The Storefront: A role for social media

As far as consumer experience goes, brands with brick & mortar establishments have a huge advantage. Shaping a consumer experience is much easier when a brand has an entire space can do the talking: Jamba Juice is about easygoing health, Nespresso for serious coffee drinkers. Benefit is a fun make-up brand, Mac more glam. Besides marketing and packaging, a storefront is a way to immediately tell consumers what to expect from a brand. Is it homey and inviting? Minimalist and serious? Or is it for specialists?

When it comes to RTD beverages or drugstore cosmetics, all the branding happens on the packaging. Advertising sets the mood, but when touchpoints are across disparate spaces, it is more difficult to give consumers a feel of the experience we want attached to the brand. POS might help but these materials are dedicated more to functional messaging that seems to take precedence. Advertising may not hit everyone, and when there is only thirty seconds or 60-by-40 feet to tell a story, it is difficult to set the mood.

So especially for FMCG's who lack a physical place to spell out their brand feel and values, social media can play this role.

2011

This was a crazy year.

As always, a learning year.

So much happened that it has been difficult to process as they happen.

But, good stuff.

We got lots of great ideas approved. And got clients to learn that good stuff takes quite some time to figure out, think up and produce. We brought one client into digital listening. One of my strategy ideas was featured at the Ad Congress. Even if I wasn't directly involved, I was proud to watch several of our works go viral. One of our fanpages hit a million fans.

This was an epic year, better than I've had in the six years I've been doing digital.

The work is not, is never, done. There is so much more to do, always so much more to learn. But a few things that became clear to me this year, that helped me navigate the crazy space that is digital:
Never think you've figured it out, but never stop trying to understand what is going on. Digital work is team work, and the best work that gets produced is by the people you work closest and most honestly with. Learn the old school to make sense of the new. Try everything with a mind set to Play. Bring new people into the fold but their real learning will be by doing. Always ask Why, Why Not, Who Cares, What Now. Tell people what to do. Try to see the bigger picture. Remember that nobody has figured it out, that we are writing the rules together, and/but while nobody has figured it out rules are meant to be broken.

With this in mind, and a new agenda for 2012, the new year sounds quite exciting.

Thinking of Experience & Engagement Planning

Not that you can plan for every reaction, but the idea of direction, action, reaction. The dynamic flow of information.

Planning detour

I often wonder how I got here. Planning was a detour within advertising, one I never even thought of pursuing. When I took advertising in college talked mostly about Accounts and Creatives. Planning was never really discussed, and if it was it didn't make an impact on me.

I was assigned to a big project with working our head of Planning during my first month in advertising. During a cab rides back from a client's office, he told me he thought I had a "planning brain" and asked if I'd ever considered working in that group. The honest answer was no.

I was strictly on the digital path and nothing was going to derail me, certainly not a group called "Strategic Planning" that wasn't on my radar. I wonder what would have happened if I'd known what he was talking about and/or if I'd taken him seriously. That was almost five years ago. And now I'm here. How do things happen?

ADVERTISING + EXPERIENCE

why Brands need to SAY + DO

HEINEKEN LIGHT STRATEGY: “Rather than settling for constantly mediocre instances and routines, the campaign celebrates consumers and their 'occasionally perfect' experiences. While every occasion is not right for Heineken Light, the beer is a perfect fit for those situations that call for something a little more unique, special and upscale.” (via)

ADVERTISING




EXPERIENCE




Getting people to experience what we want our brands to stand for is most meaningful in the real world. But because of digital media we can now share activations and real-world goodness the whole world over.

Just realized that this image could well be mistaken for the Digital Sh*t.
But this conference was quite the opposite!

Two days of intense information overload. Still absorbing and thinking through all that was said and tweeted. But will post something soon!

TADD GADDUANG for Brand Ambassador! (slash endorser)

(Not exactly digital except in the channel I'm using to campaign :P)

Tadd Gadduang, who I follow and tweet regularly at @D8Tadd, is one of the top four finalists on So You Think You Can Dance (in case you aren't so familiar, here's my quick intro ). And he's Filipino!

He is awesome! On a show that gets dancers to stay fabulous even outside their comfort zones, he has somehow conquered almost every style thrown at him. Even if he is a B-boy (breaker), he is able to do so many styles brilliantly.

Similar to what I wrote for also-awesome-Pinoy Marko (yes the top two guys in the SYTYCD finale are Filipino!), I believe that it is only a matter of time before some brand brings this guy over as an endorser and I will be damned if it is not the agency I work for because I want to meet him! So people at that collaborative place were I work, please listen up.

