years best non-traditional advertising 2012 contagious mag

Introduction /By Paul Kemp-Robertson, Contagious, and Dave Senay, Fleishman-Hillard

Movements / Evolution and empowerment

Purpose / Playing a role in society

Marketing as Service Design / Utility not noise

Divine Data / Insight by numbers

Technology / Big battles, small victors

Design /Personalised play

Social Business /Adopting an open door policy

Image Sharing / The year of the photo

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MOVEMENTs purpose sErVicE data technology design social biz sharing amplified screens augmented retail personalise new loyalty payment sbpf

Amplified Live / Enhance, capture and share

Screen Grabs / Creating, sharing, watching

Augmented Media /Layering content and utility

Retail /Shopping gets connected

Personalisation /Here’s to you

The New Loyalty /Services not schemes

Payments /Changing the way we pay

Small But Perfectly Formed /Little brands, big thinkers

Most Contagious / Award Winners

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Contagious / IntroductionBy Paul Kemp-Robertson

Welcome to the Most Contagious 2012 report, our annual review of the trends, technologies and creative innovations that have influenced brands this year. By putting the past 12 months into context we hope to equip you, in some small way, for the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead.

The golden thread stitching the year’s report together is citizenship. Think of the spirit of the London Olympics encapsulated by Tim Berners-Lee at the height of the opening ceremony, tweeting ‘This is for Everyone’ to the watching world. Think also of the disintermediating potential of Kickstarter and the grassroots fan fiction communities that spawned Fifty Shades of Grey. How about the data-driven intimacy of Obama’s election campaign? The transparency and ubiquity of social media is fuelling the rise of people power. What’s more, Nielsen’s Global, Socially Conscious Consumer report found that 66% of consumers prefer to buy from companies that have implemented programmes to give back to society. Citizens the world over are demanding that advertising speeds up its radical shift from perfection to honesty, from control to collaboration.

In Contagious Magazine’s recent case study on IBM (Issue 33) we looked at how one of the world’s biggest brands has re-engineered its smarter commerce principles around the ‘Chief Executive Consumer’. This is a business philosophy also endorsed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: ‘Above all else, align with customers. Win when they win. Win only when they win.’

Brands behaving as super-citizens is something that our consultancy team at Contagious Insider explored in a Cannes seminar in June, where we presented the concept of brand as interface, not interrupter. We used the title ‘Better With The Brand’ to suggest that the best brands are a conduit through which the lives of real people can be made better. The original definition of the word interface is to meet, to synchronise, to coordinate, to harmonise. We think that a brand should behave as an indispensable tool or a common boundary that connects people to information, augmented content, services and experiences that they wouldn’t get via any other means.

That’s why this report is filled with examples of brands being driven by a higher sense of purpose. Brands have long behaved like corporate Medicis – bestowers of creative munificence in the form of epic TV commercials or sponsored art – but now many are starting to take on the more purposeful role of NGOs. Most Contagious 2012 features examples of brands acting as lifesavers, health and wellbeing networks, educators, ecologists, technology incubators and – in the case of the Red Bull Stratos mission from the edge of space – daredevil rocket scientists.

Maybe we should all be aiming higher.

Paul Kemp-Robertson / Co-founder & Editorial Director


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Fleishman-Hillard / IntroductionBy Dave Senay

You’re about to read remarkable stories about people and brands that are pushing the boundaries of creativity and innovation. How branding is reinventing itself to meet real human needs, delivering tools and services that truly improve our lives, how social media is morphing into social business. And that’s just for starters.

Most Contagious is about the structure, nature and purpose of business itself, and incorporates society as a whole. Creativity is breaking out of the confinements of communications and marketing to the bigger, deeper role it needs to play in the transformation of our organisations and society.

Businesses are rising and crashing faster than ever. We see this in the collapse of the boundaries that used to separate public relations from marketing, reputation management from brand marketing. These labels seem so irrelevant today. Your brand is your reputation. Your reputation is your behaviour. How you are is who you are.

This means our organisations must become exceptionally clear and aligned around their core values, purpose and character. So we must communicate and behave in a manner that is consistent with our beliefs. Businesses must define and know their purpose and ensure that any marketing communication aligns with that. ‘Consumers’ need to be treated as people and provided with genuinely useful tools and services. We need to look beyond the value of their latest transaction, towards building lasting relationships.

Most Contagious will provide you with the inspiration. The next step is to channel that into actions that make a difference. Over to you.

Dave Senay, President and CEO of Fleishman-Hillard

Most Contagious, in partnership with Fleishman-Hillard

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MoveMents / evolution and eMpowerMent

As we pound towards the finish line of 2012, we can finally glance back on the landmark events, movements and socio-economic shifts that have shaped the last 12 months.

We’ll try and save you the blood and sweat but we can’t guarantee not to tear up a little when replaying the collective glory of the Olympic Games or Obama’s choking speech to his victo-rious campaign staff… but more on that later.In 2011, we described how the torrent of infor-mation, collaboration and distribution afforded by the web was putting pressure not just on global industries, but also on governments and estab-lished social infrastructures. This year may have been less riotous, but it hasn’t failed to present significant fodder for the increasingly connected, enlightened and empowered world to sink its tweet-sharpened teeth into. So let’s begin…


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London 2012 /

The spirit of the Olympic Games was summed up during Danny Boyle’s epic opening cer-emony, when father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, took centre-stage and live-tweeted: ‘This is for everyone’. The message coursed around the stadium on over 70,000 handheld pixel screens wielded by the crowd. London 2012 was an Olympic Games for, about and powered by the people.

Beyond the sentiment of this message was the amplification of the Olympics via social media, prompting the ‘Social Games’ tag. According to monitoring agency Radian 6, 9.9 million Olympic tweets were sent over the course of the 17 days. Tracking tool VenueSeen revealed that 260,000 images were uploaded to Instagram with the hashtag #London2012.

High levels of interaction were sustained, with #Paralympics trending worldwide during the Paralympics closing ceremony. For the first time in their 52-year history, the Paralympic Games sold out, proving that, in mobilising and empow-ering the masses, London 2012 created an insa-tiable appetite for Olympic competition which

united every nation that took part, tuned in and tweeted. Well played, social media.

bit.ly/olympics-social-infographicbit.ly/olympics-instagram

US Presidential Election /

When Obama won his first term in office in 2008, it was no secret that his team wielded a distinct advantage over McCain et al. thanks to their competency in the social web and engag-ing the hoards of precious young voters who were flocking to Facebook, YouTube and Twit-ter. 2012, however, was a different matter; not only were the Republicans catching up in the polls as well as in their social media compe-tency, but Obama’s team now had to appeal to a much wider range of demographics on social platforms (Facebook’s user base had increased from 100 million to 800 million). Also the novelty of social media was wearing off for many voters, so the same issues that face the world’s biggest brands today also troubled both parties’ election teams – namely figuring out how to offer genu-ine relevance and value.

Mitt Romney’s digital director, 33-year-old Zac Moffatt, claimed in a pre-election interview with Mashable that Obama’s team was ‘still running their Facebook campaign like it’s 2008’. In con-trast to the Obama team’s failure to adapt and evolve, he claimed that his strategy centred on driving engagement only on the platforms most relevant to Romney and his campaign. These were Google, Facebook and Twitter, although Moffatt also flirted with Instagram and Pinterest.

Yet the Obama administration’s head start on all these platforms proved too much to overcome. At the time of election, Obama’s 28.8m Facebook Likes played Romney’s 7.1m; 19.9m Twitter fol-lowers played 1.1m. In terms of activity, the two teams employed surprisingly similar tactics, both opting for consistent, lightweight engagement and tempting voters with competitions to win din-ner with Obama or a ride on Romney’s jet.

The key difference, however, was tone. Oba-ma’s team painted a far more intimate and per-sonal picture of their candidate. In the end, it was this that signified Obama’s timely rediscovery of the ‘everyman’ mojo that won the world’s heart in 2008 and ended up clinching him a second

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term in office. He declared victory on Twitter and then Facebook shortly after the first US network made the announcement. The now infamous ‘Four more years’ picture used by his team has since become the most shared in history, racking up a record 4.4m Likes on Facebook and over 817,000 retweets.

tinyurl.com/mashable-romney-obamatinyurl.com/social-media-election2012

Disintermediation / Crowdfunding

Admittedly it hardly trips off the tongue, but disintermediation (that’s cutting out the mid-dle man) has been one of the hottest topics in the Contagious office this year.

On 19 November, video game designer Chris Roberts smashed the record for the most crowdfunding ever raised for a new title – US$6.2m – pledged by PC gamers around the world to see his space sim, Star Citizen, get made. The generous gamers won’t get hold of an alpha version of the title for at least another year, but their faith and investment is a perfect example of how crowdfunding has matured in 2012.

tinyurl.com/9amw3tc

Roberts sourced $2.1m of his funding through Kickstarter, with roughly 34,000 backers donating an impressive average of $62 each. This is consistent with current behaviour on the platform, with video games receiving more funding this year than any other category. Official figures published

MoveMents / evolution and eMpowerMent

on the Kickstarter blog show that as of 31 August, Games had racked up $50m, beating Film ($42m) Design ($40m) Music ($25m) and Technology ($16m).

tinyurl.com/9trtdlp

Despite the success of Kickstarter, 2012 has also revealed potential cracks in the crowdfunding model. In November Kick-starter was sued by 3D Systems – a leading maker of 3D printers – which claimed that its patents were being infringed by a device made by an MIT-bred company, Formlabs, which secured over $2.9m on the crowd-funding platform. As more established com-panies start to see their offering undercut by crowdfunded challenger brands, perhaps it is inevitable that the rigour and legality of Kickstarter projects will be increasingly called into question. Crowdfunded legal representation anyone?

tinyurl.com/c8aw8my

Kickstarter is working hard to manage the

expectations of backers, clarifying in its blog posts that the platform ‘is not a shop’ and there will be no equity crowdfunding or IPO made available. The process currently remains firmly rooted in gifting, not owner-ship, although this hasn’t stopped many economists claiming that the real revolution will come when backers will be able to obtain equity in exchange for their investment.

tinyurl.com/c9fw38m

Disintermediation / Fifty Shades of Grey

Lastly, we can’t cover disintermediation without recognising the amateur success story of 2012 – E.L. James’ (aka Brit-ish author Erika Leonard’s) erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey. Although eventually published through a traditional publisher (Random House subdivision Vintage Books), Fifty Shades started out as some-what niche Twilight fan fiction written under the pen name ‘Snowqueen’s Icedragon’. It lived first on fanfiction.com, then on Leonard’s own website, FiftyShades.com,


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The standard in mass, online education was set by the Kahn Acad-emy, founded in 2006 by Bangladeshi MIT and Harvard Business School graduate, Salman Khan. This non-profit organisation relies on donations for funding and has delivered over 200 million lessons (approx. 3,600 of which are available on YouTube) across topics including medicine, art history, macroeconomics and computer sci-ence. What 2012 has brought, however, is a new generation of alternatives inspired by Kahn’s original dream to provide a ‘high quality education to anyone, anywhere’.

www.khanacademy.org

Most notable is Udacity, founded by Stanford professor and Google Fellow Sebastian Thrun. Unlike the Kahn Academy, Udac-ity is a private organisation funded by venture capital firm, Charles River Ventures, as well as other companies such as Google that sponsor specific courses in exchange for access to the most promising talent. Launched in February this year, Udacity currently specialises in computer science, with courses including Program-ming Languages and Applied Cryptography, although 2013 will see HTML5 Game Development added to the syllabus amongst other new subjects. Udacity currently has approximately 400,000 students worldwide.www.udacity.com

It is two of Thrun’s colleagues at Stanford, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, who are responsible for 2012’s other standout source of online education – Coursera. Unlike the Kahn Academy or Udacity, Coursera partners with 33 existing universities such as Princeton, Michigan and Pennsylvania to make some of their most popular courses available for free online. It has already attracted 1.8m students since April, as well as $16m in first round venture funding. As Koller explained to the Guardian newspaper in Novem-ber, ‘We had a million users faster than Facebook, faster than Ins-tagram. This is a wholesale change in the educational ecosystem.’

www.coursera.org

So there you have 2012, a year in which the novelty of social media wore off and in its place arrived a new standardised expectation for how we can interact with the world. This includes controlling what products are made and how much we pay for them, right through to accessing the kind of education that will create and empower whole new generations of technological entrepreneurs from differ-ent nations around the world. Think we’re making progress now? Something tells us we ain’t seen nothing yet…

before being released as an e-book, join-ing the hundreds of thousands of other titles now being sold directly from author to reader on Amazon.

Only after it gained significant traction on e-readers around the world was it selected for re-release by Vintage and proceeded to become the best-selling book in British his-tory and spend a record 20 weeks at No.1 on USA Today’s best-selling books list. Like or loathe Fifty Shades, it proved that any-one with a basic knowledge of BDSM and a passion for the written word could become one of the most successful authors of all time. Go internet.

