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Last February we began a project with Sony. The brief was to materialize a creative concept linked to their newest laptop release, the VAIO SB, targeting trendy and dynamic students.

After exploring the concept further, our team was inspired to go beyond the scope and take the project to another level. We decided to work with the client to produce photographs in order to achieve our vision for the campaign. Read more

Digital advocacy – aligned with online campaigning more broadly – has been effective on issues that capture the public imagination for quite a while, largely because the web works extremely well as a grassroots mobilisation tool. From whale hunting to GMOs, pressure groups and concerned citizens have used a variety of online tools to express anger, spread the word and mobilise likeminded people. I’d argue that, were Greenpeace to announce a big-time campaign tomorrow on banning mink farming in Europe, it could be web-centred, with offline elements operating around it. Meaning that Greenpeace would be able to engage and mobilise enough people using primarily online channels to certainly reach (although probably not influence) relevant policy-makers.

However, the vast majority of advocacy issues don’t capture the public imagination. Nobody knows about them; the media doesn’t care. Until a short time ago, these were the sort of issues where advocacy was done off the radar i.e. primarily with stakeholders and policy-makers sitting down face to face. There’d be no large-scale media campaign or the like in support because it wouldn’t have been worth the effort seeing as all stakeholders were a phone-call away.

Now, I’d argue that digital advocacy is nearing the real deal for niche issues as well. Meaning what? That the web is ubiquitous enough – even in public policy land (view Fleishman’s EP Digital Trends or Edelman’s Capital Staffers’ index if in doubt) – to work as a direct advocacy tool.

In practice, I mean that if you plan and execute the online element of your campaign well, you can safely assume that you’ll reach relevant policy-makers directly, as well as engage and/or mobilise the aforementioned stakeholders that are just a phone-call away, using primarily online channels. By no means does that mean that traditional advocacy or media relations are a dying breed, but they can now be supported, enhanced and sped up no end. Exciting times ahead.

(This is a cross-post from Steffen’s blog)

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From time to time a strange discussion takes place with one of our clients, prospects or someone I meet at a party.  In the later case I was discussing what a viral marketing campaign was and whether it could actually be commissioned by a client.  The scary answer by inexperienced (or dishonest?) marketing agencies is horribly consistent: let’s do a one minute video – it will be funny and maybe a bit outrageous and as a result we will have ourselves a viral marketing campaign.

This kind of answer makes me sad and a little angry.  I must also admit that I was once involved in a project like this and had to fight with the ‘advertising people’ about the fact that a funny video alone simply would not do it.

Recently Seth Godin, the man who ‘owns’ the concept of viral marketing (calling it ‘ideavirus) has revisited the subject on his blog.  He wrote a post entitled ‘what is viral marketing’ which is a great recap of the meaning of the concept.

He summed up my feelings better than I could:

The reason for this post is that viral marketing is getting a bad name, largely from clueless marketing agencies and clueless marketers. Here’s what they do: they get a lame product, or a semi-lame product, and they don’t have enough time or money to run a nationwide ad campaign. So, instead, they slap some goofy viral thing on top of it and wait for it to spread. And if it doesn’t spread, they create a faux controversy or engage a PR firm or some bloggers and then it still doesn’t work.

My word of advice next time the topic comes up:

1) You can never predict whether a campaign or video will go viral

2) The real question is why do you want something to go viral and what you are trying to accomplish: the answer to this is often that you want to get your message out and get a discussion going on a topic or raise awareness of some issue.  Instead of trying to create a viral marketing video, why don’t you concentrate on doing just that?

3) Stop using the word ‘viral’ – if you want traffic, say you want traffic, if you want people to forward the message, say that too.  Nobody wants viral marketing for its own sake – and the most successful viral marketing video were accidental (ask the Star Wars kid).

I want to end this with another quote from Seth Godin’s post:

Something being viral is not, in an of itself, viral marketing. Who cares that 32,000,000 people saw your stupid video? It didn’t market you or your business in a tangible, useful way.

Marketers are obsessed with free media, and, as is often the case, we blow it in our rush to get our share. We create content that is hampered or selfish or boring. Or we create something completely viral that doesn’t do any marketing at all.

A few months ago, when the crisis/recession started dominating the news in Europe, we tried to understand how these changes would affect our business – that is the business of online marketing.  We shared with you a couple of articles from McKinsey, the Economist and other sources (on this blog and on Ning) that all pointed to the possibility of the trend not affecting the web in a direct way or perhaps even the opposite.

Over the past two weeks I have been observing, first hand, the consequence of this trend in our day to day activities.  I have had a succession of meetings with new clients, sometimes old prospects, who have been very open to the very serious exploration and use of the internet as their core marketing channel for next year.  They all agree on the same thing: traditional marketing has been ‘frozen’ or cut or put on hold completely.  On the other hand they recognize that the web is a comparatively low cost alternative and is measurable.  Many of these companies or individuals have never taking this line before, and I think that it is actually being driven by the environment.

So it seems as if 2009, might be the year of the shift to online that we have been expecting for some time, driven not by hype, but by necessity, experience and an almost inevitable transformation of the marketing landscape.

We have yet to see how far and how deep the transformation will be, but 2009 will probably mark the no return shift to a new marketing structure.  Clearly, this is a very bad time to be in traditional advertising.