Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Coffee Break, Cool & Online | Tags: clubman, fun, mini, my other car is a batmobile, viral
new mini clubman - check out the viral
New viral launches for Mini which is a parody of all things viral. It’s small and fun but well worth a look – just like Mini!
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Cool & Online | Tags: ABDC, America's Best Dance Crew, dance, footwear, hip-hop, I used to do the caterpillar, microsite, Nike, Root agency, sneakers, street, trainers, troupe
homepage of troupe website
If you are loving the dance revival (America’s Best Dance Crew anyone?) right now and the high style footwear of urban/ street hip-hop vibe then here’s a site that you can spend some time drooling on. Troupe Battle is a website that celebrates a shoe designed for Hip-Hop.
pick your style screen
You can decide the role you want to play in the site. If you feel shy you can just judge the shoes, or if you dare, you can submit your own Troupe.
Check out the website here
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, News | Tags: amazon, Blockbuster, CEX, Ebay, exchange, game, good idea, HMV, mail order, PS3, sell, spingwise, swap, video games, Wii, XBox
amazon trade-in grab
In these budget-minded times, companies aplenty have begun offering cash or trade-ins in exchange for unwanted electronics, gift cards and gold. Now, from none other than Amazon, comes a program to offer gift cards in exchange for second-hand video games.
To be eligible, games must be in good condition and include the original manual, cover art and case. Amazon’s Video Game Trade-In site lists a wide variety of games it will accept, along with their trade-in values. For Wii, for example, “Marvel Ultimate Alliance” is valued at USD 6, “Winter Sports the Ultimate Challenge” brings in USD 6.50 and “Super Paper Mario” is valued at USD 15.50. On Xbox 360, on the other hand, “Call of Duty: World at War” brings in USD 24.25. For shipments valued at USD 10 or more, Amazon even gives consumers a way to ship them for free. Upon receipt, Amazon deposits an Amazon.com Gift Card into the consumer’s account. The games, meanwhile, are ultimately purchased by a third-party merchant. While trade-in prices might not be as high as a seller can get on eBay, there’s no denying that Amazon’s service is the more convenient option.
Until economic conditions begin to improve, consumers will continue to seek out recession-busting strategies to make their hard-won dollars, euros and yen go further. Help them do that, and you just may be able to do some recession-busting yourself! 
Interesting to see how this impacts ebay and the other high street retailers like Game, HMV, Blockbuster and CEX.
RB @Springwise
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Coffee Break, Hot List Clients, Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth, research | Tags: Aquafresh, coffee, Costa, I like mine black, Jeremy Caplin, Marketing magazine, media360, milk and 2 sugars, mystarbucksidea, niche networks, NPD, Pringles, social networks, Starbucks, Via ready brew
Starbucks logo
Interesting article in Marketing that talks about the slagging match brewing (pun intended) in the coffee world with Costa making the most of a Starbucks spillage (less effective pun also intended). Whilst the recession has stalled maturity in the coffee market, leaders still point to YOY growth of 2% upwards.
You can read the whole article by clicking here
Marketing coffee wars article
But the really interesting part is at the end by Jeremy Caplin (an interesting chap I met a few years back at Media360) who adds “The out-of-home experience of visiting a coffee shop is transferring in-home”. He cites the rise of brands like Nespresso and Tassimo, whilst the article talks of Starbucks new instant Via Ready Brew. For the brand owners, this makes digital the next frontier to enhance the ‘home coffee shop’ experience. It’s important that the brands do all they can to extend the experience online, to provide an additional point of difference or value add. Coffee shops offer a level of social engagement that is hard to repeat at home but at least online can help bridge that experiential gap and offer a worthwhile alternative. One solution could be a niche social network. This is something that Neoco has delivered for several clients with very impressive results – particularly for developing brand loyalty and understanding consumer motivational factors. Another could be actively engaging the audience in NPD – which Neoco also have a welath of successful examples with brands such as Aquafresh, Pringles, and many more.
Filed under: Coffee Break, News, Our team | Tags: Account Manager, Adidas, bucking the trend, economic downturn, employment, football, growing, hiring, jody minton, neoco, new, Nissan, Playstation, soccer, Spurs, staff, stream, TBWA, team, Tequila, tottenham, what's going down in Chinatown?
Jody Minton is having the time of his life!
