Mountain Dew has long been the drink of choice for the geek set. In college we lovingly referred to it as ‘Engineering Green’. It certainly had come a long way from its ‘zero-proof moonshine‘ days.
But rather than slavishly stick with the brand image that has worked since 1973 the handlers behind the yellowish drink are again mixing it up. As described on the Innovative Ecosystems blog:
Pepsico has launched the Green Label Art project for Mountain Dew, marrying the introduction of the first aluminum bottle in the U.S. CSD category with gorgeous, breathtaking, visually arresting designs by an eclectic group of non-traditional designers, including skateboarders, tattoo artists, vinyl toy developers, etc. These designers know their audience and Mountain Dew is leveraging their edgy appeal to create breakthrough, on-brand creative. It’s brilliant and beautiful.
Just having snazzy bottles would be one thing. But Mountain Dew is also backing up the project with a dedicated website. It features short videos of the designers, wallpapers of custom artwork, and a design contest for people to participate in.
It’s this kind of stuff that I love to see major companies doing with their products. Sure, Pepsico probably didn’t have to do any of this and they would have continued to sell truckloads of product. However, by being willing to embrace other interpretations of the brand they make it cool.
You might have heard of ‘Gears of War’. It, thus far, has been the premier title for next generation gaming. One of the most notable things about the game’s success was its marketing. Rather than have the traditional rain of empty slug casings over a throbbing techno beat ads featured the incredibly down tempo ‘Mad World’ (originally by Tears for Fears) with incredible in-game footage.
The ads hit a cord with gamers. The commercial quickly shot up the download charts at iTunes and launched a slew of user generated remixes, mashups, and homages. As Long Zheng writes on the istartedsomething blog it was a marketers wet dream. Mich Matthews is the Senior Vice President of Central Marketing at Microsoft:
Speaking at the Microsoft Strategic Account Summit, Mich was discussing the effects of building reach through information sharing by the customer. “The ideal campaign may get two times, four times, even ten times more of that reach via pass along and remixing.”
Mich’s comments, along with the original Gears of War ad, are in the embedded video:
The comments on Long’s board quickly keyed in on the cold, almost calculating nature of Mich’s comments. My response:
Planning for customer engagement does seem to be incredibly cold and calculating. It also seems to miss the point. People didn’t send time on mashups because the saw the commercial and thought “Wow, what a great brand to be associated with”. They contributed the time and effort the did because the commercial resonated with them. In the ad we see a war torn city. We hear the melancholy rendition of ‘Mad World’. Almost inevitably one’s mind draws parallels to our own troubled world. The song and images speak to our own fears and insecurities. The commercial fades out with the avatar of ourselves firing back at seemingly impossible darkness. What happened? Did he survive?
Mich can share all the information she wants with the customer. If all that’s there is something more to buy the effort will fail. The information must be an experience that reveals something more about ourselves.
If you want your content mashed up provide a profound experience. Speak to the human condition. And then let people tailor it to be their own. That’s how mashups get started.
For quite some time (like the last two years) businesses have seen crowd sourced websites as something akin to the Golden Fleece: for nothing passionate users would populate your website with rich content in volumes far greater than anything your own team could do (and they’d work for nothing more than the opportunity to have their account name at the top of a ‘best of’ list).
While some have been warning about the woes these site would suffer if they would bite the hand that feeds them things have worked out pretty well – until now. Digg is a ’social news website’. Users submit news stories and then vote the pieces up or down. In theory this is supposed to create a ‘democratic’ approach to the news.
The backstory: a story including the number got to the front page, but was quickly pulled by a moderator. That led to another user reposting the story with the number in the description – “Spread This Number. Again”. That story was also pulled, at which point the mob piled in.
Clearly, they’ve now lost the fight over the key: almost every single story on the homepage, and 100% of the popular stories in the technology section are links to sites that aim to propagate that number. This key, for those who don’t know, is a series of numbers which will unlock copy-protected High Definition movies. The MPAA hates this of course, and there’s no one Diggers hate more than the MPAA and RIAA. DRM has met its match against a single-minded army numbering more than one million strong.
Late on Tuesday the public face and founder of Digg, Kevin Rose, threw up his hands in defeat on his blog:
after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.
If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.
A reader of Om Malik summed the situation up perfectly:
I think the real story here is user-generated content biting back when it’s actively censored by the site generating revenue from it.
Does this mean that crowd sourced efforts are inevitably doomed to have the serfs charge the castle? Why hasn’t this already happened with other aggregated news spots, like SlashDot?
Bob Leftsz, in the music world, has incredible reach. His newsletter not only is straightforward and laced with insights but it commands the attention of major music industry movers and shakers. The best posts are those that spur responses from those he’s questioning.