Democratised Education /

Potentially the most socially significant well to spring forth from the internet in 2012 is that of democratised educational resources. Put simply, online learning that now extends far beyond a bodged Sweet Child O’ Mine guitar tutorial on YouTube…


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www.khanacademy.org

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Purpose has been an overriding theme of 2012, with companies realising that a brand doesn’t exist inside a bubble of happy, shiny marketing; it has a role to play in society.

As David Hieatt, founder of Hiut Denim (featured in our Small But Perfectly Formed section), says: ‘The great brands of the world make a great product but also have a clear understanding of their purpose. They understand the “why” as well as the “what” and the “how”.’

One company that embodies this is US restaurant chain Chipotle, with its ‘Food with Integrity’ mission that pushes the organic food agenda and fights the cause of beleaguered farming communi-ties in America’s bread basket states. Contagious was delighted to see its animated Back to the Start film (featured in Most Contagious 2011) win a flurry of awards this year, with its prize money for the Grandy appropriately donated to the Chipotle Cultivate Foundation.

purpose / playing a role in society


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Another Contagious favourite, the out-door brand Patagonia, pinned its sus-tainable colours to the mast in January by becoming a certified B Corp, an idea that’s gathering momentum across the US. There are now some 650 B Corps, validated by the non-profit B Lab based on meeting specific standards for social and environ-mental performance, legal accountability and transparency.

The fact is, people like to be good. One of Contagious’ choice stats of the year came from Nielsen’s Global, Socially Conscious Consumer report, which found that 66% of consumers around the world prefer to buy from companies that have implemented programmes to give back to society. Below are our top picks from the year.

Safaricom / Daktari 1525

To differentiate itself in the Kenyan telco marketplace, the company behind success-ful mobile money transfer service M-Pesa has rolled out a mobile health service.

With just one doctor for every 10,000 people in Kenya, Safaricom (working with agency Squad Digital, Nairobi) joined forces with Dial-a-Doc Ltd, an organisation specialising in the dissemination of medical information, to improve access to expert medical advice for those living in rural areas and relieve pressure on overstretched out-patient departments.

The Daktari 1525 service enables Safa-ricom customers to dial 1525 on their mobiles 24/7 to be connected, via Safa-ricom call centres, to one of 50 qualified doctors recruited by Dial-a-Doc. The call charge of Kshs20 per minute (to cover the doctors’ fees, rather than the connection charge) is subsidised by Safaricom, which recently slashed it in half to widen access. The service currently handles around 2,000 calls per day. Featured in Contagious 31.

The company continues to explore new ways to transform people’s lives via its mobile network. In October, it joined forces with mobile technology company M-KOPA to make solar power accessible to low income families in rural Kenya via a pay-as-you-go Safaricom SIM card.

tinyurl.com/daktari1525

Tata Docomo / BloodLine Club

Telecoms companies are a vital link between people. Indian telecoms service Tata Doc-omo has demonstrated the potential of using this link for philanthropic purposes with a peer-to-peer blood donor matching service called the BloodLine Club.

Volunteer blood donors sign up via their mobile, Facebook or Twitter by entering a few details including, of course, their blood type. In the event that someone needs blood, they’ll be pinged, and should they need blood themselves, they can then

ping their network, linking them up with local people who are part of the scheme. Members can even call people directly to arrange giving blood in an emergency.

By using its infrastructure to extend its remit in this way, Tata Docomo is acting as an NGO, stepping in to provide the kind of life-saving scheme that it could take gov-ernments years to set up.

www.bloodlineclub.com

Renault / MOBILIZ

To help the socially or economically excluded in France, automotive company Renault launched Renault MOBILIZ in July. This initiative aims to make transport more accessible for those who can’t afford to own or maintain a car.

Renault is working with volunteer garages and dealerships in its network, called ‘Socially Responsible Renault Garages’ or ‘Garages Renault Solidaires’, to develop affordable repair schemes for those on low incomes. It is also partnering with NGO Voiture & Co to support initiatives such as car-pooling, community transport, and low-cost car hire and has launched (with an ini-tial budget of €5m) an investment company, MOBILIZ Invest, to finance companies developing innovative mobility solutions for people in social and financial difficulty.

Renault has long held the ambition of pro-viding mobility for all, but this programme shows the automotive company moving beyond its core product to invest in mobility services. With lack of access to transport being one of the major causes of social and economic exclusion, Renault MOBILIZ offers a genuine lifeline to the eight million people in France living below the poverty line – who wouldn’t otherwise be custom-ers of Renault, but may well yet become so. Featured in Contagious issue 32.

www.renault-mobiliz.com


MoveMentsthe new world order

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Banco Popular / The Most Popular Song

Surprise hit of the year comes courtesy of Puerto Rico’s largest bank. Showing how a sense of purpose can be aligned with a company’s mission (and achieve a PR win in the process), Banco Popular set out to revive the country’s economy this year by effecting a fundamental cultural change.

In Puerto Rico, 60% of the population lives on government handouts and this wel-fare culture is celebrated in the hit song No Hago Más Ná (‘I Do Nothing’). Based on this insight, Banco Popular – with agency JWT, San Juan – approached popular salsa band El Gran Combo to re-write their song so that the lyrics extolled the benefits of work rather than advocating laziness. The

song quickly topped the music charts and helped spark debate about the local econ-omy and the country’s future. The campaign culminated with the bank organising a free concert (featuring El Gran Combo) for over 60,000 Puerto Ricans in January this year.

The campaign generated $2.3m in earned media and helped Banco Popular to soar to an unprecedented 80% on a reputation index. It won the PR Grand Prix at Cannes, fulfilling the jury’s criteria of a strong idea, audience impact and a sense of purpose. Featured in Contagious issue 32.www.popular.comwww.jwt.com/themostpopularsong


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Marketing as service design / utility not noise

Brands have long taken a good, hard look at consumer behaviour. But what if, instead of using that insight to serve people with the right type of ad at the right time, marketers considered adding value to the lives of those people, or removing pain points?

That’s a service-design approach to mar-keting. We saw it in action in March this year when Dubai pizza-delivery company Red Tomato realised that because of the number of languages spoken in the Emirate, each phone-based order took nine minutes for customers to complete. No amount of leaflets through doors would ever overcome that situation.


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But what about – courtesy of TBWA\ RAAD – a Bluetooth-enabled fridge-magnet button that instantly sent an order for that customer’s favourite pizza via mobile when pressed? That would revolutionise the whole process. It’s a marketing solution so frictionless and, dare we say it, magical, that similar fridge magnets were quickly developed by Evian in France and Turkish telco Turkcell. Featured in Con-tagious issues 31, 32 and 33. www.redtomato.biz/magnettinyurl.com/c6qnfet

Västtrafik / Tram Sightseeing

Gothenburg’s local transport authority, Väst-trafik, was keen to get tourists off expensive tour buses and onto its tram network. So rather than bombard them with ads, it took a service-design approach to the problem. Created by Forsman & Bodenfors, a free Tram Sight-seeing app guided people to their nearest tram stop. Once they were on a moving tram, the app used the phone’s GPS to play an audio tour triggered by the user’s specific location, telling travellers about landmarks as they passed them. Each tour told users when to change trams and dropped them back at their original location 45 minutes later.

Forsman & Bodenfors told Contagious that the goal was ‘to produce advertising that didn’t feel like advertising’. It’s an objec-tive that encapsulates marketing as service design: providing something so useful that it

no longer feels like you’re being sold to, merely offered help and utility. Fea-tured in Contagious issue 30.

tinyurl.com/TramApp

Delta / Fly Delta AppUS airline Delta updated its mobile app to allow customers to track their bags once they disappeared down those mysterious airport conveyor belts. Passengers who have scanned their bag tag can keep updated on its loca-tion even while on a flight, offering a little peace of mind that, even if it’s not where it’s meant to be, it’s at least not lost. A YouTube video, Your Bag’s Journey via Wieden+Kennedy, New York, showing what goes on ‘behind those rubber flaps’ has now cleared the 1.5 million view-count mark. The app also allows people to check-in, view updates to flight and boarding times, change their allocated seat and rebook a cancelled flight. The app is part of a wider personalisation drive from the airline, which includes making a range of back-end logistics data, including passenger profiles and ecom-merce behaviour, available to customers. Featured in Contagious 30.tinyurl.com/DeltaAndroidtinyurl.com/DeltaiTuneswww.youtube.com/watch?v=ocbxs5aWUso

Orca Chevrolet / Rescue Drive

Thinking more broadly about the customer journey than just how to entice people onto its forecourt, the Orca Chevrolet car dealership in Brazil took an insightful approach to promoting the new Chevrolet Cobalt. Its Rescue Drive campaign, created by Monumenta, Brasilia, saw the business part-nering with a local breakdown service to send a new Cobalt (along with a salesman) to people stranded with broken-down vehicles. While the


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rescue company towed their faulty car away, Orca Chev-rolet allowed motorists to drive themselves home in the new Cobalt.

At its core, Rescue Drive was a smart way to add value to people’s lives while also running a product demo pre-cisely at the time when drivers may be considering a new purchase, i.e. when their old car had crapped out on them. Go-getting managers looking to maximise productivity will no doubt like the way it mobilised showroom staff and stock into action instead of passively waiting for customers to come to them. Featured in Contagious issue 32.

www.orca.com.br

Dermacyd / Teen Code

In an attempt to become part of Brazilian girls’ conversa-tions, intimate soap Dermacyd Teen with Publicis, São Paulo created an online tool which allowed people to trans-late social-media posts into Teen Code – a secret language of symbols, numbers and letters. In order to write in Teen Code, people first had to gain access to the site by proving they were a girl – answering questions such as ‘When is the best time to moisturise?’ Highly secret messages could then be encoded and posted publicly across social net-works, allowing friends to copy them and translate using the same Dermacyd site – as long as they could pass the ‘girls only’ entry criteria.

With more than 498,000 coded messages written and an average site dwell time of five minutes 30 seconds, the brand not only positioned itself as a trusted friend to teenage girls, but potentially provided it with a huge quan-tity of personal insights about its target market. Featured in Contagious issue 31.

www.dermacydteencode.com.br

Bupa / FoodSwitch

In a bid to help Australians make healthier food choices, medical health insurance provider Bupa launched its FoodSwitch app in January. Supermarket shoppers can use the app to scan food to view traffic-light coded info about the saturated fat, sugar and salt content in more than 20,000 products, as well as receive suggestions for healthier options. The app, based on three years’ research by The George Institute for Global Health, was down-loaded 26,000 times in the first 24 hours of its release – a figure which rose to 75,000 in just five days, making it Aus-tralia’s most downloaded free app on iTunes.

Unlike traditional advertising, services are able to truly mani-fest brand promise and FoodSwitch is a great example of this. As a medical health insurance provider, Bupa’s mar-keting may encourage, persuade and influence people to adopt a healthy lifestyle. This app goes one step further, actu-ally helping people to attain it. Featured in Contagious 30.

tinyurl.com/foodswitch


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divine data / insight by nuMbers If you were in any doubt as to the

value of being more data literate, this year’s race for the White House should have you dusting down your calculator.

So-called ‘big data’ proved its worth for President Obama, but for brands and marketers the challenge remains of what to measure, how to do it and how to act upon it. According to 2012 research from the Corporate Executive Board, marketers depend on data for just 11% of customer related decisions.

It’s not just companies that are grap-pling with data: new tools are emerging to help more people ‘divine’ personal insights from their physiology too, to help them improve their health and wellbeing.


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Predicting Presidents /

When asked by a reporter what lesson would-be 2016 US Presidential candidates should glean from the 2012 election, David Axelrod, chief strategist for the re-elected Barack Obama, replied: ‘I would invest in peo-ple… who understand where the technology is going and what the poten-tial will be by 2016 for communications, for targeting, for mining data, to make precision possible in terms of both persuasion and mobilisation.’ His words will no doubt also be ringing in the ears of CMOs the world over.

With an analytics team five times larger than in 2008 and on the back of a promise from campaign manager Joe Messina ‘to measure every single thing in this election’, the sophisticated Democrat data machine (known as Narwhal) crunched its way to helping raise over $1bn in campaign funds, bagging Obama 1.25 million more votes from 18 to 24-year-olds than in his previous outing. Its influence on the final result was emphatic.

But data-crunching wasn’t solely the preserve of backroom pollsters: many regular voters seeking smart analysis turned their attention from tra-ditional political commentators towards stats junkie Nate Silver. Silver’s predictive modelling, hosted on blog FiveThirtyEight at the New York Times website, correctly predicted the race’s outcome in all 50 states, often in the face of staunch scepticism from the old guard. At one point in the election run-in, a fifth of traffic to the New York Times website visited Silver’s blog.

fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com

The Wearable Watchmen /

The Quantified Self movement has gathered momentum over the past few years, but for most wannabe self-analysts there has been something miss-ing: simple, affordable (and cool) technology to make personal analytics

accessible. All that changed this year when Nike’s Digital Sport unit, work-ing with R/GA and AKQA, launched Fuel, a new metric for measuring physical activity, and a piece of kit to collect the required input data, Fuel-Band. Nike effectively now sees itself as a tech company.

The sleek black wristband measures steps taken, calories and time spent exercising via a three axis accelerometer to work out a Nike Fuel score against a daily target. The effect? Throughout the day, Nike – mimicking the relationship between the brand’s founders, coach Bill Bowerman and his college athlete Bill Knight – offers the wearer encouragement to be more active.

