The XX & IE partner up for Coexist Stream//

by Sandy_Pandy

The XX’s second album, Coexist, is possibly one of the most anticipated albums of the last few years based upon the critical acclaim and success of their debut album XX and what better way to whip up a hype frenzy than to allow fans to steam the album before it’s release. However, this is streaming with a sharing functionality included enabling a feature to see where the ‘share’ has ended up? Microsoft and The XX collaborated to produce a HTML5 based page which plots a user’s position on the map and then tracks their social post to a point where the next person has accessed and streamed the album – thus showing the ‘flight path’ of the stream.

It is interesting how Young Turks, The XX’s record label, always gets these digital executions right – remember the HTML5 mobile radio site created for Jamie XX’s remix collaboration album with Gil Scott Heron?

What will be interesting is to see the final reach of such a stream and how much of a global appeal The XX have and will it affect sales?

Looking at how Microsoft are challenging the internet browsing market this is a good move to make the new IE9 just as cool, techy and at the fore of browsing as Chrome and Firefox to which have been leading the way for a while now. But will this actually make a difference and will users care that this is powered by Microsoft or just that they can stream the album? Either way, all the IE9 activity has changed the perception here but if I did a survey of what browser people used Chrome would still come out trumps, perhaps watch this space…

 

iStrategy London – Notes

by thepaperthepen

 

I popped down to the London iStrategy conference which was held at Stamford Bridge on Tuesday and Wednesday last week; there were a couple of speakers that stood out &  felt their content was worth sharing with everyone.

Bertrand Bodson, SVP Global Digital Marketing @ EMI

Bodson talked about his experience in trying to open up the music label to innovation through the use of their first ever hackathon. They teamed up with tech developers who were also passionate about music (enough to give up their weekends) to work with open APIs such as Spotify, LastFM, & a selection of EMI’s content to come up with ideas for great apps, websites etc.

• The revenue share is then shared 40:60 between the developers and EMI / artists to encourage developers to push through the idea into reality.
• Some of these ideas are now in production, such as an iPad app focused around their Blue Note Jazz back catalogue

 

A nice idea; rather than briefing creative agencies to come up with ideas (often the same old, same old) and instead open it up to passionate people to see if they can come up with something new and purposeful. Hackathons are becoming an increasingly popular way to develop great ideas in an intense, short session (for those of you who aren’t geeks, here’s the definition on what it actually is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon)

 

Alexander Koppel, CCO @ Red Bull Media House

Koppel spoke about content yesterday, and in particular how this has progressed from being central to their marketing policy to becoming a key part in their overall business model. Red Bull are on top of their game at creating and distributing content, and definitely leading the way in this space. Here are some of the key outtakes:

• They found that there were no traditional publishers for them to distribute their content that focused on extreme sports, so created their own to fill the void – including TV stations, magazines and a music label. Koppel emphasised that you can’t always rely on 3^rd parties to deliver, and where this is the case you have to go at it yourself.
• They’ve managed to grow their online social communities to 28 million Facebook fans, 600,000 twitter followers & 250 million YT video views – impressive stuff.
• With their content they are not prepared to stop at sponsorship of individuals or sports, but move beyond this to have a closer relationship with their athletes so that they’re with them from the start & for life
• From here, they’ve started to monitise their content & their brand, selling their content in packaged goods & streaming (such as The Art of Flight film, trailer here if you haven’t seen it already: http://youtu.be/kh29_SERH0Y)
• Where they have historically partnered with other brands pre-production, they are now being asked if they can distribute the content of these other brands in a commercial agreement (such as Quicksilver). They also white label their brand to phone companies to create new tariffs that appeal to the young ‘Red Bull audience’
• And finally, you need to allow failure to encourage innovation.

Alexia Paterson – TED 

The EASPORTSFIFA Final

by thepaperthepen

We were kindly invited by our friends at EA to partake in the annual EA SPORTS FIFA 5-A-Side tournament at the Emirates last night. Ray Parlour & Martin Keown provided the warm-up, and some tactical advice / banter during the game. It was an amazing night, and the team walked away winners, beating SkySports 3-2 in the final. Well played all, and look forward to our next trophy. Here is the winning team, and video footage from the final. More great photos taken by a pro on the day, so will share.

