most contagious 2010
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MOST CONTAGIOUS 2010
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01 /PROJECTS
02 /MOVEMENTS
03 /FACEBOOK
04 /REAL-TIME
05 /STORIES
06 /VIRAL
07 /EXPERIENCE
08 /GAMING
09 /DEVICES
10 /TV
11 /TECHNOLOGY
12 /DATA
13 /MONEY
14 /DESIGN
15 /DEMOS
16 /COMPANIES
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MOST CONTAGIOUS / 2010 /
Hello and welcome to Most Contagious 2010. This is our free, shareable review of the trends and technologies that have provided the loudest bleeps on our radar this year, and comes supported by those nice people at Yahoo!. Send it on.
In 2010, the smartest brands realised that the model is not 360, it’s 365. This means thinking editorially, reacting in real time and engaging in reciprocal conversations to distribute content that feels generous, useful and personalised. As we’ve always said, the best brands are those that see themselves as networks which connect like-minded people around shared interests and causes.
Some of the best initiatives of the year fell into the category of on-going projects, rather than hermetically sealed ad campaigns. Think Levi’s’ involvement with the recession-bitten town of Braddock or Kraft’s ‘Real Women of Philadelphia’ community. This shows a shift away from the traditional reach and frequency model to one of sustained engagement.
2010 was also a banner year for infectious online video, with two unexpected players (Old Spice and Tipp-Ex) grabbing the viral limelight. It was also a boom time for the much-debated gamification trend and for the connected promise of internet TV to finally take root, whilst burgeoning tech trend the Web of Intent fills us with hope for a less chaotic 2011.
It’s been quite a year for Contagious, too. Our micro offices in New York and Sydney are up and running and the Contagious Insider consultancy has been working overtime. In December the London team moved into a new HQ in Farringdon, to accommodate all the shiny, new and brilliant people we’ve had to hire.
Wishing you a happy and healthy 2011
The Contagious Team
P.S. Please share the joy and forward Most Contagious to your friends and colleagues.
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02 /MOVEMENTS
03 /FACEBOOK
04 /REAL-TIME
05 /STORIES
06 /VIRAL
07 /EXPERIENCE
08 /GAMING
09 /DEVICES
10 /TV
11 /TECHNOLOGY
12 /DATA
13 /MONEY
14 /DESIGN
15 /DEMOS
16 /COMPANIES
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While the phrase ‘always in beta’ can be euphemistic for ‘not quite finished’, some of 2010’s most striking brand initiatives were ongoing projects as opposed to one-off campaigns. They share a commitment to tinkering in real time, long-term engagement, interactivity and total openness to where a project might go… As the examples below show, shifting from the traditional reach and frequency model to one of sustained engagement can generate phenomenal results.
Levi’s / Go Forth
In 2010 Levi’s returned to its roots as ‘the performance sportswear of the 1870s’. Its showpiece campaign, Ready to Work, via Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, was based around the small American borough of Braddock, Pennsylvania, celebrating progress and hope, while being brutally honest about the issues contemporary America faces. The brand supported young mayor John Fetterman in his mission to repopulate and redevelop the town, encouraging artists, craftsmen and business owners to move there.
Levi’s partnered with Braddock in a two-year financial and legal agreement to fund the completion of a community centre and urban farm, documenting the process in films and still images featuring Braddock’s inhabitants which then became a campaign for the brand’s new line. [See Contagious 24 for a Levi’s Case Study.]
Reinforcing its commitment to creativity characterised subsequent 2010 work. With help from Sub Rosa, New York, Levi’s opened workshops in San Francisco and New York helping visitors to learn print work and photography. And to celebrate its new Curve ID range for women in which jeans are measured on shape, rather than size, the denim brand launched its most sustained online effort to date: the Shape What’s To Come community, targeting young women with a focus on mentorship and the creative arts.
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Levi’s has been prolific rather than precious about developing its work, aligning the brand with post-economic crisis trends: the importance of local, the value of hard work and creativity, and the demand for brands to use marketing budgets to make tangible differences. www.levistrauss.com
Philadelphia / Real Women of Philadelphia
Philadelphia positioned its cheese as a key ingredient for home cooking thanks to an online cooking contest. Women were challenged to submit recipes based on a theme such as side dishes or appetisers, with the chance for the most successful to be included in a cookbook and win $500. Over 5,000 cookery videos were uploaded by the 220,000-strong community in 16 weeks, uncovering new brand ambassadors from the group of enthusiastic cooks. The brand teamed up with all-American chef Paula Deen, who delivered weekly video tips and led the community; her introduction has been viewed over 10 million times and, thanks to Real Women, Philadelphia sales are up 8%. Developed by Digitas, New York, with production by EQAL, LA. Featured in Contagious 24.
www.realwomenofphiladelphia.com
Dulux / Let’s Colour Project
A worldwide project from Dulux and Euro RSCG combined CSR and social media with the truth that life is better when it’s more colourful. A team of brand representatives – including bloggers, Dulux senior management and agency staff - visited cities brightening up tatty squares and streets with a lick of paint. The resulting time lapse commercial was an ideal product demonstration, while subsequent executions played with the notion of colour in different markets, including a graffiti project in the Parisian suburbs. Featured in Contagious 23.
http://letscolourproject.com
Pepsi / Refresh & PepsiCo 10
While Pepsi’s ongoing Refresh work was impressive, when the brand pulled its Super Bowl budget to invest $20m in a massive CSR initiative, our jaws dropped. The inbuilt viral mechanism, whereby people amass votes for their suggestions across categories such as health, education and the planet saw the campaign gather rapid momentum, with more votes cast in the first nine months than in the US presidential elections. Pepsi rapidly responded to crises as they arose – including announcing an extra $1.3m of funding in July to sponsor ideas that would specifically have a positive impact in the Gulf of Mexico, in the wake of this year’s massive oil spill. For more see Contagious 22.
Pepsi also launched the PepsiCo10, an innovation incubator unit, with Mashable and Highland Capital Partners. The unit matched 10 entrepreneurs with venture capitalists and industry mentors, developing ideas and technology that PepsiCo brands can use. Smart.
www.refresheverything.comwww.pepsico10.com
Volvo / Emissions Equality
Volvo in the UK has been working with cleangreencars.co.uk to create an international ‘kite mark’ for cars based on air pollutants. The standard would ultimately improve the air quality in cities, where road transport accounts for 70% of air pollution. Volvo is recruiting for a petition via social networks, putting pressure on the automotive industry and the government to implement the rating, and has also developed an iPhone app to help users discover information about toxic emissions based on a car’s make and model. Rumour has it that Volvo has new technology up its sleeve that will place it at the top of the ratings should the standard be adopted, rendering this a canny long-term marketing strategy. Featured in Contagious 23. www.facebook.com/insidevolvouk
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Kulula / The ‘You Know What’
Trip-planning site and airline Kulula played on FIFA’s inability to take a joke to propel its World Cup campaign, offering reasonably priced local flights in South Africa. King James, Cape Town, oversaw print ads announcing the airline as ‘the unofficial carrier of the ‘you know what’’, which subsequently spilled into radio and banner ads. When FIFA demanded the ads’ withdrawal - citing trademark violations - they took the cease and desist order to Twitter and Facebook, and the public and press rallied behind the brand. A further ad promising free flights to FIFA president Sepp Blatter, or anyone sharing his name, was given an unexpected twist by the arrival on Facebook of a photogenic Boston terrier (pictured on our front cover) claiming that his name was, indeed, Sepp Blatter. Kulula ran a final ad announcing that ‘Sepp Blatter flies with us’ and flew the dog all around the country. Earned media coverage added up to over R3m (£270,000) of free publicity and a 33% increase in ticket sales. See Contagious 24.
www.kulula.com
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Newsjacking /
In October this year, American comedians Jon Stewart, presenter of ‘The Daily Show’, and poliyical satirist Stephen Colbert held a Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington DC – a direct response to right wing pundit Glenn Beck’s ‘Restoring Honour’ rally earlier that year. Much was made of the humorous signage brought to the event, yet one placard in particular summed up the mood. ‘I go to Fox and CNN for entertainment,’ it proclaimed, ‘and The Daily Show for news’. http://bzfd.it/100signs
As lines between news, entertainment and corporate lobbying become increasingly blurred and investigative journalism gives way to the incessant documentation of celebrity culture in order to attract eyeballs and advertising revenue, popular confidence in traditional news outlets to report what’s actually happening (rather than what the government would like us to think is happening) is understandably low. Such a calcified system requires aggressive tactics to overcome – the sort of ‘newsjacking’ tactics demonstrated by WikiLeaks, a consortium of anonymous journalists headed by Australian Julian Assange. In July, WikiLeaks seeded a series of files called ‘The Afghanistan War Logs’, 90,000 documents detailing operations by American and other Allied Forces in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009. In November, WikiLeaks began the staggered release of a series of US State department diplomatic cables in conjunction with prominent media outlets worldwide including El Pais, The Guardian, and The New York Times. ‘Cablegate’ included a series of embarrassing revelations about American foreign policy (including the news that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had apparently ordered the gathering of intelligence on foreign delegations to the UN Security Council in contravention of UN directives). Despite the redaction of various extremely sensitive parts of the document – Assange is keen to point out that during WikiLeaks, four years of operation ‘there has been no credible allegation, even by organisations like the
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Pentagon that even a single person has come to harm as a result of our activities’ – the diplomatic community was thrown into crisis.
Variously described as an anarchist with a god complex or an unparalleled hero in the fight for political accountability, Assange’s archived blog entries from a time pre-WikiLeaks reveal a precise and philosophical nature committed to the destruction of the culture of spin that dominates politics and has castrated the media. Reports suggest that he may not be long for this world, as the calls for his assassination at even the highest levels of politics would attest (funny how ‘incitement to murder’ becomes political commentary depending on who’s saying it). Assange has already been the target of a rape charge brought by the Swedish authorities, which he has dismissed as a smear campaign. At time of press, he was under arrest by the British authorities. As a result, he is attempting to guarantee his security with the distribution of an encrypted document containing the confidential information that was redacted from the original leak, as well as other extremely sensitive missives. Over 100,000 people have access to the file, and the details for decryption will be made available should anything untoward happen to Assange or the WikiLeaks team. At this fascinating juncture, one can only imagine what smoking guns might be contained therein. As publishing magnate Lord Northcliffe once remarked, ‘News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising.’
If it’s still there: http://bit.ly/frenchmonkeys
A less sinister form of newsjacking is happening over on Twitter, as members of the Twitter community take on assumed identities in order
to pass comment on current affairs. The most high profile of these was @bpglobalpr, from which account a bedroom activist satirised the oil company’s appalling mishandling of the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico. ‘Black sand beaches are very trendy in some places,’ tweeted the fake PR to around 180,000 followers. ‘Mexico, we upgraded you. #bpcares’. Elsewhere, 18th century lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson offers his acerbic take on the events of the day, including a description of France as ‘a barbarous HEXAGON’.
http://twitter.com/drsamueljohnson
And finally – Twitter ‘activism’ claimed a minor scalp in the form of the new Gap logo. Announced in October to general derision, the new logo was not only redacted, but gave rise to a site, http://craplogo.me, in which visitors can create their own hamfisted design identities. WikiLeaks this ain’t.
The Web of Intent /
Following a decade dominated by the massive generation and influx of information into our lives, the Web of Intent looks set to offer some respite. Based on the notion, not that the quantity of content needs reducing, but that we just need more trusted filters to manage it, a series of applications and services are helping to reshape the web to the whim of individuals.