A double Cannes Lions Grand Prix success, Stefan Olander, Nike’s VP of digital sport, told us in Contagious 32 that the thinking behind FuelBand was a customer centric sense of purpose: ‘We don’t start with technology or the potential profit, we always start with the athlete. I think that’s an important distinction, because when you do that the other things follow.’

www.nike.com/FuelBand

Adidas / miCoach Elite System

Not to be left behind, adidas has been making progress with its own per-sonal fitness tracking tool, miCoach. Football could be on the brink of its very own Moneyball moment, after the German sportswear brand announced in July a deal with Major League Soccer (MLS) in the US, whereby every player in the league next season will be equipped with a miCoach Elite System data cell. The data transmitted from the devices during games (including metrics such as heart rate, speed, acceleration, distance, field position and, power) will help coaches on the touchline make better selec-tion decisions based on performance levels. The MLS is also promising to


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divine data / insight by nuMbers

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www.nike.com/FuelBand

make at least some of that data available to fans for greater insight into their favourite teams. Contagious 33.

Meanwhile, for those a touch shy about their self-quantifying ways, help may be at hand from Indiegogo-funded company Misfit Wearables. Its first product, Shine, is the size of a quarter and discreetly clips on to clothing to collect activity data. It syncs with an iPhone when placed on the phone screen without a Bluetooth or cable connection.

www.adidas.com/us/micoachwww.misfitwearables.com

Performance-Based Data Deals /

For those inclined to track and share data on their physical performance, benefits and offers lie in wait from brands keen to lure or reward high value customers.

Nike in Mexico used data generated from Nike+ gizmos to reward runners in a week of online auctions. Bid Your Sweat, with JWT, Mexico, saw the kilometres that runners amassed converted into currency which could be bid on products such as Nike FuelBands. The further they ran, or the better they performed, the more ‘currency’ they amassed. In two weeks, 5,000 people

installed the app to bid with their kilometres. A total of 1,000 km were offered for the first pair of Nike Free 5.0. Contagious 31.

Meanwhile, UK insurance broker Mota-quote partnered with Dutch GPS naviga-tion specialists TomTom in February to cre-ate a new data-driven policy that gives lower premiums to people who drive better. The Fair Pay policy sees customers provided with a modified satnav that sends details about their driving back to the insurer in real time, as well as to the screen, meaning drivers can modify and improve their driv-ing style whilst Motaquote can offer fairer deals. Contagious issue 30.

nikemexico.mx/subasta www.motaquote.co.uk

IBM /

Over the last year, business software spe-cialist IBM has been working with sports organisations to help fans understand and analyse performance in new ways, whilst also showcasing its technology and data capabilities.

At the start of the year, the software com-pany partnered with NFL team Miami Dol-phins to install some of its Smarter Cities analytics solutions into the franchise’s Sun

Life Stadium. The aim was to provide bet-ter experiences for fans, for whose custom the stadium now competes with the ever-more sophisticated comforts of home and big screen HDTV. The result? By running data from inputs such as information from turnstile passages, weather reports, traffic conditions, and social media updates, IBM’s Intelligent Operations Centre will soon be able to advise stadium management and fans in real time on anything from where to find a car park space, to which parts of the stadium have best performing concessions. See IBM case study in Contagious 33.

Meanwhile over at Flushing Meadows, as part of its sponsorship of the US Open, the IBM analysts were crunching match stats to offer fans new insights into the strategies of the competing players. The Game Changer Wall was updated in real time to show not only real-time predictions on match out-comes, but also how player performance affected social media sentiment.

tinyurl.com/85fvbybwww.usopen.org/ibm


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divine data / insight by nuMbers

www.adidas.com/us/micoach

www.misfitwearables.com

http://nikemexico.mx/subasta

www.motaquote.co.uk

http://tinyurl.com/85fvbyb

www.usopen.org/ibm/

technology / big battles, sMall victors

Patent Wars erupted into mainstream consciousness in 2012, with Apple beating Samsung in the first of the year’s major quarrels.

Technology consumers are beginning to understand the capital value of patents, both in defending a company’s intel-lectual property and litigating against others, often labeled Patent Trolls. As one Silicon Valley insider told us, it’s like an arms race, with major tech compa-nies comparing their stacks of patents against each other.


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The strategic flow of rare earth metals and the conditions in which prod-ucts are assembled have become part of the transparency discussion for major brands. Investigation into Foxconn, supplier to Apple and others, has sparked ethical questions around consumption and compensation. Meanwhile, makers in the developed world are debating the efficacy of robots versus humans, to assemble parts in factories, to choose pills in pharmacies, to drive cars and to write articles.

Small prototypes point the way forward. We saw many types of wearable tech offer additional dimensions and functionality. And it’s getting easier to raise money, with Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites continuing to power intriguing projects. But, watch what you make, and how long you take: Kickstarter has just been named in a patent case, and murmurs about project fulfillment times and realistic goals versus hype and fraud are becoming louder…

Google / Project Glass

By far this year’s sexiest piece of tech is Google’s Project Glass, from the company’s X Lab. Essentially a pair of augmented reality spectacles, the device allows users to see messages, calendars, maps and even record and stream live video. After launching in April, Glass made a daredevil

entrance to the company’s I/O developer conference, where Google out-fitted skydivers and bike riders in the glasses and got them to live display their stunts through a Google+ hangout before meeting co-founder Ser-gey Brin onstage. Google sold a prototype of its glasses to the develop-ers who attended the conference for $1,500. This project illustrates the potential of how wearable computing can make it more seamless for con-sumers to share and access information. In September, during New York City’s Fashion Week, Diane von Furstenberg’s fashion show saw mod-els wearing the glasses striding down the runway. After the show Google published a YouTube video of footage captured by models, stylists, and the designer herself. Contagious 31.plus.google.com/+projectglass

Rethink Robotics / Baxter

Baxter Rodney Brooks, world-renowned robotics expert and professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, along with his com-pany Rethink Robotics, has created Baxter, a robot designed to help US manufacturers. Baxter was created to be more human than existing robots, with eyes on a screen that register emotions like happiness or surprise. Baxter adapts to changing conditions and can be taught to perform new tasks. Importantly, at $22,000 Baxter is cheaper than most traditional robots, which may help revive US manufacturing. Contagious 33.

www.rethinkrobotics.com

Disney Research / REVEL

Disney’s research arm is working with academics from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, to develop technology that will add artificial tactile sensations to almost any surface or object. REVEL, by Disney Research, Pittsburgh, is a wearable system that can add textures to furniture, touch screens, walls, art, plastic or even human skin. The system injects a weak electrical signal into a user’s body, so when they touch the surface of another object connected to the system, it becomes augmented with an additional


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http://plus.google.com/+projectglass

http://www.rethinkrobotics.com

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artificial texture. For instance, while wearing the REVEL system, you may be able to feel the texture of stuffed tor-toises’ shells through a plexi case. The creators believe the mobile, inexpensive technology could be used to let people access private tactile information on public touchscreens, experience personal sensations in applications or games, or get dynamic tactile feedback from posters and maps. We can also envisage how the system could add an extra textural layer to entertainment content, advertisements or shopping websites. Contagious 33.tinyurl.com/disneyrevel

Boxer8 / Ouya

Riding the cultural wave for all things open source, startup Boxer8 and designer Yves Béhar created an Android-based games console costing $99 called Ouya. Funded on Kickstarter and also involving former Microsoft VP of games publishing Ed Fries, the system includes a software devel-opment kit. All games will be free to play via the console, with developers setting their own prices for items bought in

the game, or charging after a free trial. Hacking is encouraged – the device opens with standard screws and rooting it will not void the warranty. This has had the snowball effect of encouraging prominent developers to commit games to it. Robotoki founder Robert Bowling has announced an episodic prequel to Human Element exclusively to Ouya. He told PocketGamer: ‘We really need to adapt our experiences and universes to the device our players are engaging with most.’ Contagious 32.

www.ouya.tv

Nest /

Former chief architect at Apple, Tony Fadell, has taken the minimalism and sleekness of the iPhone and adapted it for a $250 home thermostat which claims to cut energy bills. The Nest Learning Thermostat, through Fadell’s company Nest Labs in Palo Alto, ‘learns’ as it is used, adapting to a house-holder’s schedule and using wifi to be ‘weather-aware’. An example of next generation connected home appliances, it can also be controlled remotely via a mobile app. Contagious 29.

www.nest.com



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http://tinyurl.com/disneyrevel

http://www.ouya.tv

http://www.nest.com


Leap /

As the tracking technology powering the Kinect passes through the ini-tial novelty phase, companies like Leap Motion aim to make faster, more accurate 3D modeling and response technology. The Leap device sits in a compact housing about the same size of an iPod and is set to retail for $70. Leap’s creators claim it’s up to 200 times more accurate than Kinect, thus enabling it to implement detailed gesture-based commands. Co-founder and CTO David Holz is a former fluid mechanics researcher for NASA.

leapmotion.com

Ones to Watch /

Smart Sand comes from MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Essentially, Smart Sand can self-assemble to copy objects, passing messages between grains to create structure. From there, the structure can be shuf-fled off to a permanent assembly protocol, like a 3D printer, leaving the smart sand to replicate the next item. Contagious 31.

Google’s driverless car project became more significant this year when Nevada was the first state to allow the cars to operate on its roads. Florida and California have followed as the tech giant lobbies for legislation per-mitting its autonomous vehicles.

In a world where the cost of connected technologies (such as RFID and NFC) is falling and smartphone penetration continues to rise, the inter-net of things has been on the theoretical table for a while. EVRYTHNG’s engine helps manufacturers create unique digital identities for individual objects. Drinks behemoth Diageo used EVRYTHNG to transform whiskey bottles in Brazil so that smartphone users could scan a code on a bot-tle to add personalised Father’s Day video messages. It has also used the platform to create applications that help track products in the supply chain and let customers ‘check in’ to products to receive loyalty rewards. Venky Balakrishnan, global vice president for marketing innovation, Dia-geo, said: ‘We now have a profound strategic opportunity to transform our physical products into owned digital media, which can communicate per-sonalised information and experiences to consumers, exactly when and where they want it.’ Contagious 31.

Having pioneered Steam, a software delivery service for its games, developer Valve is joining game industry heavies including Unity, id Soft-ware, Epic Games and more on the Oculus Rift, a virtual-reality headset for gaming. The diagonal field of view of the prototype is 110 degrees, compared with earlier models, which had only 40, and the headset boasts minimal processing delays. Founder Palmer Luckey was able to convince more than 9,500 Kickstarter backers to support the project, buying in to access the software development kit before the general public and raising over $2.4 million. Expected delivery date? January, 2013.

bit.ly/H9Kd7xbit.ly/GYQHu1www.evrythng.comwww.oculusvr.com


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http://leapmotion.com

http://bit.ly/H9Kd7x

http://bit.ly/GYQHu1

http://www.evrythng.com

http://www.oculusvr.com

www.oculusvr.com

design /personalised play In 2012 the increasing affordability

and quality of 3D printing has seen the process become far more mainstream, with commercial 3D printer Cubify (priced at a very reasonable $1299) and Kickstarter-funded Formlabs’ Form1 ($3299) leading the way.

Brands have reacted, utilising the technology and rethinking manufacturing processes in order to meet demands for products that are personalised and adaptable. Meanwhile hackers, makers and intrepid amateurs are generating and sharing their own 3D printing designs with the help of sites such as Autodesk’s 123D.

Here, in our round-up of 2012’s design innovations, we bounce from new-age architecture and sustainable transport to playable buildings and shoes that find the way home for you.


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ABSOLUT / Unique

ABSOLUT’s iconic bottle has long been used as a creative medium, but in September the Pernod Ricard-owned vodka brand outdid itself with a lim-ited edition of four million uniquely designed and numbered bottles.

Collaborating with Stockholm-based agencies Family Business, Great Works, and Jung Relations, ABSOLUT re-engineered its production pro-cess to create what the company describes as ‘carefully orchestrated ran-domness’. Splash guns sprayed a range of 35 colours onto the bottles, while complex coating, pattern and placement algorithms ensured that each specific combination was never repeated. The bright colours and one-off designs ensure that the bottles create a splash on the shelf, and are desir-able items that people want to keep, even if the vodka has long since disap-peared. Contagious 33.

absolut.com/unique

Tesla S /

Tesla’s S model sedan’s combination of performance, style and efficiency saw it named Motor Trend’s Car of the Year – the first vehicle without a combustion engine to do so.

Launched in June 2012, the four door electric car manages an impressive range of 300 miles on one charge using the 85kW h battery, and takes only 30 minutes for a half charge. It aims to compete with the best gas-pow-ered cars, and sold out the 5,000 models produced in 2012, costing from $60,000 for the basic model. The Californian-based manufacturer aims to sell 20,000 units in 2013 at an increased price.

www.teslamotors.com/models

Coca-Cola / Coke Beat Box

Created by young London-based architects Pernilla Ohrstedt and Asif Khan, Coca-Cola’s iconic pavilion at the Olympic Park was surrounded by a perpetual queue of people waiting for their opportunity to ‘play’ the building.

