IBM: Smart ideas for smarter cities useful billboards

Billboards are often overlooked, annoying and ineffective. That is, until now. The creative folk over at Ogilvy & Mather France took billboard advertising to the next level. Their concept was truly interactive and helpful! 

By adding a simply bend to the billboard advertisement, they were able to create an interaction with the advertisement that helped people in their time of need. The concept was for IBM’s People for Smart Cities Program.

Credits

Ogilvy & Mather France
Chief Creative Officer: Chris Garbutt
Executive Creative Director: Susan Westre
Art Director: Daniel Diego Lincoln
Copywriter: Lauren Elkins/Andrew Mellen
Concept: Daniel Diego Lincoln/Stephane Santana
Photographer: Bruno Bicalho Carvalhaes

Agency Supervisor: Muriel Benitah, Mary McFarland

By: Creative Guerrilla Marketing

Five creative ways to market successfully from home

Any time you are trying to expand and grow a brand or business online, knowing how to get creative with your marketing techniques is essential. If you work from home and you want to successfully market your brand, doing so is possible by tapping into your creative energy and trying various methods. Marketing successfully from home can be done with enough commitment and a dedication to learning more about your target demographic and what it is they are seeking.

Understand Your Brand
Understanding your brand and what it is you are representing is vital when you want to market successfully from home. Knowing what type of products, services or content you represent is a key factor in finding success online and out of the home.

Know Your Audience
Knowing who you want to appeal to will help you to devise marketing strategies that are useful and effective. When you know your target demographic’s age group, gender and even their interests it becomes much easier creating advertisements that are relevant and interesting to them.

Use Social Media
Implementing social media is also necessary when you want to get creative with marketing from home. Having various social media platforms that represent your brand is a way to reach a much wider audience instantaneously. Update your fan base online regularly with information about discounts, deals and even contests or giveaways you are hosting. Use social media to connect with those who are genuinely interested in your brand. You can use social media entirely free of charge to build a large audience in a short amount of time. Social media is highly recommended over traditional advertising techniques as it is free and gives you access to more potential customers and online visitors for your site.

Launch Your Online Presence
It is important to consider launching your own online presence with a blog or website. When you launch your online presence, it is much easier to be taken serious and to create a splash when you share content or if you are trying to sell products and services.

Be Consistent

Consistency is key when marketing successfully online. Ensuring you market on a daily or weekly basis for your brand across your website and all social media platforms you have will ensure you receive the most feedback, visitors and potential sales depending on the business you are representing.

By: Creative Guerrilla Marketing

What you can learn from 3 smart guerrilla campaigns

When you’re organizing a guerrilla marketing campaign, your number 1 goal is to get attention for you or your client’s product. The very last thing you want is a problem that derails the entire campaign or, worse yet, attracts negative attention. For example, a campaign that failed to secure the proper permits before starting or ticks off people in authority by doing something inappropriate is doomed before it starts.

Here are three really smart guerrilla marketing campaigns that did it right, and lessons that you can take from each of them.

McDonald’s Coffee Light
The shape of a streetlight inspired a great campaign from McDonald’s a few years ago. It placed a coffee cup (with a note advertising free coffee) around the bottom of the light. Then it attached a faux coffee pot to the top. That made it appear as though the “coffee” (really the base of the light) was being poured into the cup.

The lesson: make a direct visual connection between the product and the offer.

Fed Ex Kinko’s Street Crossing

Fed Ex Kinko’s set a super-sized (fake) bottle of white out on a corner, with the top placed next to the bottle, dripping with white-out. The bottle was located right next to a cross walk with the white stripes on it, making it appear as though the bottle had just finished painting the stripes. The bottle had a note saying “Go to Kinko’s for all your office supply needs.”

The lesson: look at things in a new way and you’ll find inspiration for a campaign, whether it’s set on a street corner or you do viral marketing like the Harlem Shake at the Dover Downs Casino.

Fitness Company Weighted Subway Grips




The bars at head level that riders hold onto on subway cars were transformed into weighted barbells by Fitness Company. The company placed faux weights a few feet apart on each bar. When riders clung onto the bars, it appeared that they were effortlessly lifting a very heavy weight over their heads. The Fitness Company logo was placed nearby so that it was clear who had sponsored the clever visual.

The lesson: promote results. Obviously the visual trick was meant to make it appear that when you use Fitness Company products, you become so strong that you can lift heavy dumbbells over your head with ease. It’s a very effective illusion, and it definitely draws attention: the goal of any good guerrilla campaign.

By: Creative Guerrilla Marketing

Google Glass XE7 update includes hidden music player, app store, lock screen, and more

As first noticed by +Andrew Wiggin on Google+, the XE7 update includes evidence of a music player, video player, Glass app store, a volume screen, and more.

The music player appears to be dedicated to showing what’s “Now Playing,” and given the lack of storage on Glass, it seems like it will be able to interface with an external iPhone or Android device. The update also includes a handful of labs features, which are features not yet meant for primetime and for developers to play with. First off, there’s a labs feature entitled “VIDEO_PLAYER,” though no one has been able to figure out how it works just yet. It could be that it’s simply a way to playback videos taken with the device, but there’s always the chance of Glass being able to stream video from your phone. There is also a new Volume card that simply allows you to change the volume of your device. 

Also in the XE7 build is evidence of a lock screen, something people have been calling for since Glass was released. Within the glass-services.odex file, there are terms such as “Sliding” and “Pattern,” which suggest the ability to set passcodes relying on a combination of swipes to unlock. Finally, there is also file entitled “Boutique” in the latest Glass update, which will most likely be an app store for the platform. There is also mention of APKs, which means that we may see native app development on Glass.

By: 9 to 5 Google

New York City gets own domain name as ICANN approves “.nyc”

New York City residents can now sign up for websites ending in .nyc — a move that pleased city leadership but should have trademark owners worried.

New York isn’t a modest place at the best of times, but now Gotham has a new reason to crow: it will be one of the first cities in the world to offer citizens and local businesses their very own “.nyc” domain name. The result is likely to be an onslaught of websites with names like cupcakes.nyc or hipster.nyc or lenadunham.nyc.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg today confirmed that ICANN, the agency responsible for assigning top level domains like “.com” and “.org,” had formally approved the new New York City Suffix, which will go on sale near the end of 2013 for a price yet to be announced.

In a release announcing the domain name, Bloomberg’s aspiring successor, Christine Quinn, said New York will now “also be the greatest city on the internet.” City officials boasted that the domain name will be a boon for small businesses and a revenue generator for the city.

But before other New Yorkers start patting themselves on the back, they may want to ask their leaders how the city will protect famous trademarks — Magnolia Bakery, Katz’s, FAO Schwartz and so on.

When ICANN has approved previous top level domains, the business community has vociferously opposed them — complaining they are forced to buy them or see them fall into the hands of domain squatters, who then demand more money for the real owners to buy them back. This is what occurred when ICANN launched the “.xxx” domain — businesses said it amounted to “domain extortion.” ICANN has also botched other parts of the new domain name process.

Bloomberg and other city officials have so far been silent about how it will protect its businesses from squatters, only noting that registrants must have a “bona fide presence” in New York City, but not explaining how they will verify that.

By: gigaom