Company like Zynga does a good job in designing this second layer, products like Farmville and Zynga Poker do a really good job with almost around 30 million daily active users.

Now, will there be the 3rd layer under the 2nd one?

Many of us are aware of how fast the luxury market has been growing in China, it is currently the second largest market in the world for luxury goods. China is also a country with most internet users, so it’s pretty obvious that luxury brands should start targeting netizens and let Internet plays huge role in their marketing strategies, but they all face the same problem; Chinese people still don’t purchase online.

Weak e-commerce

There’s no Paypal in China, other than popular site like Taobao (Chinese version of eBay), Chinese people do not trust many online payment platforms due to safety issues, so purchasing online is not as common as other countries. Especially for industries like luxury fashion goods, consumers prefer to buy at offline stores so that they can actually try them on.

Why many brands are still not on Chinese Social Media

There are of course many reasons behind brands for not engaging on Chinese social media, but I can see 2 major reasons for it.

1) Complexity of Chinese social media landscape – People (including most agencies in China) still can’t figure out how to develop a proper social media strategy for China as the online space is very different from any other country in the world. Government and mainstream media still play a huge role on social media in China as they have so much control over it.

2) Unclear ROI – As I mentioned above about the weak payment method, many luxury brands have very traditional marketing teams that are not very comfortable with the ROI when considering investment on social media since e-commerce is very weak in China, they don’t see, and perhaps don’t know how to measure how engaging on social media can directly benefit the brands financially.

Why are brands on Chinese Social Media?

China is the world’s youngest luxury market, high Internet penetration with users who are extremely active on social media, Chinese also love to share branded messages online more than any other countries. But beside all these obvious reasons, there’s one huge opportunity in China that many brands have ignored…

I’m not expert in fashion, but lifestyle and fashion trends are extremely driven by social media in China, people are influenced by what other netizens think, the peer is the true trend setter. For example, whenever a product is featured on Taobao, or most voted by other users, it would become the new trend in fashion. Singers/ celebrities actually dress themselves based on what people like, or what’s hot on social networks like Kaixin, not the other way around like most other countries where celebrities can easily influence purchase decisions. Although they don’t purchase it online (yet), the power of this peer trend setter drive obvious sales offline, and the good news is… there are ways to measure it!

Photo Credit: Ivan Walsh @ Flickr

GlobalWebIndex has recently launched a free tool that allows users to quickly get a snapshot of their data on social media insights, this free tool was built based around the data they have gathered from Wave 2 database from January 2010. The latest data, Wave 3 from July 2009 is only available for GlobalWebIndex clients.

This tool comes very handy when you are looking to create quick slides with valuable data that gives brief understanding of online behavior for specific group of people from different regions.

I tried to embed the tool to this blog post but I failed to adjust the size of it.

Start playing with the tool now

Why Tweetup?

Some of you might have seen tweets about the Ogilvy’s APAC Digital Influence Summit lately. Ogilvy’s DI Summit is an internal event held by the Asia Pacific Regional team where all the digital experts from around the region will be attending a 3-day event in Hong Kong to exchange digital knowledge, connect and bond with other team

Although the event is not open for public, we would like to offer you a chance to meet our team, head of the global digital influence team John Bell will also be flying all the way from Washington DC! It is a very rare opportunity for you to meet all of us at once, in the offline world!

When?

Tweetup will be held this Sunday, June 27th at 7pm. Not the perfect timing for tweetup but due to the World Cup schedule, this is the only time when venues are available.

Where?

Tweetup will be held in RED Soho as usual.

How to sign up?

Here

See you there!

Remember the marketing textbook from University? There were all these marketing principles, rules, and graphs, marketing funnel must be one of them.  I don’t think we need further explanation on the tradtional marketing funnel with Awareness, Consideration, Preference, Action, and Loyalty.

This graph by Forrester explains the new marketing landscape, most of us rely hugely on recommendations before purchase. With the help of social media and other communication platform, recommendations, peer reviews, and user generated content really play a really big role during consumers’ purchase decision. As the graph suggested, the landscape these days is more complicated than ever!