We Love Creative Agency is proud to announce it’s relationship with Sony Ericsson as supplier of creative services. Kicking off with the design and development of an interactive campaign site for the Mobile World Congress 2010, the launch of their new range of handsets was supported by a Social Media strategy including Facebook and a mobile version of the site.

At the heart of the site design was a 3D interactive space, creating engagement and starting the story of the Sony Ericsson MWC event. Taking center stage were the heroes of the site, the phones themselves, supported by social media feeds that drove users towards established Sony Ericsson Social Media channels – creating more awareness and ultimately extending long term engagement.

Congratulations to everyone involved – a great project, an amazing effort all round and most enjoyable to work upon.

Checkout the Campaign Site, Facebook page and Mobile site

After a month working at We Love I thought I’d better pull my finger out and write my first blog… seeing as the Hoskinator has already chalked up 4.

Whilst wondering how best to flex my (slightly underused) literary muscles I came across what might well be the most incredible pack of cards ever – assembled by 52 of the country’s most famous contemporary artists it’s being exhibited at the Haunch of Venison Gallery, London.

The “House of Cards” exhibition was launched to raise awareness of the housing insecurity facing millions of families in the UK and has been backed up with this sublimely hard hitting video.

With more than 1.9 million households awaiting social housing and an estimated 65,000 facing repossession it really hits the note.

Brilliant. VIral for the Swedish tourist board aimed at us Brits…

Well… what can I say. Cheesy as hell… I mean use a dog or baby and everyone will love you… but this I thought was quite amusing. Watch the movie…

http://www.evianliveyoung.com

In The Netherlands, IKEA is setting a great example of useful consumer generated content with the ‘Design Your Own Life’ campaign. A few months ago, they’ve launched Open Kitchen,

a user generated showroom of kitchens with IKEA products. With over 2000 entries, it instantly became the biggest kitchen showroom in Holland. Right now they’ve launched the follow up Bedroom Secrets, in which you can have a look inside Dutch bedrooms. Literally, because besides the user uploaded bedrooms, a webcam stream makes it possible to watch the bedrooms of Lonne, Sven and Manette, live.

After its Open day launch in May 2009 the Grand Ocean housing development has successfully sold all of it’s Phase 1 apartments and is now entering into the second part of it’s marketing push.

With over 20 apartments sold already, the response to this new development has been overwhelming. These positive figures highlight the obvious benefits of an engaging and highly targeted X-channel campaign.

Elements of the campaign include a concept driven website, social media mash-up, contextual outdoor advertising, and an array of local media activities and offline collateral – all of them strategically combined to create an overall story which prospective buyers can relate to and buy into…

So congratulations for Phase 1 and here’s to Phase 2…

Visit the site yourself… www.gograndocean.co.uk

Recently the government released a safer sex campaign aimed at teenagers, which has been branded as ‘gimmicky’ and a waste of taxpayers money! The ‘Want respect? Use a condom’ campaign (initiated by the NHS Leicester viral banned from YouTube) was based around a custom made drama series which cost over £250,000 to film and create… and when launched only 5,576 people signed up to the series (over the past 4 months) meaning so far it has cost £45 per subscriber…

According to the government the campaign has been a success so far, but tax payers argue that “too often the government engages with gimmicky marketing and advertising because they think they are going to reach a new audience”.

Now, in this instance, I don’t necessarily think the government are trying to be too ‘alternative’, hoping to reach a new audience, but instead they are taking a more obvious route, hoping to appeal to the desired target market through known (and tested) social media marketing, such as Facebook, YouTube, mobile phones, etc… which makes perfect sense – however, I wonder if these methods of marketing are becoming over saturated.

Where they may have fallen down in this instance is simply through lack of (or the wrong type of) exposure… although saying that, we’re talking about it now! Even though the campaign seems to have had a negative response amongst tax payers and critics, it could have all been part of a cunning plan to simply get some exposure… and it could be argued that any exposure is good exposure!

Marketing methods such as these can generate great results, especially if the campaign is seeded and pushed in the right direction – however if incorrectly deployed they can remain unseen in an ocean of campaigns, all fighting to get pushed through to your inbox or txt to your mobile phone! Besides, it’s obvious that tax payers aren’t happy with the government taking this ‘risky approach’ – so maybe they should stick to more conventional methods… or finish the job they started and make sure it’s effectively fulfilled.