Neoco are really happy to announce a period of recruitment in this time of global economic downturn – we like to buck the trend! Jody Minton is new to our Account team and comes with a prestigous agency background including Stream\TBWA & Tequila, working on large pan-Euro projects with clients including Adidas, Nissan, Playstation, Masterfoods and more. Jody is really into football and also supports the Spuds… I mean Spurs.
Without further ado, I’ll hand over to the man himself:
“So, how did I end up at Neoco? Well, it’s all about what you want from your next big move I think.
You want to feel excited about work, you want to feel like you’ve got a new challenge, and a big one at that.
You want to feel like you can really add something to the process – and make things happen.
Neoco represents that for me. Cool place, cool work, cool clients and cool team. That doesn’t happen very often.
I don’t need to tell everyone that digital has been the biggest growth area of our industry (advertising and marketing) in the last decade and the steamroller’s not stopping… but I do need to tell you I want to be a key part of it. We’re still scaring the hell out of the big ad boys (and girls), while they scrabble around with a 30sec TVC, we’re creating social media apps and mashups!
It’s clear the agency wants to drive forward and challenge things, meaning I’ve been gifted a unique opportunity to influence the future here – and I’m lucky enough to find that bundled up with fun people, in a fun environment.
And that, doesn’t happen very often either.”
Thanks to Jody, we already have an assortment of cool/ cheesey phrases bounding around the office, including:
“What’s going down in Chinatown?” and my personal fave “This is Soho, not Guantanemo!”
Looks like I’ll have to watch my back on this one as Jody is definitely going places. Welcome to the team.
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Cool & Online, Hot List Clients | Tags: advert, animation, children, coke, creatures, cynical, download, I'm a Pepsi man myself, iPhone, picnic, storytelling, superbowl, trans-media, version
Readers of the Neoco blog will know we have a lot of time for what Coke have been doing over the last few years – covered pretty well in a previous post about trans-media story telling. Well here they come again with a take on Coke-time at the park. While it’s hard for us in Blighty (England) to fully identify with (today’s weather is mostly cloudy and 50F) it is very easy to engage with.
Coke are fast creating a sense of animation that is there ‘own’ and this style can become as instantly identifiable as other elements of their brand. Unfortunately, I can only find a pretty poor YouTube version of the SuperBowl advert.
I have a got a high res version at Neoco which I’ve converted to an iPhone friendly mp4 for . Click here if you want to download this version – it’s well worth it.
As in the previous post regarding Coke though, the direction remains extremely child friendly and something cynical inside me still can’t help but feel this is a resourceful way to get around the whole ‘marketing high sugar/ fat products to children’ issue.
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, Cool & Online, Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth | Tags: adverblog, build world, but is is second life?, comcast, comcast town, cool, dream big, fun, god, goodby silverstein and partners, habbo hotel, nexus productions, sim, triple play
I think one of the brands that uses interactive in a really wise way lately is Comcast. The awareness they’ve gotten since their 2005 fantastic Comcastic (not online anymore?) and other pieces like Tripleslanguage has made the brand being known even in places where Comcast services are not available, so i’m always kind of expectant what they will be releasing next.
Comcast world
These days, and again done by Goodby Silverstein and Partners, working together with Nexus Productions, there is a new campaign called Dream Big. Presenting a fantastic website using a look-alike of isometric view Sims-style games, you can join the so-called Comcast Town, choose a neighborhood and then build your own space, using the capabilities of the Triple Play feature (tv, phone, internet) and inserting the product in a really smart way inside the experience.
Comcast empty
Also i liked very much the way in which user interacts with others in the website and also through social networks like Facebook making a good use of Facebook Connect to get users logged onto the site, and doing it in a way that really makes it not so disruptive as i once wrote.
I won’t extend very much, just visit the site and discover it because it’s worth a good time spent on it. I found that there’s also some TV commercials:
*Credit to Adverblog for blog content
Filed under: Coffee Break, Industry news, Ping.fm update by Neoco, Technology | Tags: BBC, big brother, consumer rights, hollywood, kazaa, limewire, peer-to-peer, piracy, pirate bay, tv
Pirate Bay logo
Prosecutors in the trial against the four men who run the file-sharing site The Pirate Bay have called for a one-year prison sentence to be imposed.
