Touching Pantene commercial

Got this from Kats Tan via Facebook. Amazing ad - love the lesson permeating through the ad, and how subtly Pantene appears in the commercial.



My 3 key take aways from this:
1. An ad that has a strong lesson to share, in a moving manner, will always fly virally.
2. Even if the brand is not mentioned explicitly, people will make the connection. (at least, some people will and explain to those who don't.)
3. On the story in the ad - Never give up your passion! Fight for it! Almost reminds me of my write up on grit.

Oh - the classical piece is Canon in D Major by Johann Pachelbel.

Krispy Kreme - Glaze your friends for a free doughnut

Krispy Kreme is offering free doughnuts + coffee in exchange for your personal info (to send you "communication" presumably in the future).

So how do you do that?

1. A friend emailed me to visit chocolatekarnival.com and claim my freebies.
2. Enter your data to claim your freebies. But that's Step 1 of 3.

3. Spray it out to your social network contacts, or put in your friends' email.

4. An email is sent to you which you can print and bring to the store.

More foot traffic going into the stores also means a higher chance of purchase apart from the freebies they will give away.

I'll try and get my donut and tell you what happened!

Facebook's "25 random things" is a "virus"

Having seen a number of 25 random things being written by my Facebook friends, reading this article was very relevant to me. Its main point is that the behavior of the 25 random things simulates that of a virus' growth, in fact it "was strikingly similar to a virus outbreak, including mutation and epidemic progression."

From the same article, Lauren Ancel, a biology professor at the U of Texas explains that "'25 Things' authors can be seen as 'contagious' under what’s known as a 'susceptible-infected-recovered' model for the spread of disease." and that "on average, each '25 Things' writer inspired 1.27 new notes."

I've actually thought about writing my own version of 25 random things as well. But I find no use for it, so I won't succumb to the virus.

If it employed a marketing message, then this is truly viral marketing.

Singkit na Pag-ibig: song for a Chinese-Filipino affair

Singkit na Pag-ibig (or Chinky-eyed Love) is a song created by some of my friends at De La Salle University, primarily as a birthday gift for my friend. This is for Filipino men who have fallen in love with Chinese women, and have encountered cultural obstacles. My friend is from La Salle of course, and it's common knowledge that there are many Chinese students in La Salle.

The first line of the song "Gua ai di" is Chinese for "I love you" to those who do not know.

I thought of putting this song up to be a little different for Christmas. :)

ABS purchases 5% stake in Multiply.com for $5M USD

ABS CBN announced last Nov 17 that they are purchasing a 5% stake in Multiply.com for $5 million dollars, valuing the entire company at 100 million dollars.

Multiply is a popular social networking site in the Philippines and according to Alexa, is the 6th most popular website in the country, next only to Yahoo, Friendster, Youtube, Google.com.ph and Google. Multiply has an estimated 3 million Filipino users.

From the official announcement over at http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/ ABS stated that Multiply and ABS complement each other.

"Multiply is a natural fit for ABS-CBN. It is the social network that is most consistent to our business model because they have focused on photo, video and blog features compared to the other social networks such as Friendster and Facebook, which focus on connecting friends and running applications. This puts together content and communities around the content, whether it is ABS-CBN-branded or user-generated," he told abs-cbnNEWS.com.

With regard to long term plans for the partnership, it will be monetized via advertising (which are happening now) and creating a mobile version of the site.

I think that Multiply.com is a viable medium for advertising for the Philippine market, but these brands should establish an emotional relationship with, and be of real value to, their consumers. (Compare to P&G's Ted McConnell's statement on Facebook, where he says P&G probably shouldn't advertise on Facebook.) If you know of one, let me know. Majority of commercial entities in Multiply are online stores, selling stuff like clothes and shoes.

Obama wins! (Marketer of the Year, beats John McCain, Apple)

Ad Age recently declared US Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama as the Marketer of the Year, beating giant Apple, online shoe seller Zappos.com, and even Republican nominee John McCain.

I've highlighted in my previous blog entry how efficient and pervasive Barack Obama's presence is on the net. Turns out that it wasn't just me who thought did an amazing job of building his own brand. I quote from Ad Age:

"I think he did a great job of going from a relative unknown to a household name to being a candidate for president," said Linda Clarizio, president of AOL's Platform A, the sponsor of the opening-night dinner attended by 750 where the votes were cast.
"I honestly look at [Obama's] campaign and I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers," said Angus Macaulay, VP-Rodale marketing solutions "To see what he's done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it's created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It's very easy for people to participate."
Jon Fine, marketing and media columnist for BusinessWeek, pointed to Mr. Obama's facility with engaging voters in social-media channels. "It's the fuckin' Web 2.0 thing," he said.

