Since their creation, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have gained widespread popularity in part due to the way they enable users to interact over shared experiences.

Topical news, local and global events, concerts, a shared love of a brand or product… – all play an active part in the expansion and evolution of social sites, acting as a pathway to the development of new ideas and applications – which keep users interested, and more importantly, coming back.

So with Halloween festivities kicking off tomorrow, there’s a range of Facebook applications being ‘unmasked’ to get users into the haunting spirit.

Halloween Treats lets you send treats to friends on Facebook,  there’s an app that helps you choose a Halloween costume and the amazingly popular Farmville game is allowing users to buy Halloween decorations (yes, using real money) for their virtual farms.

But it doesn’t stop there. In a move similar to U2’s concert this week that was streamed live on YouTube, the Foo Fighters are also jumping in on the festivities – playing a special Halloween gig that is going to be performed live via the band’s Facebook page.

However, the icing on my virtual cake and the winner this Halloween (in my opinion) goes to the UK Psychic who will be performing an interactive séance via Twitter – dubbed a ‘Tweance’. Apparently all you need to do is tweet which celebrity you want to be contacted and your question, and the Psychic will post any responses that she gets in real time…

The concept is certainly bizarre, however it’s definitely generating interest online… oh, and there’s a not so subtle link to an online costume store too, although I’m sure the whole thing is legit..!

So while Halloween may not have the greatest following in Australia, the global nature of the large social networks means that marketers from around the world are able to ‘brew up’ attention for their products via branded apps and experiences – allowing users to celebrate together as they go ‘trick or tweeting’.

I can hardly wait until the virtual Christmas gifts start rolling in!

Rebeckah Kinkade is BCM Sydney’s Media Coordinator

BCM’s campaign for Sunny Queen’s Cage Free eggs was recognised last night at the Australian Marketing Institute National Marketing Excellence Awards.

Winning one of the top marketing accolades in Australia, Sunny Queen Farms’ ‘Natural Grain Cage Free’ was honoured by the AMI in their New Product category.

Each entry was judged by Australia’s leading marketers and based on a tough ‘return on investment’ focused criteria.  Sunny Queen Farms was up against other well known and established national brands.

Launched in January this year, Sunny Queen’s new Cage Free product was a first-to-market innovation in the egg category.

The campaign tapped into key consumer insights and within 16 weeks of launch, Sunny Queen achieved their key objective of becoming the clear number one national egg brand, boosting their brand share by a massive 4.4% to an all-time record of 12.6%.  This result was unprecedented and smashed all previous sales targets.

Sunny Queen Farms has been consistently recognised by the AMI in their annual Marketing Excellence Awards, including a previous win as their Marketing Campaign of the Year – the AMI’s highest honour.

BCM’s Share My Story campaign for the Department of Transport and Main Roads, and Pauls Zymil Milk campaign for Parmalat Australia were also Finalists at last night’s AMI Awards.

Well done to everyone at BCM who was involved in these campaigns!

Natalie O’Keeffe is an Account Director at BCM Brisbane

You may have read my ‘Crowdsourcing Creativity – Brave Breakthrough or Creative Abuse?’ from October 14. I talked about the fact that through the Idea Bounty website, Unilever has been ‘crowdsourcing’ ideas for its Peperami brand.

Well, here’s a quick update.

At midnight last Friday the Peperami project closed with… wait for it… 1185 ideas!

And what have Unilever paid for all that creativity? For 1184 of the ideas the answer is absolutely nothing! Zero!

The winning idea will earn just $10,000.

This just proves the point I made in my blog post. If we took a stab and guessed that each idea on average had ten hours of work behind it, then that totals 11,850 creative hours.

If we then, as I suggested in my previous post, valued those hours conservatively at $150 per hour, then the value of the time spent on this project could be over $1.7m! Also, the $10,000 bounty values those creative hours at roughly $0.84 per hour.

That’s less than 1% of its real value or a 99% discount.

This is blatant abuse of the creative community in my view. It dramatically undervalues ideas and creativity.