Frederik Neij, Carl Lundstom, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Warg are accused of promoting copyright infringement.
The Pirate Bay hosts thousands of links to so-called torrent files, which allow for movies, TV programmes and applications to be shared online.
No copyright material is stored directly on The Pirate Bay servers.
“I believe that the correct punishment should be one year in prison and that is what I am requesting that the district court hand down in this case,” prosecutor Haakan Roswall told the court.
The four men, who deny the charge, have been charged with earning at least 1.2m kroner (104,000 euros) by facilitating copyright infringement.
The film, music and video games industries are seeking about 117m kronor (10.1m euros) in damages and interest for losses incurred from tens of millions of illegal downloads facilitated by the site.
Prosecutors will sum up in the case later on Monday, while the defence is scheduled to give its closing arguments on Tuesday. A decision in the case is expected to take a few more weeks.
Filed under: Cool & Online, New Technology, Ping.fm update by Neoco, Social Networking/ Word Of Mouth | Tags: Twitter, content, Mashable, Triond, bloggers, monetize, monetise, I hate using Z's for the Yank audience, Writinghood, PurpleSlinky, Computersight, Cinemaroll
triond-logo
Bloggers are always in search of ways to monetize their content. A lot of us blog for love of the art form, but many of us would also love to be able to figure out how to get a return on our time investment.
Although content is king, making money requires a wide readership and targeted ads or sponsors. Now you can turn to Triond to do everything but the content creation for you. So, even if you’re gainfully employed, and especially if you’re not, Triond’s new publisher and content creator network could be the answer to your blogging for cash prayers.
Triond is a simple to use and straightforward site that gives all content creators the ability to earn ad revenue for their work. Creative types write or create original articles, photos, videos, and audio clips and post them to Triond. Triond then distributes the content through their network of niche publishers, and content creators earn 50% of ad revenue generated — paid monthly via Paypal, check, or Western Union.
Triond’s publisher network includes a variety of sites on all topics and subject matters like Writinghood, PurpleSlinky, Computersight, and Cinemaroll.
Triond also includes ways to connect with other creative types using the site, track statistics for your articles, and get an earnings overview. Plus, you can use your profile page as a portfolio, install a Firefox toolbar, and add your Twitter login credentials to have Triond auto-tweet on your behalf with links to published pieces.
Even though we’re not advocating that you chuck your own blog, we do think Triond offers bloggers and all content creators an interesting avenue to explore when it comes to monetizing their work. Definitely check it out for yourself and let us know what you think in the comments.
(pulled from and all creds to Mashable)
Filed under: Brands & Marketing, News, Ping.fm update by Neoco | Tags: barack obama, blue state digital, campaign, communication workers union, De Post La Poste, DHL, digital marketing, election, labour party, lord mandelson, my post is always late anyway, privatisation, Royal Mail, TNT
Barack Obama and his support
The digital agency behind Barak Obama’s online election campaign, Blue State Digital, has been appointed by the Communication Workers Union to help it in the fight against the privatisation of Royal Mail.
Blue State Digital is developing campaign elements that it hopes will help persuade the government to reverse its plans to partially privatise the public company.
A spokesman for the CWU confirmed that the agency have been tasked to use tools that will “drive the protest message quickly and effectively”.
The agency, which is hoping to woo the Labour Party and win its digital business, will be running online petitions and developing a social networking strategy.
The CWU is also looking to build its email database.
Blue State Digital’s appointment comes as another player enters the bid to buy a 30% stake in the beleaguered publicly owned postal company.
De Post La Poste, a Belgian private equity backed postal group, will now make a bid alongside buyout firm CVC Capital Partners.
Dutch postal company TNT and DHL, a subsidiary of Deutsche Post, are also in the running for the 30 per cent share.
The government’s plans, which are being overseen by business secretary Lord Mandelson, to sell the stake off to the private sector have been met with heavy criticism.
Workers, trade unions as many as 100 Labour backbenchers have all condemned the move.
Yesterday, in an interview with The Observer, business secretary Lord Mandelson accused the CWU of using “scare tactics” that could cost workers their pensions and their jobs. Mandelson said that the strength of opposition will not prompt the government to back-track on its sell-off plans.
Hmm. I wonder if we should push the Buy British angle and encourage them to get their digital marketing through Neoco?
(creds to Brand Republic)