Described by Venkatesh Rao, entrepreneur-in-residence at the Xerox Innovation Group, as ‘a gritty, greasy, roll-up, fix-it-sleeves vision’, the current Web of Intent comprises platforms like Instapaper, an app and browser button. When one clicks on the browser button, all text from that page is scraped and saved to the Instapaper app for reading offline, enabling the user to skip around the web, following links and clicking, safe
in the knowledge that all text will be stored for later consumption. Another app, Memonic, grabs any kind of content and posts it to a personalised digital archive. Web video streaming hardware Boxee enables you to timeshift video in the same way, clicking the browser button so all YouTube clips etc can be viewed from the comfort of your sofa, later. And Rao’s own service, Trailmeme, allows for the creation of maps of content – like web browsing journey trackers – to enable users to map the connections between items.
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Perhaps the most remarkable of these services is ‘curated web experience’ Qwiki. Users search for any of around 300,000 terms, and data is pulled from Wikipedia and thousands of other media sources to create an ‘information experience’ in the form of an amalgamation of images, video and audible narration. The Contagious Team looked for Charlie Brown, negative capability, Ecuador – and instantly received a two-minute interactive informa-tion package on each. The overall effect is like watching a news report, combining visual data with a voiceover that delivers the key facts. A wormhole of learning that scooped the top prize at the TechCrunch Disrupt awards in September.
www.instapaper.comwww.memonic.comwww.boxee.tvhttp://trailmeme.comwww.qwiki.com
It Gets Better /
This year’s most heartfelt instance of web activism comes in the form of sex columnist Dan Savage’s campaign to reach out to the young LGBT population. Following a spate of suicides due to bullying, Savage took to the web to point out that even though the situation might look bleak now, it does in fact get better. Since the launch of the campaign, everyone from Barack Obama to comedienne Sarah Silverman and the staff of Pixar have submitted their own videos to confirm the sentiment. Simple, smart, and hopefully, successful. www.itgetsbetter.org
Soft Paternalism /
This year’s most buzz-worthy political ideology came in the form of references to the book Nudge, written by Richard M. Thaler and Cass Sunstein. As adorable as a little ‘nudge’ might sound, the principles of the book make reference to a philosophy of soft paternalism – the notion of replacing the stick with the carrot in order to skew the decisions of the populace towards a favourable outcome. According to The Economist, proponents of soft paternalism see it as a means of ‘helping you to make the choices you would make for yourself – if only you had the
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strength of will and the sharpness of mind.’ Barack Obama’s politics owe much to the theory, and in 2010 David Cameron established The Behavioural Insights Unit, dedicated to the development of practical applications of this theory to British life. BBC documentarian Adam Curtis’ blog on the subject is recommended reading.
www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the tenets of soft paternalism are beginning to make themselves felt in marketing. GE’s Healthymagination unit in conjunction with Big Spaceship, New York has developed an application called Morsel, which sets small achievable daily targets in order to encourage users towards a more wholesome lifestyle. Sample tip: ‘Buy groceries from around the edges of the store’ is intended to steer shoppers towards more fresh produce (although the theory collapses somewhat when the alcohol aisles are on the edge. Whisky and asparagus, anyone?). Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Boulder launched a US campaign for actual carrots by repositioning them as a snack food to appeal to our tiny brains, complete with loud packaging and accompanying mobile games, thus achieving double digit sales growth for the humble vegetable. And finally, VW’s Fun Theory, in which the automotive manufacturer attempted to prove that the quickest way to get people to change their behaviour was to make things fun, was pure soft paternalism. This year the campaign crossed from theory into practice when the winning entry to the Fun Theory contest, the ‘Speed Camera Lottery’, was implemented in a region of Sweden. The prize takes the fines paid by motorists caught speeding and transforms them into a lottery fund for those driving sensibly, and saw an average reduction in speed of 22% throughout the course of the campaign.
www.healthymagination.com/applications/morselwww.babycarrots.comwww.thefuntheory.com
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p.10most contagious / facebook /
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It’s safe to call 2010 ‘The Year Your Parents Joined Facebook’.
The social network has reached the size where peer comparison is fruitless; more useful quantification comes in terms of the population size of nations. It’d be the fourth largest in the world, with over 500 million active users and a whole host of new challenges.
Facebook also got the old media treatment in the form of director David Fincher’s The Social Network, a film based on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s conception of the company. By November, Facebook employee stock, traded on secondary markets in a share auction, led TechCrunch to interpret a $50bn valuation on the company, which reported a positive cash flow for the first time in late 2009.
The company began to dominate search titan Google in simple metrics like page views. For a week in November, Hitwise estimated that Facebook had 25% of all US internet traffic, five times as much as Google. While clicks alone won’t unseat Google’s ecosystem, Facebook is aiming to consolidate areas like gaming, e-commerce, location, mail and collective knowledge.
Several product launches point to that theme; Messages unites Facebook messages, chats and texts in one inbox; it’ll also include a place where users can have their own Facebook email address. Facebook is also emphasising how its social functions will differentiate it from other email services, chiefly Gmail.
Facebook also launched a beta of its Questions product, intended to compete with services like Quora, Hunch, Google’s Aardvark and most successfully Reddit. These services seek to refine mainstream products like Yahoo! Answers through the aggregated wisdom of the crowd, who vote answers up and down in order to create insightful, informative conversations. Whether Facebook will be able to cull the best aspects of these other sites and convince users to participate remains to be seen. As the feature entered beta, we put forth the question ‘What Dostoevsky
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novel should I read first?’ and have received 36 answers to date, none of them entirely definitive yet all well informed and thoughtful. (Though the simple ‘You have to start with Crime and Punishment’ received 21 upvotes.)
The most intriguing Facebook pushes of 2010 were Deals and Places, which threaten entrenched businesses in their respective spaces by leveraging Facebook’s massive user base. Places, a location-based check-in service with the same fundamentals as Foursquare, launched in August, and was cemented at the company’s mobile event in November, when Facebook also unrolled the Single Sign-On and Deals features.
Single Sign-On is meant to simplify the process by which you can use your Facebook account with other services, creating a contiguous landmass of contacts that share your various app choices. Sites lose large groups of potential customers in the registration process; being able to log-in with your Facebook account facilitates a transaction or interaction with others in your network.
www.quora.comwww.hunch.comwww.reddit.comwww.facebook.com/creditswww.facebook.com/places/www.facebook.com/FacebookAds
Deals /
Through Facebook Deals, marketers can encourage check-ins to Places by offering free or reduced price goods. For example, in the inaugural push, retailer Gap gave away 10,000 pairs of jeans, free, to any customers who checked in to the store using Facebook Places, up to a $59.50 value, first come first served. Customers who arrived after the jeans
were gone received a 40% discount. The company should be able to scale Deals to retailers large and small relatively easily, a move that took rival service Foursquare months. So soon, it seems, even local businesses will be able to use Deals for promotions.
The next logical step in this process is to integrate Facebook Credits into Places and Deals. From there the real fun starts. Credits are already being sold in Target and Tesco stores the same way gift cards are sold, and more retailers are slated to stock them. About 200 applications on Facebook accept the currency.
Once Deals and Places are integrated consider these scenarios: The first 500 people to check in to Gap get a $50 gift certificate for Facebook Credits (they’re worth about a dime apiece at this point). This is the sort of frantic deal-making that Groupon offers (see money section), with the extra push of Facebook’s network effect; I see you’ve bought a Deal, and there are only 459 left. Better act fast.
Direct commerce has also boomed on Facebook, as brands give customers the ability to buy products direct from the source. Procter & Gamble’s Pampers brand was one of the first to harness this energy, working with Ohio’s Resource Interactive’s Off The Wall product to sell diapers directly from the Facebook Wall in a limited test in February. The initiative makes sense. Market research firm Morpace found 37% of US. Facebook users became ‘fans’ of a brand on the site to receive coupons and discounts, which P&G has long used to sway consumers to its products. This initiative has since expanded to a permanent e-commerce store in partnership with Amazon.
Several other brands have brought commerce to their Facebook pages in one form or another. Levi’s developed its social shopping platform, Friends Store, using the Open Social Graph (see Issue 23), putting a
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p.12most contagious / facebook /
Like button on its products. Delta gave users the ability to purchase flights directly from its profile. Walmart is joining the fray too, offering discounts to fans via Facebook through its CrowdSaver app. The first week’s deal saw more than 5,000 people liking a 42” plasma television at $398 – securing them an 18% discount on the in-store price.
www.facebook.com/pamperswww.resource.com/offthewallwww.morpace.comPampers / http://bit.ly/efe1Dg
Casual Gaming Domination /
Gareth Davis, platform manager for games at Facebook, told November’s Social Gaming Summit in London that 200 million Facebook users monthly are active in social games on the site. The vast majority of these are playing games like FarmVille.
FarmVille has paved the way for FrontierVille, FishVille and now CityVille, and investors are seeing massive potential for profit. Zynga was estimated to be worth $5bn in April on an estimated $500m in 2010 revenue, but much of that depends on Facebook’s continued benevolence. In May, after reports Zynga was chafing under Facebook’s proposal that all applications use Facebook Credits, which bring Facebook a 30% mark-up for their currency, the two companies announced a five year partnership. Presumably Zynga received preferential rates, and as a result continues to exist on the platform. For now.
Brands that have placed sponsored items in FarmVille include Farmers Insurance and McDonald’s, which offered farmers special crops that bloomed into golden arches and red and
yellow balloons. It also featured a McCafe drink to power-up virtual farmers so they could move faster. Branded items aren’t integral to Zynga’s revenue stream, though, so it is in a position to charge fairly high amounts for placement; in April, a personal care brand was quoted $600,000 per week for FarmVille entry. Brand partnerships have also extended to currency, with American Express allowing its Member Rewards points to be exchanged for virtual goods.
This year’s most high profile in-farm initiative saw users able to purchase white corn - special sweet potato seeds to benefit victims of Haiti’s earthquake to benefit the World Food Programme (whilst benefiting players by thriving unattended). The seeds raised $1.5m in five days.
www.zynga.comwww.farmville.comThe New Yorker / http://nyr.kr/gn4cae
It’s a Web 2.0 Suicide /
As Facebook continues to grow, so too does its army of detractors. With the launch of Places, concerns over privacy became an increasingly vocal protest against the dominance of Facebook, and the data exchange necessary in order to keep the service free. The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is an app created to ‘delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web 2.0 alter ego’.
Unfortunately, the right to decide is no longer yours. Facebook has blocked the Suicide Machine. http://suicidemachine.org
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ZYNGA / MAFIA WARS /
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most contagious / facebook /
Skittles / Liking Likes
The introduction and subsequent explosion of the Like as a metric was fueled by many brands and activities on Facebook last year. The Mars candy brand Skittles has used the universal prevalence of Like and the Open Social Graph to its advantage, racking up nearly 14 million with a series of unique promotions.
Mob the Rainbow used real-time techniques to spread goodwill and spontaneity, such as sending a Valentine to a traffic warden. Poll the Rainbow asked the group of fans to choose a wacky scenario; they elected a tree that gave away Skittles. Scholarship the Rainbow turned 100,000 likes into a $10,000 scholarship for one winner.
In the UK, Man vs Skittles took stuntman David Phoenix and pitted him against Skittles’ 13 million Facebook fans, locking him in a glass box and inviting the community to submerge him in Skittles. Fans could add a specified number of Skittles and the more fans watching, the quicker the box filled up. TBWA\London staged the stunt which was broadcast as a live Facebook stream, while Academy Content produced. With the addition of almost 1 million likes in the UK from Man vs. Skittles, the same group unleashed the Mega Super Updater the following month, turning status updates into movies in an Old Spice-esque promotion.
www.facebook.com/skittles.uk
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In 2010, the smartest brands grasped the nettle and committed to communicating with their customers on at least a daily basis. Less 360, more 365, a powerful combination of micro-interactions, personalised responses and ‘planned spontaneity’ saw some unlikely brands creating the kind of pop culture groundswell that traditional marketers can only dream of. As the chaps at P&G would say, both surprising AND delightful.
