The AMP Energy Rock Off! concert, the culmination of a rock band contest designed to engage consumers 18 to 25 with the beverage, was held on June 20, 2009 in Toronto and simultaneously streamed on Facebook – http://www.facebook.com/AMPenergycanada . The winning band – GSpot Boyz from York University  -was awarded $100,000.

OMD Canada planned and executed the media for the entire campaign, BBDO/Proximity developed the stand-out creative, and Eyeblaster was chosen to power the Facebook streaming for the finale.

Prior to the concert, the AMP Your Game National Gaming Tour travelled to 39 college and university campuses across Canada from February to April auditioning talented gamers in a national Rock Band 2^TM contest. At each campus, a winning band was declared and moved onto the semi-finals on the AMP ENERGY Canada Facebook page. Each performance video was posted for one week and the bands solicited votes for their video.

The campaign resulted in more than 15,600 Facebook fans for the brand, nearly 257,000 visits to its Facebook page, and more than 61,000 votes. The tour, which also included opportunities to play other video games and product sampling, generated over 151,000 AMP beverage trials.   And the average time spent viewing the stream during the event was 567 seconds (approx. 9½ minutes!).

The ability to do a live stream on a social site such as Facebook enables consumers to “attend” events they might otherwise miss, in an environment in which they’re comfortable, and obviously magnifies the reach of a sponsored event far beyond what has been possible in the past.

As part of our Favorite Brand Experience series, we’re pleased to bring you an interview with Tracy Ahern (Tray), Creative Director at ImagineThat

Your idea about the perfect working day?
The perfect working day to me would be to have a calendar free of meetings so that I could get back to being creative. With that being said, I’m extremely lucky to work with an amazing team at ImagineThat. I have the perfect balance of artistic talent and technical talent. Together, we are a force to be reckoned with!

What is your favorite brand experience?
The Snickers Get Some Nuts (Mr. T) was awesome. The creative and content is really well written (and hilarious) but also the technology was very cool. The data capturing done in-ad was really smart.

 

And of course, the recent expandables that WE just did for McDonald’s Big Mac. We synched up the “two all beef patties” chant music, taken from their TV commercial, with some great 3D graphics. The result was very cool and different. It got a LOT of play time.

Your muse best comes when? Â
Ironically, it mostly comes when I don’t need it the most. I find I get my best creative inspiration when I’m half asleep. Ideas and solutions really come to me at this time. I’ve learned to keep a pencil and paper close by so I don’t forget them or lose them when my logical, awake mind comes into play.

What needs to be changed/improved in order to achieve ultimate engagement with users?
Clients and creatives alike need to throw away the thinking of the past. The Internet (and online advertising) has changed. We can no longer force information down viewers’ throats or blanket them with a generic message. It’s all about creating a personal connection with the viewer – be it through targeted advertising or just engaging them in REAL dialogue. Users these days see right through contrived content and they are no afraid to say it (and post it all over their FB pages and Twitter feeds.)
 

How has the recession impacted business?
We’ve been pretty lucky (knock on wood.) Because we’re a small agency, we are able to create efficiencies and prove ROI much better than the big agencies these days. The pendulum always swings, though. My theory is to stay consistent, provide amazing, knock ‘em off their asses creative EVERY time, and get to know your clients’ BUSINESS, not just their brief. If you do all of these things, you’ll survive no matter what the economic climate.
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How did you start working in digital advertising?
I started in the advertising business about 18 years ago, before there WAS digital advertising. I’ve always been a tech nerd so when the industry started focusing on digital, I ate it up and shifted my career there as well. For me, it’s not ‘work’, it’s just who I am.

As part of our Favorite Brand Experience series, we’re pleased to bring you an interview with Burak Özyörük (nicknamed: il presidente) from OMD Digital in Turkey. 