 

 

You Tube to TV CTA//

by Sandy_Pandy

With adidas being heavily involved in the Olympics they have created a new ad with all the hallmarks of the adidas brand including a specially written rap by Wretch 32, and all the stars, East LDN, the 236 Bus plus Keith Lemon [Pride of Leeds apparently!].

What I found interesting was the call to action on the bonus content that was leaked out as an end frame pushing users to remember a certain time and tune into the ad break on ITV – perhaps they missed a trick and should’ve used our favourite app Zeebox to tune in and watch with Keith, maybe they did and I missed it…

Anyway, I just found this an interesting point.

Create your own NFC ‘hot spots’//

by Sandy_Pandy

Near Field Communication [NFC] technology doesn’t have to be a payment or associated with a huge brand/organisation and Sony have iluustrated this with the ‘Smart Tag’.

Create personal hot spots that when tagged will set your phone to a certain setting or open a certain app for that specific zone/time of your day. We have seen this with internet apps and user behaviours where everything can be personalised and tailors to wants and needs and now for the inherently lazy they is no more need to fiddle with settings before a meeting or going to bed.

 

It must be noted that this is for demonstration purposes of what the technology can do at this moment in time but the concept is brilliant.

And contrary to what was said before it offers a blank canvas for advertisers to utilise by creating almost any day to day task, even the most mundane into  a mobile opportunity to interact, ‘MOI’ [S Bardega, 2012].

Top Twitter Trends of 2011//

by Sandy_Pandy

As the year reaches an end more and more trends across social networks will be releasing the top trends of 2011. So here is Twitter’s from Hoot Suite. Interesting how 1/2 of the trends are music related with Bieber dominating…

12-Year Old talks at TEDx about his pass

by tedmediacom

12-Year Old talks at TEDx about his passion for developing apps. Incredible how succinct his presentations skills are http://ow.ly/7vnFT

TED speak up .Industry view: What does G

by tedmediacom

TED speak up .Industry view: What does Google+ offer brands? via @BrandRepublic http://ow.ly/7qkKu

Google + Brand Pages. Why the hype ?

by thepaperthepen

Our relationship with Twitter and Facebook originated in personal relationships, but with Google, it was search. But, as Facebook and Twitter products evolve, it’s become pretty clear that they now want a piece of the ‘search’ pie. It’s healthy for the industry, and it’s fascinating to watch.

Does the fact that our relationship with Facebook started in personal relationships hinder its opportunity to focus on commerce opportunities ? I don’t completely agree with this notion, as there are many success stories with Facebook credits, but I do think this is where Google have an advantage. We have historically used Google (search) when we want to find our more about a product, or purchase a product. Is it this engrained consumer relationship with Google that will help Google + leap Facebook in commerce opportunities ?

Google has products like Google Checkout that already close the purchase cycle , and more importantly developed a commerce product that instill customers with that ‘trust-factor’. This is a really important factor in thinking about the potential for Google + , in comparison to Facebook & Twitter. In the last year Facebook mistrust stories have hit national news around the world, and this could be massively detrimental as it matures. If Facebook were a person, this is how they would be:

That is not to say that I completely trust Google, no way.  But, I think a large majority of the public would rather use Google product when parting with their hard-earned cash compared to Facebook and Twitter. If Google were a person I would put him in khakis, a white shirt, and an ill-fitting blazer – far more trusting, obviously.

Google + Brand Pages must not be viewed as an isolated experience, but rather a platform that has the potential to underpin a brands relationship with their customers over multiple Google touch points (Chrome, Android OS, YouTube). With this opportunity, comes data, and with data comes a requirement to make sense of that data. Facebook analytics sits on Facebook, Twitter analytics on Twitter, but with Google Analytics you have a product that is baked-in to a reported 50% of global websites.  The mind boggles at the potential here for Google, and I would be very surprised if the Google + brand page uptake doesn’t surpass its competitors very quickly.

TED in the booth

by thepaperthepen