Old Spice / Questions
In a spectacular, Travolta-like renaissance, 2010 was the year in which P&G-owned Old Spice used real-time, spontaneous marketing to transform a brand more associated with unwanted Christmas gifts into a beloved icon of the web generation.
It all kicked off in February with the now infamous The Man Your Man Could Smell Like Super Bowl spot promoting Old Spice body wash, which subsequently netted the 2010 Cannes Lions Grand Prix for film. Initially launched on YouTube just before Super Bowl Sunday, it generated 30,000 views. But in a textbook display of viral spread following its TV debut, the view count rose by over 800% in just four days. The film then started to draw viewers in their millions and its star, former National Football League (NFL) player Isaiah Mustafa, stopped counting.
P&G and Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, then set to work on a sequel. At the end of June, the ‘Questions’ spot reintroduced Mustafa; in July, the campaign stepped up a gear when people were invited to interact with him via Twitter. Consequently, Mustafa
starred in a marathon succession of rapid-fire video responses to admirers on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Reddit. Offering advice, suggestions, support and even a marriage proposal, Mustafa and the W+K team dispatched 117 videos in the first 12 hours alone. Old Spice became YouTube’s most-viewed sponsored channel of all time, the YouTube responses generated 40million views and 120,000 people now follow the brand on Twitter.
Whether it sold any more Old Spice or not is where it all gets a little bit hazy: P&G claimed that Old Spice body wash sales increased over a month by 107% while Symphony IRI data indicated that Old Spice’s market share remained flat. But on the upside, who didn’t feel better disposed towards Old Spice for entertaining us so brilliantly? Contagious 24. www.oldspice.com
Gatorade / Mission Control
PepsiCo-owned sports drink Gatorade netted a few Lions at the Cannes Advertising Festival this year for its Gatorade Replay series via TBWA\Chiat\Day, LA (featured in Most Contagious 2009), whilst also offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse at ‘Mission Control’, its ‘social media command centre’. The company uses Mission Control to track media performance, create an ongoing dialogue with consumers, and collect insights that will influence new product development as well as marketing strategy. We expect to see a lot more brands using social media not only to monitor conversations with consumers in 2011, but also to react to what they’re saying. A Gatorade case study ran in Contagious 24. www.gatorade.com
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Hippo /@HelloMeHippo
Twitter as a retail and distribution tool? We were seriously impressed to learn of Hippo, a newly-launched snack food in India, which turned to social media when it learnt that consumers couldn’t get hold of Hippo Baked Munchies. Distributed to over 400,000 stores across India, stocks kept running low – or running out altogether – because the snack proved so popular. Hippo worked with Mumbai-based Creativeland Asia to use Twitter to speak directly to consumers, asking them to tweet @HelloMeHippo whenever they couldn’t find the snacks in stores. The brand promised to re-stock any empty store within hours. With tweets coming in from 45 cities around India, Hippo established a central Twitter monitoring operation which passed stock details directly onto the sales and distribution arm of the business. Again using Twitter, Hippo then notified its followers once stock had been replenished. By matching supply with demand, Hippo boosted sales by 76%. And, as an extra incentive to tweet, Hippo delivered personalised ‘anti-hunger’ hampers to those customers who tweeted them the most. Rumbling bellies have never been so well rewarded. See Contagious 24.
http://hippofighthunger.com
Burger King / Whopperface
‘Have it your way’ is Burger King’s long-held mantra, showing off that all BK sandwiches are made to order. So Ogilvy Brazil came up with the idea of personalised packaging for its customers. One São Paulo outlet was fitted with a hidden camera which photographed each customer who made a personal request for their food (extra bacon, hold the mayo etc). The digital image of their face was then printed directly onto a conventional grease-proof sheet used to wrap their burger – lined up perfectly so that their ‘Whopper Face’ was beaming up at them from their tray. Both speedy and personalised – ‘have it your way’ made real.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBvtANapQwU
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Some of the most successful brands are those simply those that tell the best stories. And 2010 showed that those narratives can survive and flourish in all sorts of obscure and unexpected places.
Jay-Z / Decoded / Random House
Rap legend Jay-Z’s talent for self-expression has helped him build a worldwide musical empire, but when it came to launching an eagerly-anticipated autobiography, there’s no place like home.
To promote the release of Decoded, publishers Random House worked with New York’s Droga 5 agency to replicate the book’s status as a kind of holy grail to fans; the key to the secrets behind the lyrics from the star’s 11 albums. The result was an interactive game on a grand scale. The Jiggaman’s followers were challenged to find individual pages from the book which had been incorporated into unexpected real world locations – from cheeseburger wrappers to billboards to plates in a restaurant.
Over the course of a month, fans could log on to a microsite developed with the help search experts at Microsoft’s Bing.com, and solve clues to reveal the location of each of the book’s pages. For the true obsessive, that meant up to three trips to Bing Maps per day to work through all the challenges – and a lot of flitting around NYC - with the help of Bing Maps - to digest Jay’s finely-wrought memoirs in situ.
Ardent fans could not only read the book, bit by bit, weeks before it was due to hit the shelves, but anyone who unlocked a page at Bing Maps – or out in the field by texting a unique code included on each page – stood to win that page signed by Jay-Z himself, or concert tickets. One canny individual who managed to solve all 200 clues netted a Lifetime Pass, offering admission for two to any Jay-Z gig anywhere in the world, for life.
As a reinvention of book as an experience, it’s an impressive and compelling demonstration of the power of digital. But more on that later…
http://bing.decodejay-z.com
HP / My Computer
Where Jay-Z’s approach was masterfully top-down, preaching to the converted, IT giant HP took a different tack, initiating the mother of all crowdsourcing projects in a bid to win the hearts and minds of China’s youth market.
The sprawling My Computer, My Stage campaign inspired and encouraged teens and college students to conceive and submit the key components for a feature-length movie. With the brand taking a back seat, participants could propose and vote on plot themes and then submit scripts, film their own scenes and audition for acting roles.
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Previous iterations of the campaign, which began in 2008, had used design and music themes to encourage users to set up profiles at HP’s utility-driven microsite, leading to the collation of a book of creative inspiration. Next, participants were challenged to produce hip hop tracks and music videos – music which has since been incorporated into the movie soundtrack.
According to ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi Beijing, a jaw-dropping 195,000,000 people took part in the campaign, with 220,000 directly contributing to the film – a road movie that combined the intense friendships of Stand By Me with the three-strand storyline used in Pulp Fiction. The average dwell time on the site was 2.3 minutes, but many of the millions who took part will have spent hours deeply engaged.
The lesson for brands? Your audience is at least as interesting as you are… See Contagious Issue 24. www.hpmystage.com.cn
IKEA / Easy to Assemble
In January, we reported that the second season of IKEA’s Easy to Assemble web series had attracted a phenomenal 6.1 million views, usurping Unilever and Sprint’s In The Motherhood for the title of most-watched sponsored web show.
Over the course of this year, the view count for Easy to Assemble has leapt up to over 20 million, with a third season currently in production. The series was created by and stars actress Illeana Douglas as an actress-turned-IKEA-employee at the furniture chain’s Burbank branch. As the transition from overt marketing messages to engagement strategy continues apace, many are following the progress of this series with keen interest.
For one thing, thanks to a pact with the Screen Actors Guild, cast and crew are being paid near-TV rates for their work on the show. That’s a real departure from the low-budget rep of online production, and potentially a benchmark, too. What’s more, the second series was shot in hi-def: another important step away from the shonky production values that often define web-based entertainment. One IKEA exec even went so far as to describe it as ‘an incubator for the future model of its $300 global media budget’.
CJP Digital Media promoted the show and helped to make it popular via word of mouth on well-targeted sites. Once IKEA fans started watching it, they also helped to spread the word…See Contagious Issue 22.
www.easytoassemble.tv
Macmillan / It’s a Book / Lane Smith
Finally, while we’re on the subject of storytelling, it’s worth acknowledging that over in the Devices section of this year’s Most Contagious report the impact and success of eReaders, tablets and smartphones is heartily and justly applauded.
Sometimes, however, you just cannot beat an actual, physical, tangible BOOK. Children’s author Lane Smith makes this point brilliantly in It’s a Book, her playful manifesto on behalf of print in the digital age. It may be a simple kids book, but Adam Gopnick, reviewing it for The New York Times Book Review hits the nail on the head: ‘The moral of Smith’s book is the right one: not that screens are bad and books are good, but that what books do depends on the totality of what they are — their turning pages, their sturdy self-sufficiency, above all the way they invite a child to withdraw from this world into a world alongside ours in an activity at once mentally strenuous and physically still.’
www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4BK_2VULCU
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Much as we wish there was a less dated way of describing compelling content that you love, tweet and forward to friends, ‘viral’ it is. This year was something of a banner year for contagious online video, not just by brands which rarely disappoint (Nike, DC Shoes) but also by unexpected players, like Tipp-Ex. Music videos, too, were some of the most passed-around films, with bands such as OK Go cementing their reputation as visual artists first, musicians second.
Nike / Write the Future, Tiger Woods, Rise
Nike more than upheld its reputation for strong viral films in 2010. First up in May, came Write the Future, a blistering three minutes of the on-pitch exploits of Italy captain Fabio Cannavaro, England’s Wayne Rooney, Franck Ribery of France, twinkle-toed Brazilian Ronaldinho and Portuguese pin-up Cristiano Ronaldo. Their play was interspersed with footage of the three players’ imagined destinies: Rooney sees endless babies named Wayne, while Ronaldo wins that unbeatable badge of fame: a cameo in The Simpsons, all on the understanding that a single moment of triumph or failure can lead to immortality or ruin. Unveiled on Facebook to underpin Nike’s ‘Write the Future’ World Cup 2010 strategy, the ad clocked up 6.3 million views in just six days, smashing Nike’s previous records. Shame the players failed to do the same…. Creative came from Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam and blockbuster direction from Alejandro G. Inarritu via Independent Films in London and Mokkumercials in Amsterdam. Contagious 23
Next, Nike enlisted Tiger Woods’ deceased father to deliver a pseudo-spanking just in time for golf’s Masters tournament and Woods’ return to the golf course. Earl Woods, who died in 2006, narrates the spot, asking probing questions such as: ‘I want to find out what your thinking was, I want to find out what your feelings are, and did you learn anything?’ The camera slowly pulls
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in to Woods, as he stares straight ahead with the look of a chided teenager. Through Wieden+Kennedy Portland, the oddly creepy 30-second ad attracted its fair share of criticism, although that did nothing to hamper its viral appeal: just a day after it made its debut, there were over 2.2 million views and 40 remixes of the clip, according to video tracking service Visible Measures.
