The very best and worst of British

You know you’re at Wunderman’s ‘Best and Worst of British’ party when…

“You get talking to Vicky Pollard about strategies for getting home by tube without getting beaten up, or worse.”
“You’re asked for the third time, ‘you want chilli sauce with that, boss?’”
“You’re strangely attracted to the dirty old man who just flashed you.”
“You see Geoff Boycott part the dance floor, like Moses parted the Red Sea, and hit a perfect cover drive.”
“You see five Amy Winehouses in less than a minute.”
“You’re dressed as a six foot carrot.”
“You still can’t work out who the Stig is.”
“You realise the Stig is a woman.”
“You’re dancing with a jar of Bovril and bottle of HP sauce.”
“Your CEO is trying to sell you stuff out the back of his three-wheeled van.”
“The fake Scary Spice is scarier than the real one.”
“Fish and Chips are eating fish and chips.”
“The Beatles are mobbed by the Spice Girls.”
“Chavs and punks dance arm in arm.”
“The worst seems to outweigh the best.”
“Everywhere you turn there is a chav.”
“Even at a company party you still get a guy holding a golf sale sign and another telling you not to be a sinner.”
“There’s a samurai armed with a camera.”
“You’re comparing dodgy tattoos with a sunburnt, string-vest-wearing Brit Abroad.”
“Two oversized British bulldogs are prettier than many of the party guests.”
“You spend 15 minutes comparing kebab-making techniques with Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.”
“You’re mad that another Robin Hood showed up.”
“You see a massive Yorkshire pudding trying to fit through the toilet door.”
“Your colleagues are playing, ‘How many people can you fit in a telephone box?’”
“Your tube ride to get there smelt of onions and tomato sauce.”
“You see people popping sprouts on the dance floor.”
“You’re asked to look after a giant kebab.”

Tweets, robots and beer

Every fortnight, like-minded Wunderman colleagues get together to indulge our passion and appetite for all things digital. We swap links, engage in 'wide-ranging' discussion and vote on the best online content. We call it Digital Jam and everyone is welcome.

First up we saw some amazing Twitter visualisations coded all in HTML5. Globes of colour representing tweets whizz around and flow over your mouse pointer. Being HTML5 it works in any modern browser, even on mobile devices, and uses no Flash!

Next up; Verbatim have released a promo for their line of solid state memory. Create fighting robots from USB sticks and rewritable CDs then battle with others.

The winner this week was a PR stunt for Andes Beer. Andes have created the ‘Teletransporter’ – a cubicle which plays ambient sounds while you call your spouse to explain why you’re not home yet. A brilliant, if slightly immoral, idea which will appeal to the target audience.

Google the future

Every fortnight, like-minded Wunderman colleagues get together to indulge our passion and appetite for all things digital. We swap links, engage in 'wide-ranging' discussion and vote on the best online content. We call it Digital Jam and everyone is welcome.

The first Digital Jam of 2010 was full of new excitement for the new decade. We saw a frenetic Flash game and debated bra colours on Facebook. But Google stole the show this week with two videos; an advert for their browser Chrome and - the winner of the session - an introduction to Google Goggles.

Released just over a year ago, Chrome is fairly new on the browser scene. It’s a rethink of how browsers work and in typical Google style it’s upset the entire market, having already overtaken Apple’s Safari in market share! Google are obviously pushing Chrome with a big campaign and this clever video demonstrates its advanced features with refreshingly simple animations.

We also saw an introduction to Goggles; Google’s visual search technology. The tech here is stunningly clever (another Google tradition): allowing you to search on images and location instead of typing in some text. The potential here is huge; just imagine a whole Internet of price comparison available to you at the click of a shutter while you’re out shopping!

It seems like Google is taking over the world, everything they touch turns to gold and every market they enter gets shaken up. But should we worry about such a fast growing influential company, or should we trust them and their motto “don’t be evil”?

Mobile Digest #02#

In our first guest article of 2010, David Murphy, editor of Mobile Marketing Magazine, summons the genie of the mobile (isn't there an app for that?) and kindly requests three wishes.

The start of any new year is a time for making resolutions, just as about a week later is the time for breaking them. That said, it seems only fitting to draw up a list, not so much of resolutions, but of my hopes for mobile as a marketing channel in 2010.

