Archive for the ‘Consumer behaviour’ Category

2009-07-23 20.03.09.jpg, originally uploaded by bradley23.

Running a live demo for a client yesterday, we noticed that Michael Jackson though deceased was still alive in the hearts and searches of music fans around the world.

In fact he was kicking musical butt in terms of interest levels, still the king of pop. This was originally posted over at my personal blog.

It was proclaimed yesterday in the Daily Mail that ‘Junk food is as addictive as heroin’.  The word EXAGGERATION springs to mind.  Not that I doubt the scientific credentials of the research, but comparing our love for chocolate cake to smack, do you not think that’s a bit of a stretch?  Have you ever heard of someone who’d been mugged by an addict to feed his Milky Way habit or a corner shop raided for its Curly Wurlys?  Perhaps it’s time we stopped using the term addict so liberally, because I’m pretty sure I could be accused of being addicted to Bacon Frazzles and Ribena. 

I was in the middle of reading Rob Walker’s Buying In when I started thinking about this post. Walker’s book comes with lots of examples where people have put their own values and authenticity on everyday brands. Pabst Blue Label beer moved from being cheap student-faire to an authentic hipster brand by virtue of its lack of marketing.

Timberland became a hip-hop fashion staple as the boot was ideal for the street dealer standing out on his corner in all seasons servicing his local addict clientele.

I had my own brand anecdote around Golden Virginia tobacco. I was listening to a group of Australians talking on the next table about rolling tobacco in a Starbucks one Sunday morning. According to the overheard conversation Marlboro were apparently the devils spawn because they polluted their tobacco with chemicals and many of these chemicals came from the filter tip. Rolling tobacco was better as it was more natural, Golden Virginia was particularly good as it was organic and therefore missing many toxic chemicals.

We know that tobacco is basically a slow poison and if the heart attacks, strokes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), emphysema, cancer (particularly lung cancer, cancers of the larynx, mouth,pancreas), erectile dysfunction and can also lead to birth defects aren’t bad enough, why then would you care about ‘organic’ tabacco? Golden Viriginia doesn’t make the claims for itself. Secondly, the reaction against filters would have health experts in a spin as they act as a barrier against some of the tar in tobacco.

Finally, it shows how the law of unintended consequences took the EU’s ban on tobacco advertising, switching consumers on to an arguably more dangerous tobacco product as a more healthy organic alternative. You can’t regulate against the street finding its own (idiotic) use of brands. This was originally posted on my personal blog renaissance chambara.

So for many of the uninitiated, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 was released this week. This has been the most anticipated video game since GTA IV which came out in 2008. CoD MF2 is already a record breaker with over 1 million copies being sold in day one, analysts expect 10 million sales in the run up to Christmas.

That’s mental! Record companies would bite your hand off for those figures especially when the game costs around £50 a pop.

The reason this is relevant to the PR industry is the buzz around this game this week has been incredible, it has secured coverage across not only in the traditional gaming press and blogs but also mainstream broadcast and national press with MP’s debating the games’ release in Parliament. Shouldn’t they be sorting the country out rather than discussing a piece of entertainment that has already been classified and approved by the British Board of Film Classification?

I have no doubt that the game is a great piece of workmanship and entertainment and I am looking forward to playing it. What I was impressed with was the PR launch of the game. Many shops were breaking sales embargoes and there were large queues of fans waiting to get their hands on it. The most impressive aspect of the launch was the permission to use Leicester Sq in London as the site to unveil the game. This is predominately reserved for Hollywood movies, so the fact that there was a massive scale PR event with full military occupation including camo vehicles and personnel added to the drama and event. The launch also had the red carpet feel with a number of celebrities attending, proving that gaming is part of our modern culture just as music, art and movies are.

The revenues of the gaming industry worldwide are overtaking the movie industry very quickly due to huge sales and high prices for games. The scope for executing well planned and large PR campaigns for games has arrived and will be a major aspect of the PR business sector in the years to come. Expect a lot of big agencies to be pitching for software houses such as Activision, EA, Epic, Rockstar, Eidos and Ubisoft as well as crazier and bigger PR launches.

Game on!

eBay Advertising yesterday launched some research about European online shopping habits and people’s receptiveness to online advertising and this truly got me thinking. Not about the research per se - people are more receptive to ads on a social network (seven per cent) than they are on a portal (five percent) – but more about how the success of online advertising is inversely proportional to its quality.

Online advertising undoubtedly works – the metrics don’t lie and money continues to flow into the sector. But I don’t think I have ever intentionally clicked on an online ad and my own research (a quick shout out around the office) revealed that is the case for others too. Online ads are still seen as intrusive and an irritant and people find them too interruptive and poorly targeted. I’m all for behavioural targeting if it can actually work but I keep getting served ads on a social network for a Chris Rea compilation, something hell would freeze over before I would even think about buying.

A good advert can generate buzz and discussion yet I don’t think a single online ad has come anywhere near the impact of say the Guinness ads. Is it a lack of creativity? I can only recall one online ad – a mocked-up IM exchange promoting the film Knocked Up – that I have mentioned in conversation (and now this blog) as an example of a strong advertisement that may have helped influence my behaviour.

So who are these millions of people that click through? Where is the creativity in the online space? Perhaps I am missing the better work but I don’t think so. All the while online advertising keeps working then I don’t see the quality being raised – a shame given the massive potential for creativity that online affords.

Mark Pesce, one of the pioneers of the modern web; who was the prime mover behind a now-forgotten technology called VRML. In the mid-1990s virtual reality was all the rage and the future was going to be all about tactile gloves, video visor helmets and surround sound; so a three-dimensional worldwide web made sense and ’surfing’ the web was going to be more than just a metaphor. VRML was going to be the language that it was built in and the whole lot would run on Silicon Graphics servers.

Virtual reality fell on its ass as it gave people motion sickness, but the rise of augmented reality, the Nintendo Wii controller and three dimensional displays from the iTunes jukebox to Microsoft Surface shows that Pesce may have just been too early. I recently got reacquainted with Pesce’s work when I found his latest online incarnation and read about his vision of the changing nature of the web on his blog The Human Network. Hyperconnectivity is a phrase that Pesce uses to describe the effects brought about by the following factors:

• Content and experiences can be shared easily throughout the world
• Humans are social creatures
• The web and its audiences have become a worldwide eyes and ears, wherever there is connectivity there is nothing that can remain hidden. This means that many of the traditional control mechanisms no longer work: just ask the music industry

Pesce is interested in what this means for society and social interaction, we are the precipice of a social experiment from which there is no way back. So in some respects, hyperconnectivity has yet to be fully defined.

This is cross-posted from my personal blog renaissance chambara.