Virgin Active jumps on the Wimpy bandwagon
This week saw the fast food lovers in South Africa ablaze with Wimpy’s promotional offer of a free breakfast. The offer simply put was that Wimpy restaurants were offering their streaky bacon breakfasts for free between 7am and 8am on the 19th of January, 2012.
This however is not what I want to write about; I would rather like to talk about the stroke of guerrilla marketing mastery from Virgin Active.
Their offer broke on Twitter :
This tweet was sent out short ly after breakfast and encouraged non-Virgin Active clients the opportunity to take advantage of a free workout at any Virgin Active (bar Classic Clubs) and work off the extra calories they just took in with the free breakfast.
This is sheer brilliance because of the following :
- It cost Virgin Active NOTHING.
- When non-members go to a Virgin Active club, they need to sign in and give their phone and email details – thus making a FREE list to which Virgin Active can market.
- It piggy backed on a lot of FREE exposure that Wimpy had paved the way for. There was a lot of buzz about the free breakfast and Virgin Active slid in right on top of that.
The only criticism that I have is that Virgin Active could have used this opportunity far more than they did. The Virgin Active tweet went out on the 19th of January – the same day as the Wimpy special. Wimpy started making noise about their special a few days before the special and had a few media punting it. (This memeburn article highlights which media they used.)
I feel that Virgin Active ran their response as a quick fire way to jump on the bandwagon and failed to realise how powerful it could have been for them.
I would be really interested to hear from Virgin Active if they have any Online Mention tracking in place to see how far their tweet went and then further to that see how many receipts were handed in from the free Wimpy breakfast!
Car Magazine tries out Augmented Reality
In an incredibly welcome bold and adventurous move; Car Magazine have started experimenting with the concept of Augmented Reality! This is excellent news for consumers and even for the ailing offline media industry who have been hit considerably hard by the recent recession.
Even though their foray into augmented reality is a small one; it is the start that is going to set Car Magazine apart from the rest of the magazines that play in this space.
Recap on Augmented Reality
Augmented Reality is simply put; using the digital world to enhance the real world through the combination of the two. In other words you can use the camera on your smart phone or tablet; combined with specific augmented reality software to overlay an enhanced image of what you are looking at. So if you are looking at a car through your smart phone and your augmented reality software is geared to “read” the image; it can overlay additional information about the car such as engine size, kilo wattage, price etc.
How have Car Magazine done it?
Car Magazine have inlaid a reference image on the cover of their May edition of their magazine. This image when viewed through the Car Augmented Reality Webpage; with your computers web cam activated, will display a video. Once you have watched this video, you can close it. This will then allow you the opportunity to click on any of the other feature stories on the cover of the May Car Magazine.
The downside to all of this is that if you are not using 2x screens, you are going to have to juggle rather frustratingly between holding the magazine up to the camera and trying to see the screen. In fact, even if you are using 2x screens; let’s hope that you are ready to exercise some upper body strength as you need to keep the magazine up to the camera the entire time that you are trying to play with Car Magazine’s Augmented Reality.
What will this do for Car Magazine?
This will undoubtedly earn Car Magazine some “cool points” with their techno savvy readers and also push them ahead of the competition in terms of ensuring that they are giving their readers something new all the time.
Whether this will get them some additional long terms subscribers is yet to be seen; but seeing this level of integration between offline and online marketing is truly excellent news for their current subscribers and even better news for the greater marketing industry.
I look forward to seeing a lot more augmented reality features from a lot more offline media and cannot wait to see how they try to out do each other - which is inevitable!
Social Media in the South African Local Government Elections
By the looks of things; some South African political parties are finally waking up to the digital revolution and are beginning to embrace online marketing and its integration with offline media. From having a functional website, through to using social media like Twitter and Facebook – the times they are changing!
Of course as with everything; there needs to be a balance and there needs to be integration between everything that is being done offline and everything that is being done online. Added to this in politics is the fact that different parties are trying to attract different sections of the market so we cannot look at their marketing strategies and assume that they are both targeting the voting public. So let’s look at arguably 1 of biggest horses in the Local Government Elections, 2011: The Democratic Alliance and their entrenchment with new media.
Website.
The DA website has a decidedly Barack Obama feel to it; especially compared to when he was running his last electoral campaign.
The site is light and dynamic; it invites you to interact and most importantly it highlights the critical campaign messages of the DA :
- Donate to help the campaign
- stamp out corruption
- build the country together without discrimination.
Social Media.