Finally, when NBA player LeBron James defected from the Cleveland Cavaliers to Miami Heat under an enormous ESPN-shaped cloud, Nike chose to address the controversy surrounding his move with a viral film. Rise showed James asking ‘what should I do?’ and exploring his options. Defensively, he insists ‘I am not a role model’ and asks ‘Should I be who you want me to be?’ The original film attracted 4 million YouTube views and a host of response videos, mainly from bitter Cleveland residents. Our favourite was a superbly edited mash-up from film student Tom Hinueber which includes words of wisdom from a previous Nike ad featuring Michael Jordan, demonstrating the brand’s deft capture of athletic sentiment over the years.
http://bit.ly/wtfnike http://bit.ly/niketigerhttp://bit.ly/lebronrise / www.youtube.com/user/TomHinueber
Ken Block, DC Shoes / Gymkhana 3
Ken Block’s first two epically-successful automotive virals, which were also sponsored by DC Shoes, were joined by a third this year. Watched by 18.5 million petrolheads on YouTube, the seven-minutes of hair-raising hell-raising showed Block flinging a pimped up Ford Fiesta around a French racing track. The school run it ain’t.
www.youtube.com/user/DCshoesFILMlwww.dcshoes.com/gym3
Tipp-Ex / TippExperience
A clever idea from agency Buzzman in Paris for Tipp-Ex correcting fluid resurrected Burger King’s 2004 subservient chicken idea and attracted a phenomenal 13 million views on YouTube. Here’s the story: you’re shown a film where a hunter is about to shoot a
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bear, but before he does, he reaches outside of the frame, grabs the Tipp-Ex Pocket Mouse and whites out ‘shoots’, enabling visitors to insert their own verb which the congenial bear then executes. What did you write? Yep, us too. Contagious 25
www.youtube.com/tippexperience
T-Mobile / Welcome Home
27 October 2010 was just another day at London’s Heathrow Airport…. until a seemingly impromptu welcoming committee burst into song and dance to greet returning travellers. Yes, following the success of 2009’s flashmob Dance at Liverpool Street station and the mass karaoke in Trafalgar Square, those talented people at T-Mobile and Saatchi & Saatchi London took to that most emotional of places – the airport arrivals hall - to cheer up po-faced Londoners. As well as tears and laughter, the film of their antics also provoked a grand total of 4.7 million views on YouTube alone. Considering that its Life’s For Sharing proposition helped it acquire 143,000 new UK customers and boost sales by 52% in 2009, mass-scale singing and dancing are clearly working wonders for T-Mobile. This latest iteration saw a 12% rise in sales in the week after airing. Featured in Contagious 25.
www.youtube.com/user/lifesforsharing
The Rebirth of the Music Promo
In 2010, OK Go’s output was prolific, kicking off with This Too Shall Pass in March (think of a much more colourful lo-fi Honda Cog) which racked up nearly 20m YouTube views. Other highlights included the dog-infested White Knuckles and brand collaborations with Samsung and Land Rover as they sought to piggy-back the band’s viral magic.
There were a few NSFW promos in 2010 worth noting: an explicit video for Klaxons’ track Twin Flames directed by Saam Farahmand through Partizan, London, and inspired by Brian Yuzna’s 1989 flick Society, showed writhing bodies joined together by sex, limbs, torsos and fluids. As one YouTube commenter drily noted, ‘The video is ultra amazing so you won’t notice just how shit the song is’. And MIA’s Born Free showed a dystopian world where red-heads were under siege. Being withdrawn from YouTube only enhanced its viral appeal.
For her promo for Don’t Fucking Tell Me What To Do, Swedish pop star Robyn used a production process which eschewed cameras for code, revealing the song’s lyrics as well as a stream of user-generated images from fans’ Twitter comments. Fans could join in Robyn’s whinge-fest by tweeting about ‘what’s killing you’ via robyn.com/killingme or using the hashtag #killingme. The brainchild of Mary Fagot, creative director for Blip Boutique and Stopp Web in Stockholm, expect to see a few ad-based copycats of this technique in 2011…
www.youtube.com/user/okgo?blend=1&ob=4
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The more demands digital culture places on our attention, the greater the emotional potential of real life events and experiences that reconnect us to the tangible world. Brands have noticed this too… Heineken’s ‘Auditorium’ viral, a mass-pranking of Italian football fans, showed just how poignantly we feel each other’s pleasures and pains. Finding ways to tap into this sense of collective experience is becoming a winning strategy for advertisers.
Arcade Fire / Google / The Wilderness Downtown
The collaboration between anthemic multi-instrumentalists Arcade Fire and Google on their single ‘We Used to Wait’ has pushed both music video and product demo into new territory by combining sound, memory and the emotionally unpromising contribution of a web browser to mesmerising effect.
To run the video, users are advised to shut down everything on their computer ex-cept the Chrome web browser. Then, at http://thewildernessdowntown.com, viewers are asked to key in the address or postcode of the home where they grew up. This cues a multi-window journey through various satellite views of their old neighbourhood, following a hooded figure running home as Google Maps and Street View images create a montage of eerily familiar images.
As the song builds to a crescendo, viewers are asked to write or draw a message to their younger self. Their keystrokes and cursor lines grow plant-like branches and tendrils, presaging the final stage of the video which sees trees bursting forth across the streets and gardens of the viewer’s childhood home.
Director Chris Milk and Google Creative Labs artist Aaron Koblin led the project, collaborating with a large team from B-Reel, Google and friends to create, yes, an experience, but one that felt like it was just for you. And what did you do when it was over? Pause. Breathe. And then tell everyone. See Contagious Issue 25.
www.thewildernessdowntown.com
Coca-Cola Israel / Real Life ‘Like’
Picking up on teenage enthusiasm for heavily subsidised thrills, sunshine, friendship and sweet fizzy drinks, Coca-Cola Israel hosted a series of three day festivals called Coca-Cola Village. These events, essentially brand-sponsored holiday parks, are popular, oversubscribed, and
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available to just 650 teens at a time. With fox-like cunning, digital marketing experts Publicis E-dologic in Tel-Aviv combined Facebook and RFID technology to bring the Facebook ‘Like’ to life.
RFID, that little chip that lurks in travel cards and other dull-but-handy places, was embedded in plastic wristbands and handed out to the teenage Coke-fiends. Then, specially-rigged RFID readers were placed at strategic locations around the Village. Each time a visitor touched their wristband to these RFID ‘Like Machines’, a cheery update was posted to their Facebook profile. Positive buzz ensued among each visitor’s circle of Facebook friends, telling everyone what a great time they were having at the Coca-Cola Village.
Some 35,000 real-life ‘Likes’ were registered by each group of 650 visitors over their three day stays, generating 105 million views and responses on the events Facebook page. Talk about a happiness factory. See Contagious Issue 24.
Nike / Write the Future
Nike’s Write The Future activity round the 2010 World Cup was more than just that epic ad (see ‘Viral’ section). Aiming to connect fans to players, Write The Future, via Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, encouraged users to posting footage of their football skills on Facebook to compete for a place at a Nike Football Academy.
The focus then switched to Jo’Burg, where the brand wrapped landmark skyscraper The Life Centre in 90 metre-tall digital LED screens. Using social networks Facebook, Twitter, MXit and QQ fans all over the world could pick a Nike-sponsored star for the LEDs to display and send a short message of encouragement to be broadcast across the South African capital’s skyline. A hundred messages were displayed every evening throughout the tournament, with each contributor receiving a photograph of their words lighting up the night sky.
Nike’s deft post-digital touch also travelled to Japan where the brand asked fans to tweet messages of support to the national team. The best messages were selected to carve into a statue of Japan and Nagoya Grampus star Marcus Tulio Tanaka. The life-sized piece was constructed by a Kawasaki Robotics-built sculpting arm and housed at Nike’s Harajuku store in Tokyo where cameras provided a Ustream feed sending live transmissions of the robotic inscription process. A microsite hosted the full message archive and also featured a ‘Twitter face-off’ between Tulio and stars such as England’s Wayne Rooney and Korea’s Ji Sung Park: players’ online images were revealed in greater detail with every tweet featuring their name. See Contagious Issue 24.
www.facebook.com/pages/NIKE-Write-the-Future
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Intel / The Creators Project / Vice
Intel joined forces with Vice to appeal to bright young creative things. The Creators Project straddles online and offline worlds in a bid to support new creative talent across music, film and art, creating a virtual mecca for influential tech-inspired artists and cool-hunting consumers. Documentaries of over 100 Creators have been broadcast online, and a series of interactive events has toured from New York to London, São Paulo, Seoul and Beijing. The website drew over five million five-minute visits in two months, and over 15 million Creators videos have been viewed to date. See Contagious 24. www.thecreatorsproject.com
MINI / Getaway
To drive (sorry) word-of-mouth around the MINI Countryman launch in Sweden, Jung von Matt set out to engage consumers in a game that took place on smartphones and Stockholm’s streets. An iPhone app challenged players to find a virtual MINI in Stockholm via GPS/Google Maps; GPS pinpointed both the player’s location and that of the virtual MINI. Once they had made their way to within 50 meters of it, the app invited them to ‘TAKE THE MINI NOW’. The next challenge was to avoid other players aiming to snatch the car… The player with the virtual MINI at the end of the week-long game won a real one . Some 11,413 people downloaded the app and took part. See Contagious 25.
http://minigetawaystockholm.com MINI /
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Before we dive into a year of Facebook-based farms, swine-bombing birds or record-breaking war sims, let’s consider how the mechanics and points systems from these games are influencing other industries and everyday life.
Gamification /
Gamification, the process where real-world activities become imbued with the points systems and playfulness of a game, has become a serious trend in 2010. In one of 2010’s must-see key-notes at the D.I.C.E. summit, former Disney Imagineer and casual game studio head Jesse Schell introduced the proposition of a ‘gamepocalypse’ – a hypothetical world where we get points for brushing our teeth in the morning, or for watching TV ads. Schell’s ultimate point was that these rewards would help refine our behaviour and make us better people.
Whilst it’s true that points systems have been used to motivate us for years in the form of airmiles and loyalty systems, the advertising industry is now abuzz with the notion that consumers can be rewarded for participating in marketing campaigns, or helping with market research (see NBC’s Fan It for an example). Whilst the notion of a media landscape dominated by continual exhortations to score points and head to the next level rightly sounds exhausting, there’s no doubt that genuine playfulness can be immensely appealing. Read on...
www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLwskDkDPUE
Check-in Culture /
Due to the personalisation and portability of the mobile phone, one of the most successful platforms for points-scoring initiatives in 2010 has been the location-based mobile game. Foursquare – in which users ‘check in’ to locations and earn badges and points – has proved most popular with brands. Pepsi, Jimmy Choo and Courvoisier have all rewarded users for their location-based loyalty. Facebook, with its new ‘Places’ functionality is now also in on the act – capitalising on users’ typically compulsive sharing habits. Foursquare rival Gowalla has also proved popular, although it is Booyah’s MyTown which has hosted some of the most impressive marketing campaigns.
The H&M MyTown campaign enabled users who checked into US stores not only to earn game points, but also receive digital discounts. During the campaign, 10.6 million brand impressions were delivered to MyTown users, resulting in 700,000 check-ins, and H&M being the most searched for retail brand on the app.
The retailer has recently launched a new feature on MyTown which lets users earn points by checking in to a specific H&M product, either by scanning its barcode or taking a picture of it. During the first week of the feature’s launch, users notched up 350,000 products check-ins and were entered into a sweepstake for a $500 H&M gift card.
www.foursquare.comwww.booyah.com
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Rovio / Angry Birds
Without doubt the gaming success story of 2010 is Swedish developer Rovio’s mobile title, Angry Birds, a deceptively addictive finger twiddler that involves catapulting the eponymous winged avengers at the pigs who stole their eggs. (And yes, we are aware of how stupid the concept looks written down). Launched for iPhone in December 2009, this unassuming puzzler has since become the no. 1 downloaded iPhone app in 70 different countries worldwide, with 12m sold to date and over 30m free game downloads. When it launched for Android in October, servers crashed within one hour – a feat repeated when introduced on the Palm platform. 2011 will see Angry Birds released not only for PC, MAC and Facebook, but also on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and Wii. Not wanting to risk being usurped, EA bought Angry Birds publisher, Chillingo, that same month for $20 million. However, Rovio quickly tweeted: ‘We did not sell to EA, Chillingo did. We own Angry Birds and all the rights.’