If I’m right then why did the creative community submit 1185 ideas?

Are there that many people who need work or want to be recognised?

Is it simply a case of quantity over quality? Are most of the 1185 ideas going to be rubbish? Only the team assessing the work can answer that question.

If most of the ideas aren’t of a very high quality then this process still has people expending creative hours without being paid for their time.

It’s a rip-off and I think Unilever knows that.

Creativity at less than 1% of its market value means that in this case Idea Bounty is nothing more than a discount idea store. I can’t imagine that’s what its founders set it up to be.

What do you think?

Paul Cornwell is a Partner at BCM

News flash people – consumers aren’t waiting with bated breath for our next campaign. They’re far too busy, cynical and jaded to care.

But they will give us the time of day if we create something of value. Let me give you an example.

QUT, which operates in the higher education category, recently wanted to promote its Master of Business (Public Relations) degree. The course is specifically designed for PR practitioners who want to upgrade their professional qualifications.

In the old days we would have dutifully taken advertising in some professional journal, perhaps advertised on some industry websites, sent out a press release and maybe done some direct mail. We would have spent the budget in 4-6 weeks and hopefully generated a result.

But if you subscribe to the idea of creating value not just creating ads, then you take a completely different approach.

This thinking led to the creation of Tweepr – a website which aggregates, in real time, the thoughts and observations of Australia’s top 100 most followed PR specialists on Twitter.

If you’re in PR then having access to the top 100 gives you tips, observations and insights from industry thought leaders and rising stars.

It’s the stuff ambitious, motivated industry types are likely to find invaluable and it’s exactly these types that QUT would like to attract to their masters degree.

The other benefit of creating something of value is that it gets traction. PR people are actively sharing Tweepr with other PR people, discussing colleagues’ ranks in the top 100 and writing about it on their blogs.

So we haven’t just created advertising, we’ve curated content – and we’ve produced something which has ongoing value beyond the 4-6 week campaign cycle that used to be the norm.

If the buzz we’ve created amongst the PR fraternity on Twitter is any indication, then it’s proof positive that this is a winning approach.

Kevin Moreland is a Partner at BCM

Notice how those spunky young digital natives – when referring to things that existed in non-digital form before the rise of the internet – now refer to them as the ‘offline’ versions?

You know; old fashioned, physical things made out of paper and wood and stone and bits of string, like books and shops and conversations.

I was in an e-commerce briefing the other day, and the young bloke was talking about ‘online stores’.  But when he talked about the original brick and cement and carpeted versions, he referred to them as ‘offline stores’. Not ‘shops’ but ‘offline stores’. I love it! What a brilliant evolution of the language.

In a lot of areas, the rise of the virtual seems to be relegating the original entities to the basket marked ‘terminally uncool’.

It’s the online stores, e-books, online advertising, online learning, and online dating that are de rigueur. If you’re offline, you’re SO off the A-list.

Don’t get me wrong. I love my iPhone like a brother. I get all gooey over a seamless multi-platform digital end-user experience, especially when it’s one I’ve given birth to.

But I also feel it’s important that our non-digital heritage isn’t lost forever. I even reckon that being able to digitally recreate some aspects of the ‘offline’ experience in an online environment makes for a better experience.

If I’d been feeling a bit cheekier during that seminar, I might’ve shared my decades of wisdom with the chap, and mentioned to him that the offline version of a blog used to be called ‘having a chat’.

That an offline e-book was once referred to as a ‘paperback’.

That using Wikipedia  – but in its original offline form – was called ‘talkin’ bullshit’.

Asking your mate on the train what he or she is viewing on YouTube, was once expressed thus: “Oi, what’s on telly?”

Offline gaming was called ‘backyard cricket’.

Online dating, but performed offline, was called ‘chatting up’, and sometimes, ‘pulling a root’.

Offline education was called ‘let’s have a few beers at the Port Office’.

And iTunes offline was called ‘hitting play and record when Dire Straits came on FM104’.