Recently Bob openly asked if online ’stars’ could really sell music. He used Tila Tequila (her MySpace homepage link probably NSFW unless your workplace encourages Pussycat Doll-like ambiance), one of MySpace’s more popular members, as an example (he’s referring to Tila having nearly 2 million MySpace ‘friends’ but only being able to sell 13,000 singles of her new album on iTunes):
Code doesn’t manipulate. And Web statistics don’t lie. Oh, the ones on YouTube and MySpace can be manipulated, but is iTunes hiding pressing reports?
And the fact that social networking numbers can be faked only speaks to the underlying point. Is what is being exhibited any good? So, Tia Tequila is a massive star online. Does that mean she’s going to sell records?
Anybody with the cash can get a lot of “friends” but it doesn’t mean squat if the quality of the music isn’t there. So the next time you visit a page, you have to wonder are these really fans or were they just bought? Somebody with some deep pockets is backing Tila, but they forgot about good songs sung well.
In the following comments was this little gem of an insight:
I recently worked at an indie where interns sat at computers all day, every day, on myspace and “friended” people for the label’s bands. The company didn’t shell out money for it though, since the interns were unpaid! Why pay lots of money when you’ve got an endless supply of people willing to work for nothing doing menial tasks?
That being said, I also worked at another indie where interns managed bands myspace accounts and accepted friend requests, never sending any out. The bands on this label weren’t huge but they had talent and a core audience, and were certainly not at a loss for myspace friends. (The interns were a lot happier there too.)
Other’s posited that it wasn’t a matter of fake friends but poor usage of those friends she did have:
Brian L. Klein:
I was asked to put a proposal in to Renshaw’s office to promote Tila’s single online. It was designed to set up the release in a “super distribution” plan that I came up with. I’ve been very successful with this technique with the artist I manage named Joe Purdy. We’ve sold over 250k single downloads worldwide this past year and a half with no label. I’m doing this with all of the artists I manage. I’ve been working with majors and indies for years. I’m done with them. We are actually making money on record royalties this early in the game and reinvesting it!!
Renshaw’s office decided not to hire me. They f*ked up. With the traffic Tila gets every day and her reach she should have done much better. Her music isn’t amazing but neither is a lot of s*t that sells. They had one tiny buy button on her front page leading to itunes. NOTHING viral besides the video.
The reason I was excited to work on the project was her reach. 1.6 million “friends” should have had a bigger impact if executed properly. It was embarrassing to see what happened. They ended up hiring the same old “new media” marketing company every label hires. Her traffic should have been used to create thousands of front doors to her Itunes page. There was NOTHING forward thinking or exciting about what they did.
The whole discussion raises a slew of mutednoise talking points:
Are ‘management’ an artist’s number of friends manipulative or just necessary way of establishing legitimacy?
Does prove that MySpace is or isn’t a good place to launch a music career?
Is this a validation that it still takes true talent to succeed online? Or was it just botched marketing?
Would any of this have come to light if Bob hadn’t thrown the topic out for debate in a public forum?
Would you be more likely to buy something if friends recommended it? What if we lived in a economy where any good or service could be purchased as easily as hyperlinking to a webpage? Fred Wilson is a venture capitalist that I’ve mentioned a few times before on mutednoise; he’s extremely active in technology stocks (although I first came across him because of his frequent music posts). This morning he lays out the concept of SuperDistribution. Is it a vapid terminology christening to win a book deal and land speaking engagements? I don’t think so – he might be onto something:
It’s word of mouth marketing, referral marketing, but with one important difference. The consumer is the retailer.
I’ve wanted to be a superdistributor ever since. When I talk about music, books, politics, Sonos, Blackberry, MacBook, or anything else, I want all of you to be able to click and buy. When I buy something, I want to be able to pass it along to everyone else and get paid for doing that. And I want the people who created the thing I pass along to get paid too.
A lot of people who read and comment on this blog think I am anti content creator, that I want to eliminate property rights. Wrong. The thing I want to eliminate is FRICTION. I want to supercharge commerce. I want to turn everyone on to Arcade FIre. I want to them to sell 100 million Arcade Fire mp3s. And I want to get paid for doing my part.
My friend Steve calls me anti establishment. He’s right. I am done with the old way of selling goods. I don’t want to buy from an institution. I want to buy from my friends. And I want to sell to them.
The part about ’selling to my friends’ is a little strong – we see this behavior already with services like LinkedIn: people connecting to others not because of the strong relationships present but because of the initial perceived ‘value’ a large number of connections has (i.e. “John Doe is connected with 3000 other people! Golly, he must be the popular kid”). Right know that value is only in reputation but when friends become nothing more than wallets to appeal to insincerity will go through the roof…
…or am I making too big of deal of how relationships work anyway? Do we band together with those for whom its mutually beneficial? Or does friendship entail admiration without expectations of a return?