Disney / D-Tech Me

Disney’s tales give children the chance to dream that they are about to be plucked from obscurity and transformed into royalty, thanks to a genie or charming prince. This year, Disney gave wannabe child princesses the chance to see what they would look like as Sleeping Beauty or Snow White thanks to some in-store 3D printing.

Children at the World of Disney Store in Florida could use the D-Tech Me experience to capture multiple angles of their face, which was digitally reconstructed using 3D printing technology to create a personalised Disney Princess figurine. Costing $99.95, the prin-cesses were seven inches high and could be further customised to match their creator’s eye, hair and skin colour.

D-Tech Me charmingly illustrates the poten-tial applications of 3D printed products for brands, creating toys that are affordable and unique. The experience ran from August to November and Disney is considering rolling it out as a permanent fixture. Contagious 33.

Japanese agency Party has also been ena-bling 3D portrait miniatures. Visitors were 3D scanned in a photobooth in Harajuku and then awaited their tiny selves. Statuettes are avail-able in three sizes and cost from ¥21,000 ($255).

tinyurl.com/Disney-D-Techwww.omote3d.com

design /personalised play

Photo / Heatherwick Studio


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http://absolut.com/unique

http://www.teslamotors.com/models

http://tinyurl.com/Disney-D-Tech

http://www.omote3d.com

Made from EFTE, a plaster polymer that acts like a speaker, the walls were sensitive to movement and touch and embedded with sample sounds. Connecting smartly back to Coke’s Move to the Beat proposi-tion for its sponsorship of the London 2012 Olympic Games, the sound samples included a human heartbeat and trainers squeaking on a court taken from Mark Ronson’s song Anywhere in the World also created for the brand. Contagious 31.

tinyurl.com/cokeBeatBox

Interactive sound and light installation Resonate also impressed audi-ences in Frankfurt at the opening of biennial festival of lighting, Luminale 2012. Visitors could ‘play’ complex string structures, which illuminated and made a sound when plucked. Created by students from University of Applied Sciences, Mainz and Joannes Gutenberg University, Mainz.tinyurl.com/cokeBeatBoxluminale2012.fh-mainz.de/en

Izhar Gafni / Cardboard Bike

Demand for sustainable, low cost and innovative solutions for everyday life is high, so we applaud the creativity of Israeli designer Izhar Gafni who used origami principles to develop a bike made from cardboard.

Strong, durable and cheap, the bikes are now close to mass production. They are set to have a substantial impact in developing countries, costing just $9 to produce, and will be sold for around $20. The bike weighs just 9kg, around 65% less than its average metal counterpart, and uses no metal parts – even its chain is made from a car timing belt and the tyres are formed from reconstituted rubber. The cardboard’s coating makes it waterproof and fireproof, as well as giving the bike a slightly sleeker look. erb.co.il/en/cooperations.asp

Dominic Wilcox / No Place Like Home / GPS Shoes

Layering technology into physical products is growing apace, as Google Glass demonstrates in the Technology section of this report. A more whimsical approach comes from British designer Dominic Wilcox who has created a pair of shoes embedded with GPS to help the wearer eas-ily find their way home. Inspired by Dorothy’s shoes in The Wizard of Oz, the shoes are activated when the wearer clicks their heels. The technology was developed by expert Becky Stewart from Codasign, London, and the shoes made by Stamp Shoes, Northampton, as part of the Northamp-tonshire Global Footprint Project to celebrate the English region’s historic shoe industry.www.dominicwilcox.com/gpsshoes.htm


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http://tinyurl.com/CokeBeatBox

http://tinyurl.com/CokeBeatBox

http://luminale2012.fh-mainz.de/en

http://erb.co.il/en/cooperations.asp

http://www.dominicwilcox.com/gpsshoes.htm

Mirai Nihon / TBWA\Hakuhodo

The chance to live entirely off the grid in style comes in the form of this hi-tech house from TBWA\Hakuhodo. The Japanese ad agency collaborated with 20 companies that could provide the requisite technologies. The Nis-san Leaf electric car, for example, acts both as a means of transport and a homepower generator, while Nissan Sangyo Corporation provides a special heat-resistant and insulating ceramic coating technology currently used in rockets.

This project is a ground-breaking illustration of how brand alliances can fulfil a powerful social and environmental vision. Contagious 32.

tinyurl.com/mirainihon

Highly Commended /

British architect Thomas Heatherwick’s incredible Cauldron to hold the Olympic flame marked the culmination of the London 2012 opening cere-mony and, impressed as we were by the various stadia in the Olympic park, this was the piece of design that stood out from the Games this summer.

Made of 204 inscribed copper pots, the Cauldron was formed during the opening ceremony, and dismantled during the closing ceremony, with each constituent part returned to the country it represented. Contagious 32.

The largest climate-controlled greenhouses in the world known as The Cooled Conservatories have netted the World Building of the Year 2012 award. Designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects, London, The Conserva-tories form part of Bay South in downtown Singapore and showcase the application of sustainable energy solutions while telling the story of plants and their intimate relationships with man and the ecosystem. Contagious issue 33.

www.heatherwick.com/2012-olympic-cauldronbit.ly/cooled-conservatorieswww.wilkinsoneyre.comwww.mvrdv.nl/#/news/mvrdvwinsfloriade2022



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http://tinyurl.com/mirainihon

http://www.heatherwick.com/2012-olympic-cauldron

http://bit.ly/cooled-conservatories

http://www.wilkinsoneyre.com

http://www.mvrdv.nl/#/news/mvrdvwinsfloriade2022

Brands are moving past social media marketing to incorporate social mechanisms into everything they do, from supply chains to customer service to product design. This is ushering in a new age of collaboration and transparency.

Even large corporations and governments have now recognised the value of giving the public the power to influence key decisions and have adopted socially-oriented business models. This past year, for example, Iceland invited its citizens to submit suggestions and comments on a new draft constitution using Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. In October, 66% voted in favour of basing the new constitution on this crowdsourced document.

social business / adopting an open door policy


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Magazine Você allows Facebook and Orkut users to create their own mini stores on the social networking sites, stocking them with up to 60 items from Magazine Luiza’s inventory that they can sell to friends. Each sale gen-erates between 2.5% and 4.5% commission for the seller, with Magazine Luiza organising payment processing and deliveries.

Within two weeks of launching, 20,000 people had opened stores online and the retailer saw 40% higher conversion rates than through traditional ecommerce stores. The 53,000 virtual stores have sold more than 10,000 products between them.

This genuinely social approach to online retail helped the brand solve its dilemma of how to increase sales without the expense of building and open-ing new stores. Contagious 33 features a case study on Magazine Luiza. www.magazineluiza.com.brwww.magazinevoce.com.br

Domino’s Pizza, Heineken, Walmart, Unilever /Open Innovation Platforms

This year, a crop of major corporations developed platforms to seek public input on everything from product design to business strategies, demonstrat-ing that no company is too large to tap into the spirit of collaboration.

Domino’s continued the transparent approach it has taken since 2009’s Pizza Turnaround campaign by launching Think Oven (Contagious 30) – a Facebook platform crowdsourcing suggestions from menu ideas to the design of the ultimate pizza delivery vehicle. In a similar vein, Heineken solicited business innovations from beer drinkers through its own platform Ideas Brewery (Contagious 31). The brand requested suggestions on eve-rything from reusing and recycling its bottles to reinventing the draught beer experience. The projects have helped Heineken and Domino’s strengthen their social relationships with customers by being seen to be listening.

Walmart, through its digital division Walmart Labs, reached out to both established businesses and new innovators with its Get on the Shelf con-test (Contagious 30), which uncovered the next products to be stocked

Visit Sweden / Curators of Sweden

By handing over Sweden’s official Twitter account to ordinary citizens, Visit Sweden, (in the words of its CEO Thomas Brühl) dem-onstrated that ‘No one owns the brand of Sweden more than its people.’ The country’s tourist and travel information site collaborated with government agency the Swedish Insti-tute and agency Volontaire Stockholm on the campaign, which saw Swedish citizens take weekly turns sharing their diverse opinions and recommendations on things to do in Swe-den via the @Sweden Twitter handle.

The project sparked controversy in early June when a Swedish woman managing the account posted messages about Jews and Nazis. The Cannes Jury nevertheless awarded Curators of Sweden the Cyber Grand Prix, commending Visit Sweden for not censoring the posts. Jury president Iain Tait said: ‘Allow-ing people to have the conversation out in the open felt like one of the facets of the case. It shows that they’re passionate about freedom of speech.’

twitter.com/sweden

Magazine Luiza / Magazine Você

Brazilian electronics and homeware retailer Magazine Luiza illustrated how social devices could play a fundamental role in driving busi-ness with its Magazine Você (translation ‘your store’) platform. Created with Ogilvy Etco, São Paulo, in partnership with Ogilvy Brasil,


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www.magazineluiza.com.br

www.magazinevoce.com.br

http://twitter.com/Sweden

by the US retail giant. More than 270,000 people voted and 4,000 product designs were submitted. FMCG conglomerate Uni-lever also opened its doors to collaborators both great and small with its Unilever Open Innovation Submission Portal (run in part-nership with global technology and IP mar-ketplace yet2.com) (Contagious 30). Uni-lever gathered suggestions on how to grow its business and simultaneously reduce its environmental impact, asking potential col-laborators to propose new ways of preserv-ing food naturally and bringing safe drinking water to the world’s poorest people. The global company vowed to pursue the most promising partnerships – be they with small technology startups or major international organisations.www.thinkoven.comwww.ideasbrewery.comGetontheshelf.comoiportal.yet2.com

Harrods / Be the Buyer

With its Be the Buyer project Harrods proved that even an established retailer could take an open and collaborative approach. The London department store streamed Burberry’s A/W 2012 runway show live via its Facebook page and invited fans to vote, via Likes, for their favourite cat-walk look, with items from the most popular ensembles guaranteed to appear in store.

Through opening up a previously closed part of its business – collection buying – to customers Harrods offered an exclusive experience. By Liking a product, people made a public statement of their interest in it, and (as outlined in Robert Cialdini’s clas-sic book Influence) research shows that these types of commitments are far more likely to result in action, in this case going to Harrods to buy the item they’ve Liked. Contagious 30.

www.facebook.com/Harrods

Ones to Watch /

We’re expecting even companies in sec-tors traditionally known for keeping their processes closed to adopt social business initiatives. It might seem unlikely that a finan-cial company would open up a credit card’s profit and loss statements to its customers, but that’s exactly what Barclaycard in the US did with its community-driven credit card Ring. Cardholders become members of an online community centred round a forum in which they can vote on product features and weigh-in on community discussions; they also benefit from the card’s financial success through the Giveback programme.

Social business strategies can also ena-ble brands to turn real customers into not just advocates but customer service rep-resentatives. Startup Needle is a live chat sales platform that pays a brand’s biggest fans $10 per hour and rewards them with

products for answering customer que-ries. Needle’s clients include major brands Skullcandy, Under Armour and Urban Outfitters. Featured in Contagious 30.www.barclaycardring.comwww.needle.com

Xxxxxxx /

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www.thinkoven.com

www.ideasbrewery.com

http://Getontheshelf.com

http://oiportal.yet2.com

www.facebook.com/Harrods

www.barclaycardring.com

www.needle.com

iMage sharing / the year of the photo Visual culture online evolved in

2012, from taking photos to virtually socialising around them through a raft of image-based social net-works.

Brands spent 2012 tentatively figur-ing out how to use these expanding networks in their marketing (with mixed results), and considering how to mon-etise photos. Brands, said British ad agency Rabbit, need ‘not only a social media strategy, but a visual social media strategy as well.’

Two cultural milestones marked the Year Of The Photo: iconic film stock maker Kodak announced it was filing for bankruptcy in January. And Facebook’s $1bn, if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them buyout of photo-sharing social network Instagram in April.


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A Thousand Words /

The growth of visual culture has been stag-gering. Late in 2011, blog 1000memories calculated 10% of all the photos ever snapped were taken that year. Three hundred million photos are uploaded to Facebook every day. Unsurprisingly, people care about photos a lot: a report from ROI Research found that 35% of respondents said that of the social media activity their friends post, they enjoy photos the most. For brands that matters a great deal. In the same study 44% said they were likely to engage with pictures posted by brands on social media, the highest of all options.

But Facebook wasn’t the big news for image makers this year, as people gravitated to niche photo sharing sites in droves. Twin giants Tumblr and Instagram reached giddy new heights. The former hit 20 billion monthly page views, propelling it into the top 20 most-visited US sites for the first time in September; the latter reached 100 million users the same month, double that of 12 months before. New-comer Pinterest meanwhile rocketed to 25 million users by November to become the third largest social network (from just 1.27 million in July 2011), earning a sky high estimated valua-tion of $7.7bn by Forbes in April.

Show Me the Money /

Having reached a critical mass, all three net-works matured and started thinking about their business models, courting brands to turn the

crowd into cash. Fresh from being named Apple’s App Of The Year 2011, Instagram hosted a rash of campaigns from every sector. Among others, apparel brand Levi’s ran a model search, jeweller Tiffany’s created custom filters for budding snappers and airline BMI launched a photo-based daily lottery.