It was a bloody good seminar though. Next time I’m out of milk, I’ll know to pop down to the offline store on the corner and maybe pick up an offline newspaper and an offline Paddle Pop while I’m there.

Andrew Bartlett is a Senior Writer at BCM

For decades, not much changed in advertising land. We didn’t realise it at the time, but things were pretty straight forward and we all knew our place.

Allocating budgets was easy – the rule of thumb that we all subscribed to was to spend around 80% of the budget on media (otherwise how would anyone know what we had to say) and around 20% on production.

Reach and frequency was the benchmark and if we were really lucky we would get to spend the production budget on one really slick TVC. Marketers controlled their brand’s perception and mass media was in its heyday.

Routinely popular shows like Friends, Sunday night movies and mini-series were watched by half of the Australian population.

Newspapers were at their peak and the Australian Women’s Weekly had a circulation of around 1,000,000 (compared to roughly half that today).

Of course the power of the Internet has irrevocably changed how brands engage with consumers and how advertising agencies operate.  Creative, media and strategy people now need to work together closely to identify the best idea about a brand that can be brought to life both online and offline.

One brand that has had enormous success harnessing the endless opportunities for engagement is Nike. The incredible success of Nike is an inspiration as it moves more and more of its budget into interactive, content and events.

Nike UK Marketing Director Simon Pestridge said recently:

“We don’t do advertising any more. We just do cool stuff. We need to become part of people’s lives and digital allows us to do that.”

Pestridge now allocates 80% of Nike’s budget to production and 20% to media. Producing TVCs is only a part of his production budget.

Events, interactive digital platforms and lots and lots of content from virals and webisodes to TV programs have driven deeper connections with Nike’s youth target.

The reality is that online, often the medium is the message. The interactive asset is both the engagement vehicle and the distribution platform.

Content like Nike’s Ronaldinho ‘Touch of Gold’ viral video has almost 30 million views. Platforms like YouTube are free – the challenge is to make the content shareable!

Now not every brand is Nike and this production to media ratio is rather extreme. However a recent study by the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) brought this shift to life by comparing where advertisers will likely split a total budget in the traditional model compared to those required in the interactive space. The production ratio shifts from 27% to 48% in this modelling.

One last consideration when thinking about production is this – technology greatly affects production costs in the interactive world. At the leading edge of innovation the costs are high, while trailing behind it makes the production much more affordable and much faster.

It is almost impossible to ballpark production costs when breaking new ground – but providing the interactive idea is consumer centric and adds value via engagement, entertainment or utility, the consumer will do their part to share it. Many to many – that’s what we aim for!

So what’s the point? Old dogs need to learn new tricks. The 80/20 media to production split is redundant.

If you followed that rule in the interactive space – your asset will be pretty lonely, with cooler, more engaging, more sharable content luring your best prospects away.

Jo Stone is Head of Channel Planning & Integration at BCM

Here are the highlights from some of the sessions on day two of the AIMIA Digital Summit which I attended last week.

FMCG Opportunities
Paul Fisher, CEO of IAB Australia, started the day with some facts and commentary about local online advertising. He commented that marketers are learning to leverage the multiplier effects of using online display advertising with search, email, video and social media by understanding how each tool reaches and influences consumers.

He felt there are big opportunities for FMCG brands in the next four years. His opinion was that now reach and frequency are being delivered online in Australia, it will demonstrate to the major supermarkets that digital marketing can have a real impact on unit sales. This should lead to shelf space in stores being allocated to brands that implement compelling and effective interactive campaigns which should encourage more FMCG brands to embrace the medium.

Facebook, Facebook, Facebook
Regional Vice President of Facebook, Paul Borrud, told the audience that we have entered the marketing era of interactive – one that is built upon creating powerful networks and maintaining relationships with consumers. He gave some astonishing statistics into Australian Facebook usage, indicated that users interact with ‘Engagement Ads’ the same way they interact with other content on Facebook and how conversations with users lead to organic impressions on the social network. Paul’s talk reinforced to me how Facebook gives companies the perfect platform to make their brand more open and connected to its fans.

