Marketing

Just two weeks ago Pizza Hut launched an iPhone application (iTunes link) that has already been downloaded over 100,000 times the company informed TechCrunch.

The company dubbed the software as “killer app for your appetite” and it surely is a good example for a company producing a mobile phone application. Aside from the ability to order food, users are also able to collect coupons or play “Pizza Hut Racer” while waiting for their food to arrive. Check out the video showing a bit of the functionality.

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Guerilla Marketing that plays with the prejudices of Porsche – sports car – driver’s.

Great Photoshop Adbusting of a boring advertisement which you see everywhere in Berlin, Germany: Britney Spears, Leona Lewis and Christina Aguilera selling their albums. The adbusting was done by the FTW crew (Mr. Tailon, Baveux Prod., Kone & Epoxy) and consists of overlaying the image with stickers from Adobe Photoshop’s interface panels.

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Funny viral campaign by Burger King: Delete 10 friends on Facebook with the WhopperSacrifice-App and get a Whopper for free. How many whoppers would Burger King need to make if whole Facebook got deleted? :-)

[Update] Facebook shut it down due to privacy issues as they say. 233,906 friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week.

Similar to Dynamite Surfing by Quicksilver or DC Shoes basketball commercial is the viral from Electronic Arts promoting FIFA Street 3. Insanely great fake great f…!

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The people at mSpoke blog started their series with a very interesting topic: What makes a blog post popular.

To start, we’ll need a bunch of feed items and measures of popularity and writing quality. For the popularity measure, I will use the feed item’s NewsGator attention score. While Newsgator has done some additional work to renormalize the scores to range from 0 to 10 since this post, it should give you a good idea about what factors into an item’s score. Put simply, the larger the NewsGator attention score, the more popular the feed item.

Airports usually have loads of car renting firms trying to pitch their offer to the customer. Here’s a great guerilla marketing idea for German company SIXT at the Hamburg airport: setup a couple of wifi stations and give them each a different name. What you’ll get is cheap but effective wifi advertising. I’d call it Wifitising :)

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Michael Fiorella pointed me to an interesting article he wrote about QR Code Marketing.

What are QR Codes?
The image you see on the left is an example of a QR Code, a fairly new type of bar code that can hold more information than in the past, like alphanumeric characters and even Japanese text. As Fiorella writes, most japanese cell phones now come equipped with QR code readers that quickly scan using the phone’s camera lens.

QR codes are widely seen on posters and billboards in Japan, providing anyone with a cell phone immediate access to information on consumer prize campaigns and maps to find retail outlets. Other fields of usage include the fast food market, where brands save nutritional data on to a sandwich wrap, and, companies printing QR codes on business cards with more info about the person.

It will be interesting to see, when and how this will spread over Europe.

Read more at Japan Marketing News

NYT: Companies will soon have to buy the electronic equivalent of a postage stamp if they want to be certain that their e-mail will be delivered to many of their customers. America Online and Yahoo, two of the world’s largest providers of e-mail accounts, are about to start using a system that gives preferential treatment to messages from companies that pay from 1/4 of a cent to a penny each to have them delivered. The senders must promise to contact only people who have agreed to receive their messages, or risk being blocked entirely.

The plan is that in exchange for this fee yAhOoL will direct the e-mail straight to inboxes without having to pass through spam and phishing filters. Don’t worry, if you don’t pay the e-mail still will get through, maybe. Once the easy way to transmit information, e-mail is becoming less and less efficient. Blogs and RSS get around these problems because they are opt-in by nature.

Steve Rubel puts it this way:
That’s all folks. The door has officially closed on email marketing. Maybe this will drive more companies to start up opt-in RSS feeds and blogs that facilitate dialogue.

And I think he’s right. There just need to be enough online-magazines, companies and private people promoting RSS in a non-nerdy but communication-friendly way.

Just for the record and because there has been some discussion going on in this blog: in my opinion a dumb and uncool campaign from Onitsuka Tiger for its football shoes. It is kind of a mixture between wanna-be Zomtec coolness (remember the Bifi Sausage?) and klischee-like karaoke. There are commercials that are so dumb, they’re funny but this one isn’t. Is this at least successful in Asia? What do you think?

Onitsuka Tiger Lovely Football

As of last month, bowling has significantly increased in Ghent, Belgium. The cause: a new guerilla campaign aimed for the area around the “Overpoort Bowl”, a popular bowling alley right in the heart of the student’s neighbourhood.

All kinds of round objects were bonded with three little round black stickers, representing holes. The obvious effect is that all kind of sphere objects were transformed into a bowling ball: bike helmets, watermelons, traffic sings, …

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From the agency DM9, a nice viral game for Brazilian telecom company Telefonica. Oscar stays up at night to spare on Internet connections, he needs your help to stay awake at work: use a microphone and your mouse to avoid him falling asleep.

Anyone wishing to display ads or brand and slogan information is invited to use my freshly developed script to incorporate the stream of data into your blog. The brands (with or without image), slogans and ads get randomly selected and updated every hour.

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and because I’m a millionaire I bought a whole 6 blocks, enormous chunks of pixels on the Million Quarter Webpage. Hey, I got 2 blocks for free!

This is how it looks like:

Maybe you think this is a waste of money but I want to give it a try and find out:

• how much visitors the picture attracts on the millionquarterwebpage
• how the link influences google, alexa rank and other search engine rankings
• how helpful the Alt/Title Tag is
• in what time these positive changes occur and when they will tail off

The Alexa Traffic Rank curve looks pretty good. If only my stocks would fly that high. But I never really knew what to think of this whole ranking thing anyway. So I guess this is also a test for Alexa.

I’ll keep you updated with some thoughts and stats.

Update 22 OCT 2005

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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.