The BCM Blog will take a short break over Christmas but will be back next week.

In the meantime, here’s a few of my favourite online things from 2008 – some light holiday reading!

The Sprint Widget – best described as a dashboard for the planet. Very cool! Make sure the sound is on.

Social Media in Plain English – part of the popular ‘Plain English’ series, this is a great short video primer for those who are unsure about the future of the web – social media!

The TimeTube – a visual represenation of Youtube videos over time. Enter a term like ‘Barack Obama’ and see how he has evolved over time on Youtube.

Popular Mechanics – 10 Tech Concepts You Need to Know for 2009

New York Times – Year in Ideas 2008

And finally, my award for the most savvy media owner in the world for 2008 goes to the American teacher who sold advertising space on his student’s exam papers. Now that’s entrepreneurship!

Merry Christmas to you all, see you next week.

Merry Christmas to all BCM blog readers! If you’re still in the office, like me, I hope you have a relaxing Christmas break – I’ll be back here and blogging between Christmas and New Years.

What better topic for a blog post today than Christmas and advertising. I was pondering what I could post about in relation to both topics, and I found two things lying around in the back of my mind – both related to Coca Cola, funnily enough.

1. Coca Cola did not invent the modern image of Santa Claus

This is one of the most pervasive Christmas myths around! How many of you think that Coke’s classic Santa advertisments from the 1930’s were the first to give Santa his distinctive rotund features, and red and white colours? Just like the one below.

I certainly did for a long time. But it’s completely untrue. In fact, the modern image of Santa existed well before these advertisement – this image below is from 1906:

More evidence than you will ever need to prove anyone wrong about this can be found at Snopes.

2. In Sweden, Coke plays second fiddle to Julmust

Heard of Julmust before? No, neither had I until recently, when I read about the shenanigans that go down in Sweden every Christmas. Julmust is a coke-like beverage that is only produced around Christmas time. Swedes love it. So much so, that sales of Coke plummet, and Coke responds by ratcheting up ad spend and trying to convince Swedes to come back to the dark side. They fail.

They even tried making their own imitation Julmust a few years ago, which only made things worse. The Swedes are now so fed up, they’re even hammering Coke’s Twitter stream with cheery ‘leave Julmust alone’ messages.

Merry Christmas everyone!

One of my favourite trends of the last couple of years has been product ‘life stories’. This is where brands give you full detail of a product’s provenance, whether it be on-pack, or online (via entering a barcode) or many other means.

Springwise first reported on this trend last year, but there’s still plenty of great examples popping up. I found this one on PFSK – a clothing label called MADE BY from the Netherlands:

MADE-BY has partnered with several Netherlands-based fashion brands to insert an added tag to their products that comes with a code which ‘unlocks’ the history of the item. Shoppers enter the code on the MADE-BY site and are given a glimpse of the product’s long journey to the shop window – where the garment was manufactured and by whom, who spun the yarn, who grew the cotton. Each step in the process includes a picture of the worker(s) and a brief interview about that stage of production and the labor that went into it.

That is so cool! It’s little wonder consumers would have an interest in this, what with news stories of contaminated toys from China hitting the headlines, and an increased focus on local produce.

The thing is, I’m yet to see any brands doing something similar in Australia. Anyone care to correct me?

I love the research that comes out of the Pew Internet & American Life Project in the USA. I’ve always imagined Pew to be the kind of place that American research boffins aspire to work – somewhere people actually listen to and read what you’ve discovered!

Their latest report is typically insightful. It’s called Future of the Internet III: How the Experts See It. It has a heap of interesting conclusions (which I encourage you to check out), but there are two that are particularly interesting when contrasted:

• The mobile phone is the primary connection tool for most people in the world in 2020: 77% agree.
• By 2020, social tolerance has advanced significantly due in great part to the internet: 33% agree.

There you have it folks. Despite all the great things that have already come, and will come, from ubiquitous connectivity, lightning-fast information and the ability to share with any other human being at any time… we’ll all still be hating on each other in 12 years. I guess this shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s a bit depressing coming from the finest minds in the business.

I guess we can always hope Ray Kurzweil is right – we’ll all be well on our way to being quasi-robots by then anyway

You might have seen the post we put up last week about Davo’s website and all the things he loves.

In the week or so since Davo’s site went up, it’s been fascinating watching how it has started to spread around the globe. We’ve got a few tricks up our sleeve to help it spread in the world of social media, but we haven’t yet started. All this stuff has happened organically. True viral power!

Davo has been tweeted about, several times.

He’s shown up on some bizarre forums – the UK Fiat Car Owner’s Club, Bowls World, and Australian Long Distance Riders to name a few.