Nine Inch Nails (NIN), the band fronted by Trent Reznor, have a new album coming out in April. The problem, however, is that the number of alternative radio stations to help spread the new stuff have been diminishing since the mid nineties. How do get the publicity in this age of dispersed media attention? For NIN, the answer is an Alternative Reality Game, or ARG.
An ARG was used to great effect with Halo 2’s ‘I Love Bees’ launch campaign. There, clues found on a website lead to mysterious pay phone calls, an intergalactic plot, and mounds of press. A recap of the NIN ARG for the album ‘Year Zero’ includes:
On the back of a new NIN tour shirt, some letters are highlighted. These highlighted letters all come together to form the clause “I AM TRYING TO BELIEVE.” This directly leads to other things, as iamtryingtobelieve.com is an actual site. This website and many others popping up with the same theme depict a very tortured, dystopic world.
Much more is on the recap site. After hearing the first single (Survivalism) I was pretty cool on the new album. However, given all this backstory, I’m now looking forward to hearing the entire thing.
Are there other examples where an ARG has been used to turn the mundane into the interesting?
In recent years we’ve seen an explosion of grassroots campaigns built around the web’s strengths: the low cost of production, the ease of distribution, and ability to build community. But while there are a host of worthy causes I feel like I’m spread too thin. The most insidious is the call to actions; while each organization may only rally the troops on an occasional basis when totaled it seems like there is a constant barrage of time requests. If it’s not DownHillBattle.org (music activism) then its One.org (the campaign to make poverty history), or DefectiveByDesign.org (a campaign to eliminate DRM), or IPac (defending culture and technology at the policy level), or the Electronic Frontier Foundation (defending freedoms in the digital world), or SaveTheInternet.com (fighting for net neutrality). Thankfully the mid-terms are over so I no longer feel guilt when I don’t have time to stump for my chosen political candidates. But the 2008 race is already so contentious that I fear I may be compelled to do something there.
In the old days (say, oh, even ten years ago) it would be very likely that I’d only have heard of one or two of these organizations – much less be called on repeatedly in an efficient manner to take some kind of action. Today, however, it seems like not a week goes by without pleas for calls to a congressman or letter to the editor. How does a person battle this compassion fatigue? Does anyone else have this problem? What do you do about it?
Shel Israel has a piece on Social Media Today which takes a brief look at people that are enforcing discipline via blogging.
Leigh Ann, a financial educator, told the Times she teaches people how to get out of debt, but couldn’t do it herself until she started the blog.
As part of my MBA degree we spent time going over goal setting and how best to keep them. A major facet of making a goal ’stick’ is writing down what you want to achieve and then putting it in a public place. Writing forces a person to articulate what they want and putting it in a public place keeps one from forgetting them. It certainly sounds like blogs fit that bill to me.
But the article ends with an intriguing question – would you read any of these blogs if you weren’t in the same situation?
Public TV is doing a very cool social experiment. For each Wednesday, starting tonight and for the next two weeks, they’re airing a different science program pilot. You can then go online and leave comments on which one you liked best. The best received program will start a regular run this fall. If you miss the show you can also go online and watch the bits for free.
The first entry was Wired Science, from the creators of Wired Magazine. While I had high hopes for the show, my comments were decidedly against the program:
I really had high hopes. The opening animations were slick and immediately invoked the Wired brand… then things went down from there. First off was the set – what was that? Did somebody let a four year old loose with the crayons? What happened to the bright, bold colors? There’s all this dead sea scroll stuff hanging about. Is this what happened to the house set from Blair Witch? Next, each host seemed incredibly uncomfortable; I’m sure they all have personalities in real life but here they were as bland as the meteor segment. Just when one would seem about to break into quirky humor the moment would be broken with a statement of the obvious. What made American Scientific Frontiers so great? The stories? NO! It was Alan Alda, acting like an excited child being allowed to play with big boy toys! He was infectious! And he didn’t have to do a stunt like cutting a plasma television in half either. What was that? From this bland, droning crew suddenly one is acting bubbly and saws a TV in half? The results of which we don’t even see as we cut immediately to computer animations? What? What a waste! The one point that Wired could of really stepped up and made something unique was the interview segment; with their name recognition they could pull some really interesting personalities in for a talk. But that’s only have the battle – when the interviewer asked ‘So rocket science is really rocket science?’ I wanted to throw the remote at the screen. What the hell kind of question is that? Why not just ask him ‘boxers or briefs’? The answer is probably a lot more television worthy than watching the guest blanch.
As you can tell, I was really disappointed. Did anyone else see it? What were your thoughts?
Recently Bob openly asked if online ’stars’ could really sell music. He used