Ideas on advertising, creativity, online marketing and the web
brought to you by Armando Alves,
an Interactive Ninja from Portugal.
Today is a sad morning. My club just lost yesterday to Espanyol Barcelona at the quarter-finals of UEFA Cup, so i started to look for something positive about Benfica to cheer me up, and nothing better than announcing that Benfica has their own fan club at Second Life !
According to the sources, this is the first major football/soccer club to have a presence at Second Life, with some virtual merchandise to see or chat with other club fans. And this was all created by 2 loyal geek supporters, although the Marketing Department of the club is already in talks and looking at ways to be a part of it.
Second Life surely is a great opportunity to sports marketing, with their inherent fan based culture and passion about their other selfs. In a way a club fan is having a second life when he goes to matches or gathers his friends to have a beer while watching the match on TV.
While Benfica is not as global as Manchester or Real Madrid (although it is officially the club with most associates), if they manage to create a great experience at the virtual fan club, with clever product placements, merchandising, memorabilia and links to the online store, it might be a great revenue source - maybe next year we could pitch Saviola or Ronaldinho :).
Oh, out of curisity, the anagram for Benfica is SLB (Sport Lisboa Benfica), as in Second Life Benfica.
Good things come to those who wait.
Besides the web/advertising related posts, i evangelize a lot about Arcade Fire so it’s rewarding to see that they’ve just reached #1 in several iTunes charts.
The only thing that i miss is the chance to see them live, but it seems that they’ll be in Portugal at SBSR festival so hope remains. After Paredes de Coura fest 2 years ago, i miss that ethereal atmosphere on AF concerts.
Since September 2006 i began posting on a quite regular basis so let me share a bit about myself and this blog, celebrating it’s 100th post.
A bit about me … I studied Business and Management at UBI, where the only thing i was fun of was Marketing and Computers, so it kind of makes sense my career twist as a digital marketing professional. In fact, one of the first companies i worked for was named Digital Branding, a dot-com that burst with the bubble. With the trend of integrated/full-service agencies i ended up working in Foote, Cone & Belding, that later became FCB and now is merged as DraftFCB.
I’m Head Of Interactive, planning and developing interactive solutions and online marketing campaigns, with several technologies (mainly Flash/Actionscript). Searching the blog by “Shameless PromoTion” you’ll find some samples of my work, and also some sites by fellow bloggers and friends from PorTugal (hence the PT … PromoTion). I know it’s a lame copy but i’m not a writer.
The blog … the idea for “A Source of Inspiration” came up in early 2005, when i did more than 200 bookmarks a month, and wanted to share my browsing adventures with friends (later i discovered social bookmarking). The bookmarks were placed on a folder named ASourceOfInspiration, so when it was time to create a blog that was one of my first naming choices. The Source part because it has a bit of programming/interactive stuff and the Inspiration part because it deals with creativity and design.
The numbers … if you’re into metrics here’s a few of my stats until February 2007.
So, enough about me and A Source Of Inspiration. To all of the anonymous readers out there, do comment this post and let me know what do you think of this blog and how i can improve it to inspire even further.
And thanks for your great conversations.
* Part 3 of 3 of my lecture “Advertising 2.0″ [read part 1] [read part 2]
Viral marketing and online video made possible to have our 15 MB of fame, just by a matter of clicks.
Brands, products or services can now tell their stories, and if they do it right, their consumers will share those same stories to a even broader audience.
Although there are no secret recipes to produce something viral, there are elements that can nurture the “viralness” of the message, sharing common features such as:
such as the “Dove Real Beauty” campaign:
This online action from Unilever was one of the most successful ever done, resulting in more brand awareness and loyalty, mostly because the message was spread through more reliable sources such as our friends or TV shows that featured the campaign. The consumers are now buying more of the brand that they used to and have a stronger connection to the brand.
Web 2.0 brought also social networks, with sites like MySpace, Orkut or Hi5, that now are one of sources of highest traffic in the Internet. And this is not a teenager trend: about 1/4 of the users of MySpace is in the 25-34 target.
On these social networks, users naturally create their groups of interests, such as gardening or photography, discussing and sharing their common passions. Suddenly, brands have available marketing segments clearly defined, with highly envolved consumers and on top of all, measurable and accountable.
Brands tend to participate on these networks usually on a integrated manner, sponsoring some special pages or contests, offering tools and interactive experiences and helping users to become viral agents. In this terrain, where users take quite seriously their privacy, brands should take a more human message, creating profiles for their products, telling stories about the companies and avoiding commercial spam.