And he’s also getting blogged about – by some Spanish dude.

Never underestimate the power of word of mouth! Oh, and if you’ve haven’t told someone about Davo yet – you’re not keeping up!

As consumers’ media choices multiply and fragment, many in our industry fear an increasingly complex media landscape, a higher degree of difficulty in reaching prospects, and a big challenge in capturing attention.  And they’d be dead right in identifying these issues and being concerned about dealing with them.

As consumers’ attention increasingly skips across media channels from television to social networking, to online entertainment and news, to RSS feeds to mobile telephony, to interactive outdoor, we marketers face the real possibility of not being where the eyeballs are and even if we are, then not making a persuasive connection with them.  We’re now dealing with individuals who are often on their Facebook page, listening to a live radio feed, shopping online and ‘Twittering’ all at the same time!

It’s like trying to get an A.D.D. child to stop what they’re doing, listen to us and then change their behaviour based on what we say. It can be done but it takes a great deal of specialist skill.

But like most complex problems, and in tune with Occam’s Razor, the best solution is often the simplest one.

In this case, it’s a one word solution.

Relevance.

A powerful, relevant proposition put to most of us will be quite compelling most of the time.  Then, deliver it in the right place, at the right time with the right approach and you are probably going to make a meaningful connection.  Do it in a thoughtful way which engages the prospect and it’s going to work even harder.

For example, why would an eBay shopper consider listening to a message from an online retailer? They’ll probably listen in the first place if they’re served up a product message in the category they’re browsing, when they’re browsing.  But, when the key message of free delivery is served up to an audience who are only too aware of the costs of shipping products that are purchased on ebay, then they’ll really take notice.

So, what’s happening out there right now is that the media is continuing to fragment into smaller and smaller pieces, but that actually provides an incredibly exciting opportunity to finetune more and more relevant messages to tighter prospect clusters.  Relevance reigns and affinity is close behind.  A pretty powerful combo.

There is no doubt that this environment is more complex, more time consuming and more difficult to plan and manage.  But the opportunity to connect highly relevant messaging, often in the form of entertaining dialogue, is undeniable.

This is exciting. This is a massive opportunity for all of us.

Fragmentation.  Bring it on!

We don’t usually talk up cool websites that we find on our travels around the interweb, but we love this one! Check it out:

www.whatdavoloves.com

In the lead-up to Christmas, I have been conducting a series of presentations on all things interactive for staff here at BCM called ‘Brain Food’. The first one of these took a wide view of what is happening on the internet at the moment – what is commonly termed ‘web 2.0′ – and also took a look at some of the things that might be in store just around the corner. Some things you might have heard of before – like cloud computing – and others that you might not, like the semantic web.

Embedded below is my presentation. If you have any questions, please drop me a line via the comments to discuss.

BCM has been working closely Radio Rentals to launch their new online retail store, Big Brown Box. As part of our launch strategy, we are kicking off a video competition this week with a massive prize – $10,000 in goods from Big Brown Box!

The competition revolves around a microsite – designed and developed by Michael Battle, our Associate Creative Director (Interactive) – and a Youtube group which allows us to collate the entries.

The microsite is a fantastic example of the possibilities of Flash today – an engaging pre-loader, great sound design, and a highly intuitive user interface.

There’s also a weekly giveaway competition – so if you’re not that keen on making a video, there’s still prizes to be won.

Check it out – and if you’re up for winning a huge swag of gear, get cracking with your video camera!

“The Conversation” by Brian Solis – click image for hi-res version

Forget about mobile, cloud computing or that crazy ‘semantic web‘. They’re all very cool, but it’s pretty obvious that 2009 is going to be all about social media coming of age. Social media participation has without doubt reached a critical mass of participation in Australia – 26% of online adults are active content creators, 35% are critics (via ratings and reviews) and 63% like to spectate at the very least, according to Forrester.

Two very important things will happen in 2009 to make it the year of social media.

Firstly, we’ve reached a tipping point of sorts where Australian brands will no longer be able to afford to keep social media off the channel plan in the vague hope it will disappear. Ignorance is no longer bliss. Unless you have your ear to the ground, and a plan in place to take action in this space, you’re going to be left behind – or worse. Just ask Motrin.

Secondly, as the social web struggles to monetise, and brands try their darndest to work in this space without treading on toes (or splashing banners all over the place), we’ll start to see social media strategies that work on both fronts come to the fore. The Facebooks and Twitters of this world might start to make some money, and brands (even yours) might start to find ways to measure ROI on your social media activity. When this happens, the marketing managers at major blue chips who are treating social media as a fad might actually start to take notice.

So, how are you going to take advantage of the social web in 2009 – the year of social media?