After having pretty much ignored brands, Tumblr changed tack in 2012. In June, it bolstered its team with brand strategists, and announced spon-sorship packages for brands. Adidas Football was among the first to take advantage, posting videos and photos from its various celebrity endorsers. The New York-based company rounded off the year by launching Tumblr A-List, showing its intent to help brands make better use of the platform.

Arguably the most financially tempting of the three for brands is Pinterest, which has the strongest intent graph (broadly speaking, people publicly posting stuff they want to buy). Its valuation was doubtless helped by stats from content discovery and sharing firm Shareaholic showing that the site drove more referral traffic than LinkedIn and Google+ combined. And those referrals spend a lot. A report from RichRelevance found average spend from retail shoppers from Pinterest was $169 dollars, compared with just $95 from Facebook, and $71 from Twitter. With around one third of brands already using the platform, according to Econsultancy, the launch of Pin-terest for Business and brand pages in November was an obvious next step towards more official – and lucrative – participation.

www.levistrauss.com/blogs/iamlevisstatigr.am/flybmitinyurl.com/WhatMakesLoveadidasfootball.tumblr.coma-listpartners.tumblr.com


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iMage sharing / the year of photo

http://www.levistrauss.com/blogs/iamlevis

http://statigr.am/flybmi

http://tinyurl.com/WhatMakesLove

http://adidasfootball.tumblr.com

http://a-listpartners.tumblr.com

Social Shopping /

Much like early efforts on Facebook and Twitter, brands that aligned their visual social media strategies with people’s behaviour on the platforms fared best. These either provided seamless added utility, or entertainment and relevant information. Many brands nonethe-less simply posted ad-like content, missing the point entirely of a mood board to aggregate inspiration.

Highlights on Pinterest included online fashion retailer ASOS’s simple strategy of using the site as an editorial newsfeed: posting catwalk trends, celebrity news and more across its 23 boards. Better still was fashion brand Oscar de la Renta’s campaign, in which it live-pinned the catwalk show of its bridal collection, tapping the site’s heavily female-skewed demographic and the large number of bridal-themed boards.

Other smart executions created tools to maximise the conveni-ence of the online pinboard: interiors magazine House Beautiful’s print campaign let people pin directly to Pinterest via their smart-phone, for example. Gucci meanwhile cannily unveiled pinnable online banner ads that led to the brand’s ecommerce site. Online shoe retailer Zappos focused on Pinterest’s role as virtual wish list. It’s gearing up for the Christmas retail bonanza with a service called Pinpointing, which lets people enter a loved one’s Pinterest user-name to get gift suggestions based on their pinning activity.

pinterest.com/asospinterest.com/oscarprgirl/bridalpinterest.com/guccipinpointing.apps.zappos.com

Ones to Watch /

While the big three visual social networks work on monetising content through brand partnerships, three youngsters have taken a more explicitly commercial approach from the off. Social shop-ping start up Svpply brings together influencers, retailers and shop-pers. It provides a real-time stream of images of products curated by members from across the web, personalised to each user based on their social network on Facebook, who they follow on the site, and their interests. Influential Svpply’ers tapping the ‘Want’ button are then offered deals directly by retailers who have partnered with them.

In September eBay bought Svpply to bolster its personalisation and curation capabilities. Reflecting the influence of visual social networks, the world’s biggest online marketplace has since subtly changed its homepage to ape Svpply and Pinterest’s personalised, image-rich aesthetic. Working along the same curation lines, Svpply rival Fancy has around two million users. Affiliated brands bid to sell people products they’ve earmarked on the site.

Rather than build a proprietary system, in-stream commerce app Chirpify (launched this year) aims to piggyback Instagram’s API. It lets people enter their payment details, then buy directly from the Instragram stream by simply putting the word ‘Buy’ in the comments under any photo with the #InstaSale hashtag.

svpply.comwww.thefancy.comchirpify.com

iMage sharing / the year of photo


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http://pinterest.com/asos

http://pinterest.com/oscarprgirl/bridal

http://pinterest.com/gucci

http://pinpointing.apps.zappos.com

http://svpply.com

http://www.thefancy.com

http://chirpify.com

aMplified live / enhance, capture and share This year’s Olympics, the first

‘social games’ (see Movements section) showed how audiences are increasingly creating and sharing content during live events.

This kind of user-created activity can be amplified to heighten the experience of the people at the venue, as well as enabling them to share and amplify that experience to their wider social networks. Brands are now recognising that these additional, participatory layers can have a powerful impact on their businesses, and are starting to provide consumers with tools to heighten, capture and broadcast live experiences. It’s still early days for the Amplified Live trend, but below are some cases that should inspire wider creativity in this area in 2013.

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Coldplay / Xyloband

British rock band Coldplay has built a reputation for its colourful live shows, with lasers and balloons galore. For their 2012 world tour, however, the band took this a step further by introducing Xylobands. Each ticket-holder was given a wristband containing LEDs and ultra-low-power microcontrollers. During various songs, these wristbands lit up in sync with the music and stage lights – effectively turn-ing the audience into a visual extension of the show. The devices were designed by Devon-based RB Concepts, a company in which Coldplay has now invested.

In a similar move, Disney handed out light-up Mickey Mouse ears for its Glow with the Show event at Disney California Adventure Park. The LED-filled ears were purchased beforehand and collectively synched to flash during the show. Both examples gen-erated a visually stunning spectacle, height-ening the audience’s enjoyment of, and interaction with, the performance.

xylobands.com

Dan Deacon App /

For his 2012 tour, Baltimore-based musi-cian Dan Deacon created an app that turns the audience’s smartphone into an extension of his live act. The application

turns the speaker into an instrument, the flash into a strobe and the screen into part of the light show.

The app doesn’t require data connectivity or a phone signal to operate, ensuring it will work in any venue. Fans install the app before the show and watch as their smartphone becomes an extension of the performance. The application is activated by audio signals emitted from the stage, which carry data to trigger these functions.

Forget the flags at Glastonbury; holding mobile phones in the air has become a 21st century frustration for millions of gig-goers. Deacon’s app turns this (rather annoying) habit into one that amps up the collective excitement around the concert. Contagious 33.

bit.ly/rQN0s7

Beldent / Random Music Fest

Mondelez (née Kraft)-owned chewing gum Beldent left the audience guessing at a festival held in Buenos Aires, Argen-tina, on 29 September. Devised as part of the Project Fly innovation programme (which we’re proud to be a partner in), The Beldent Random Music Fest featured four stages with a lighthouse in the centre of the audience. This light-house randomly illuminated a particular stage, which was the cue for the next band to begin playing. A mobile app detected the live music and provided lyrics for the audience. People could also use the app to vote for their favourite band to perform an encore. More than 8,500 people attended the event, while 250,000 watched the live stream on Facebook. Featured in Contagious 33.

www.beldent.com.ar

aMplified live / enhance capture and share


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http://bit.ly/RQN0s7

http://www.beldent.com.ar

http://xylobands.com/

Frontrow /

At this year’s Vivid Live Festival in Sydney, Australia, Google’s Creative Lab launched Frontrow – an in-built functionality on YouTube enabling viewers to take photos whilst watching a live stream. Fans could pause the action, move the camera and zoom in and out to capture their favourite image. These photos could then be shared on social networks. Frontrow was first introduced for US band The Temper Trap’s headline performance inside the iconic Sydney Opera House.

Rather than being passive viewers at home, fans from all over the world could create a unique image to save, and share. In just ten hours, the stream notched up 296,000 live views – 100 times the capacity of the concert hall. In addition to the photos taken inside the Opera House itself, a further 66,000 were captured by people watching the live-stream via YouTube, significantly increasing the event’s presence on social channels.www.youtube.com/user/sOHfestival

Ones to Watch /

Increasingly, brands will provide more effective tools for consumers to amplify their experiences at live events, and share these stories with their friends. Enabling consumers to relive events after they’ve taken place is another interesting avenue, which we saw in August with Blur’s Insta-gram feed. Those attending the band’s Hyde Park gig were encouraged to

upload their images using the hashtag #blurhydepark2012. These were then streamed in a continuous, moving gallery on the band’s website, cre-ating a visual record of the evening’s events. Aggregation platform This is Now took this a stage further, by collating geo-tagged Instagram photos from cities around the world, and displaying them in a live stream online.

Developments in technology will also accelerate this trend, providing con-sumers with more seamless tools to capture and share their live experi-ences. Taking real-time life logging to its natural conclusion, for example, is Kickstarter project Memoto: an always-on buttonhole camera from a Swedish tech collective that takes two photos every minute, tagged by location for easy search. Contagious 33.

Amplified Live will continue to spread beyond its obvious home of live music and sporting events. During September’s London Fashion Week, Topshop partnered with Facebook to launch Shoot the Show – a camera button embedded within a live stream window that lets viewers click to snap pictures of their favourite looks. These could then be shared directly with Facebook friends. Contagious 33.

blur.co.uk/hydepark2012now.jit.sumemoto.comwww.facebook.com/Topshop

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www.youtube.com/user/SOHfestival

blur.co.uk/hydepark2012

now.jit.su

http://memoto.com

www.facebook.com/Topshop

screen grabs / creating, sharing, watching

Twenty four miles. That’s how high the bar for branded content has now been set.

Seven years and tens of millions of dol-lars in the making (the exact cost isn’t known), Red Bull’s Stratos project saw Felix Baumgartner free fall from space, breaking the sound barrier and a brace of world records. Coverage of the feat set a landmark for live streaming: eight million people tuned in. Contagious 33.

Stratos represented, in some ways, how content this year changed: from recorded to live streaming video; and short-form amateur content to longer-form, professionally-produced films.


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Robert Kyncl told fellow Googlers in January in a speech about the future of TV and content, reported in The New Yorker. ‘We think they will continue to go that way – spend more and more time in the niches – because now the distribution landscape allows for more narrowness.’ A case in point is Twitch.TV, founded in 2011. The site lets videogamers stream their play live to eager videogame voyeurs, and hit 20 million monthly unique views in August. Average daily viewing time per user? A staggering 75 minutes.

www.twitch.tv

TV Everywhere /

Video content began to untether further from TV, and onto web tablets and mobiles. A 14-country study from NPD found that tablet use for watching TV had doubled in 12 months (to around 15% of total view-ing), and that 70% said they were watching video on devices that weren’t TVs. That was a boon to VOD services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime. Despite downgrading forecasts, Netflix is projected to have added between 4.7 and 5.4 million subscribers this year as more cable custom-ers cut the cord. And as LTE/4G mobile rolls out, expect broadcasters to look to more so-called TV Everywhere initiatives as a way to keep viewers watching.

Among the most progressive, ESPN this year announced it was going ‘mobile first’ with its content, while MTV’s Under The Thumb app from AKQA brought paid-for mobile content to US Millennials (Contagious 30). In the mainstream meanwhile, NBC’s streaming service for the Olympics saw seven million households stream via web and mobile apps. HBO, a groundbreaker with its TV Everywhere app HBO Go, even rattled cable companies by going it alone in Scandinavia with stand-alone, over-the-top streaming service HBO Nordic. See HBO case study in Contagious 31.www.mtvunderthethumb.comwww.hbogo.com

YouTube’s evolution to a professional network through a shiny new channel strategy, investment in content makers (the Creators Hub and London studio space) and $100m to production companies paid off. Seventy two hours of content are uploaded every minute to the site, but usage is changing. ComScore reported in May that people are watching fewer clips (they peaked at 21.8bn in January, going down to 15.3bn in April), but spending 57% more time watching clips. In short, engagement is up – which is great news for advertisers, 90% of whom agreed that content marketing would become more important in the next 12 months, according to an Econsultancy report from October. The bad news? Only 38% said they had a content marketing strategy in place.

www.redbullstratos.com

Going With the Flow /

Live streaming and socialising online around content became more popular throughout 2012, a trend which Contagious identified as Digital Live. In the news realm, the Huffington Post launched a live, socially-led news service bringing people into the heart of breaking stories. Google pushed new social network Google+’s differ-entiator, Hangouts, hard, enlisting celebs, most notably President Obama, to appear via the service. Lots of brands joined in too, including online UK grocery deliv-ery service Ocado, which streamed instructional cook-ing videos (Contagious 32), and fashion e-tailer ASOS, which let viewers quiz US fashion writer Indigo Clarke and model, blogger and IT girl Cory Kennedy about fash-ion and style.

Niche streaming sites gained serious traction too. ‘Peo-ple went from broad to narrow,’ senior YouTube exec

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www.twitch.tv

www.mtvunderthethumb.com

www.hbogo.com

www.redbullstratos.com

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And Finally… /

What round up of this year’s content couldn’t name-check South Korean rapper PSY’s Gangnam Style (c’mon, you know the one…) with its monstrous 830 million plus views? Born of the country’s industrialised pop music-making machine – K-Pop’s notorious ‘cultural technology’ pro-gramme – PSY deeply subverts its picture perfect boy and girl band output with his age (too old), look (too fat) and off-brand message (Gangnam residents are vapid and vul-gar). But WHY the views, you ask? Perhaps it’s the global zeitgeist of lampooning the rich in a time of austerity. Or the cultural jolt of seeing a wry Asian piss-take of bombas-tic American music video clichés. Or maybe just the sheer bloody ridiculousness of it. More likely, like most virals, it’s a confluence of factors so mind-bogglingly complicated we’ll never properly fathom it.

www.youtube.com/user/officialpsy

Amateur Dramatics /

Phones and tablets are also a platform on which videos can be created too, and brands are empowering people with the tools to become directors and distributors.