As creatives, its our responsibility to ensure that creativity helps create change, define future thinking and help towards shaping the way people absorb, understand and interact with the information they’re given. That way we can ensure that our marketing & advertising solutions will continue to grow ever more inspirational, more engaging and most importantly of all… successful!

It would be good to hear some other opinions and let’s see if we can help boost those stats! Go and visit www.thmbnls.co.uk, sign up and watch the series… maybe you’ll learn something

Following a link from our October newsletter, we’ve highlighted some of the best (in our opinion) digital howlers. Ideas, that when given the room and money needed to grow, can lead to some very interesting and entertaining outcomes… from marketeers that should know better…


01 – Second Life… No Life…

2007 brought us the uncontrollable excitement of Second Life’s commercialisation … What crap. Build a virtual storefront and everyone will love you. I hope, come the recession, that the marketeers who suggested such rubbish are the first to be shot at dawn.

A second ‘rate’ idea that cost not only dollars, but a loss of face for the marketing industry as a whole by jumping on this rubbishy bandwagon, making it more difficult to say ‘hey, this is what you should be doing’ with the corporate dollar when the ROI of $100,000 to $5mill spend for a poxy 1000 visits, is and will forever be shameful… woohoo…

I bet the likes of Nike, Nissan, Reebok, Starwoods, et al are kicking themselves and wishing that they invested in some good old fashioned engagement which would show a better return of say 1000%

Overhyped rubbish… yes it was.

02 – Meaningless links

These days we all know that to rank well with the Search Engines you need plenty of Inbound Links – what people tend to forget is that any old link just won’t cut the mustard.

Organic links from relevant, quality pages are what you’re after, following basic rules such as:

i) make sure they’re from pages at least 1 point higher in Page Rank and have content relevant to your site (and if you get the opportunity ask for the inbound links to be from your top keywords, not from words such as ‘click here’)

ii) the pages should have less than 100 total outbound links (inc. internal navigation)

iii) and feature no more than 16 sponsored links or 2 Google Adword boxes.

Anything else will turn you into an online pariah – so don’t leave irrelevant comments on blogs leading back to your monetised homepage and don’t carpet bomb the internet with your link. Let inbound traffic build organically – encourage 2-way communication with other people and become part of the online community as a whole.

(And if you have do have a link page on your site, make sure you don’t call it this – Google does not like these words and if it finds them it’ll negatively impact on your ranking)


03 – Sony’s… All I want for Christmas is a PSP

And the title of worst viral campaign goes to the agency that created the Sony PSP Christmas campaign… After they set up a fake website pretending to be PSP “fanboy’s” and produced a video with a cringe-inducing rap, followed by fake comments praising their campaign. The original posting included “we started clowning with sum not-so-subtle hints to j’s parents that a PSP would be teh perfect gift”. Now I don’t know about you, but I think I just threw up a bit in my mouth… Never ever underestimate your target market’s intelligence . . . NEVER fake a viral!


04 – Cut price websites… Bargain!

When someone offers to design and build you a website for £400 all in, it must be a bargain…
Oh, but it appears to look like all the other site’s out there… AND YOU SEEM SURPRISED! There are far too many people offering templated websites, that neither fulfill the clients needs or offer you any sort of advantage over your competitors.

Now I understand that clients often have to work within a budget, but there’s really no benefit to using these cowboy’s because people will NEVER be able to find your website unless you GIVE them the URL… So they have no SEO properties what so ever.

Not only that, but these sites only ever use one template, have no thought behind target market, tone of voice or market positioning – they’re badly built, badly managed and they provide no positive comeback whatsoever – so our advice is you may as well go and burn your money instead…


05 – Always check your mailing list…

Earlier this year Virgin Trains accidentally hit the send button before checking their mailing list, inviting thousands of customers to a luxury golf weekend… After which they quickly sent another email apologising, as the offer was only meant for a selected few!

They then gave the thousands of ‘happy to have won’ customers the chance to enter another competition to win back one of three available spaces on the luxury weekend that they had already just won… Confusing or simply embarrassing… Well that will teach you to check your mailing list next time…