Seems like the only thing left for Obama is to win the election. :) It will not be easy for Obama though given the economic storm that's looming.

Lenovo's amazing Olympics web campaign

I came across a wonderful blog post by Lenovo VP of Global Web Marketing David Churbuck. (Yes, he blogs about his marketing executions and other thoughts). As many of you may know, Lenovo was a global partner of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. With this partnership in place, it is good sense to infuse the Olympics spirit in Lenovo's marketing. I believe that this particular execution counts as one of the best examples of social media marketing.

The big idea is simple, but let me use David's own words from his blog:
What [if] the main event were the athletes themselves? What if, using Google’s Blogger platform and YouTube capabilities, Lenovo could offer any athlete a way to share their Olympic experience with their fans, family, friends, even the world?

The background
The hackneyed strategy for Olympics sponsors, according to David, was to build an interactive program driven by a PR story or a raffle. However, for Lenovo, that was not enough: in fact, to David, it was a checklist item, not a strategy. As a "young brand seeking recognition as a global technology innovator on a global scale" David concluded that Lenovo needs more.

Note that the athletes mentioned here are not just the superstars like Michael Phelps or Shawn Johnson, but they focus more on the "normal" athlete - the no-named athlete to the media, the athlete who will not win a medal.

The execution - let me share the online components (of course, traditional media was there)
1. Equipping the athlete bloggers - To enable the athletes to blog, Lenovo gave away over 100 IdeaPad laptops and a video device. The qualification is that the athlete is passionate and a credible contender.

Chasnote reported,
Lenovo has created 100 athletes’ blogs in an attempt to align itself with some less mainstream sports, such as field hockey and modern pentathlon. It gave the athletes laptops and video cameras to chronicle their preparation for the games. We wanted to do something that shows our tech prowess, not something that uses the Web as billboard,’ said David Churbuck...

2. A microsite at http://2008.lenovo.com called the "Lenovo Olympic Podiumpowered by iGoogle gadget technology. It's basically an iGoogle page with content focused on the Olympics. As the official Lenovo blog stated,

The Podium is a highly customizable experience built on iGoogle gadget technology, where a user, once signed in, can change the appearance and layout of the page and add custom modules, or gadgets, or related content. Existing Google account holders will automatically sign in to the system The team has focused on the creation of gadgets that stream content dynamically from:

News sources

Olympic athlete bloggers – we’re recruiting more than 100 athletes to blog on our new IdeaPad line of notebooks

Map interfaces using mashups of Google Maps and the Olympic Torch Relay route and the Beijing Olympic venues

YouTube videos related to the Games

Picasa photos from the Games

3. A Facebook campaign that allows people to identify with their countries, check medal tallies, and read blogs of athletes. It's shown strong success: downloaded more than 200,000 times.
Facebook allows for a wide spectrum of branded activity. On one end, you can just go for simple banner ads that can reach many people (impressions) but will have very little interactivity. Or one can create a specialized application that has high engagement and equity but will only reach very few people. I feel Lenovo has done amazing in this aspect, managing to hit it somewhere in the middle, with high reach and also high engagement. From an equity standpoint, it showed Lenovo's tech prowess (they enabled the athletes to blog). Also, this campaign has generated a lot of buzz (this blog is an example! and months after the 8/8/08!)

I believe it is hard to outdo what Lenovo did, but this shows the potential of partnering with well-recognized activities.

Fab Facebook gadget

To my knowledge, no Philippine company so far has tapped social networks (Friendster, Facebook, Multiply, Myspace) and achieved monumental success. There are the banner ads but that's mainly it, nothing yet that has broken out of the mold the way Wario did on Youtube.

What could be the barriers preventing this? Cost? The fear of foraging into the unknown and backfiring world of social networks? These social networks' resellers in the Philippines?


This campaign by Fab done in Facebook is a welcome difference. Exploiting the assets and the recall caused by the wonderful girl-in-brother's-shirt commercial, they proceeded to make a Facebook app out of it.

I just wonder how they intend to use the information they gathered here... or was it purely for a fun consumer experience?

I've also seen Colgate do something in Facebook but those are primarily ads related to the Fresh Confidence video making contest.