Ever the smart marketer, Red Bull tapped into the long standing extreme sports tradition of videoing tricks with its Flow app, which let fans shoot, edit and share content direct from their mobile. LEGO’s Superheroes Movie Maker app, through Pereira & O’Dell, San Francisco, lets children direct stop motion shorts using their phone and favourite brick-based creations. Contagious 31.redbullflow.comdcuniversesuperheroes.lego.com

Ones to Watch / Social Video

Just as Instagram threatened the dominance of Facebook with a superior mobile interface and social sharing func-tion for images, so YouTube is watching with interest the explosive rise of a new breed of video sites that do the same. GIFs had a brief flicker of popularity among brands early in the year, with VW, GE and even Burberry launching campaigns in the format, but it was ‘Instagram for video’ apps including SocialCam, Viddy, Klip and Threadlife that really came to prominence in 2012, through building in seamless social sharing.

User numbers are difficult to pin down, but SocialCam claimed 16 million downloads in July (from a massive 54 million peak), and Viddy 26 million users in May, accord-ing to The Wall Street Journal. At last count Red Bull, GE, Sierra Mist were among the brands experimenting on the platforms. However, YouTube needn’t worry just yet: no one truly cracked social video this year. socialcam.com / www.viddy.comwww.klip.com / www.threadlife.com



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www.youtube.com/user/officialpsy

http://redbullflow.com

dcuniversesuperheroes.lego.com

http://socialcam.com

www.viddy.com

www.klip.com

www.threadlife.com

Ninety nine years ago, German newspaper editor Wolfgang Riepl famously observed that new media doesn’t kill old media, but rather they converge.

2012 saw a raft of mobile inventiveness in augmented reality and two-screen viewing behaviours. Smartphones are creating exciting new ways for brands to redraw the traditional purchase fun-nel for TV and print by adding contextual layers of information, utility and entertain-ment in real time. The promise for brands is, ultimately, cutting the time and friction between awareness and purchase to almost nothing.

augMented Media / layering content and utility

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That’s being led by a change in people’s mobile behaviour and how they interact with traditional media. Smartphone penetration tipped over 50% in the US this year, and tablets are set to out-sell PCs next year, Microsoft’s VP web services Antoine Leblond told attendees at the TechEd conference in Amsterdam in June. Nielsen reported in April that 86% of US tablet owners and 84% of smartphone owners used a second screen at least once over a 30-day period while watching TV, with as many as 45% doing so on a daily basis.

In last year’s Most Contagious we looked at how audio recog-nition technology Shazam was moving from being just a music recognition service to being a trigger for TV content. Since then it’s bloomed: the app counts 250 million users and is growing at two million a week, with a staggering 54% trying to use the app to identify shows they’re watching, according to Shazam. That growth didn’t go unnoticed by broadcasters and brands; 160 channels in the US now make their content ‘Shazamable’, serving up trivia, info and links, as did almost half the advertisers at this year’s Super Bowl.

TV wasn’t the only winner, though. Print evolved from a static medium to an interactive and changeable platform – a gateway to play games, watch entertainment content and buy products direct.

Coca-Cola / Coke Polar Bowl

More than 110 million fans tuned into the 2012 Super Bowl, and an estimated 60% watched the big game while using a second screen such as a mobile phone, or PC. To maximise its media investment, Coke, with Wieden+Kennedy, Portland, created a campaign that extended its presence beyond a standard TV spot, merging two-screen viewing with social media.

Two TV spots aired during the game containing content specific to whichever team was in the lead. The ads, along with Facebook

and outdoor messages, drove users to www.cokepolarbowl.com where two animated Coca-Cola polar bears reacted in real time to events happening during the game and the ad breaks, including placing their hands on their hearts during a patriotic Chrysler com-mercial and even leaving their seats during a Pepsi spot.

The user experience was enhanced on social channels too: the bears took over Coke’s Twitter account and interacted directly with fans, answering questions and sharing pictures. Sharable high-lights of the bears’ antics were uploaded to YouTube and Face-book, and the brand also streamed the bears’ reactions live via a Facebook app.

Extending dwell times well beyond the TV spots, nine million con-sumers engaged with the bears for an average of 28 minutes and Twitter followers grew by 38% during a four-hour period. Conta-gious issue 30.

www.cokepolarbowl.com



www.cokepolarbowl.com

California Milk Processor Board / Time to Go to Bed

To increase milk consumption among His-panic children, the California Milk Proces-sor Board developed a campaign that used Shazam for TV to add interactive content to a traditional commercial. Time to Go to Bed, created by Grupo Gallegos, Hunting-ton Beach, CA, featured an animated video showing droplets of milk helping a young boy get to sleep. The spot aired in the early evening on two of the largest Spanish lan-guage television networks, letting children know that it’s time to go to bed while also promoting a glass of milk and bedtime story.

Parents could tag the TV spot using Shazam and receive a free download of a children’s book which, of course, inte-grated milk into the story. They could replay the video, leave comments, and share it with their friends on their social networks. 120,000 hard copy books were distrib-uted to paediatricians’ offices in California and were also available digitally via Face-book, where they were reported to be downloaded at a rate of 110 books a day. Featured in Contagious 33.

tinyurl.com/timetogotobed

Australian Defence Force / Mobile Medic

The Australian Defence Force won a bunch of gongs this year for its inventive way of recruiting medical students for its Defence Force University Scholarship. Working with George Patterson Y&R, Melbourne, it cre-ated an augmented reality-based outdoor campaign that put students’ skills to the test.

A series of posters featured patients in need of medical treatment. By pointing the app at the ad, students could virtually diag-nose and treat the patients using tools such as CT scans, X-ray scans, stethoscopes,

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http://tinyurl.com/timetogotobed

and ECG. After treating all of the patients, students entered their details via the app and those who performed best were contacted and offered a scholarship.

Effectively acting as an entrance exam, Mobile Medic was a clever way of immersing students in the role of an army medical officer as well as testing their skill. It lives on as an education platform in all Defence Force Universities. Contagious issue 32.

www.defence.gov.au

IKEA / IKEA Catalogue

This year IKEA added another dimension to its traditional print cata-logue by presenting users with a layer of digital content accessible through a free augmented reality app.

Scanning the catalogue with the app reveals a variety of features: users can interact with 3D product models, find out product details, view how-to videos and be inspired by photo galleries.

IKEA worked with McCann, New York and Allofus, London, to redefine its iconic publication, which has 211 million copies in cir-culation, and extend its lifecycle throughout the year. Contagious issue 32.

www.ikea.com

ASOS / Scan to Shop

British AR specialists Aurasma have been busy this year adding clouds of digital content and interactive functionality to a range of print publications from Tesco’s Real Food magazine to the entire September edition of American GQ. Contagious’ favourite was the ASOS Scan to Shop app, which enables the 450,000 UK subscrib-ers of the retailer’s monthly magazine to access additional video content, product information, unlock exclusive offers and purchase items directly from the pages. bit.ly/scan-to-shop-itunesbit.ly/scan-to-shop-playwww.aurasma.com

Shortlist Magazine /

Meanwhile, UK-based Shortlist Magazine partnered with AR com-pany Blippar, which is reported to have more than 350,000 users in the UK, to create a special interactive gaming edition that featured a playable AR version of a 1980s computer game on the cover.

Inside the magazine, exclusive video interviews, interactive polls, competitions and podcasts could be experienced on a phone via Blippar. Users could also ‘blipp to buy’ items straight from the pages of the magazine.

Blippar recorded 229,178 blipps of the issue from more than 50,000 unique readers, who viewed and played with interactive content for over six minutes each, on average.

blippar.com


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http://bit.ly/scan-to-shop-itunes

http://bit.ly/scan-to-shop-play

http://blippar.com

In Burberry’s majestic new retail space, it was the screen – not in cinematic portrait format, but iPad-esque landscape – that epitomised the convergence of online and offline shopping in 2012.

This year saw retailers bring social, mobile and web into the physical space, embedding products with RFID chips, sensors to detect shoppers and person-alise content, frictionless payment, and layers of online functionality via mobile apps and services.

retail / shopping gets connected

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brands like adidas, Nike and Puma. Fans with the app checking out competitors’ wares were offered a 99% reduction on trainers from Meat Pack – but with every passing second, the discount got 1% smaller. To get the best deal, the customer had to drop everything and run.

Meat Pack Hijack is fascinating because it neatly combines location, connectivity and strategic discounting with the motivational power of a relentlessly ticking clock. Retail with jeopardy? We’re in! And so were the 600 customers the brand hijacked from its competitors in just one week. Contagious 32.

www.facebook.com/themeatpack

Audi City /

Buying a new car is less impulsive than buy-ing a new pair of trainers, but the impact of digital on that process is driving key changes across the sector. This year saw the launch of Audi City, a small-footprint digital showroom in London’s West End. Visitors use multi-touch screen tables (cre-ated by Razorfish International) to design their ideal Audi from more than 3.5 million possible configurations. Their creation can be viewed, life-sized, from all angles on huge HD screens, and can be seen ‘driv-ing’ through virtual landscapes.

That vivid first impression is more impor-tant than ever. Research by Jaguar Land

Why? Because shoppers no longer see physical, techno-logical and geographical boundaries, and retailers needs to adapt to changing behaviour. According to IBM’s 2012 Winning Over The Empowered Consumer report, 25% of people use three or more technologies to shop; mean-while, mobile sales for Black Friday exceeded 16% this year, up from 9.8% in 2011, also according to IBM.

The smartest retailers are rethinking the customer journey – from initial awareness and product research to in-store experience, purchase and post-sales – seamlessly bring-ing together the best of offline and online to make a com-pelling, entertaining and frictionless shopping experience.

C&A / Fashion Likes

The familiar metric of Facebook Likes was given a social twist when DDB Brasil repurposed it into an interactive rating system for its clothes. To kick-start the idea, the new season’s C&A fashion collection was previewed on the brand’s Facebook page. Users were encouraged to Like their favourite items, and after a week of online voting the collection finally hit the rails at C&A’s flagship store in São Paulo – with one important difference. Each item was displayed on a hanger that showed a running total of the Likes it had earned, changing the scores in real time as fans continued to vote online. Social proof moved from Facebook into the real world. Contagious 31.

www.facebook.com/ceaBrasil

Meat Pack / Hijack

If there’s one thing we all like, it’s a bargain. Working with 4AM Saatchi & Saatchi, Guatemala, sneaker retailer Meat Pack enhanced its existing app with a time-sensitive dis-count feature that used GPS to map the stores of rival


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Rover discovered that in 2000 people made an average of 7.5 trips to dealer-ships before buying a car. By 2010 that figure had shrunk to 1.3 visits. The impact of each encounter gains significance. Audi City combines the flexibility of digital car-configuration with the sense of high-impact retail theatre that a brand-controlled envi-ronment of a store can offer. It’s a strategy the brand clearly believes in: Audi plans 20 further such destinations around the world by 2015. Contagious 32.

tinyurl.com/audicity

Neiman Marcus / NM Service App

With a long standing reputation for cus-tomer service, high end US department store Neiman Marcus spent the summer trialling a smartphone app designed to enhance the relationship between sales staff and shoppers. The free NM Service app allowed users to see which staff were on duty, and set up meetings with their pre-ferred associate. The opt-in service notified staff when participating customers entered

the store, displaying their Facebook profile picture (to help assistants identify them) and also their purchase history. Shoppers could use the app to access product infor-mation and to tag their favourite items, help-ing staff make more accurate recommenda-tions for individual customers.

So far San Francisco-based Signature Labs, the clienteling specialists behind the app, are maintaining an enigmatic silence about results. This much we know: the Lux-ury Institute, New York, recently published the findings of its 2012 Luxury Customer Index survey, which found that across cat-egories 70% of ultra-wealthy customers say their relationship with a specific sales associate causes them to spend more. Confirmation, if it were needed, that it pays to know your customers. Contagious 31.

www.getsignature.com

Topshop Unique / London Fashion Week

Understanding its young clientele is a major obsession for Topshop, the standard-

bearer for British high street fashion. The Customise the Catwalk feature for its London Fashion Week show allowed web users to not only select and order key looks and accessories, but also to change the colour of their preferred option before buy-ing. Additionally, Shoot the Show let view-ers snap and share pictures of their favour-ite looks direct from the show’s live stream. Music and make-up from the show could also be bought straight away, with online tutorials available to help customers repli-cate the beauty looks created for the show.