Analytics Driven Interactive Success
Stuart Tucker from Aussie Home Loans and Ian McDonald from Amnesia delivered the best case study of the conference when taking us through the digital life of Aussie from the year 2000. The web is such a driving force for Aussie now that they no longer put their phone number on television ads, just their URL. It is a long way from when the company had to purchase the aussie.com.au domain name using “cash in brown paper bags” to ensure that they didn’t continue to lose visitor traffic to the most intuitive web address for their brand name which they did not own.

The company now generates 75% of its business from the web. Aussie has been able to achieve this by making their interactive focus all about the customer journey and experience. Results are driven using live monitoring of web analytics and conducting weekly analysis of business data against online activity. Search campaigns, the web site and online application forms all undergo multivariate testing and optimisation so that every opportunity to improve the user experience and ultimately conversion rates is achieved.

Video Killed the Television Stations
Ian Gardiner, CEO of online video streaming company Viocorp, gave the digital summit attendees some interesting information about online video. He stated that over three billion videos are watched online each day and that because broadcasters in Australia haven’t provided suitable video content platforms which consumers have embraced, we are now the highest users per head of BitTorrent in the world.

When asked if a single platform would win the battle of online video, it was Gardiner’s position that while TiVo, Apple TV, Hulu, Boxee and Foxtel IQ were good services, he did not think one single platform would dominate the market. He followed that by saying if the iPhone could dramatically improve its processing power it may possibly be the single device that could “win” video content delivery by linking together consumers’ three screens (television, computer and mobile).

Australia’s Slow Internet
Tony Marlow, Research Director at Nielsen Online, showed some interesting statistics from Nielsen’s studies about cross media consumption. Nearly 60% of people use the internet while watching TV. These fragmented spans of attention mean that as marketers we have to work very hard for the time and attention of consumers.

Tony mentioned that dial up internet has almost been completely phased out as broadband has now reached near saturation in metropolitan Australia. Though, our access speeds are slow by International standards. Out best is 30MBS compared to the 100MBS available in the likes of Singapore, Hong Kong, Sweden and Japan.

Selling Handbags Online
Iain Nairn, CEO of the Witchery Group who own the fashion accessory retailer Mimco and Karson Stimson from WeAreDigital presented an excellent online retail case study about Mimco’s online store.

From the outset the company placed an emphasis on web analytics and business intelligence and unlike many retailers, they were not fearful of it cannibalising sales from their 60 offline stores so resourced it as if it was an additional store to ensure its success. Since launching in August 2008, the online store has already grown to be their 10th largest and turns over $90,000 per month. Mimco recovered their initial outlay for setting the site up in the first two months.

It’s also interesting to see how Mimco make use of social media. Nairn indicated that people are loyal to a brand and want to connect but not just to a handbag. Social media allows Mimco to talk to their consumers in a richer way than advertising ever could.

Thanks!
I’d like to thank AIMIA and the organisers for allowing me to present and attend the Digital Summit. There were a terrific range of speakers and topics discussing the latest trends and future opportunities in the digital marketing sector. I hope this and my day one wrap up gave people who didn’t attend some insights into what was an excellent event.

Anthony Dever is BCM’s Interactive Strategist

It’s been around 12 months since we launched this blog.

In that time we’ve explored a whole bunch of stuff. We’ve talked about marketing brilliance and blunders.

We’ve showcased our work.

We’ve offered friends of BCM a chance to debate and comment on everything from whether Aussies will embrace Twitter, through to the lament of New-South-Welshmen losing State of Origin.

We’ve run experiments (remember when Anthony, our Interactive Strategist swore off Google for a month – albeit with serious withdrawal symptoms).

We’ve run research forums (yes, people did indeed think iSnack 2.0 was a  massive marketing hoax).

We’ve broken news (Two Cents noticed that Ben Southwell, winner of  ‘Best Job’  had enjoyed  lunch at Hayward Island … ahem … I mean Hayman Island) and the press picked up our post and ran it internationally.

