Micro Marketing

I'm looking forward to Miller High Life's 1 Second spots tomorrow during the Super Bowl. The media buy is a great idea and fits perfectly with the brand. 

I was hoping they'd push the idea a little further and produce a few spots spots with real-time media placement that paralleled the story line of the game. For instance, after an end zone celebration "Tasty Celebration".  Or after a fumble, "Two hands on that High Life." 

It's also an idea that would work great with social media by sending friends a one second message or leveraging one second script lines through crowdsourcing. 

To view the High Life 1 Second Ad site go to www.1secondad.com

Flame-Broiled Engineering

The insight into social networking that Burger King uncovered is so simple I can't believe it was overlooked for so long. The Whopper Sacrifice asks "what are your Facebook friends really worth?" Pure genius. BK completely flipped the Facebook value proposition on it's head by rewarding users that sacrificed 10 of their "Facebook friends" for a free Whopper through a viral application. More than 230,000 friends were removed by 82,000 users during the very short promotion. 

Due to a few technical issues around privacy the promotion was pulled but I give BK (and CP+B) a lot of credit for producing an idea like this.  

Objectified

Gary Hustwit will be releasing a documentary film on industrial design in spring of 2009. If it's anything like Helvetica it will be worth watching.

Opening Day

Several brands and products are attaching their wares to the Obama bandwagon during the run up to the Inaugural Address. Many fall flat simply because they're inauthentic.

The Chicago White Sox have have struck the right tone at the right time with their bringchangehome.com microsite. With spot on messaging and design it's part celebration, part social media promotion and all for the greater good.

Any guesses where the President will be throwing out the first pitch for the 2009 baseball season? 

Nadav Kander Photographs Obama Administration

A very impressive collection of Nadav Kander portraits documenting the incoming Obama staff. For a peak into the process make sure to view the back story as well. Published by the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/magazine/2009-inauguration-gallery/index.html

Streaming Success

Twitter is such a unique medium that people may not completely understand what's going on the first few times they check in. In my opinion it's all about building a quality "stream" to tap into and collaborate with. Building a quality stream that meets your needs can take time and and some discipline. Before logging in you should be aware of the user types you'll come across. Ryan Deal, author of http://mashable.com breaks down the 10 users you'll meet on Twitter.

10. Memes, games, and activities

9. A company, product, or brand

8. Suspended accounts

7. Guy in a suit, corporate background, with more following that followers

6. The default avatar

5. Schoblizer... and others like him

4. Entertainers, athletes, and otherwise famous people

3. News sources

2. Characters, personalities, and unusual entities

1. The rest of us

The rest of us is the key to developing a quality Twitter stream. Any medium that offers a low threshold for entry generates a lot of noise that becomes distracting and possibly a turn off all together. My objective is to build a stream of new media, branding, trend spotters and technology thought leaders. There are several contributors offering up quality information. The key is to keep up.

There are several people already dissecting the art of twitter better than I could but I hope to pull together a cross section of insights on best practices in the near future.

For Ryan's full entry (with some more details about the types) follow:

http://mashable.com/2009/01/01/twitter-user-types

Twitter Poll

Within my Twitter stream there are several individuals contributing ideas and information about their audiences. Mike Johnson, aka TheBusyBrain was able to capture some basic information about his 13,500+ followers with a simple web survey. The graphic above shows an age breakdown to his Twitter stream. There's nothing earth shattering about this data, but I think it's interesting that Twitter can provide a platform for real time quantitative market research.

To view the original posting click here:

http://blog.thebusybrain.com/poll-age-demographics-of-twitter-users/564

The Lake Effect

Lake effect snow has always been an interesting phenomenon to me because it's a lot like creative ideation. With the right conditions you can accumulate a lot of material. In average conditions you net average results.