The New Entertainment

The new entertainment is back!

Well, ok the entertainment never went away - it was just me. And then I forgot the password and even the email that I registered this on. And didn't have the bankcard it was set up with. And so on...

Before this was kind of a work, social media marketing kind of a blog and kind of for the more personal pervasive entertainment side. Now this work stuff is fully on my company Tom Sawyer Effect blog, and this will be for just the entertainment...

I continued the pervasive summaries on Tseffect for the pervasive approach in general, some of the campaigns we have been running for John Connelly, Stephen King,and with the Winterwell Festival, plus what we've learnt from them and other things going on in the space - particularly in Spring and Autumn last year.

And there is also the Hollywoodstock site where I hosted some of the content around the entertainment we have actually been running...

 

 

Corporate presents

We were in a meeting with our volunteering client Vinspired last week, talking about the campaigns that we've got going on for them for Christmas - using exercise bikes to pedal power the lights on Christmas trees in London, Manchester and virtually pedalling online to raise awareness for deeper volunteering opportunities; and then an online advent calendar featuring different opportunities every day for creating some festive goodwill...

Towards the end of the meeting My partner in Cake digital Mr Will Scougal, normally a very relaxed man, got a little over-excited about it all towards the end of the meeting and started waving his hands around and exclaiming 'it's a good thing we are doing here! A genuinely good thing...' Which got me thinking, is it not normally?

This Christmas it certainly feels like we do. I dont normally brag about our campaigns our in this forum, but from the Vinspired campaigns, to talking lions in Trafalgar Square for Visit London, to Ben & Jerry's Christmas Cowrol animated Christmas moosic video (sorry), raising money for the RSPCA, it seems that we are striving every day to do something a little bit special (and promote our brands at the same time, I will admit).

Actually I would argue that we do full stop - that we have now reached a position that it is necessary (or at least more effective) to be doing something that does genuine good. And recent meetings with the Good Business company, and our fellow Stephen Mews resident the Green Marine's CSR, and Project Genie   are inspiring me to believe that the world is moving that way. If slowly...

virtually a celebrity

   

three stories in the last week have highlighted the growing acceptance of deeper forms of online worlds, and the affects that they have upon the real one. Each has had its fair share of the press

firstly the biggest scoop to come out of Second Life for months, that of a real life relationship broken up by an online romance. This was interesting for more than just being scooped in the virtual world rather than in Cornwall (where South West News was able to break a story run by the rest of the (press) world), but because Ann Taylor had her own avatar (which she could make as sexy and risque as her imagination allowed) and yet this wasnt enough for her (real or virtual) man, who needed the fantasy to be as real as possible.

Will be interesting to see how David Pollard gets on with his (virtual) lover, now (real) fiance when they meet. And finally in that Ann has now got another (real and virtual) man lined up, through another online universe - World of Warcraft.

Then World of Warcraft was in the news again today, in a story on the Swedish boy that collapsed having played Wrath of the Lich King. There was a blizzard of coverage when it came out two weeks ago and 2,000 people queued to be the first to play it (just an expansion pack - it's not even a full game). This in itself is not news - this is the tenth in the series, and each of the more recent has seen the same hype. What is news is that it is news - the media now admit that this is an interesting phenomenon, and not one purely to be gawped at...

lastly the Andrew Sachs affair, which has now led to the resurgence of Andrew Sachs' career - who is reported to have been offered a part in Coronation Street - and the potential creation of self-confessed fame lusting 'Satanic Slut' Georgina Baillie's, who is allegedly going to appear in the nadir of celeb-gawping, I'm a Celebrity and is set to appear on the cover of dozens of lads mags a la Abbie Titmus...

The V Festival content train

So the full Cake team rolled into action at the V Festival this weekend, with more than fifty of us delivering the television coverage, traditional media and online activation across the two sites.

My team's remit was helping to deliver content for the website, specifically the 'festival-goer's experience', which doesn't tend to come across on tv. So, we got some 'real people' to help us out with the filming, in the form of the nascent Cake Seeding Crew (name tbc). 

This really seems to me to be the future of brandertainment, and is something that i bang on about in presentations (and any other time i have a captive audience) - if the marketing 1.0 model was all about pushing messages to a passive and silent audience, and marketing about creating content for audiences to respond to and share, then marketing 3.0 (i know, bullshit bingo!) is about getting your target audiences actually involved in the content creation itself, fully intertwined with the brand and the experience.

it's not exactly rocket science, and there are many doing it already, but i really hope to be able to implement it consistently this across the great opportunities, events and brands that Cake has access to. It was really good to see this in practice at the weekend for the first time.

Check out the results here...

the new advertising

So I begin again, more or less along the same lines (as http://benny008.typepad.com/) – an exploration of the lines where entertainment, marketing and self-publishing meet.

The point at which brands stop either forcing people to consume their messaging (traditional advertising), or even bribing them to consume their content through entertainment or shock value (viral marketing) and instead work with their key target audiences to help them lead and then publish their lives in the most exciting and fulfilled way.

This  might still sound naïve within the current marketing climate, but the emphasis is finally slowly shifting from the insistance on how many eyeballs are secured on a particular campaign to how deep the level of engagement was and how many of those were actually relevant audiences.

And as we move towards this new model campaigns are increasingly becoming deeper and more authentic. Marketing will be the vampire that has to be invited in (without this it will be screened out completely or merely ignored).  To receive this invitation it will need be more than just charming, and any falsification will be at first embarrassingly impolite and eventually socially outcast.

I saw a good example this morning on my way through Bristol Temple Meads, with some typically blatent advertising by the South West Tourist board which showed ‘romantic rambler’ Stuart who proposed to his girlfriend in front of some cows on Dartmoor, and then ‘canny shopper’ Julie who chose the ring at a bristolian antiques shop the next day.

And all I could think was ‘I DON’T BELIEVE YOU.’ In the web 2.0 age of self-publication it should be possible (obligatory?) to use real people in a campaign like this, and then use the poster ads as teasers for the rest of their stories which you could find online.

Ultimately this should then even link to their social media profiles to ennable you to talk to them, find out the wider, deeper  story behind the ad. Find out what it was really like, see the photos, comment on them, pass them on. And it would all be real…