12 months later, we’ve posted 160 articles and  over 11,500 visitors have checked us out.

To the 30 staff  who have taken the time to write a post, a big thanks for sharing your thoughts and observations.

Hopefully it has given some insight into how we think  here at BCM and what we’re about.

Thanks for coming. Please come again!

Kevin Moreland is a Partner at BCM

For their Peperami brand in the U.K, Unilever has recently dropped Lowe, their agency of 15 years, and decided to crowdsource for their latest campaign.

Through www.ideabounty.com Unilever plans to source ideas from 4,500 registered creatives around the world by offering a $10,000 bounty for the winning idea.

The brief is to continue to build on the ‘Peperami: It’s a Bit of an Animal‘ campaign which was developed by Lowe and has delivered great success for the brand. Peperami is one of the largest UK consumer brands and has been built on the back of ‘The Animal’ which is a tiny snack-man and is the established face of the brand.

This raises many questions for me.

Firstly, how fair is it to use the conceptual skills of a great agency like Lowe to develop the massively successful Peperami campaign and then put the brief out to ‘the world’ to simply extend it?

Secondly, whilst Unilever denies it, how can we be expected to think anything other than they’re trying to save money. The $10,000 they’ve offered on Idea Bounty is a drop in the ocean compared to the amount of creative hours that will go into all the ideas that will be developed.

Thirdly, what value will Unilever derive from the next successful installment of ‘The Animal’ campaign – bearing in mind that sales of Peperami in the U.K are nearly $50m annually. The measly $10k ‘reward’ seems to completely ignore the value that these concepts bring to a brand.

Fourthly, how much time will it take Unilever marketing execs to sort through the multitude of ideas, work out which ones, if any, have any merit and then work with the originator to further refine it. I suspect that if Unilever did an honest and objective post analysis they’d find that the whole exercise proved to be a classic case of ‘false economy’.

Finally, if they do find the ‘big idea’ who’s going to produce it? Unilever? Often bringing an idea to life is as important and coming up with the idea itself. Sometimes it’s more important. I think Unilever has completely missed this point.

I had a look through the brief and Unilever don’t just want rough ideas. They want fully worked up print and TV ads and in video form preferably. Between this and the idea generation each participant could easily have spent 20-30 hours on their submission.

If Unilever receives only 20 submissions then that’s 600 hours of ‘creativity’. If we valued that time at a conservative $150 per hour then the value of the work submitted is at least $90,000. Given that those numbers are probably conservative then I reckon Unilever are ‘having a lend’.

You might expect an instantly defensive response to this from an agency person like me but I’ve thought about this from a very objective viewpoint.

The only conclusion I can come to is this marketer has used Lowe to develop a highly successful property which is worth tens of millions to them, then at a very convenient juncture decided to ‘crowdsource’ an extension of it to save money. In others words, having ‘used’ Lowe they’re now ‘using’ the creative community.

To my my mind it’s creative abuse we shouldn’t sit back and watch it happen.

Paul Cornwell is a Partner at BCM

The 5th annual AIMIA Digital Summit brings together our country’s digital marketing and media leaders who are shaping the Australian digital landscape.  For two days  the latest trends and future opportunities are discussed.

I was lucky enough to attend and present this year so I thought I’d post a quick wrap up of some of yesterday’s sessions to give people  highlights of Australia’s leading digital marketing and media event.

Digital Economy
The summit was opened by Mia Garlick the Assistant Secretary from the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. She talked through the recently released discussion paper Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions.

It outlines the key areas of focus for Government, industry and the community to maximise the benefit of the digital economy. It is an interesting discussion paper, not least of which because of how it was released- online with tag clouds and individual sections of the document shareable, to promote discussion. The most notable aspect of the report was that the digital direction of the country should be a collaborative effort by industry and the community. A great example of that is the Federal Government’s recent Mashup Australia contest that provides open data-sets for industry to create mash-ups for the benefit of the community.

