Futurescape - digital entertainment, online television and social media R&D

Golddigga in Sofia's Diary - case study

Written by Futurescape
Posted Tuesday, 24 June, 2008 at 05:20 PM

The Media Futures conference here in London last Friday included some very relevant presentations, so we’re blogging the cutting-edge media talks.

Track three in the afternoon comprised a series of seven-minute presentations, which is a pretty good format, because makes the speakers focus on a few key points and get them across effectively without rambling, particularly with e-commerge guru Ian Jindal keeping everyone strictly to time.

The snappily-attired Philip Slade, creative director at the 7th Floor Consultancy agency talked about “Getting on with teenagers” and used Golddigga on Bebo and Sofia’s Diary as his case study.

The campaign included Golddigga clothes being integrated into the show’s storylines. One of the product appearances was used as the springboard for a competition:

“In episode 17 of Sofia's Diary, Josh burns the golddigga dress that Sofia is supposed to be looking after. It all ends up being ok (phew) but we want to know how you've got out of an awkward situation before? Vote & tell us your story in the comments bit below! (Comp closes 4th July).”

Here’s the clip (note the Unilever Sure Girl sponsorship in the pre-roll):

And the Golddigga profile on Bebo.

Philip observed after his presentation that great care has to be taken with the scripting and it involved rewrites so that the clothes were part of a proper storyline and not too obviously just pushed at the viewers, who are perfectly capable of finding the brand for themselves once it’s been mentioned.

Click below for more insights from the case study

EMI Digital Strategy vs Robbie Williams

According to The Times, via PaidContent UK, Guy Hands of Terra Firma, the private equity company that specialises in turning around ailing businesses, is putting the final touches to the digital strategy for his recent purchase, record label EMI, and will announce it on Tuesday 15 Jan.

Says The Times: “Mr Hands is keen to provide greater incentives for artists than those traditionally offered by the music majors, because the rise of digital downloading has changed the needs of the consumer, making artists less dependent on remaining with a large record label”.

Unfortunately, one of EMI’s biggest stars has decided to get his retaliation in first, as of the Friday before the big announcement.

It could be written off as just a typical music PR stunt that has succeeded handsomely on a slow news day, but when Robbie’s manager comes out with comments like these, it’s hard not to see a real commercial conflict brewing. From the Evening Standard article:

Williams's manager Tim Clark said the new boss of EMI, Guy Hands, was behaving like a "plantation owner".

Mr Clark said: "The question is, should Robbie deliver the new album he is due to release to EMI? We have to say the answer is no. We have no idea how EMI will market and promote the album. They do not have anyone in the digital sphere capable of doing the job required. All we know is they are going to decimate their staff."

UPDATE

More details on the strike via The Times (thanks to David at Net, Blogs and Rock'n'Roll!)

Robbie is "seeking control over his back catalogue from EMI, the issue that prompted Radiohead’s departure, and a greater return on digital distribution of his music."

And Coldplay are equally unhappy. Says their manager, "Why would you want to release an album with a record company in the midst of massive lay-offs? Coldplay have a lot of options. They are in no hurry to deliver their new album."

And The Economist predicts a chilly 2008 for the music biz as a whole. Not that they didn't see it coming...

IN 2006 EMI, the world's fourth-biggest recorded-music company, invited some teenagers into its headquarters in London to talk to its top managers about their listening habits. At the end of the session the EMI bosses thanked them for their comments and told them to help themselves to a big pile of CDs sitting on a table. But none of the teens took any of the CDs, even though they were free. “That was the moment we realised the game was completely up,” says a person who was there.

Ouch!

Three strikes and you're out!

Evening Standard digital poster screen in vendor's box

Speaking at Doug Richard's Mediatech 2007

Doug Richard of Dragons' Den fame is hosting his Essential Mediatech 2007 conference at IMAX London tomorrow, with speakers from LinkedIn, Razorfish, RealNetworks, Channel 4, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and more investors, corporates and entrepreneurs.

It looks like being a terrific day and Futurescape's Colin Donald is on the 3.50pm panel: "Marketing and advertising using social networks, blogs, virtual worlds, and more".

Chairing is Lee Henshaw - Founder, Silence Advertising - and also on the panel:

- Ashley Norris - CEO & Co-founder, Shiny Media
- Simon Wheeler - Director of Digital, Beggars Group
- Mark Iremonger - Head of Digital, Proximity London
- Katarina Skoberne - Co-founder, OpenAd

It's a great opportunity to debate the findings from our research into Facebook marketing and brand marketing via video social networking sites.

Next speaking engagement is on Monday 26 Nov on the panel at Simon Grice's Mashup evening on social networking.

When is a Facebook page a fake?

The new Facebook advertising system has gone live with 100,000 "pages" - Facebook jargon for a business presence. But as you can see from these screenshots, there's a problem. The system obviously allows for duplicate names within the same category.

In this example, there are two Blockbusters. One is a major movie rental service. The other is, er.... some guy who's making his own blockbuster movie. Is the bloke in the box a fake page, getting a free ride on the Blockbuster name, or just inventive and optimistic branding for a low-budget film?

And how long until one of the Blockbusters gets renamed or deleted?