Consumers have new habits, new tools and new forms of relationship, in a digital lifestyle where traditional media is becoming more and more fragmented. Strangely, advertising and marketing don’t seem eager to follow this trend. Even when we spend 1/3 of our time digitally “wired”, most of the media spend is still on traditional media.
Some changes though, seem to be happening, with online advertising revenues expected to grow 31% in 2007, to a total of 16.4 billlion USD, 7% of market, and many budget expenses on his way to online media. On the other hand, print media, used get their revenues from subscriptions and classifiedds, has now serious competition from online services.
Online marketing is also in a period of evolution:
Many marketeers might ask: “Why should I even bother with all that stuff, if most of my customers don’t have a clue about those web things?”. The answer is strikingly simple:”Because that’s where all the money will be as soon as the people that now use these tools start to consolidate their online habits”.
And if advertising is not fast enough to change, then innovation will find new media models, like the company SpotRunner , that enables someone with a computer to pick an ad, plan the media budget and launch their campaign in 5 minutes.
I hope all the marketeers out there start to wake to this new reality, where the web is a platform to new kinds of conversations with the consumers. Where they (consumers) have the biggest importance ever. And where the future is digital.
© Lynetter
P.S: If you know portuguese, you can also watch the video below, a 24 min. lecture produced with the materials i’ve collected for this 3 part article. So, feel free to share it and help me out to awake a few more portuguese people on the importance of Advertising 2.0.
* Part 1 of 3, of my video (25min) lecture “Advertising 2.0″
Time Magazine, since the beginning of this century, has elected as Person of the Year:
And who was elected Person of The year for Time Magazine in 2006? You.
In fact, all of us who are now part of this digital democracy, where our role as citizens found a new importance.
In 2006 we created and shared videos, did book reviews, edited our profiles and avatars, developed open-source applications, wrote blogs and uploaded our photos online. We did a bit of everything to be Time’s Person of the year in 2006.
To celebrate the award, the magazine placed a outdoor screen in Times Square and those who walked by, could send a photo and appear on the cover of the magazine during some brief seconds.
Online, users started to change the cover to highlight those honored: themselves.
To the great inspiring readers of the blog, my wishes of A GREAT 2007 !
* I’ve been away on holidays, so i’m tryin to catch up with the latest inspirations.
And reminding us of this new year, if you haven’t got a fresh calendar, here’s a bunch of well designed ones:
 Time Tunnel
Days go down the spinning abyss,
by Luis Pabon
|
 Calendar on a regular dodecahedron
puting a face on each month.
|
 Compact Calendar
for a die-hard GTD dan,
by David Seah
|
 Around the sun
a daily visual scratchpad
|
Source: http://infosthetics.com/
It’s that time of the year when i get into the “Best Of” lists bandwagon. As music is one of the my main sources of inspiration, here are a few of my favorite 2006 albums.
Next year I’m putting my bets on Arcade Fire’s new album and “A Weekend In The City” from Bloc Party.
Based on Jeremy Ruston’s TiddlyWiki, ccTiddly is a web personal notebook.
It’s a server-side adaptation, based on PHP and MySQL, with version 1 released last September.
I’ve tried to use the TiddlyWiki standalone version for notetaking in a USB drive, or the GTDTiddlyWiki version for the incursions in GTD, but these weren’t quite useful since i’m always exchanging notes between work and home. Also, as i’m most of the time online, it’s not that practical to plug the USB and save the HTML file, that could easily reach several MB.
From the several server-side adaptations, only one seemed promising, so i gave ccTiddly a go. The setup was quite smooth, mostly database parameters and admin rights, and after the upload, it was online.The only thing that failed were the importTiddlers plugin, so i had to start with a blank wiki and expected that future releases might fix this problem.
I spent some time customizing stylesheets, creating some default tiddlers, and learning how to adapt my writing/note-taking style to this app. An finally,here it is:
[Screenshot only. Web app on private URL]
It has all the 2.0 webiness, with ajax transitions and easy editing and the essential feature of being able to access your personal wiki anytime you’re connected.
My review: Great ! If you’re a writer, blogger or training consultant it’s an excellent tool for knowledge management and notetaking, with more freedom than a traditional wiki.
Download link: http://cctiddly.sourceforge.net/
Final Fantasy is the solo project of Owen Pallet, a tour member of Arcade Fire.
The 2nd time here in Portugal, now with 3 concerts, one of them at Clube Lua , 15 October.
He recently won the Polaris Prize for a canadian album, based only on it’s artistic merit.
I’ll be there !
Musical genre: indie pop.
You could find more here:
