Everything Counts

I took this photo to document a brand that doesn't get it. I was annoyed that the label kept falling off of this bottle of water, and the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Aquafina still treats its packaging as a disposable throw-away. Aside from the crappy glue that turned their brand into an irritant, the bottle could be for Diet Coke, A&W root beer or practically anything else. Compare to Perrier.

Then Eric Ryan, founder of method, hopped on stage and showed us how he turned the household cleaning product category on its side. He talked a lot about the effort they put into packaging and it really struck me. Part of method's birth came from the insight that people are crammed on space and are trying to get a little cleaning done in between everything else in their lives. So they're not going to be patient with digging through the closet for some detergent. He realized that, if you design it right, people will leave their cleaning supplies out by the sink, on the counter, or in the bathroom. For method, the package is part of the product, not just the container around it.

Beyond Eric and method, the idea that "everything counts" rose to the top as a key theme of this year's conference. What's inside, how it's presented outside, and where it fits into our individual and collective lives. We heard it in the stringent efficiency of XS Energy Drink, and in Bruce Mau's compelling narration of the purpose behind Massive Change. This is inspiring as a subtext to the conference's theme of Creating Possibilities; we as planners are peering toward a future of opportunities that is only limited by our own ingenuity and inventiveness.

Mass Interactive: Robin Sparkle's #1 Fan

NYTimes details an interesting new media meets old media case study similar to the That Girl Emily/Court TV integration of last year.

Summary fact highlights:

The Robin Sparkle's MySpace page was a plant, concocted by the producers of the CBS sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” to play off a storyline in the show’s Nov. 20 episode.

During that episode, it was discovered that one of the main characters has an embarrassing childhood secret: her teenage performances as Robin Sparkles. At the moment in the show when a character discovered a video of Sparkles online — 21 minutes into the episode — a streaming video went live on the Sparkles MySpace page, with 3 minutes and 20 seconds of clichéd pop music, big bouncy hair and bad synthesizers, not to mention lyrics like “I’m going to rock your body ’til Canada Day.”
Let's Go To The Mall - Robin Sparkle


By the next morning, the number of “friends” on the Robin Sparkles fan page had jumped from fewer than 100 to more than 5,000, and the video was one of the most viewed on both MySpace and YouTube. More important, the ratings for “How I Met Your Mother” jumped the next week, increasing by more than a million viewers in the age 18-to-34 demographic group. That gave the show, a critical favorite but a middling ratings success, its highest overall ratings of the season.

As of today she has over 6000 MySpace "friends".

An interesting takeaway on how we all may best integrate social media into the the broader marketing schema, one of the show's creators, Carter Bays says “We also don’t want to forget what we’re here to do, which is a television show. Everything we’ve done online — whether it’s Barney’s blog or the Robin Sparkles video — has come organically from something going on in the show. It’s great to have these things out there, but we don’t do them just for the sake of doing them. There has to be a reason.”

I ran a BlogPulse read...


Note that Nov 05 spike for the show's buzz is star Neil Patrick Harris' real life gay revelation. Without that gay reveal, the show's buzz would be fairly flat, the next 2 big spikes for show buzz are Robin Sparks MySpace page related, and subsequent show buzz flattens to mere mentions of the title buried in TV articles. The Robin Sparkle MySpace buzz lowers, yet long tails and keeps on givin' buzz long after airing. This week's spikes are PR pushes to get the creators out there (you know the hustle) and that buzz is mostly centered on re-capping the innovation about the MySpace integration (like this post).

PR and Marketing, like Ebony and Ivory

Jonah Bloom at Ad Age writes a timely commentary about "The Cultural Gulf that separates marketing & PR - and why both sides must work harder to bridge it"

To excerpt from the article:

"Transparency means that marketing departments, so often home to hyperbole in the past, are also confronting the fact that an over-claim in promotional material can be exposed as a lie in the time it takes some blogger to write that his whites don't wash whiter and his phone service actually drops calls every other conversation. Ad execs are also learning the importance of listening to influential consumers before crafting messages and are trying to facilitate word-of-mouth programs -- two tactics some PR practitioners see as inherent to their discipline."

"Conversely, many companies' PR executives, who once massaged other people's messages and left most content creation to the marketing department, are now building and populating websites, social networks, message boards, blogs, vlogs and podcasts. They're no longer just intermediaries; today they're becoming media and message originators, too."

"Its a big cultural gulf, but as the internet makes the relationship between corporate reputation and brand equity ever more transparent, the two departments will have to use their new found common language to bridge it."

And with that, I cue Paul and Stevie...

Lyrics


via Ad Age