MARKO GERMAR for Brand Ambassador!

(Not digital except in the channel I'm using to campaign :P)

Anyone who follows me on Twitter will likely have seen my messages to @D8Marko. That is Marko Germar - a pure Pinoy who is vying for the top spot on reality show So You Think You Can Dance (in case you aren't so familiar, here's my quick intro).

Marko has been a frontrunner from the beginning. He and partner Melanie started the season with a Travis Wall contemporary routine. The judges gave the pair a standing ovation and the rest was history!


As much as I love this show, I usually save SYTYCD posts for my non-digital personal blog on Tumblr. But now I have a marketing-related issue so I'm only too happy to have an excuse to post something Marko- or SYTYCD-related on this blog!
I believe that it is only a matter of time before some brand brings this guy over as an endorser and I will be damned if it is not the agency I work for because I want to meet him! So people at that collaborative place were I work, please listen up.

Notes on So You Think You Can Dance

(This isn't digital but I love this show and need to write this as a reference for my next two pieces.)

So You Think You Can Dance is one of my favorite shows. Even if I have zero dance background (not counting my ballet classes as a kid), I love this show. Every (U.S.) summer, I rush home every Thursday night to watch the latest episode. I avoid Twitter on Friday mornings so that I won't see who was eliminated. I LOVE THIS SHOW.

For those of you who haven't had the immense pleasure yet of watching the show, So You Think You Can Dance, it is a reality show on the Fox network, sister to much more popular reality competition American Idol. While AI has infinitely more viewers and fans, SYTYCD is a far better show. The contestants train for years (whether in formal classes or hmm... on the streets? like if you're a hip-hop dancer?) and by the time they get on the show they are experts at their own style - contemporary, jazz, ballroom, Latin, Broadway, etc. The challenge every week is to be able to master a range of styles outside of their own. Contemporary dancers are asked to do hip-hop, hip-hop dancers are asked to do ballroom, and they all get weird styles like African jazz or Bollywood, and the point is to shine no matter what style.

TV Hashtags, Part 2

TV shows use hastags to organize real-time word-of-mouth about new shows and new seasons.

(Click for TV Hashtags, Part 1)

Suits, a brilliant new legal show on the USA network, leads viewers to Twitter with a question + hashtag. In an episode where junior associate Mike decides to keep something from boss Harvey, the show asks "Have you ever lied to your boss?" and indicates #suits as the hashtag.

Project Runway, back for its ninth season, is inviting viewers to vote for their favorite contestants using hashtags. At the end of the season the show will award a Fan Favorite based on Twitter hashtag votes.

Hashtags can be pretty messy - I'm certainly guilty of making up my own hashtags even if I don't know (or care) if anyone else is using them. But mainstream media is one way to provide the common keyword that consolidates and unites conversastion on Twitter.

clueless in advertising?

I was an ad agency intern in 2004. Back when I thought I wanted to be a designer. Before I had a stint in PR, an affair with account management, a brush with digital. When advertising meant TV+Radio+Print and the last stop on the project checklist was signing FA off or sending tapes to the stations. When I thought agencies were made up of Suits and Creatives (no concept of planning). When, as I would leave at 5 pm, creatives would tell me the day was just beginning. When advertising seemed like the ultimate playground.

Some things will never be the same. Some things will never change.

When I was a very impressionable intern, a very kind art director lent me a book that someone else had given him when he was thinking of getting into advertising.

It excited me because it was well designed, and because he was my intern crush. Cut to today and I've been at the same agency, pretty much, for almost five years. So even if this book only rates with two stars on Amazon, I think it was pretty effective. 

I'm working with an intern now and I think I will pass it on to her. I wonder what she'll take out of it, if she will be as excited as I was when I first felt the agency buzz. 

MMDA Traffic Navigator

MMDA & TV5 launch Philippines' first digital traffic map

I love transit maps! I get extremely excited when I see a well-designed information graphic, and transit maps are at the top of my list because of their crazy utility. It can't be easy to design just one image that effectively communicates so much inter-related information at the same time - where each train goes, what routes are available to get somewhere, how near each station is to where you're going, where you can get on or off, whether or not each line runs all day.