Search results for Blockbuster

Not the DVD rental store Blockbuster

Alicia Keys Facebook app launches

We’re launching a new Facebook application for Sony BMG, that enables Facebookers to share advice with their friends, to celebrate Alicia Keys’ latest album, As I Am.

The app is the first ever artist-endorsed, socially powered self-help tool.

The advice sharing functionality leverages Facebook’s social graph to give the app a viral potential and engage the people who install it. This is one of the few examples of music marketing exploiting the full potential of Facebook and a significantly more sophisticated use of the platform than most music apps, which follow the traditional advertising model by only showing a video.

Facebookers who install the app can see their own advice, friends’ advice, everyone’s advice and vote and comment on all of the solutions, which are in six categories. They can also enter a prize draw to meet Alicia Keys, buy the album and watch the music video for the first single, No One.

To add the Alicia Keys As I Am app and share advice with your friends, click here.

For more on Futurescape, social media marketing, reports and services, contact: Colin Donald or Ozlem Tuncil

Blinkx AdHoc video advertising launches - see demo

Video search engine Blinkx has just launched its AdHoc ad network for overlay ads. All you need to get started is pick up a video embed code from one of the main video sharing sites - MySpace, GoogleVideo, YouTube, Revver, Metacafe, Veoh, DailyMotion, Break - and paste it into the AdHoc system to generate another embed code that includes the ad. Finally, paste the new, AdHoc embed code into your blog. (So does this mean that you can just go grab anyone's video and slap an AdHoc ad over it?)

The ads come from PPC and affiliate networks and can be displayed either above and outside the video or at the top of the video as an overlay. See the AdHoc FAQ.

This seems to be open to everyone, whereas the YouTube overlays are restricted to approved video creators (major brands plus popular YouTubers such as Valsartdiary). It'll be interesting to see how the two compete.

The video demo here is a flashmob, taped by Futurescape at Liverpool Street station, London, hence the ads showing as this post is written are related to London and Liverpool. NB This information is coming from the video, not the text of this blog post.

Chinese human-powered spam

Here's a worrying trend. Futurescape has been running JigsawUK, a wiki for British digital media startups, for more than a year. In the last month, there's been an increasing amount of spam. The Italian spam is from a bot and that's not too hard to fight by setting a banned words list.

What's much more awkward to deal with is human-powered spam originating from China. In about 10 days, there have been spam pages for heavy machinery, SEO services and gold farming services. (That's where someone in China plays World of Warcraft or Runecraft to create high-level characters or equipment, buildings etc that they can sell for real-life money.)

The spammers are reasonably good at using wiki markup and even seem to be "innocent" about what they're doing. After their page was deleted, one of them made a new page with a plaintive message asking, apparently in all seriousness, what the problem was.

So here's the key question. We're used to receiving automated spam and fighting it with automated responses, as with e-mail spam vs filters. But what happens when it's worth employing someone in one part of the world as a human spammer?

Automated responses won't work nearly as easily when there's a real intelligence on the spamming side, rather than a bot. Yet the cost of using people to defend against this on the receiving end would very quickly be disproportionate.

Hallam Foe Voyeur widget

To promote the new romantic comedy Hallam Foe, this is the Hallam Foe Voyeur widget.

It's a prototype of a PR/marketing mini-site for the widgetsphere, full of RSS feeds and widgets incorporating people and content from other social networks, such as MySpace profiles.

As the main character Hallam - played by Jamie Bell with the binoculars above - spends much of the movie spying on other people, a "voyeur" micro-site that tracks the movie across the blogosphere seems pretty appropriate.

Technically, it's a collection of widgets gathered together as a Netvibes tab that can be shared. (If you haven't seen Netvibes yet, it's one of the better build-a-home-page Web 2.0 companies.)

Here's what's on the Voyeur:

• The trailer, from MySpace Videos
• Interview videos from the bloggers' preview
• MySpace profiles for three characters, Hallam, Kate and Verity
• Official photos via Colin Kennedy on Flickr
• Google or Flickr photo searches for Hallam Foe and actors Jamie Bell and Sophia Myles
• Links out to the official site, blog, IMDB and more
• Google news feed for the movie
• Feed from the official blog, Get Your People
• Bloggers writing about Hallam Foe, via Technorati
• (And there will be a module for the ace soundtrack as soon as Domino Records have it online)

To see the Hallam Foe Voyeur for yourself, grab the tab by clicking here.

NB Some testing shows that this works well in IE 6 and 7 on a PC, but Firefox fails to carry over some search settings - the photo searches in the middle default back to "lighthouse" instead of Hallam Foe, Jamie Bell and Sophia Myles, so you need to type those into the search boxes.

2012 London Olympics logo disaster

It's bad enough coming up with a logo that everyone just hates on sight...

including the experts at Brand Republic.

But it gets even worse when the BBC "users" are invited to make their own (see no.11 for Graham Coe: "The origin of the Olympic Logo?")

And your staff don't quite appreciate what they're looking at...

Original on B3TA member The Coast of Yemen via teflon at MoblogUK

And as shown on the BBC via, of course, YouTube

Daily Mirror wants Big Brother gossip via Facebook

British tabloid paper the Daily Mirror is inviting Facebookers to "spill the beans" on the new Big Brother contestants for "good money".

Go on - "you know you wanna"!