Two Cents

I’ve seen some bizarre uses for Twitter in the last few months (augmented reality t-shirt anyone?) but this one takes the cake (quite literally). If it wasn’t for the fact it’s now 8 days into April, I thought I would have been well fooled by this one.

It’s called BakerTweet. It’s so simple, it’s almost genius:

BakerTweet is a way for busy bakers to tell the world that something hot and fresh has just come out of the oven. It’s as simple as turning the dial and hitting the button. All of the baker’s followers get a Twitter alert to tell them that it’s bun-time. Or bread time. Or whatever.

And it’s not just a concept either – it’s up and running at Albion’s Oven in London. You can follow their freshly-baked delights at @AlbionsOven.

Watch a video!

A truly tasty and wonderful way of using Twitter! Really though, something like this says less about tasty treats, and more about what happens when you give clever developers a ball. They’ll run with it. The open nature of Twitter has allowed people to do pretty much whatever they want with it. Which means, thankfully, that way cool stuff like BakerTweet is only just the beginning.

Is it just me, or is the ‘pay what you like’ concept becoming increasingly common? A few high-profile examples in the news over the last week or so have led me to believe we might be seeing more of it in the future.

At the moment, it’s hard to tell whether some brands are offering their consumers the chance to pay the price they see fit as a genuine pricing strategy, or whether it’s just a PR stunt, or both. The most famous example, going back to 2007, was Radiohead’s offer to fans to pay whatever they saw fit for their most recent album, In Rainbows.

In London, a high-end restaurant by the name of Little Bay is serving customers and insisting they pay what they like. He readily admits that he’s doing it as a means of alleviating some stress from the recession, but it’s proved to generate incredible PR. The owner said:

“Even if people don’t pay anything I have told my staff to treat them the same as if they pay £50 or £60-a-head.

“It’s entirely up to each customer whether they give £100 or a penny. All I’m asking is they pay me what they think the food and service is worth.

Meanwhile, in Singapore, Accor Hotels is running a promotion doing much the same thing, but with an online twist:

Through March 15, the pay-what-you-want competition runs during a designated portion of each day, as announced on the hotel’s site. Interested consumers need only sign up as members and make a bid for the price they’d like to pay during one of the announced promotion times. If they’re one of the first to bid, they can win a night at the hotel at exactly the price they offered. Bids have gone as high as SGD100, and the first promotional rooms sold out within minutes of the contest’s launch last Wednesday.

So… is this the start of a genuine change in attracting consumers? A blatant PR stunt? Or a little bit of both?

And what’s next… pay-what-you-want advertising perhaps?

Hats off to UK media agency Curb who wasted no time taking advantage of London’s recent snow storm by launching what is probably a world first… snowvertising!

Within the space of hours Curb had created laser-cut stencils and hit the streets to stamp over 3,500 impressions of sports brand Extreme’s logo all over the London snowfall.

And the best part of all? The logos melted away into the air, leaving no environmental impact at all.

An amazing and fascinating effort! And just one in a long line of new ‘green’ advertising techniques that have sprung up, including street ‘cleanvertising‘:

Whereby dirty footpaths are stencilled with a high-pressure hose to create ads from dirt… literally!

So, have any readers of Two Cents seen anything similar in Australia yet?