The game was even parodied in a skit on Israeli comedy show Eretz Nehederet. In a mock UN peace negotiation, talks between the birds and pigs rapidly disintegrate into a violent free-for-all despite the attempts of the hapless moderator. The video has attracted over 2m views.
Farmville-parent company Zynga, has also grabbed the headlines in 2010 – not least for refusing exclusivity of its titles to Facebook and amassing more players of its farming game, Farmville, than there are registered Twitter users. The most recent press surrounding Zynga, however, has not been too positive. In October, the developer was hit with a class action lawsuit claiming it had breached privacy agreements by selling the personal data of millions of users to advertisers. This would not only put it in violation of US Federal law, but also its contract with Facebook. Attempts have since been made (unsuccessfully) by the developer to dismiss the lawsuit, but at present, the case continues…
www.rovio.comwww.youtube.com/watch?v=2bDN7Wibkfkwww.zynga.com
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Landmark Launches /
Studio Treyarch, part of Activision, broke all previous records when Call of Duty: Black Ops achieved first five day sales of more than $650 million; seven million copies were sold in the UK and US within 24 hours of launch.
The other most anticipated launch of 2010 is the long-anticipated Sony PlayStation 3 title, Gran Turismo 5, the Chinese Democracy of the gaming world. A fiendishly in-depth racing simulator, Polyphony Digital’s GT5 was five years in development and represents a new level in video game depth and accuracy. The game features over 1,000 genuine models from real manufacturers. From exhaust notes to suspension stiffness, the in-game physics for every car has been based on data drawn from the same real-world cars analysed in different states of tune. Mind-blowing.
www.callofduty.comwww.gran-turismo.com
Microsoft / Xbox Kinect
Xbox Kinect, Microsoft’s gaming golden child of 2010 with a new controller-free system with RGB camera, depth sensor and multi-array microphone, promises a brave new world of video game experiences. The hardware launched in November and 2.5 million units were sold by the end of that month alone – suggesting the tech is living up to its reputation.
The key to Kinect’s success, however, is in a balance across the entire Xbox range, as it aims to offer what Stephen McGill, director of Xbox
and Entertainment at Microsoft describes as ‘a broader entertainment experience through movies, Sky, Last.fm and Twitter, but [also] games [with] appeal to a broader, more female demographic.’
Microsoft has promised more advanced Kinect titles for 2011, yet developers and hackers across the world have already taken things into their own hands by modding the hardware itself. Check out the ‘Demos’ section of this report for a full low-down on the most weird and wonderful hacks to date. www.xbox.com/en-US/kinect
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So, the apps boom continues apace and the mobile web is finally approaching passable levels of usability. After bloody YEARS of prediction, it looks like 2010 was finally the year of mobile. I know, we can’t believe it either.
The massive proliferation of networks is accelerating, with closed operating systems replacing the connected ecosystem of hypertext first envisioned by the creators of the web. Wired magazine provoked a Twitterstorm when they declared in the September issue that ‘The Web Is Dead’.
Think of it this way – how many times did you hear friends or colleagues declare allegiance to specific devices, with their own proprietary formats, this year? ‘I’m an Android gal’, or ‘Nope, the Kindle’s for me’ are acknowledgements of affinity to platforms that will likely not play well with the rest of the web, over a longer term. They go beyond identifying one as a user of a specific software and extend the obligation to a unique operating system, online shop, delivery method, and (oh yeah) physical object.
It’s tempting to consider the apps boom that coincided with the introduction of the iPhone as a gold rush, but the data shows the opposite. The App Store has now served over 300,000 apps a total of seven billion times, and people are generally installing more of them. Nielsen data found in December 2009 the average smartphone had 22 apps, increasing to 27 by
August, with iPhone users, then Android, then BlackBerry finishing first, second and third in the number of apps installed. But adoption and usage statistics for apps show that most are downloaded and rarely used after a few weeks. A study of free applications found only 5% of users returned to the app after three weeks. As developers ad advertisers weigh up the pros and cons of a permanently installed app over a robust mobile browsing experience, expect 2011 to be dominated by the conflict between ‘Team Apps’ and ‘Team Internet’.
Starbucks is one marketer to be lauded for its steps taken in the right direction. As it opened up stores’ WiFi this year, Starbucks developed the Starbucks Digital Network in partnership with Yahoo! which offers bespoke content for customers logging on with their latte. The network, which links to users of the myStarbucks smartphone app to alert them of its content, has been built in HTML5 and is set up for touchscreen interfaces and is optimised for iOS, Android and BlackBerry devices ahead of laptop browsers.
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Android /
The Android mobile OS, built on open source principles of constant refinement, accessibility and sharing, has been the fastest growing operating system in the U.S. throughout 2010, with 300,000 daily activiations. Android also boasts the largest share of the U.S. smart phone market, with 44% of the Q3 smart phone purchases, or 9.1 million handsets. Bloomberg analysts expect sales of handsets carrying Android up 78% this year.
Android now forms a fundamental part of any smart mobile marketer’s arsenal. Elements like Chrome2Phone, a Google Chrome extension that pushes a link from the browser to Android device, have begun to shift the apps status quo; while previously many hot new apps and games were available only in Apple’s App Store, more and more are coming through on Android. As technical literacy on the software continues to rise, the opportunities for manipulation of this open source platform are enormous.
iPad / Publishers’ Salvation?
By far the sexiest device to make its debut in 2010, the iPad has forced reconsiderations of gaming, publishing and retail, but is also shaping up as a strong medium for advertisers. According to mobile ad exchange network operator Mobclix, iPad apps are five times more effective than iPhone apps, while a textPlus report found that ad interactions on iPads are about six times longer than comparable desktop interactions. iPad users should be a lucrative demographic for publishers, as well – the BBC found 25% of Kindle and iPad owners earned more than $100,000 yearly.
By now, moguls Rupert Murdoch and Richard Branson have both launched iPad-specific publi-cations, the former assembling an all-star team for
The Daily, a subscription-only newspaper priced at $.99 a week described as ‘the New York Post goes to College’, the latter, Project, a $2.99-per-issue monthly digi-glossy mag.
New publications aren’t the only ones getting onto the iPad. Conde Nast titles including Vanity Fair, GQ, Vogue and Wired have all made notable gains in reputation with their iPad versions, developed along with Adobe for the device’s debut. Meanwhile, publisher Bonnier worked with London design studio BERG on Mag+, a conceptual framework and R&D effort that resulted in Popular Science+.
The roll-your-own option has also been made available via Flipboard, an iPad-friendly social magazine. The free app aggregates social networks to produce a constantly updated, bespoke magazine for owners of Apple’s tablet. Boasting a deluxe, stylised RSS reader of sorts, the free app connects to the user’s social networks to lay out the content. Photo uploads, status updates, shortened URLs and retweeted links come to life on the iPad screen in gesture-controlled magazine format.
Apple / iAd
In July, months after the iPad launch, Steve Jobs unveiled iAd, an Apple-led in-app advertising scheme for its tablet, iPhone and iPod Touch devices. As we mentioned above, ad interactions have been shown to be higher on the iPad, but advertisers haven’t flocked to the iAd platform like Apple hoped. The high minimum buy-in, at $1m, combined with the increased difficulty in having Apple approve creative were cited as reason why it wasn’t working out for agencies and media buyers. The company hopes to engage with a relatively young and diverse demographic using iAd’s ability to target people through geolocation data and iTunes preferences. (See Contagious Issue 23 for more.)
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While eMarketer predicts mobile ad spend in the US to pass the $1bn mark in 2011 – a rise of 79% – and reach over $2.5bn by 2014, a survey by Strata revealed 97% of agencies weren’t hearing shouts for the platform from their clients. Early adopters, though, included Unilever, for Dove, and insurer State Farm.
It will be interesting to watch iAd roll out in countries with different media markets. The platform launches in the UK and Europe in late 2010 and early 2011; iAd begins in Japan, through communications dominator Dentsu, in 2011. The device will also be available from telecoms provider SoftBank, Apple’s exclusive carrier, as a subsidised offer for subscribers.
Ebooks / New Bestsellers
The Kindle, the Nook, the Kobo eReader, Sony’s Reader, Apple’s iBooks – all are vying for bookworms’ time, attention and book budget. According to Forrester Research, $966m in ebooks will be sold in 2010, but by 2015 that’ll have tripled to $3bn. Meanwhile, the 7% of adult book-readers who buy ebooks are the ones who read the most and buy the most books; the average ereader owner reads 66% of their books digitally.
The rapid growth of ebooks is just another example of Riepl’s Law, from German newspaperman Wolfgang Riepl. Riepl suggested back in 1913 that new media would never replace old media, just join and mutate existing formats for the modern audience. He was only wrong about the carrier pigeon.
In the US., as of August, digital books already accounted for 6% of sales, and the Kindle store arrived in the UK. with 400,000 titles. The Kindle – released in a new, smaller graphite-colored version – remains the device to have for the most serious readers – AllThingsD found 88% of The New York Times fiction and non-fiction best-sellers are available on Amazon’s
reader compared with 63% available for Apple iBooks. The best-selling ebooks are available for 10% less on the Kindle as opposed to the iBook platform.
Devices / Replacing Each Other
Like a snake eating its own tail, our device cycle continues to cannibalise itself. Take a look at the mobile GPS business in the last few years, where satellite navigation companies like TomTom and Garmin were immediately impacted by GPS-enabled smart phones replacing their products and subsequently struggled to bring their own applications to bear inside the App Store. But this is proliferating beyond basic features like GPS. Mixr is an app currently under development designed to bring a DJ experience to an iPad, which, if you think about it, is very well suited to the sort of tactile interfaces required for mixing sounds. Multiple apps have moved to health functions, like the HeartWise Blood Pressure Tracker.
Muji turned the paradox of obsolescence to its advantage, unveiling a range of free and paid iPad apps that essentially did the same thing its paper organizing products could do; in fact, the only paid one is Muji Notebook, which is a sketching and note-taking app. The company’s calendar skinning app and Muji To Go travel organizer are free, along with its catalogue app.
http://source.android.comhttp://code.google.com/p/chrometophonewww.flipboard.comwww.bonnier.com/betalabwww.projectmag.comwww.condenastdigital.comhttp://advertising.apple.comwww.amazon.comwww.kobobooks.comwww.barnesandnoble.com/nook/index.aspwww.apple.com/ipad/features/ibooks.htmlwww.sony.co.uk/hub/reader-ebookhttp://ipadmixr.comwww.swengcorp.com/products/heartwisewww.muji.com/appMUJI /
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When the CEO of Best Buy, Brian Dunn, says 2011 is ‘the year of internet TV’, it’s time to pay attention. That’s just what he predicted ahead of this year’s Black Friday sales in America, not long after he welcomed the retailer’s collaboration with Google TV by calling the web connected sets and set-top-boxes (STB) ‘not just a new aisle, but a new category’.
With big players such as the BBC, Apple, Samsung and Yahoo! joining the search giant in releasing connected TV products full of browsing, streaming and app possibilities, and users already ac-customed to interactive content through second and third-screen activities, television is no longer a passive medium. Already by the start of 2010 59% of Americans were surfing the net while watch-ing the TV, according to Nielsen, suggesting the box in the corner is increasingly becoming a social hub for online communities.
Connected TV /
Imagine this – you’re on the couch at midnight catching up with True Blood through an HBO app, simultaneously checking baseball scores through an onscreen MLB widget. You dive into two-screen mode to tweet a comment on the show’s cliffhanger ending, then download the series for a friend via Amazon. You turn the TV off with your smartphone and go to bed. Pretty smart, right?