Helen Zille has thrown herself into social media and opened herself and The DA up to the public. Allowing the public to interact, to ask questions and to most importantly voice their opinions. This social approach has definitely done the DA good as they have ensured that their campaign messages have been heard by a very important voting demographic : The Young South African!
These social media users are literally the future of the country and it is a very strategic and brilliant move; in my opinion; that The DA have realised that this is where the elections will be won or lost.
There are a number of DA Twitter profiles and personalities who are taking advantage of the media. There are Twitter profiles such as : DA News; DA_SA; votetowin and DA_parliament. Each of these profiles is pushing out information relevant to either the local elections; what impact the DA is having in government as well as general party news.
Engagement is the name of the game in politics and social media is the perfect medium to completely engage with an audience in a way which has very quickly become second nature to young South Africans.
From Facebook to Twitter and from Flickr to YouTube; the Democratic Alliance has ensured that they have not left any popular social media platform unattended.
Integration.
Online marketing and by extension social media are merely one channel of communication though and it is the integration between each of these channels which truly makes for a powerful campaign. once again the Democratic Alliance has echoed the last Obama campaign and has ensured that the offline voter has been catered for as well by using TV, radio, print and outdoor media to adequately enforce and repeat the major campaign messages.
Good luck to all the political parties on voting day! But most importantly; good luck to South Africa! Remember, you can’t moan, comment or pass judgement unless you do your part and vote!
IMCC : Integrated Marketing Communication Conference
The Integrated Marketing Communications Conference is coming to Johannesburg in June of this year (6 – 7 June, 2011). This is the second time the conference is being held and the first time it is coming to Johannesburg.
What’s it all about?
The general thrust of the IMCC is to get industry experts to share their knowledge around integrating marketing communication and why this is important. These top speakers will be sharing their thoughts and ideas of marketing for the upcoming years as well.
The speakers include : Heidi Brauer; Isis Nyong’o; Walter Pike and Ben Wagner as well as a few mystery speakers from international companies marketing departments.
The conference will not only have the run of the mill conference format (speakers present and the masses listen) there are also workshops and a keynote panel discussion.
The workshops are there to ensure that you delegates get the most out of the conference and up close exposure to marketing experts; ensuring that you can ask the pertinent questions and get expert answers.
I will be writing more on the IMCC 2011 as we get closer to the date; and I will also be live blogging from the conference itself.
To keep up to date on what is going on; you can follow me on Twitter
Advertising; Augmented Reality and the future!
I dove into the world of augmented reality today for the first time; and to tell you the truth I basically only just scratched the surface!
First, augmented reality refers to a display in which simulated imagery, graphics, or symbology is superimposed on a view of the surrounding environment.
Augmented reality really allows you to experience a literal new dimension to the world around you. This technology simply put allows the camera, gps and a layer of software on your device to function as one. It pulls all these resources together to work out exactly :
1. Where you are.
2. what you are looking at.
3. What information has been attributed to whatever you are looking at.
In the example image above the user of the phone is looking at buying a new house. They simply look at the houses in the area that are shown to be available and the software interface does the rest by flagging the pertinent info and showing the user the detail relevant to the house they are looking at.
Advertising alert!
This opens many millions of doors to advertisers both online and offline! Magazine adverts can have augmented reality features built in so that the adverts “come alive” when you move your phone or media consumption device (trying really hard not to say iPad – D’oh!) over the advert additional info can be displayed.
Billboard advertising can really begin to flourish and the “3D” advertising we have at the moment (thank you Eno’s 3D billboard) will soon be a thing of the past and look like amateurish outdoor advertising. With augmented reality, the billboards will again be able to live and move.
As dangerous as it sounds, image having the windscreen of your car acting as the platform on which these additional bits of info were displayed. No longer will you have to squint your eyes to see the tiny GPS screen; now your entire windscreen IS the gps (I should patent that if its not already taken!).
The reality (augmented or otherwise) is that every media device being launched at the moment already houses some augmented reality software and with developers launching AR (augmented reality) apps every day; the future is here already. The device houses that don’t keep up with this digital trend are going to lose market share and are going to find themselves scrambling to keep up.
Mixed Reality.
For the moment there is still mixed reality; the tiny little stepping stone that might get completely forgotten. It’s the bridge where you can still use your hand held device to look at an image and then translate that image into a online experience.
An example of this is the 2D barcode 
(if you are using a BlackBerry, you can use BeeTag which is available in App World). When you scan this image with your phone, BeeTag then reads this info and pushes you to the website destination.
When this becomes mainstream; as many people still don’t use this either as marketers or as consumers; augmented reality will be hot on its heels and ready to blow us all away from advertising to the way we experience the world in general!
