2005

Interesting Clerasil ad using the Hermann grid illusion.
As soon as a black spot appears, use Clearasil.

The Air Sickness Bag, created by Scholz & Friends Berlin, juggles nicely with the word “feedback”.

It promotes low cost flight operator HLX (Hapag-Lloyd Express) and is part of an award winning campaign at the Effie Award 2005. The cross-media campaign used attention-grabing ideas to achieve maximum effectiveness with a low budget compared to HLX’s competitors. Well done!

Following the posts about Looza, Gaylord and Flop, here’s the next branding “mistake” from Lulu, a company offering self publishing and printing books on-demand.

I’m a Lulu!
How do you get people to buy books when your brand name means “piss”?

Well at least that’s the case for parts of Germany and all of Austria: two countries having a quite big book market and healthy reading culture I must say. Do companies never check international markets before coming up with a brand name they’ll probably use for the next years?

Having that in mind let’s check out lulu’s/piss’ website again, where the company states:

• Who are PissMasters and PowerPosters, and do they know what they’re talking about?
  They are expert Piss publishers who volunteer to share their expertise with the Piss community. Their goals are to assist other Piss users with any problems they have with the Piss process, to educate and improve the skills and knowledge of all Pissers.
• Piss Blog: All the dirt worth dishing
• Piss Experts: Vast user knowledge. How to start with Piss
• Getting started on Piss
• Search Piss
• Piss Basics

So, now that we’re all confident in the brand and informed about Piss, let’s go buy some books!

Thanks Alex for pointing me there

Brand Directory Updates
Nokia, Osborne

Next to that a content update: all brands now have their own page with industry type, some with slogans.

Do you like the Brand Directory and its features? Am I missing anything valuable? Leave a comment

Flickr is a good name. So is 37signals. The design firm Number 17, however, is not. Answers, About, Hotels and Business are all fine URLs, but they don’t work very well if someone forgets to put the part in. Do a Yahoo search on radar and you won’t find the magazine or the website in the making, and do a search on simple and you won’t end up at the very expensive simple.com domain.

Seth Godin reports about the new rules of naming a company, service or website. I fully agree, especially in times where domaingrabbers register like every possible domain name.

Orwellian vision of Google in the future, published in the New York Times, 10th October 2005. You’ll be able to search the net, your brain, your future, basically everything everywhere…

Interesting read about fantastic ideas around the search engine Google.

Watch Video (high quality)

The new ad for Apple iTunes + iPod features Eminem surrounded by great compositing effects and a catchy tune. The design and marketing departments have done a great job once again.

Artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset recently unveiled their newest sculpture, entitled Prada Marfa. The work is located on the outskirts of Valentine, Texas (pop. 120) near Marfa on desolate land with no other visible trace of civilization. It looks to be a luxury boutique with a display of Fall 2005 Prada shoes and bags. Yet, one cannot open the door. There is more information here and here.

[found at weBranding]

I Wanna Be A Rock Star is an interactive online game for web-surfers who want to test if they have what it takes to make it in the music business. MRPwebmedia has developed the Rock Star Challenge website as a viral marketing campaign for MassiveRecordProductions.com and gets presented as prototype that can be customized and branded for radio stations, television stations, entertainment magazines, and record labels who are looking for an online campaign that involves the viewer and offers a reward for achieving a certain score or success rating.

Angela Merkel is Germany’s new chancellor.
This Ad illustrates her victory over Mr Schroeder with a passionate kiss.

“the refreshing mix of red and black”
original: “the refreshing mix of cola and orange”

Men are not waiting for a product to increase breast size. Women just laugh about tools to enlarge a penis.
You cannot infect anybody with anything but you can surely take the right measures to infect some.

Viral marketing works just like epidemics. A virus is spread to people using carriers. But unlike with sicknesses, not anybody can initiate the message to spread. You need to carefully select people with the right characteristics: sociable, enthusiastic and influential among their peers.

‘Influential’ is the keyword here as it plays an important role when you want to convince others to use your product or service. Imagine a heavy-weight guy telling stories about this great weight reduction product or a bookworm trying to convince others she/he is a partytiger. Would you trust those people? Are they influential? No.

What about an influential institution like Stockholm’s Museum of Modern Art or your good friend telling you that something is interesting, cool or worth visiting? And what about reading more about this product on various blogs on the net? I bet you would get eager to check it out yourself.

Even if it’s really silly? Yes, when it’s promoted in the right way.

Best example: the GarlicCard
A new gadget nobody needs, everybody goes crazy about, thus spreading the word to the world.

The GarlicCard, invented by Herman Rasmuson in Sweden, is a patterned card specially designed to grate garlic cloves, resulting in some sort of purée you can put on your dishes. Nothing more, nothing less.

So what could make this product worth spreading?

• it’s a little bit silly
• extra-ordinary useful, nothing similar has been produced so far
• accompanying information is amusing, interesting and unusual, for ex.: video
• a simple message, easy to explain and quick to tell
• influential initiator with an open-minded target group: in this case the museum of modern art
• gadget-like price, not too expensive. people won’t worry about the price so much

Martina from Adverblog puts it this way:
Actually the best thing about this gadget is the smart website: nicely designed and with an amusing video to explain how the garlic card works.

No virus unleashes better and more effectively than on the web. You just need to find people liking your product and they will spread it to the masses.

iSocks for your iPod anyone?

I like to travel as I’m always interested in foreign cultures, behaviors and people. As brand infected person it’s even more interesting to see how international brands look like, how they get presented and what kind of brand names companies introduce.

Here’s one from Poland, the Flop computer store, which I find kind of amusing. Not many people there use floppy disks and flop does not sound very positive either. The products inside the shop are actually modern, so it may be time for a rebranding.

Just like Flop, I wouldn’t choose the negatively affected name Looza for a beverage, nor Gaylord for a restaurant, nor Bluescreen for a computer store as I’ve seen in East-Berlin.

Agenda Inc. monitors the mentioning of brands in popular music, tracking all the mentions of brands in the lyrics of the Billboard Top 20 singles chart. Hip-hop songs do most of the plugging.
In fact, only one non-hip-hop song in the Top 20, Jessica Simpson’s “With You,” mentioned a brand – Levi Strauss.

The top featured brand was General Motors’ Cadillac with a model like the escalade, often used in hip-hop videos.

Followed by Hennessy, Mercedes, Rolls Royce, Gucci, Jaguar, Cristal, Chevrolet, Bentley and Maybach.

In one sentence:
you need a car, alcohol and lots of girls; they don’t get mentioned in the report but you’ll surely meet them with the right car, money and fashion.

Brand Directory: Cadillac

Found at Advertnews

Jumping on the celeb-fragrance ride, singer Ashanti has launched a fragrance line called Precious Jewel. Acknowledging the already overcrowded celebu-fragrance space, Ashanti said, “I always said that the perfume field was getting kind of flooded. A lot of people were doing a lot of the same thing. But I also said that if I ever got a wonderful opportunity, of course I’d take advantage of it.”

Somebody is enjoying the spoils of (musical) fame here.
I hope the perfume does not stink.

Company Renova will soon bring out black toilet paper.
Yes black toilet paper.
So what kind of effect can we expect on our posterior ends?
I don’t know.

What I do know is that this has to be elegant, sophisticated, rebellious, different and purely fashionable.
Black has become the synonym for style and chic.

So how chic and nifty can it get on your toilet?

Hm, somehow this reminds me of women wearing black panty liners, also an interesting target group.

Here are some humoristic Carefree Pantiliner Ads from the Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health. And I wonder again.