Connected TV, whether accessed through Apple TV’s STB, Sam-sung ‘s Yahoo!-enabled internet TVs or one of the myriad rivals, will let viewers catch up with and interact with the content they want, when and where they want it, with advertisers capturing deep be-havioural data in the process. The trend for this kind of on-demand online video is already well into its adolescence, with NBC/Disney/NewsCorp’s streaming network Hulu more than doubling US reve-nue to $240m in 2010, and 330m Chinese people watching online TV. UK-based Generator Research has predicted a 400% increase in global internet TV viewers, to 298m by 2014 – with annual ad revenues up 2500% to $6bn in the same period. Contagious 25.
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Google TV /
The daddy of the search dollar has ruffled a few network feathers since its October launch, with big players such as CBS and Hulu blocking content, wary of Google’s dominance in online advertising. However, the potential is clear for a product which combines a Chrome browser-powered web experience with search and sites optimised for viewing from the couch, plus the world’s most popular online video site, YouTube, and fastest growing app marketplace, Android. Google TV product lead Rishi Chandra has been on a charm offensive, promising ‘we’re not trying to replace cable’ and promoting a future of apps such as a karaoke experience (a sure fire way to win over the Contagious team). Indexing content has long been Google’s forte, yet it remains to be seen whether this fiercely competitive environment can be reshaped in its own image.
http://google.com/tv
Apple TV /
Steve Jobs used to refer to Apple TV as a mere hobby – but now it’s clear the team behind mobile and music game changers iPhone and iPod and iTunes Store means business. The new Apple TV fits in the palm of the hand and comes with an equally manageable $99 price tag. From there, users can rent shows and series via iTunes, streaming them directly to the TV. Flickr provides a photo element, iTunes again taking care of music. Early reviews have criticised the insistence on streaming rental-only films and shows. What’s more, like Google, Apple will have to work hard on its acquisitions and payments to ensure content creators play ball.
Yet a combination of the company’s trademark usability with an STB connecting to iPhones, iPads and Apple desktops and laptops through an AirPlay feature is an appealing prospect, particularly for Apple evangelists.
www.apple.com/appletv
Boxee /
And finally! Those looking for an alternative to the glitchy hegemony of Apple TV for all their web streaming needs could purchase rival service Boxee’s hardware in November this year. The sleek little box syncs content from computers to your TV screen whilst pulling in movies, TV shows and additional content via a series of apps. Perhaps the most enjoyable feature of the Boxee box dovetails with the ‘web of intent’ trend outlined in the ‘Movements’ section of this year’s Most Contagious. A button installed on your web browser enables you to mark any video link for later viewing, and the Boxee box yanks the content for you to stream through your TV at your leisure. Magic.
www.boxee.com
Interactive TV /
If connected TV is content you want, when you want it, interactive TV describes the ways in which broadcasters, software developers and content providers are seeking to retain viewers beyond the half-hour broadcast slot, sharing content and buzz with peers through apps and check-ins to shows. The proliferation of smaller, additional screens – netbooks, smartphones, tablets – means there’s plenty of opportunity for couch potatoes lacking the attention span to stick through a 12-minute segment of Idol or
X Factor without checking the Twittersphere’s reaction to Gaga’s guest appearance. On a more cerebral note, UK voters will remember how social commentary surrounding the first General Election debates informed opinion polls. For more see the feature in Contagious 24.
Most successfully this year, London-based production company Monterosa’s World Cup 2010 pilot of the ITV Live online app reached a million users in the first week of the tournament. More recently an interactive site, also by Monterosa, let viewers play along online with Channel 4 gameshow The Million Pound Drop, real-time data from viewers incorporated into the show and 4.5% of viewers taking up the opportunity.
www.monterosa.co.uk
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Console hacking. Connected TVs. Wired buildings…. 2010’s Most Contagious is liberally peppered with digital complexity. As a result, our technology section has been reserved only for the most WTF of advances.
iPad / Dentsu & BERG
Design consultancy BERG, London reinvented light painting for the iPad generation in response to a brief from Dentsu in London, to ‘make future magic’ (a brief we’d all like to have a crack at). Using a clever bespoke app for the iPad and a camera set up for long exposures, BERG could capture letters emerging from the screen as they slowly dragged it across the frame, leaving ghostly 3D words hanging in the air. Like the best magic, it’s hard to imagine, but thankfully the agency has since launched the app on iTunes. It’s called Penki, Japanese for paint. Featured in Contagious 25. http://bit.ly/Dentsu
Bloom Box /
Like a real life version of mid 90’s thriller Chain Reaction, minus Morgan Freeman and Keanu Reeves, Bloom Box is a mystical energy-creating device shrouded in suspicion and Hollywood hype (helped by the Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger turning up at its unveiling). The commercial version of the black box is the size of a parking space, and contains stacks of ceramic plates made of sand and coated in special inks. It uses a clean electrochemical process rather than combustion to convert fuel into electricity, and is reportedly twice as efficient as traditional power sources with 60% fewer emissions. NASA has been using similar technology for years in various vehicles, but the Bloom Box has successfully scaled it down, putting it within reach of corporations and hopefully, one day, individuals. eBay already has a small football field’s worth of Bloom Boxes running, so buyers can feel even smugger after bidding on that Cliff Richard CD…
www.bloomenergy.com
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Robots /
Plunging headfirst into uncanny valley, Japan-based AIST’s HRP-4C Humanoid robots display freakishly realistic facial expressions, movements and general human mimicry. The robots are capable of serving us beer, ice cream and replacing our favourite pop stars through some extraordinarily powerful and accurate singing. Depending on your level of cynicism, this could mean one, or all, of the following. a) A leap forward in the integration of robots into the service industry b) a blow for the Labradoodle as the current pet du jour or c) a whopping great cash cow for the sex industry. Featured in Contagious 25
www.aist.go.jpwww.youtube.com/watch?v=xcZJqiUrbnI
Stickybits /
Stickybits is a clever little app that allows people to attach content – such as a photo, comment or video - to any standard barcode, say, on a can of Coke, just by scanning it with an iPhone or Android device. And it doesn’t end there. Online, a barcode generator allows you to make and print out your own unique
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codes, so a colleague or even a cat can all carry information and media via the Stickybit. The service recently launched an extension to the service entitled Officialbits, which focuses on rewarding people with points and offers as they scan products. Ben & Jerry’s was one of the first brands to jump on board, offering a free T-shirt to the first 500 people to scan two pints of its Fair Trade ice cream. Featured in and on the cover of Contagious 23.
www.stickybits.com
Mobile Health Care /
2010 has been a banner year for innovative mobile use, particularly in developing markets. Handsets are now being used as crop irrigation monitors and ATMs in Africa, and even for medical purposes, performing eye tests, and as microscopes that can detect malaria. McKinsey reckons the global market for mobile health, or mHealth, is worth $50 billion, while an mHealth summit in November predicted that 500 million people will be using mobile health apps by 2015.
Eric Dishman, director of Health Innovation and Policy at Intel’s Digital Health Group, turned up at TED to explain how Intel is using the regular functionality of the phone to find early warning signs of Alzheimer’s and dementia. Intel also unveiled its SENS prototype, which uses an avatar to display what the phone’s owner is currently doing, attaining this information through features like calendars, sensors, location and accelerometers, and sharing even more details about what our friends are up to in real time. Intel’s vision for the future sees fewer people dependent on hospital-based medicine, instead caring for themselves via remote consultation and mobile monitoring.
http://bit.ly/tedtalks_ericdishman
Augmented (Hyper)reality /
Student Keiichi Matsuda created a look ahead at how the world might look if augmented reality (AR) became the go-to medium for information and advertising. The short film depicts a first person view of an overwhelming mass of visual noise cluttered with overlays about product
pricing, appliance energy usage and a web-like network of friends and filtered status updates. It’s been an interesting year for AR, with early bird Layar receiving $14 million of investment from Intel, and Microsoft’s Blaise Aguera y Arcas taking it to another level at TED when he showed off the company’s latest experiment with the technology. The architect of Bing Maps and his team projected augmented real-time video onto static ‘street view’ style maps in Bing, proving to naysayers that AR can move beyond being ‘just a fad’. Featured in Contagious 22.
www.keiichimatsuda.comwww.youtube.com/watch?v=NCPzji_-2Oo
Nokia x Burton / Push Snowboarding
PUSH is a Nokia project designed to connect the potential of its devices with the playful hack community. One of the cooler ideas came from a collaboration with the crew Solderin’ Skaters, who mixed sensors and skateboards to create a setup which records the tricks of the user by capturing movements and speeds through various accelerometers. The crew then realised that what works for one type of board sport will surely work for another, and teamed up with snowboarding giants Burton to adapt the skateboard concept for its snowy equivalent. It uses a similar set-up, but with the addition of ‘smart’ clothing with integrated sensors to communicate even more real-time data back to the phone’s handset. Featured in Contagious 25.
http://blogs.nokia.com/pushburton
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Over the last two years, the manhandling of data has fallen into one of two categories: grubby microanalysis, or attractive visualisation. The chasm between the two camps was such that 2010 saw a mild backlash against the glut of pretty yet vapid infographics sprouting up across the web. Computational artisan Mario Klingemann who brought this trend to its logical conclusion: data visualisations of classic art. (See Contagious 24.)
So, data visualisation is now being forced to sing for its supper, matching aesthetic appeal with a potential for genuine practical application. For example, Doug McCune’s 3D visualisations showed the possibilities for mapping crime, which could then be linked to GPS-enabled police patrol cars to ensure city blocks were appropriately policed.
www.quasimondo.com
Data Benevolence /
As the ability to capture, interpret and act on data becomes more widespread, so does the potential to use it to improve the world around us – but only if people are prepared to share, a new phenomenon known as ‘data benevolence’.
The UK’s Royal Mail real-time GPS parcel tracker, for instance, lets customers track the exact location of the vehicle carrying their items - as well as the speed at which it’s travelling, should you wish to know - updated every 60 seconds. Result? An end to waiting in all day to sign for a package.
And Google’s Smart Rescheduler is the perfect way to save even more time. The calendar feature which launched in 2010 automatically accesses other people’s data to find a time when all parties are free, so no more back and forth emails trying to arrange a suitable date.
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Meanwhile, Citibank has teamed up with Microsoft to use its vast banks of customer spending data to power a site called Bundle, which allows visitors to track the average spending of people like them, in their area, on everything from rent to groceries. Data such as this is usually private, but by removing the human element of each individual digit, the combined effect is more utilitarian than totalitarian.
http://bit.ly/smart-rescheduler
NY Jets / Meadowlands
American Football team the New York Jets’ $1.6bn new stadium – Meadowlands Arena – justified its hefty price tag with a host of high-tech implants, including a system for the Jets to monitor off-the-field activity with as much intricacy as they follow the athletes on the gridiron. Developed by designers at Roundarch, Chicago, the system tracks data from all areas of the stadium, including parking, concessions sales, merchandise flow, attendance and more, by category and timeline. Concessions management, for example, can direct extra kegs of beer to thirsty sections, or send additional staff members to parts of the stadium that are selling more hot dogs than usual. We challenge you to deliver a wiener more efficiently. See Contagious Issue 25. http://roundarch.com
adidas / Match Tracker
To demonstrate its commitment to innovation in sport, adidas created Match Tracker – an online tool allowing football fans to view statistical data from 2010 UEFA Champions League matches. Match Tracker captured data of every pass, shot, formation and goal during Europe’s biggest football tournament. The day after the game, the site created interactive visualisations of each match which could be replayed in real-time or up to 100x real-time speeds. In addition to a heat-map view showing areas of on-pitch activities, users could apply seven other filters to see patterns of play, formations, strengths and weaknesses by player position or even team. Integration with social media allowed users to share specific match moments either as links or infographics generated on the fly. See Contagious Issue 23. http://bit.ly/matchtracker
McLaren /
With a brief to bring Formula 1 fans closer to the action, Work Club and Pirata, London, partnered with McLaren to broadcast information from racing drivers, their pit team and even their cars. During the Bahrain Grand Prix, the Race 1.0B site pulled in live stats from Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button’s cars, including speed, gear, throttle, revs, and G-force data, as well as featuring a GPS-enabled circuit map and comments from the driver and McLaren pit team. The information NY JETS /
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was designed to augment the live experience with real-time stats, and over 100,000 unique visitors visited Race 1.0B during the race – 15,000 of them from mobile devices – with an impressive average dwell time of over 30 minutes per user. Totally unique to McLaren, the data gave fans an insight into exactly what happens in the heads of the drivers and the team behind them, before, during and after the Grand Prix. See Contagious Issue 23.
http://mclaren.com/home
Fedex / Changing World
When Fedex wanted to drive awareness and increase time spent with the brand, BBDO Guerrero, Philippines and BBDO NY came up with a website which provided beautifully realised data in the form of a morphing world map. The dynamic map was fed with global business trends and insights from the Economist Intelligence Unit, allowing users to view the world by distribution of overseas workers, business environment ranking, employment rates, and even cases of insomnia. An AR component in press allowed people to engage with the site in a more hands-on manner. Fedex’s visualisation of a (literally) changing world resulted in a 59% increase in traffic with an average dwell time of around 15 minutes. See Contagious Issue 25.
www.experience.fedex.com
Tim Berners-Lee / Journalism
You’d expect the man credited with inventing the World Wide Web to have an interest in data, but in November this year Tim Berners-Lee said that he believed the future of journalism also lay in analysing data.