Here then, in no particular order, are three wishes to consider...

iBeyond

That brands lose their obsession with the iPhone and decide which phones and which platforms to design their mobile applications for, based on the profile of their target audience and the type of phone they are likely to have. That said, with the iPhone now available for £20 a month from Tesco, it probably won’t be too long before the iPhone is genuinely unignorable as a platform; I just hope consumers using other devices are not forgotten.

Bigger push from the networks

That the mobile networks begin to genuinely embrace mobile marketing. There are signs this is starting to happen, with O2, for example, offering its customers the chance to opt in to receive marketing messages on their mobile phones. Most UK operators now also offer flat-rate data tariffs where, for a few pounds a month, the consumer can browse mobile websites on their phone and feel confident they're not racking up a huge bill. It would be good to see the operators doing more to really push these tariffs.

Virtual vouchers

That the progress made over the last 12 months in a couple of key sectors, notably transport and retailing, continues apace. Around the world, as of today, you can buy bus, train, parking and flight tickets via your mobile, and have the ticket sent to your phone as a mobile voucher. Money-off vouchers are also being sent to consumers on their mobile phones by a few forward-thinking brands and retailers, and once consumers get used to using these services, they wonder how they managed without them. Here’s hoping that these pockets of activity become commonplace in 2010. Then when someone comes along with the next neat thing to do on your mobile, people won’t think it’s such a big deal, won’t get hung up on the technology involved, and will just get on and do it.

M is for mobile, marketing and mainstream

There, that doesn’t seem like much to ask for does it? I won’t say that 2010 looks like being the year of mobile, not least because if I did, half the people in the mobile marketing business would lynch me, so tired are they of hearing that phrase. But if these three wishes come true, we’ll be a lot closer to seeing mobile adopted as a mainstream marketing and CRM channel.

There’s snow time like Christmas

Christmas is coming,
The goose is getting fat. 
Better send a Christmas eCard,
So why not one like that?

The season of goodwill is with us again. To celebrate this festive time of year we created a personalised eCard that you can share with your friends and family.

Visit the site and you'll be greeted with our Christmas message while snow gently follows your mouse. You can upload your own images, personalise your message and make it snow by either clicking ‘shake’ or grabbing and shaking the globe with your mouse. Best of all, your creation can then be shared via Twitter, Facebook or email.

Your friends, family and colleagues will be so impressed by your fun Christmas message, they'll want to give it a shake too! Plus, everyone can share their creations with us on Twitter by simply using @WundermanUK in your tweet.

Get into the Christmas geek spirit

Christmas is coming and the digital marketing industry is getting into the Christmas spirit (thanks to all the cherry brandy liqueurs), so here’s what every geek wants in their stocking…

Elf Yourself is back for Christmas 2009 and now it connects with Facebook to save you some of the pain of finding photos. They’ve also added new tools to better fit faces to elves and even more dance and music styles. Our brave CEO has even had a go.

Ogilvy have created (possibly) the first ever agency Christmas iPhone app (slightly less imaginatively) called White Xmas (iTunes store link). With the tag line “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas”, the app allows you to snap a photo which it then sprinkles with computer-generated snow. A neat idea, wonderfully atmospheric and pretty innovative. We captured our office in a swirl of snow.

AIS have been warming their vocal chords with a Christmas sing-along. Choose a song and control the good people of AIS while they sing it for you! The controls are a little hard to get a hang of but those with nimble fingers will be able to produce a good tune.

Elfquilibrium is an addictive little Christmas game. Guide Santa along a precarious rooftop by helping him balance out his somewhat drunken gait. But keep on your toes, you’ve got to deliver presents down all the chimneys, too.

YouTube are running a YouTube Carolling competition in the US this year. People can record their rendition of a choice of 4 carols (2 traditional, 2 original) and upload their video. There are $100 gift cards for 15 runners-up and the overall winner gets the $5,000 grand prize! There are some frankly ridiculous entries so far, this being our favourite by far.

What’s your favourite bit of seasonal digital?
Merry Christmas!

Is it time the music industry adjusted its sails?

What have a Wunderman planner, creative and suit got in common? They've all been intensely following and exploring the debate of free versus paid content. Constantly in flux, intellectually disputed and haunted by the spectre of big business, they're also finding that the current landscape is changing day by day. Part of our series on ‘free’.