Topshop’s new CMO Justin Cooke – former vice president of PR at Burberry – described the show as ‘social entertain-ment’, but Topshop is not innovating for the sake of it. Cooke is very clear on the value of this heady mix of social, entertainment and commerce: ‘By putting our custom-ers in control of the live experience, they show us what they love, how they want to consume information, the ways they like to share and more.’ Contagious 33.

www.topshop.com

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http://tinyurl.com/audicity

Burberry World Live /

It may have been a big, exciting year for retail generally, but it’s also been a big, exciting year for Britishness; in the launch of Burb-erry’s new flagship London store, those factors collided to headline-grabbing effect. The Regent Street space has been redesigned as a physical manifestation of the brand’s online experience, from its acoustic music sessions to Burberry Bespoke and the Art of the Trench.

Burberry World Live will not only host fashion events, concerts and performances, but blurs the boundaries between online and offline retail. RFID tags in the garments trigger relevant multimedia content, with mirrors turning into screens when entering changing rooms. On the shop floor, the same system cues making-of videos when certain screens in the space are approached. Sales staff use iPads to get real-time stock updates and product specifications, and clienteling software is used to access customers’ purchase his-tory and shopping preferences.

The democratisation of fashion may be a keenly debated topic right now, but what has set Burberry apart from most luxury brands is the authenticity of the delight it takes in embracing tech and the passion of younger consumers. Contagious 33.uk.burberry.com



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http://uk.burberry.com

personalisation / here’s to you

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‘P&G’s vision is to build our brands through lifelong, one-to-one rela-tionships in real-time with every person in the world,’ said P&G’s global marketing and brand build-ing officer, Mark Pritchard, in March. ‘It means shifting from mass broadcasting, to creating more personal, one-to-one conversa-tions.’ Welcome to the age of mass personalisation.

Underpinning personalisation is of course personal data, and vast amounts of it. Boston Consulting Group’s report in May said globally people send ten bil-lion text messages and make one billion posts to a blog or social network. There are six billion mobile phones, of which one billion are smartphones. That’s led to data-driven stories, products and even services. ‘Data,’ claims Daniel Stein, founder of digital agency EVB, ‘is the new creative brief.’



But what about privacy? It seems that our growing personal data literacy means people are becoming more receptive to a new value exchange: a recent Accenture study found 61% of online shoppers would trade privacy for personalisation, and three in four shoppers actually prefer retailers that use personal information to improve shopping experiences.

Our relationship with technology is changing, too, as digital per-sonal assistants like Siri become more sophisticated. We’re more dependent on it, and brands like Google are starting to build digital tools like Google Now based on our personal data to pre-empt our every need.

AXE Anarchy / Personalised graphic novel

If a brand seeks out your creative input, recreates your profile pic-ture to flattering effect and integrates you into an online graphic novel, wouldn’t you at least try the product? This strategy paid dividends for Unilever when it rewarded AXE’s millennial target audience with its 15 megabytes of fame. To promote Anarchy, the brand’s first unisex variant, Razorfish, New York, partnered with Aspen Comics on creating a crowd-sourced online graphic novel starring AXE Facebook fans and Twitter followers. An initial trailer, which attracted 3.2 million views, invited the 2.3 million-strong social media fan-base to get involved. After opting in, people posted 15,249 story suggestions to help steer the plot, with 34% coming from females. Fans were rewarded by seeing animated ver-sions of themselves in the graphic novel which depicted scientists attempting to hit upon a formula for attraction. Since launching in January 2012, Anarchy has become the best-selling body spray in the US. Take that, Old Spice. Contagious 30.

www.axeanarchy.com

Hellmann’s / Recipe Receipts

In a smart use of real-time data, Hellmann’s used personalised, persuasive tactics to encourage Brazilian consumers to realise that mayonnaise is more versatile than just a condiment for sandwiches and potato salad. Using point-of-sale software, the brand gener-ated personalised recipes based on the products people bought in 100 outlets of the country’s St Marche supermarkets. If a shop-per put Hellmann’s in their basket, they received a customised till receipt which doubled up as a recipe card. The recipe included Hellmann’s mayonnaise along with other products they were pur-chasing. In-store signage informed shoppers: ‘If there’s Hellmann’s in your cart, there’s a surprise in your receipt.’ The campaign, through Ogilvy, São Paulo, generated a 44% rise in sales within a month. ‘We wanted to prove that Hellmann’s can be used daily in basic consumption without asking people to change anything in their shopping carts,’ Ogilvy account supervisor Daniela Glicen-stajn told Contagious. Contagious 31.www.hellmanns.com.br

Carvalho Hosken / The Social Home Tour

Visits to new-build homes can be tricky; it’s hard to imagine living in a show-house because they feel so impersonal and generic. So Rio-based estate agency Carvalho Hosken used Facebook content to personalise display homes for potential buyers, helping them to visualise themselves in the property. Via Artplan in Rio de Janeiro, Carvalho Hosken decorated apartments with digital picture frames containing personal photos from Facebook as potential buyers looked around. They saw their favourite films playing on the TV, also selected from their Facebook profiles, and heard their most-loved tunes. While inside, they received an unexpected phone call targeting them with a special offer. The social home tour helped to convert 28% of visits into sales, a rate that was three times higher than usual. Contagious 32.

www.carvalhohosken.com.br


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www.axeanarchy.com

www.carvalhohosken.com.br

Bank of America / BankAmeriDeals

In an initiative that is not only personalised, but frictionless too, Bank of America launched a new deals service, BankAmeriDeals, which gives customers targeted discounts and offers at the stores and restaurants they regularly visit. Customers accept the offers they want and typically receive a discount through their online banking service. When they make a purchase in-store with a Bank of Amer-ica debit or credit card, they don’t even need to hand over a cou-pon: the cash is automatically refunded into their account the next month. This eliminates the need for physical coupons or any addi-tional interaction with individual retailers, as well as fulfilling Bank of America’s objectives to increase account and card activity and reinforce existing customer relationships. Contagious 30.

www.bankofamerica.com

Ones to Watch /

Where is personalisation headed? Ford’s partnership with location-aware alerts startup Roximity shows how collaboration is bringing convenience: Ford drivers can now benefit from a personalised in-car service which sends – via their dashboard’s telemetry system – notifications of nearby deals that tally with their particular interests. When better to serve deals than when you’re close, and mobile?

On that note, expect Google Now to gather momentum. The search giant’s personal assistant incorporates data from your brows-ing history, location and time of day to help you plan your life better. Google Now might even suggest a gym visit in your lunch hour, or an alternative commuter route to avoid a delay (Contagious 33).

Meanwhile, Google Field Trip offers an unprompted personalised history lesson about the places around you via your smartphone. However, you can moderate how much or how little it serves up, lim-iting it to just restaurant reviews, for instance. This is pivotal to per-sonalisation: the brands that allow the users to control how, when and with what they are targeted will be 2013’s success stories.

beta.roximity.comwww.google.com/landing/nowtinyurl.com/Google-Field-Trip



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www.bankofamerica.com

beta.roximity.com

www.google.com/landing/now

http://tinyurl.com/Google-Field-Trip

While the loyalty scheme is in demise, loyalty services are gaining momentum. Forward-thinking companies are using technology to incorporate loyalty mechanics across a wide range of brand touchpoints.

Traditionally tied to product transactions, loyalty is now being mapped to experi-ence and engagement. A number of brands and apps are rewarding a range of everyday activity, from watching TV (Viggle) to sharing status updates (Nike).

With smartphone penetration skyrock-eting, mobile is a key force behind this unfettered approach to loyalty. Almost a quarter of the top 100 brands in the 2012 Brand Keys Customer Loyalty Engagement Index enable consumer engagement via mobile.bit.ly/brandkeys-index

the new loyalty/services not scheMes


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http://bit.ly/brandkeys-index

Shopkick /

Spurring a revolution in location-based loyalty, Shopkick rewards cus-tomers simply for walking into a store. The mobile app, which has partnered US retailers like Target and Macy’s, also tracks in-store activities, allowing shoppers to accumulate points, called ‘kicks’, through actions like trying on clothes. These can be exchanged for a wide variety of rewards such as gift vouchers or meals.

A recent redesign based around Pinterest-inspired ‘lookbooks’ has extended Shopkick’s functionality so people can now be rewarded for ‘pre-shopping’ activity such as browsing products and saving items in which they’re interested.

These new features have bolstered engagement levels. At current rates, Shopkick will reach one billion product views within 12 weeks. The app also reached one million verified monthly walk-ins to partner stores in Octo-ber this year.

Shopkick has quickly become the third most-used shopping app after eBay, Amazon and Groupon, according to Nielsen, and offers a compelling shortcut for retailers keen to avoid the costs and hassle of developing their own reward app.

www.shopkick.com

Starbucks / Passbook

One of the major stories to come out of the launch of Apple’s iOS 6 this year (apart from its geographically-challenged Maps) is Passbook. The new feature is a form of mobile wallet that stores everything from movie tickets to loyalty cards. Geolocation means Passbook pulls up the relevant pass at the appropriate place, taking much of the pain out of collecting points.

As mobile money develops, loyalty and payment mechanics are merging, making loyalty more frictionless. While the iPhone 5 doesn’t incorporate a payment mechanism like an NFC chip, Passbook can make payments by proxy. Starbucks, for example, allows customers to store their digital Starbucks card in Passbook, so they collect loyalty points and pay with one scan of their phone. Notably, Starbucks customers can also pay via the Square Wallet app, which also supports Starbucks’ loyalty program and geo-fenced pop-ups (see Payment section).

While paying with Passbook is still in its early stages, it is likely that it will soon become widespread. It is expected, for example, that Apple custom-ers will soon be able to scan Passbook-enabled Apple Store gift cards. www.apple.com/ios/whats-new

the new loyalty / services not scheMes


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www.shopkick.com

www.apple.com/ios/whats-new

Nike Hong Kong / Make it Count

Alongside mobile, social media is a key driver of the new loyalty. Rethinking the idea of loyalty schemes for the social web, Nike launched a campaign earlier this year that rewards people for engagement and social amplification.

Created by Razorfish in Hong Kong as part of the wider global Make it Count campaign, amateur athletes can undertake a series of missions on the Nike Hong Kong Facebook page. However, users have to then share the completed mission online using the #makeit-count hashtag in order to accumulate points that can later be exchanged for Nike prizes. The initiative is an acknowledgement by Nike that loyalty encompasses far more than purchase, and an astute use by the brand of existing mechanisms for sharing and posting to reward loyal fans.

Social amplification is becoming an increasingly important variable in the new loyalty, as brands and consumers become more acutely aware of its value. Virgin America, for example, allows travellers to earn loyalty points each time they post a status update or take a photo at a Virgin America airport terminal or baggage claim via loyalty app Topguest.www.nike.com.hk/local/makeitcountwww.topguest.com

Kiip /

The new loyalty encompasses a fresh approach to the idea of rewards. One of the main players turning the idea of loyalty points on its head is mobile app Kiip, which focuses on tying reward to moments of achievement.

Kiip was initially set up to offer real-world rewards for virtual achievements in mobile games but is now significantly widening its focus. One of its most successful campaigns to date has been with PepsiCo fitness water brand

Propel, which partnered with the platform in April to reward users who logged fitness achievements in apps such as MapMyRUN. According to figures released in October, the campaign increased purchase intent by 51%. Kiip has also just introduced iPhone Passbook integration, so rewards coupons can now be sent directly to Passbook and redeemed in-store.

It seems that reaching out to consumers during more meaningful moments pays off. According to Kiip, advertisers benefit from initial engagement rates of 18 to 22% for their rewards and a 50% engagement rate for users who have previously redeemed a reward.

Having raised $11m in Series B funding earlier this year, it’s likely that Kiip will become more prolific in 2013. The company has said it will soon announce a major development that brings mobile rewards and physical redemption at point of sale systems closer than ever before.

www.kiip.me

Safeway / just for U

The new loyalty goes beyond one-size-fits all: a study by the CMO Council suggests that 54% of people would defect from their loyalty programme if it didn’t provide tailor-made, relevant offers.

With personalisation becoming a growing consumer demand, companies are turning to technology to create more one-to-one relationships with cus-tomers. US supermarket chain Safeway is one of the biggest retailers to be doing this on a major scale, with the launch of a loyalty programme built on personalised pricing; ‘just for U’ mines your shopping history and habits and serves you tailored prices via a desktop and mobile app.

www.safeway.com

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www.nike.com.hk/local/makeitcount

www.topguest.com

www.kiip.me

www.safeway.com

payMent / the changing way we pay With financial transactions

increasingly digital, cash is no longer king.

Last year the conversations about digital money revolved around NFC (near-field communication), due in part to Google’s introduction of its NFC-based Google Wallet solution. But while NFC is gaining pace, it is doing so more slowly than initially expected. However, other technology is springing up and changing the way we pay.

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Much of this change is driven by smartphones. Mobile money is far from being reliant on NFC, as the success of Square demonstrates. The disrup-tive startup has had a boost this year following a $25m investment from Starbucks. The Square Mobile Wallet can now be used to pay at 7,000 Star-bucks stores across the US. And just this month it announced that it’s pro-cessing $10bn in payments annually.