Speaking in response to a UK government recent release of public data, Berners-Lee commented that ‘Journalists need to be data-savvy. It used to be that you would get stories by chatting to people in bars... But now it’s also going to be about poring over data and equipping yourself with the tools to analyse it and picking out what’s interesting. And keeping it in perspective, helping people out by really seeing where it all fits together, and what’s going on in the country.’
Time to brush up on those Excel skills…
http://bit.ly/tim-berners-lee-analysis
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Whether you’re looking to make it or spend it, 2010 has been a tumultuous year for all things financial. This is the year in money, Contagious-style.
Social Shopping /
Described by Forbes as ‘the fastest growing website in history’, three year-old social shopping site Groupon is at the forefront of a new system of supply and demand. Businesses of any size can offer a heavily discounted product or experience on the premise that the deal will happen only when enough people commit to make it worth the vendor’s while, hence the term ‘social shopping’.
Groupon’s locally targeted offers come at the rate of two per email, two emails per day, and credit card details are retained, ensuring a path to purchase that’s so smooth as to be positively frictionless. Groupon takes a cut, customers receive a variety of reduced goods and services and businesses from local beauty salons to enormous multinationals gain access to a database of 35 million users under trusted, opt-in circumstances. Everyone’s a winner, right?
In August, Groupon partnered with apparel retailer Gap to offer its first ever nationwide deal – a coupon for $50 worth of Gap merchandise, for just $25. 400,000 Groupons later, the site claimed its biggest ever day of business, with $11m in transactions. If, as some reports suggest, Groupon typically takes a 50% of the value of the coupon, the champagne corks must have been popping at HQ.
As is customary for a business demonstrating such frantic growth, Groupon is not without its critics. For instance, when the hefty management fee is incorporated into the Gap deal, the 50% discount on the coupon creeps towards 75%, prompting analysts to query the rationale behind such skinny profit margins. At the other end of the operation, the web is littered with rumours that ill-thought-out offers are leading to the demise of smaller
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businesses unable to support the demand that a Groupon can create. The site’s audience, too, is subject to scrutiny. Are the serial deal-sluts attracted to Groupon’s constant drip-feed of enticing markdowns the sort of clients that might become regular customers? Or will they always drop their knickers for the next big discount that comes along?
This negative publicity has not stopped the clamoring mass of willing participants, with several competitors such as Amazon-funded Living Social and hipster iteration Keynoir springing up to take advantage of demand. To process the bottleneck of clients and maximise revenue without spamming the userbase, in October Groupon announced the addition of a platform called ‘Stores’. By creating a digital storefront, any business can create an offer at any time without having to wait their turn. Another feature, ‘The Deal Feed’, personalises offers based on user preferences and behavioural data. Suddenly, the idea of paying full price for anything ever again seems laughable.
Groupon’s seemingly watertight business model and projected revenues of $500m for 2010 have not gone unnoticed, and the lions of Silicon Valley are circling. In December, Google offered $5.3bn for the company. Recent forays by Google into the social space have proven uninspired, and the acquisition of a service that includes social elements from a purely transactional perspective is one way to take on Facebook, who are currently doing it much, much better (and have launched their own ‘Deals’ service to compete). However, the offer was rejected by Groupon’s founders, led by the Valley’s newest recruit to the balls-of-steel club, 30-year-old Andrew Mason.
This is presumably on the understanding that the company will eventually be worth a lot more. Yet Sucharita Mulpuru, an e-commerce analyst at Forrester Research, commented in an open letter to investors that ‘a multibillion dollar valuation for a company that is in a business with virtually no barriers to entry and is younger than my toddler is absurd.’ Still, in an age in which trillion dollar bank bailouts have decimated the average Joe’s ability to keep these kinds of figures in perspective, one can’t help thinking that Google would still have filed the acquisition under ‘bargain’.
Our take? Groupon is a Darwinian system. It works well to plug slow times in the life cycle of a business, to rid a company of excess inventory or to recruit consumer information for CRM purposes. However, like all the most efficient systems, it penalises weakness. If you can’t do the maths, then best give it a steer. www.groupon.com
Publishing Models /
Publishing’s own lizard king Rupert Murdoch has finally put his money where his mouth is, declaring war on free content. In July, The Times paper in the UK introduced a forbidding paywall over thetimes.co.uk homepage. Subscribers pay £1 for the first 30 days, then £2 a week, with the iPad edition thrown in for free. Further confronting the technological demons that plague him, Murdoch has also announced the launch of an iPad-only publication, called ‘The Daily’, expected to cost 99 cents per week for seven days of publication. An initial investment of $30m plus talent from the New York Post and MTV has been guaranteed for the project, which should hit tablets sometime in the new year.
Results on the Times initiative have either been triumphant or disastrous, depending on which analyst, or which of Murdoch’s gleeful competitors, you choose to believe. Statistics revealed in December indicate that 105,000 people have paid, 30,000 of those through tablet devices. Less than a month later, Experian Hitwise claimed a readership of just 54,000 (although the research was commissioned by Times competitor The Guardian). However, reports from inside Times publisher News International suggest that although
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yes, advertising revenue has been decimated and yes, reader numbers are down, the amount of money they’re making from that small proportion of paying customers is more than enough to offset the balance.
At present, Murdoch strikes a lonely figure out on that limb, his competitors hopefully predicting catastrophe as he attempts to reshape the new world in his own hard-nosed image (God only knows what he makes of WikiLeaks). However, the only genuine metric of Murdoch’s success will be indicated not in the size of the Times readership, but in the length of time he can hang on before everyone comes to join him. In November, News International sister publication The News of the World also disappeared behind the paywall, which could be interpreted in one of two ways. First, events at the Times have cemented Murdoch’s opinion that locking down online news is both lucrative and sustainable - thus making him an unlovable but undisputable hero for publishers everywhere. Or second, that the man will die before admitting he made a mistake. This is as close to a nailbiter as the publishing industry gets.
C-Commerce /
The norms of fashion merchandising and marketing have long been dictated by the luxury end of the industry; brands with a whole lot of image to protect and a subsequent fear of the interactive. However, after this long flirtation, fashion has finally fallen in love with digital media, with the charge not led by the experts (Vogue et. al) nor by the icons (step aside, Gucci), but by a group of pioneering fashion e-commerce sites. ASOS (As Seen On Screen), Net-A-Porter and The Outnet are creating social and engaging experiences that keep consumers returning for more, tempting journalists over to the coal-face of e-commerce to write sparkling, informative copy to help sell products. This is a new fusion of content plus commerce, or c-commerce. Fashion editorial and e-commerce have always been separate entities, but doesn’t it make sense to get fashion advice AND wardrobe staples, from one trusted source? While many industry insiders were waiting for the editors to make the first move in the form of interactive styling and ‘click-to-buys’, the transition has occurred
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the other way round, suggesting that it’s easier to transform an e-commerce platform into a trusted authority than it is to involve a fashion magazine in the grubby world of online shopping.
In September, Net-A-Porter announced that Jeremy Langmead, formerly editor of Esquire, will head up its 2011 site for men, Mr Porter. Meanwhile, Melissa Dick, formerly digital editorial director of Elleuk.com, is now head of editorial at ASOS, which produces a highly acclaimed customer magazine in-house. The latest ABC figure (January - June 2010) indicated a circulation of 449,943, and according to statistics from the Association of Publishing Agencies (APA), regular readers of the magazine spend 69% more than non-readers. The blows just keep on coming for traditional publishing…
UNIQLO / Lucky Switch
Another miraculous bit of technology came in the form of this reinvention of the banner ad, again from Dentsu. A bookmark installed on web browsers and a widget added to blogs allowed for the transformation of all images on a website into either lucky tickets in which the participant won a tote bag, or banner ads for UNIQLO. We don’t know how it works, but we do know that the promotion generated 2.8m clicks on the ads in one month and sales uplifts of 120% instore and 150% online. The technology was pointedly demonstrated using competitor Gap’s website. Subversive.
iButterfly /
This mobile app developed by Dentsu in Tokyo and soon to be rolled out to other markets was conceived as a means of delivering discount coupons to consumers in an intriguing way. When the app is activated, the phone’s viewfinder ‘sees’ augmented reality, location-based butterflies that can be snapped and caught in order to access a money-off deal or offer. Each butterfly is added to your digital collection book, and the little critters can even be shared, flapping from handset to handset on command. Whilst the technology on display here is nothing short of staggering, the real achievement lies in the transformation of marketing’s most boring interaction, the humble coupon, into sheer, playful joy.
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With budgets hacked away post-recession, there has been a discernible shift towards a ‘make, do and mend’ culture in design which, despite being a positive step towards a more sustainable future, can often result in less exciting aesthetics. Spectacular designs that have blown us away embrace a more sustain-able future without compromising on image, for instance Yves Behar’s Clever Little Bag for Puma (see below).
Marina Bay Sands / Singapore
The ‘staggering architectural feat of the year’ award goes to Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands development. At 10-million-square feet, comprising three towers and 56 storeys, the venture marks another notch in the belt for the rapidly growing Singaporean economy.
The most impressive part of the design is the
Sands SkyPark, the cherry on the top of the three
towers, consisting of 1.2 hectares and home to
over 650 types of plants. Guests can admire the
city view from the observation deck or cool off in
the outdoor pool at the dizzying height of 200m.
Architect Moshe Safdie designed the development, and Las Vegas Sands Corp developed it, taking full advantage of the mass exodus of workers from Dubai. This enabled them to complete the project in record time; a mere four and a half years! Here’s hoping that the well documented rumours of appalling treatment don’t travel with the workforce…
Back in 2005, the Singaporean Government dropped its 45-year ban on casinos in an effort to pinch gamblers from the nearby (and oft corrupt) Macau. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong stated at the time that the move would help double tourism revenue by 2015 and shed what he called an ‘unexciting’ image. The Singapore Tourism Board claimed that the aim is to boost revenue from S$12.8bn (£6.2bn) in 2009 to S$30bn (£14.7bn) by 2015.
www.marinabaysands.com
Tree of Codes / Jonathan Safran Foer
It may well be the year that the e-reader came of age, but you can’t argue with the sensory experience of an actual book, from the delicious velvetiness of the paper to the faint cracking of the spine. However, even the centuries-
old technology of bound pages can be ripe for reinvention. Literary wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer has experimented with the form, using a unique die cutting technique to create what he called ‘the perfect intersection of the visual arts and literature’.