Wunderman planner, Tom Gibby, explores the sea change taking place in the music industry, while it appears to have its head in the sand.

The music industry is still in denial and has been ever since one of the original file-sharing platforms, Napster, set sail through the digital ocean in 1999. Napster was swiftly scuppered by a cannonball-sized lawsuit from Metallica in 2001 and the music industry exhaled a (premature) sigh of relief. However, technology continued to evolve sharing platforms at an ever-increasing rate and everyone flocked to the next peer-to-peer service. So, is it the case that once you've tasted free, there's no going back?

Turn the clock forward and the music industry still seems shell-shocked. Besieged by legal music-sharing battleships, such as YouTube and Spotify, yet still attempting to police the increasing numbers of illegal file-sharing pirates.

For some, it's all too much. In late September, Lily Allen finally admitted defeat and walked the plank. She had chosen not to renegotiate her contract, nor did she have any plans to make another record in the future. While for some, this may have come as a relief, its effect rippled around the wider music industry signalling that something needed to change.

Embracing change

Some musicians, seeing the breakdown of traditional sales methods, have responded more positively.

Robbie Williams has just pre-released his latest album on Spotify. He’s certainly the biggest UK artist to do so to date and probably one of the only artists with enough clout to get their record company to agree to it.

In 2007, Prince gave away his album ‘Planet Earth’ to anyone who'd bought his recent tour tickets. He also gave it away with the Mail on Sunday and although the rag paid a large cash sum for the cover mount, they also sold an extra 600,000 copies, with a total distribution of 2.8 million.

The audience decides and decodes

In the same year as Prince gave away ‘Planet Earth’ Radiohead took a similar stance to distribution by making their album available to download for a voluntary and variable charge. While the PR value outshone the sale revenue, the timing was perfect. And now, as the social web goes mainstream, more musicians have started to tap into more engaging digital campaigns to create buzz and added value.

Turning fans’ propensity to share into a positive is how Muse decided to create buzz around their new album. They involved them in an interactive online treasure hunt called Project Eurasia during the pre-release campaign. Five-second clips of their latest single United States of Eurasia were hidden (physically, on 30 USB sticks) from Berlin to Tokyo. It was then up to their network of fans to find all the different clips, upload them to the web and piece the track together.

Tweet or die! Or both

Twitter is a music distribution mecca at present. Travis Barker and DJAM used Twitter hashtags to create ‘freevertising’ for their second TRVSDJAM album. Users visited http://twitter.trvsdjam.com and downloaded the new album for free in return for one tweet. This was a great strategy to cut the distribution chain while creating a huge buzz to help spread their music to a much larger audience. The plan was to boost interest in their live performances, a future thinking route for musicians to generate revenue. Tragically, however, DJAM’s untimely death would mean that this newly generated audience would have no such chance.

Going with the flow

All the examples above still relate to free giveaways, even if value is recouped through word-of-mouth and promotion. So, how is music industry monetising increasingly shared and artist-uploaded content? Sony Music is showing they're not far behind the curve; 'harvesting' the interest in Chris Brown's ‘Forever’ track being used in the viral hit "The Wedding Dance". Rather than having the video or audio track removed, Sony Music decided to capitalise on its popularity by running Click-to-Buy links over the video, giving viewers the opportunity to purchase the song on iTunes or Amazon. The result was that over a year after the song’s release, it reached number 5 in the iTunes chart. ‘The Wedding Dance’ video now has over 32 million hits on YouTube, which means a continued revenue stream for Chris Brown and Sony Music.

With YouTube increasingly becoming an online music video jukebox, tapping into ways of monetising both official music videos, as well as user-generated content, will surely become big business.

The point of no return

This generation of digital natives expect free content. In fact, they're not even put off by illegally downloading or infringing copyright. Yet, if a legal and easy-to-use alternative is available, it’s been shown they'll jump on it.

Tapping into buzz generation using Twitter's hashtags and the mindset of instant gratification only adds to the power of the download. And it's shifting again, from acquisition to access; a model which is now possible with streaming services including Pandora, Spotify and Last.fm.

So, are we seeing the music industry's last gasp before more artists follow Lily Allen and jump ship? As Dan Bull, the aspiring songwriter and creator of an open letter to Lily Allen, writes, "When you’re between the devil and the deep blue sea, you need to stop worrying about pirates, and adjust your sails."