Time flies. I realized I haven’t been very active blogger since I started at the McCann advertising agency. Even though I keep telling our clients that consumers are there were bloggers are.
It´s summer 2007 and I am having lectures at the Helsinki School of Economics. I roughly calculated that this is my sixth year teaching digital design, project management and online advertising. It has been interesting to follow what topics have been changed over the years – social media networks, rich media, broadband - and which fundamentals are the same like they were early 00´s (importance of IA, story-telling and great marketing concepts).
Well, first 6 months leading MRM WORLDWIDE HELSINKI is done. We have survived from the merge process pretty well. Small and smart team is doing good stuff. There has been great interest towards us within McCann´s existing clientele. Depate is relatively hot about how to utilize online media and digital assets for advertising and marketing purposes. Of course there is limited amount of money to be used, so how to divide that pile between offline and online for example.
But the sad truth is that, consumer do not hang around same old “media places” anymore. Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, Habbo, Messenger… you name it. And occationally they are reading magazines and watching tv films (while having laptops connected to the wlan at the same time.
But deep experiences happen online (okey, sometimes at the movie theathers), and deep experience is required to affect brand´s position inside consumer´s head.
Over the years I have been talking about how “content is the king”. Ort even more pathetic like “Medium is the Message”. But I have to admit that things has changed – from the marketer´s perspective “contact is the king”. Since consumers are more and more controlling media consumption any contact marketer gets from the audience is valuable, something to stick into. Since that is the situation, then we must say, that “Response is the Message”. More response, better you are succeeding in a fierce competition to be top of the mind brand marketer.
See some interesting ideas (and bring the love back to marketing): www.dailymotion.com/video/x1zv6w_the-break-up/
Business side: several campaigns done from local travel company Finnmatkat and insurance company Henki-Sampo. Especially great success was a promotional campaign for Finnmatkat where we asked consumers to create longest “queue of dancers”.
The campaign really went off, the longest queue was over 28.000 persons, and campaign was heavily promoted at local communities (to drive people one´s personal queue). Talking about viral effect!
Some digital campaign work for Microsoft as well, and for L´oreal too, who is really starting to spend some money for online media.
I met MRM Germany leader few weeks a ago. They have done some excellent work for Microsoft and Opel, and we reallky shared similar ideas how to utilize digital for marketing. This international aspect was oneof the reasons to jump U.S -based advertising affiliate.
Summer holiday period is approacing. 4 weeks at the summer cottage. Fantastic! Hope its not raining like today... Catch you up later with more details :-)