As a blueprint for how people navigate through a city, a transit map also says something about that city's identity. When I travel to a new place, a well-designed transit map tells me whether or not the local government cares enough about its commuters to give structure to this crucial daily activity. This of course assumes that transportation systems work at all and were strategized properly so that they can now be communicated in an efficient way that allows even new users can easily get on board.

My favorite transit map is of New York, because it is New York's! But I like this map especially because it anchors the different transit points or subway stations over the actual city map so you know where each stop is, in relation to the whole city.

Then you can immediately tell things like how near or far each station is from the another. What options you have in terms of subway lines if you want to go to, say Midtown East or the Upper West Side.

Other maps like London's, Beijing's and I think even Tokyo's, are cleaner in terms of design. But because but elements are not anchored on an actual map you'd have to look at another (actual map) to figure out where you are once you leave the station.

to the backchannel!

(Or, TV Hashtags, Part 1)


TV shows use hashtags to organize real-time word-of-mouth about finale episodes.

On Vampire Diaries, fans were invited to talk about the show on Twitter with a designated hashtag. (No, I am not ashamed of my keen interest in shows that feature high school / college students like Vampire or now-defunct Greek.) In this case #Klaus, the villain of the season. It makes me wonder if the writers were asked to select a name for the character that would be unique to and associated with the show. (Past villains like Katherine or Elijah don't really have unique names.)

The (pretty awesome) Fringe finale invited fans to tag their tweets with the show title.

As viewers start to shift behavior to watching TV at their preferred time (TiVo) and in their preferred format (online), one of the biggest challenges facing TV networks in the US is adding value to the broadcast experience. Is Twitter the fix? 


Watching live TV in the US has become a two-screen activity for some, where the show airs on television and the user follows or participates in the real-time commentary on Twitter. It gives an interesting perspective into other veiwers' and fans' reactions at the same time you are all watching.


I don't think this will be a problem for a long time in the Philippines but it would be interesting to take some of the experiments in real-time commentary to our own viewing experiences: Should the UAAP flash a hashtag on screen as the series unfolds? Should controversial print or TV ads invite reactions by including a hashtag in the material? Maybe concert tickets should invite users to tweet under the same #justinbieberph to document reactions to the show.

Hashtags are commonly used in the Philippines, but seemingly spur-of-the-moment. During Ondoy people all seemed to come up with their own tags. Can't wait to see which brand or event dictates the tag to unite commenters under one Twitter thread.

(Click for TV Hashtags, Part 2)

ways of seeing: wristwatches

a curated digital post


I've always had a wristwatch, more for style than for function; the face of my watch is a long rectangle so spacing is weird between the X and Y axis. Sometimes I can't be certain whether my watch is telling me it is 10 or 11. To be sure, I check my phone.


With the onslaught of handheld digital devices that hold the time, what happens to the wristwatch? 
THREE PERSPECTIVES:

says THE ATLANTIC

Such displays of time on mobile devices [and apps] go beyond the ticktock of the grandfather clock and the insistent pulse of the wristwatch, no longer pointing at one moment but indicating all the hours at once.

says THE CLASS OF 2014

...They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.

says LUNCHBREATH

a digital learning adventure

On my birthday last year I had just flown into the US to start studies in digital marketing.

New York is a crazy beautiful city and was an awesome backdrop to the learning adventure I started in 2010. The city felt like a long-lost home and was home indeed for the first three-or-so months of my 27th year. 

I had hit a stumbling block in digital and had decided that I wanted to learn the rules from someone else (experts?) before trying to figure out how to break them at work. I headed to New York University to learn from "the best" with a sideline at MRM Worldwide, New York. 

Silly me - there are no real rules. Funny that I had to go all the way to the first, very mature-marketed, world to learn that? But it confirmed that I wasn't the only clueless person in digital marketing. What then? 

I got a happy illumination on a seemingly unconnected trip to the Museum of Natural History. I saw a caption beside their gigantic blue whale that said that, to this day, only 5% of the ocean has ever been explored. It made me happy to imagine that if such a small part of a bounded space has been discovered by man, how much more there is for us to express coming from the limitless space of ideas and creativity.

Coming back after months of art, music, theater, avenues, blocks, burgers, food trucks, footseps, free Wi-Fi, subways, trains, classes, work days and learning that I couldn't even process, I was grounded in the thought that ideas, especially digital ideas, can still break new ground. 

I hit reset on this blog, in how I thought it could help me keep processing this crazy space, and headed home.

are we listening?: brands & trust online

A think piece I worked on over the weekend on brands and trust online. Are we listening?

Brands & Trust Online

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