Super Fast Broadband
Aidan Tudehope the Managing Director from hosting and broadband infrastructure provider Macquire Telecom gave attendees some confidence around the National Broadband Network roll out. He says it will deliver on its promises and that business should start planning now about what they can do with it because in three years  it will be live. He claims  the  the internet user experience will be so rich and fast for web sites/applications that are hosted on Australian servers, it will result in a ‘walled garden’ effect resulting in consumers  choosing local digital experiences ahead of those hosted overseas.

User Experience
Michael Kordahi the Developer Evangelist (yes, evangelist is a real job title!) at Microsoft Australia gave the audience a look at the Microsoft Office Labs 2019 video that showcases possible future technologies and digital services.

He then provided some thoughts into the likelihood and time frames of the availability of some of the Minority Report style products which were featured in the video and when they might be available to the consumer market.

While there were so many things worthy of being mentioned as it was my favourite session of the day -- the single observation I took away from Michael’s talk was that now and into the future the user experience is the most important thing. People will always visit and use the web sites that provide the best experience whether that be via static html or flash powered animation. The technology should not drive the development. The user experience should be the focus as it is the easiest most true market differentiator in the digital space.

The Consumer Journey Online
Jonathan Sinton the Strategy Director from research company TNS gave some very interesting online consumer insights out of a Google sponsored study. Specifically dealing with the buying cycles and purchase funnel of consumers, the study looked at the information sources they research products at before buying online. Especially interesting were the gaps identified by the study in consumer generated media by various industry sectors and the opportunities that exisit in certain product categories. He also mentioned that the lack of product variety available online in Australia compared with internationally is holding back online shopping in Australia.

Digital Media
The keynote speech was given by Simon Danker the Director of Digital Media at the BBC. He delivered the reasons why and how the BBC have become a successful 21st century media business -- through the delivery of their programming and content via multiple platforms. He admitted that the media industry is in a period of experimentation with revenue models but felt that their formula for success was delivered by having an audience who was interested in high quality content, on whichever platform their consumers choose but ensuring there is always a revenue model associated with what they do digitally.

When going through the conference attendee list I saw that the ABC has good representation, tI had to wonder where were the commercial  stations. It would have been great to have see some of Australia’s broadcasters present.

One Thought
My own presentation was about digital business strategies for the future. My topic dealt with how businesses need to take on the challenge of consumer’s interactive attention deficit disorder (caused by information overload) and why putting the consumer at the centre of the strategy through the “power of one thought” makes a huge difference in terms of engagement. I will post my presentation in a separate blog post.  It seemed to go well with the audience laughing at most of the bits I wanted them to and not at the bits I didn’t (thankfully!).  I hope the audience got some benefit out of it.  I would love any feedback.

Mobile, Mobile, Mobile!
The afternoon program then changed to focus on the rise of mobile with Jennifer Wilson the chairperson of the AIMIA Mobile Industry Group giving a massive number of statistics and insights into trends the mobile marketing sector here in Australia. The most interesting thing Jennifer said that was she felt that iPhone will get some serious competition over the next few years with other handsets, platforms and mobile application stores seriously challenging Apple’s dominance in the smart phone sector. She felt that Google’s Android mobile operating platform will become the dominant mobile ecosystem by 2012.

Claudia Sagripanti the Mobile Communications Director from Group M predicted that within the next 24 months mobile advertising will take off here in Australia. She mentioned that mobile will not be the preferred screen but will be the ‘now’ screen and that the time, place and purpose of usage of mobile will be different from regular internet behaviors and advertisers need to target accordingly.

The last session was with Jennifer Hiley -- a Mobile Integration Specialist at The Hyperfactory who gave five very good case studies of mobile applications. My favourite was the iPhone application for Taco Bell that combined both utility and entertainment through the “Why pay more! Shaker” that had a GPS store locator built in.

Overall, the first day of Digital Summit was superb and I’m looking forward to day two.

Anthony Dever is BCM’s Interactive Strategist