The book is made up of excerpts taken from Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles with whole words and phrases cut out of the pages to create an entirely new meaning. After being shot down by every printer the studio approached, finally, Die Keure, Belgium agreed to make the book using a different die-cut pattern on every page. The project took over a year to create, and was designed by Sara de Bondt studio, published by visual editions and features cover artwork by gray318.
http://visual-editions.com/tree-of-codes
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3D EXPRESS / China
May’s Beijing International High-Tech Expo saw the unveiling of an extraordinary solution to the traffic clogging China’s roads – buses that straddle the roads themselves. A dual level design by Huashi Future Parking Equipment, Shenzen, allows passengers to board a 4.5 metre high upper deck, while cars travel underneath in the gap between 6m-wide legs. Travelling on roadside tracks at up to 60km/h powered by electricity and solar energy, each 28 million Yuan (£2.69m) bus can carry 1,200 passengers at a time, saving carbon emissions. Beijing authorities, desperate to improve the air quality choked by the city’s four million cars, will pilot the scheme in 2011. Featured in Contagious 24.
Puma / Clever Little Bag
Puma is scrapping shoe boxes and from November the brand started to roll out its clever little bag, a new packaging and distribution system that the brand claims will save more than 60% of paper and water used by the company annually.
A box-and-bag hybrid designed by Yves Behar utilises a cardboard insert to retain a rigid structure where needed, meaning it works on shelves. The bag uses 65% less cardboard than a standard shoebox, uses no laminated paints or tissue paper, is physically smaller and lighter AND replaces plastic bags at the checkout, saving almost 275 tons of plastic.
The move marks a wider shift towards brands (including Volvo and Patagonia) moving beyond eco-claims to wider sustainability initiatives with improved transparency.
www.puma.com/cleverlittlebag
Modernist Cuisine /
Nathan Myhrvold, ex-CTO of Microsoft and keen chef spent ‘millions’ on this project to experiment with, produce and document the entire spectrum of contemporary cooking techniques. Modernist Cuisine is a six-volume, 2,400 page, 48-pound, $625 love song to the culinary art, created by a team of cooks, writers, editors, photographers and designers over a three year period in what Business Week described as ‘the most sophisticated kitchen on the planet’. Less a coffee table book and more an actual coffee table, this is one of the rare instances in which we find ourselves in thrall to the pet project of a rich man with a lot of time on his hands. Go forth and drool.
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OK, it’s overquoted, but Confucius’ proverb still rings true. ‘Tell me and I’ll forget,’ he said, ‘show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.’ Considering how this sentiment could begin to affect modern marketers in Contagious 16, Bob Greenberg, chairman, CEO, and global chief creative officer of R/GA, cited the elegant simplicity of the iPhone’s launch campaign, claiming that ‘the product demonstration is back and it needs to be a part of the aptitude and agenda of any great marketer or agency’.
Two years on, Greenberg’s comments seem prophetic. 2010 has been the year of the new and improved product demo. Despite the fact that new technologies are becoming increasingly complex in their capabilities, they are also (like the original iPhone) becoming paradoxically
more simple, or rather, intuitive. Furthermore, the average consumer is now so connected across multiple converging platforms that the potential for not just demonstrating but involving through digital channels, is massive.
Google / Chrome FastBall
In July, Google launched the interactive, YouTube-based Chrome FastBall game via BBH New York. Subtitled A Race Across The Internet, this returned to the Heath Robinson-esque machines which featured in the preceding TV ads and dared the user to ‘Solve our internet challenges as fast as you can to get the ball across the finish line’. The aim, of course, was to prove you were quicker than the Chrome browser...
Once the first video started and the clock was ticking, the player faced five speed-related challenges, such as choosing the fastest way
to get between two points on a Google Map, performing a Twitter search for the fastest ball they could think of, and translating a phrase from one language to another using Google Translate. At the end of the game, a speedometer ranked how quickly they completed the course, with a prompt to share results through Facebook, Twitter or Google Buzz. Who said internet browsers were low-interest?
To date, the Chrome FastBall YouTube channel has received over 500,000 unique views and, in just two years, Chrome is now the world’s third most popular internet browser. See Contagious 24. www.youtube.com/user/chromefastball
Kinect (Microsoft) / Hacking
Feel free to check out the Gaming section of this report for the full skinny on the most significant hardware launch in the games market since Nintendo’s Wii. Clearly the arrival of the Xbox Kinect has massive implications for maker Microsoft’s share of the social/casual gaming market. However, what’s fascinating is what can be done with Kinect when it is taken apart…
Since the November launch of the controller-free gaming system, YouTube has been flooded with videos (there are close to 5,000 results for ‘Kinect hack’) showing everything from the useful to the downright loony. What unites every single one is a sense of excitement at being given free reign to hack, piece together and play with advanced technologies previously reserved for an elite, affluent group.
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The first iterations of these ‘hacks’ online initially ruffled Microsoft‘s feathers. However, having witnessed the sheer breadth of creativity and innovation evident in Kinect hack culture, Microsoft has since changed tack. Shannon Loftis, studio manager at Microsoft Game Studios even reported that she was ‘excited to see people so inspired’.
Without doubt, our favourite Kinect hack is that from UCLA researcher Oliver Kreylos named ‘2 Kinects 1 Box’, which alludes to another extremely viral video. Taking separate 3D video streams from two calibrated Kinect cameras, Kreylos was able to combine both into a single 3D reconstruction. The objects rendered on screen precisely match their real-life counterparts, enabling an exact augmented reality environment to be constructed.
Our second top hack is from developer Hector Martin, who first won a competition run by IT hardware manufacturer Adafruit Industries, which offered a $3000 prize to the first person capable of creating an open-source driver for Kinect. Having developed just such a thing (compatible with Linux), Martin set about doing
the same for Apple’s OSX operating system. The result is a 3D drawing programme in which Kinect maps one hand as it creates lines/shapes, and the other as it rotates the view. This allows the user to create fully-navigable 3D renderings in real-time.
Japanese developer Takayuki Fukatsu is keeping the exact science of his own Kinect hack close to his chest; however, what we do know is that Open Frameworks was used to create a real-time filter which can render static images onto a moving form. The result? Walk in front of the Kinect sensor and it will camouflage your body into the room’s background - just like iconic alien movie baddie, Predator. Now, ‘get to the chopper’...
Lastly, we recommend that you check out the work of developer Yankeyan, who among various other feats, has already created a hack which enables a wooden broomstick to be rendered on-screen as a glowing lightsabre, and developed a motion-based controller system for a Nintendo NES console. His most impressive achievement, however, utilises OpenKinect PC drivers and complex speech synthesis/recognition software. The smart system enables the user to hold foreign objects in front of the Kinect camera and state their name. When the same object is produced for a second time, it will recognise each one and speak its name accordingly. See Contagious 25
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-w7UXCAUJEwww.youtube.com/watch?v=Brpu30vjCa4www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qhXQ_1CQjghttp://bit.ly/teaching-kinect
Mitsubishi / Online Test Drive
Test driving a car online? Now there’s a challenge…
To promote the new Mitsubishi Outlander Sport, 180/Los Angeles and production company, B-Reel New York developed a world-first in a US campaign which allowed internet users to take a real-world version of the sports utility vehicle for a spin, through their browser.
Working with 180 and robotics engineer Dr. James Brighton, Mitsubishi pioneered a remote control system that utilises multiple cameras, in-car servos and advanced GPS mapping. This then enabled prospective buyers to take the Outlander Sport for a drive on a closed course, but from the comfort of their homes. Participants had to be US residents aged 18 or over, and could sign up from 15 October; over 5,000 individual test drives then took place during 1-10 November. See Contagious 25.
www.outlandersport.comTAKAYUKI FAKATSU /
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Moshi Monsters / London
Moshi Monsters, a brightly coloured online mash-up of social networking, gaming and virtual pets targeting seven to 12-year-olds, launched in 2008 but really hit paydirt this year. Players pay a monthly membership fee to adopt and customise one of six cute Moshis, monitoring their critter’s activity on a Facebook style wall and befriending others to pad out their buddy list (a free version is also available). Completing educational games allows players to accumulate Roxs, a virtual currency that can be spent on pixelated goodies throughout Monstro City.
However, the fun continues offline as well. By making the shift from virtual to physical, Moshi Monsters are standing out in a sector previously dominated by the likes of Club Penguin and Neopets. The company hosted its first real world event, the 15 Million Monster Party, in London earlier this year, while printable trading cards enable kids to continue the fun in the classroom, playground or park.
Smart move. In March 2009, 1.5 million Moshi Monsters had been adopted; that figure has now leapt to over 30 million to date (7 million monthly unique visitors), with a bright outlook for the year ahead. CEO Michael Acton Smith recently projected that the retail value of all Moshi Monsters-related merchandise sold in 2011 will come to around $100 million. Seems a lot less like child’s play now, doesn’t it?
- FOUNDED / 2008
- EMPLOYEES / 40
- FUNDING / $10M TO DATE
www.moshimonsters.com
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Assured Labor / Boston
Two thirds of internet users in emerging markets don’t have a PC at home. Consequently, although job hunters can upload a CV online, there is often a long time lag in responding to interview requests or applying for specific jobs.
Addressing this fundamental problem is Assured Labor. Essentially a recruitment agency, the company uses a complex algorithm to match CVs on its database with job vacancies in emerging markets, and then connects candidates with potential employers via SMS.
So far over Assured Labor has signed up 20,000 active candidates in Nicaragua and hundreds of employers are already on board in Mexico; plans to launch the service in South America and Asia are also underway. Meanwhile, mobile penetration continues to grow three or four times faster than net penetration, increasing the potential for Assured Labor to plug a lucrative gap in the market.
- FOUNDED SEPTEMBER 2009
- EMPLOYEES 14
- FUNDING $1M TO DATE
www.assuredlabor.com
Zeebo / San Diego
Marrying the nimble, accessible, connected technology behind mobile phones with the mania for social gaming currently sweeping the internet, three-year-old Zeebo is bringing online gaming, networking and learning to TV screens in living rooms across the developing world through its low cost games console.
Exploiting a handy combination of existing, affordable, off-the-shelf technology and timely backing from telecoms experts Qualcomm has propelled Zeebo from pipe dream to product launch in just 18 months. Its versatile system offers games for download and basic web connectivity, all purchased with a virtual currency, Z-Credits.
The console has sold ‘tens of thousands’ of units since hitting the market in late 2009, and is cheerfully anticipating ‘unlimited’ potential for growth. Game developers from Electronic Arts to Fishlabs are already working on the platform, while the compact, simple, mobile-based technology means the system could easily be incorporated into other products, such as televisions.
- FOUNDED - 2007
- FUNDING $8M
www.zeeboinc.com
Waze / Tel Aviv
Waze is a dynamic navigation app which automatically updates the driving community as users drive, detecting traffic levels and difficulties that arise in real time. Users can report and share information on accidents, speed cameras or road works, alerting unsuspecting motorists that there may be trouble ahead.
As a completely open-source platform, the development of Waze is dependent on the users, who update street names and correct errors to grow the amount and accuracy of the data organically, as the community itself expands.
When we covered Waze last year the app had been downloaded 200,000 times in Israel. Since then, the number of users has grown to over 2.2 million users worldwide, garnering adoration from the tech blogs. The company has just announced a further $25m in funding.
- FOUNDED 2008
- EMPLOYEES 40
- FUNDING $37M TO DATE
www.waze.com
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