As people learn to pay via multiple devices, they are also becoming more open to new units of exchange, ranging from in-game virtual currency to social currency.

www.google.com/walletsquareup.com

Wallaby /

Wallets bursting with multiple credit cards have become emblematic of our times. According to Experian’s ‘National Score Index’, 10% of Ameri-cans have more than ten credit cards.

Having so many payment options means consumers are rarely using them in the most efficient way – a phe-nomenon that Wallaby aims to coun-teract through the creation of ‘one card to rule them all.’ The service solves the conundrum of which credit card to use to maximise savings and points by

letting people add credit cards to a cen-tralised system. When paying online or in store, Wallaby automatically sifts through the users’ cards, and crunches which one should be used to maximise returns.

The way in which Wallaby helps consoli-date and organise multiple payment offer-ings is analogous to Passbook (see Loyalty section). It points to a future where pay-ment and loyalty increasingly converge and become more frictionless.

www.walla.by

Barclays / Pingit

While banks tend to be known for making life more complicated, Barclays in the UK released an app in February that makes transferring money incredibly simple. Pingit lets users transfer up to £300 a day to other people using just their mobile phone number. The average order value of each transaction is £70, higher than current NFC mobile payment services, which are usually capped at about £20.

Mobile banking has being growing expo-nentially but this has largely come from developing countries, where access to formal financial services is lower than in the West. Last year, for example, Visa aped the success of mobile money transfer service M-Pesa by introducing a mobile payment service in Africa for people without bank accounts.

Pingit has had an enthusiastic reception in the UK, which could well set a prece-dent for future mobile banking offerings in this market. Within two days of the service launching, 20,000 users had signed up and it has now attracted more than 1.2 million downloads. Barclays claims that a signifi-cant amount of these are non-customers, with Pingit now helping Barclays to acquire more new customers than any of its other online acquisition tools.

www.barclays.co.uk/pingit

Barclaycard / PayBand

While Barclays’ Pingit works via a mobile phone, Barclaycard has been developing frictionless payment solutions in more unu-sual contexts.

At this summer’s London Wireless music festival, Barclaycard debuted PayBand, an NFC-enabled wristband that allowed festival-goers to make cashless payments. People signed up for a free PayBand, loaded it with up to £250 a day, then wore it around the festival site, negating the need to carry extra cash or cards. To pay for items from stallholders users simply swiped the band on a card payment system.

PayBand is an imaginative evolution of Barclaycard PayTag, a credit card sticker that, when stuck to a mobile handset, ena-bles contactless payments. Both PayTag and PayBand demonstrate that NFC isn’t

payMent / the changing way we pay



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http://squareup.com

tied to smartphones, but can be used crea-tively to solve pain points in the payment process in a wide range of contexts. Fea-tured in Contagious issue 32.

www.barclaycardpayband.com

Digital Currencies / Bitcoin

As people grow more open to new ways of paying, we’re seeing a rise in the ubiquity and legitimacy of virtual currencies. One of the most prominent of these is Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer digital currency that has been called ‘potentially world-changing’ by emi-nent cryptographers.

Bitcoin is not overseen by any central banking authority; instead the network regulates transactions and issuances. This means it is highly anonymous, which has led to it becoming something of an unofficial currency of the underground economy. One Carnegie Mellon study estimates that $2m a month in Bitcoin drug sales take place on the online marketplace Silk Road.

Despite its dodgy heritage, Bitcoin seems slowly to be moving into the mainstream. WordPress, which powers the blog plat-form for the likes of the New York Times and CNN, has just started to accept Bitcoins and Reddit has suggested that it might begin transacting in Bitcoins for subscrip-tions to its premium Reddit Gold service. The appeal of Bitcoins for these platforms is that, unlike credit cards and PayPal, which

block payments from a number of countries, Bitcoin enables instant payments to anyone, from anywhere in the world.

Bitcoin may also become more estab-lished via a physical presence. In August the company announced it was working on a BitInstant Paycard: a prepaid debit card that would let users spend their Bitcoins at any store that accepts MasterCard. The debit card is yet to materialise, but with vir-tual currencies becoming a larger part of the payment landscape it seems unlikely to be long before such a card, be it linked to Bitcoins or not, exists.

bitcoin.orgwww.bitinstant.com

Google / Physical Wallet

As virtual currencies like Bitcoin look to gain a real-world presence it also appears that Google may be issuing a physical credit card. The Google Wallet card, which would

look and operate like other credit cards, would act as a complement to the Google Wallet mobile payment system.

News about the Google Wallet leaked in November and at the time of writing there are still few details available. The move can be seen, however, as Google trying to establish a stronger brand in the pay-ment space while NFC remains far from mainstream.

Last year the conversation around digital money focused on the ‘digital.’ However, as we move towards a more fluid approach to payment, the landscape is increasingly being characterised by a digital/physical blur. Just as we no longer think of ‘digital media’ and simply think of ‘media’, ‘digital money’ will eventually become just ‘money.’

www.google.com/wallet


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http://bitcoin.org

sMall but perfectly forMed / little brands, big thinkers

Although many established compa-nies strive to act like a startup, the only genuine way to experience this kind of nimble, rapid and adaptive way of working is to actually launch a new venture.

This section celebrates some of the great thinkers and agile disruptors that Contagious has featured this year.

One sector-agnostic trait that many of the companies below have employed is the subscription model, which relies on cutting friction from more mundane pur-chases, and providing a fantastic service at a great price point.


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Another important shift is that social responsi-bility is no longer just a bolt-on feature, but is becoming part of the fabric of some of the best new businesses. And people want to buy from companies that care. This year’s Edelman’s goodpurpose study of 8,000 consumers across 16 markets found that if price and quality is equal, social purpose is the most important factor determining people’s purchasing decisions.

Sir Richard’s /

US condom brand Sir Richard’s impressed us this year by exemplifying the Contagious mantra of ‘useful, relevant, entertaining’, combining chemical-free contraceptives with a social-impact mission, all brought to life through some great marketing. The brand’s Vagina Rules campaign, for example, featured an online film of women explaining what they wouldn’t put in their vaginas (‘Investment bankers, roadies, street performers...’) to highlight the product’s vegan-friendly and PETA-certified credentials.

The brand’s wider social mission takes the form of Sir Richard’s donating a condom to a developing country, such as Haiti, for every one bought. However, the process isn’t quite as functional as ‘buy one, give one’. The company worked with Haitian artists and musicians to create a stand-alone brand called KORE (a Hai-tian slang term roughly translating as ‘I have your back’) appropriate for that country. Speaking to Contagious earlier in the year, Sir Richard’s MD, Jim Moscou, told us how it allowed people to

‘use their product choice to create a positive impact on the world’.

The product went to market in 2010, securing distribution across the US in 2011. It subse-quently launched in the UK during October 2012 and aims to expand into mainland Europe and Russia in the near future. Contagious 33.

www.sirrichards.com

Hiut Denim /

The South Wales-based denim company, founded by David and Clare Hieatt, previously of clothing brand howies, started crafting its high-end, handmade jeans earlier this year, res-urrecting the denim industry in Cardigan, Wales. Every pair comes with a unique code known as a HistoryTag. This allows owners to follow the production of their jeans in the factory and then build up a presence for the jeans online, by tweeting or tagging images on Flickr and Ins-tagram with their code, adding their own experi-ences to the lifeline of the jeans. We all associate certain songs, scents and objects with significant life experiences and love how Hiut is enabling people to attach their own memories to a phys-ical product. Welcome to the internet of things. Contagious 31.

hiutdenim.co.uk

sbpf / little brands, big thinkers


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http://hiutdenim.co.uk

Who Gives A Crap /

One of the most remarkable projects arising from crowdfunding platform Indiegogo this year is Who Gives A Crap, a subscription-based toilet paper brand making a direct attempt to solve sanitation issues by donating 50% of its profits to help build waste facili-ties in the developing world. The company was first established in late 2010 by social entrepreneur Simon Griffiths, former Method designer Daniel Alexander and strategist Jehan Ratnatunga.

Who Gives A Crap has successfully proven that a commodity product like toilet paper does not need to be dull and fluffy, or without a grander sense of pur-pose. The company raised AU$66,548 (US$69,000) in just 50 hours in July 2012, partially thanks to Grif-fiths staging a ‘sit in’, live-streaming himself on the toilet until the company hit its funding goal.

The organisation is currently taking pre-orders from Australia and the US. Contagious 33.

whogivesacrap.org

Percolate /

How often have you been annoyed by bland and generic posts on a brand’s social media pages along the lines of ‘Like this funny cat video if you also like cats’? Branded content has been one of the most hotly discussed topics in ad land this year. Percolate, a New York startup founded by former Barbarian Group strategy director Noah Brier and former VP of pub-lishing at Federated Media James Gross, has devel-oped smart algorithms to help blue chip clients source brand-relevant content, from interesting studies to sector-specific news.

This then enables brands to use this content as the basis for their messages across social media, helping them navigate the potentially tricky waters in a more relevant and meaningful way. Percolate received $1.5m in funding late last year and secured another $9m, in November. We’re looking forward to seeing what Percolate will get up to next, given that 90% of respondents to a content marketing survey by Econ-sultancy (October 2012) said that branded content will become increasingly important over the next 12 months. Contagious 33.

percolate.com

Dollar Shave Club /

Dollar Shave Club burst onto the subscription ser-vices scene with a standout convenience service that skilfully does away with the hassle and cost of buying razors. Its witty launch video featuring charismatic co-founder and improv comic Michael Dubin clocked up more than seven million views while challenging the big players in the male grooming market (‘Do you like spending $20 a month on brand-name razors? Nine-teen go to Roger Federer.’).

After receiving initial funding of $1.1m in March this year, Dollar Shave Club secured an additional $9.8m in November. Given the monthly subscription options at $1, $6 or $9, this is a great vote of confidence for

the company and its founders Dubin and Mark Levine. Contagious 33.

www.dollarshaveclub.com

Raspberry Pi /

Raspberry Pi was cited as a ‘one to watch’ in the technology section of 2011’s Most Contagious report before its release. Since going on general sale in February, the credit-card sized computer has been stocked by major high street electronics retailers and is expected to sell more than one million units by Feb-ruary 2013. Founder Eben Upton’s Cambridge-based organisation aimed to address a decline in uptake of computer science classes in schools by developing a programmable mini computer that could easily be wiped and rebooted.

Since its launch the device has featured in hack days from Scotland to SXSW, rebooting maker culture. Raspberry Pi has been approached by hospitals and museums; developing countries are hoping to benefit from the device thanks to its low cost (between $25-35) and ease of use. The registered charity reports that some universities are providing their freshmen with a Raspberry Pi whilst even seven-year-olds are using it to program games themselves.

www.raspberrypi.org

sbpf / little brands, big thinkers


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http://whogivesacrap.org

http://percolate.com

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Most contagious awards / 2012

Winners /

Most Contagious Purpose / Safaricom / Daktari 1525Agency / Squad Digital, Nairobi www.safaricom.co.ke

Most Contagious Technology / Google / Project Glass plus.google.com/+projectglass/posts

Most Contagious Design / Heatherwick Studio / Olympic Cauldron www.heatherwick.com

Most Contagious Retail / Audi City Agencies / Razorfish, SapientNitro, Designit, RTT, Valtechmicrosites.audi.com/audi-city/en/index.html

Most Contagious Story of the Year / Red Bull Stratos / Mission to the Edge of SpaceRed Bull Media House, Riedel Communications, Wuppertal, Flightline Films, Las Vegas, 3G Communications, Glen Burnie www.redbullstratos.com

Small But Perfectly Formed (Company Award) / Raspberry Pi Foundationwww.raspberrypi.org

Nominations

Purpose / Renault MOBILIZ, Safaricom Daktari 1525, Tata Docomo BloodLine Club

Technology / Baxter (Rethink Robotics), Google Project Glass, Leap Motion, Nike FuelBand, Ouya (Boxer8)

Design / ABSOLUT Unique, Cooled Conservatories (Wilkinson Eyre), Disney D-Tech Me, Olympic Cauldron (Heatherwick Studio), Tesla S

Retail / Audi City, Magazine Você (Magazine Luiza), Topshop Unique, Neiman Marcus NM Service App

Small But Perfectly Formed / Dollar Shave Club, Hiut Denim, Raspberry Pi Foundation, Sir Richard’s, Percolate, Who Gives a Crap

The Most Contagious awards are bestowed by Contagious. The criteria are simple. They are awarded for ideas and innovations that the Contagious editorial team have judged to be the world’s most contagious ideas of the year in key business categories.


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Published by Contagious Communications

Writers / Lucy Aitken, Sheelin Conlon, Katrina Dodd, Emily Hare, Patrick Jeffries, Alex Jenkins, Arwa Mahdawi, Georgia Malden, Chloe Markowicz, Nick Parish, Gina Rembe, Will Sansom, Dan Southern, Ed White

Editors / Emily Hare, Paul Kemp-Robertson, Georgia Malden

Research/Production / Sian Bateman, Laura Parsons

Design / Dean Dorat, Smita Mistry

Design concept / Art direction / Garvin Hirt, FLOK Design, www.flokdesign.com

Contagious Communications is a leading global news and intelligence authority at the intersection of marketing and communications, consumer culture and technology.

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