Mobile pizza

"Own the experience"

"Own the colour" or "own the category". These are the kind of objectives that brand people have been working towards for years. Red is for Coke, Ferrari and Vodafone. If you think of football shoes, what's the first brand that comes to mind?

I saw an interesting ad for Impulse on the tube yesterday. It focused on those
occasional 'sparks' with strangers, and promotes actonimpulse.com.

The campaign microsite doesn't quite deliver, except for a few interesting facts on brief encounters, but here is a thought: what if brands started 'owning' these kind of experiences? What if Impulse became the destination where people who missed that brief opportunity can try and follow up? Nike have already done it with Nike+

Will brands end up owning little bits of functionality that support a very specific experience?

Advertising on the BBC

According to this article from the New York Times, there are proposed plans to introduce advertising on the BBC sites.

This news item didn't strangely make the headlines in the UK. Not even on the BBC site.

Lame shortcodes on TV

A couple of weeks ago Russell Buckley was expressing his disappointment at the limited popularity of shortcodes in outdoor advertising.

The problem is not limited to billboards. I saw a new Peugeot 307 advert last night: interesting creative based on its great fuel economy, good photography and a little "Text 'offer' to XYZ" instruction at the very end.  What was the offer? What did it have to do with the rest of the advert?

An illustration of how text response is badly shoehorned into glossy brand campaigns.

Shortcodes In Ads Work

An M:Metrics report mentioned in moconews shows that 18.5 percent of UK mobile users has responded to shortcodes in ads.

It's good to see published figures on shortcode responses. We shouldn't however take them to the letter as it looks like they included SMS voting in their figures.

Ubiquitous brands

I watched part of 'A Town Called Eureka' the other night. Enough to get annoyed at the Cisco logos appearing all over the research lab's monitors.

I'm sure that branded content will need to become increasingly common, given the more interactive nature of our media consumption. So I couldn't advocate the removal of product placement from Eureka.

Brands will however need to become less annoying and attention seeking.  There is a parallel here with the current transition to ubiquitous computing, calling for a quieter and more seamless technology.

Could we therefore talk of 'ubiquitous brands'?  Brands that infiltrate their audience's daily lives as welcomed guests or descrete helpers?