Your idea about the perfect working day:   A perfect day always starts with a shower, if I don’t need to rush to the office, because I overslept as usual. If it is not raining or too cold, riding to the office by my motorcycle boosts my feeling of freedom.  At the office I’m usually busy with several  projects. If I can fulfill every one of them on time, that gives me a big sense of satisfaction at the end of the day. Plus if there is a good comment from some colleague or an appreciation from a client that completes my perfect work day.

Favorite Brand Experience:  My favorite ad on Eyeblaster was the new Renault Hatchback takeover ad. It was a fun process to create it. The concept of our client was ‘It’s time to change’. That road on the creative was symbolizing the lifetime, through which a person made certain decisions. Here the change in Renault reminds people how they gave up their decisions in time and how they change. ‘Remember when you said you’d never get a mobile’, ‘Remember when you said you’d never get a computer’, ‘Remember when you swore you’d never love anyone else’…  These sayings were used for the campaign to emphasize the concept.

That is why we decided to move the car through the road as a light ball and, at the end of the road, the new Renault Hatchback appears completely in its new look with a bright blast.

 

The reactions to this ad were so positive. People who saw the ad immediately said it was a beautiful piece of work. And as soon as it was published we started receiving compliments - even from other competing media and creative agencies - publishers and the clients.  Besides all these the returns of the ad in numbers were very successful. That showed us that not only experts but many other internet users liked the ad. This ad received the half of the click amount of the whole campaign which was 90.000 clicks in total.

Your muse best comes when:   It is always the best time to start a new creative if there is nothing else to deal with. I start to revise the campaign brief, visuals of the product and focus on what needed to be highlighted on the advertisement. My muse usually comes unconsciously, when I’m freely revising these documents and creating some tests for emerging ideas. On the other hand, the actual the quality of the creative comes from the brand or the products itself. If the concept is fun or something I’m already interested in, that makes me more enthusiastic to be more creative.

How did you start working in digital advertising/what was your ‘big break’?  Since I was a young boy, I was always interested in creating flash animations, web sites and the internet. Although I studied International Relations, I was always helping my friends with online projects at the Visual Communications department.   When I moved to Istanbul to settle down, a friend from that department asked me if I wanted to work with him. So I started working with him on digital marketing and he also instructed me a lot on the subject. Later I started working in the digital departments of media agencies, and now I’m here at OMD Digital.

“For the last ten years, the start of every year I have heard someone, somewhere say ‘this is the year for mobile’. It’s become a standing joke in our industry – from SMS to Wap – seems everything has tried and failed. Well, now it’s my turn – and at the risk of being laughed at, I am going to tell you ‘this is the year for mobile!’ This is why.

Currently 1 billon people in the world are online – that’s about a sixth of the world’s population. However 4 billion people – that’s two-thirds of the population – have a mobile phone. It reaches into some of the most remotest parts of our planet, areas where there is only a cyber-café or internet access and a TV between a street – even here mobile phones exist. No roads to dig up and put in wires, a fashion accessory that demands upgrade at least 3 times as often as your PC, we are talking one of the fastest growing and widest reaching technologies known to man. In Japan, all mobile phones are connected to online, in fact all mobile phones let you watch TV on the move – it’s just a matter of time before they are here. With iPhones and Google Android, we have seen the demand for mobile internet escalate to the point where 1MM new iPhones were sold within the first three days of release. That is some uptake. From mail to music to maps – and a myriad of applications, all interfacing into your favourite online services. This is just the start. Even personally speaking, I think at least 10% of my ‘online’ time now is done via my iPhone – my Twitter and Facebook updates die when my mobile battery runs out or I am out of range.

Mobile Internet is now quickly becoming a fact of life. Yep, looks like we are catching Japan up.

So what does that mean for advertisers? Several things; new reach to remote markets, enabling investigation and comparison of products whilst out shopping, grabbing content from posters via QR codes or even SMS interaction with TV programs – this is a device that is creating a personal link between all media and interactivity with brands without wires, as well as true personalization of content. But despite huge benefits of gaining new market share or motivating existing audiences, what is the real problem with mobile adoption?

Mobile advertising  is currently where internet was ten years ago, both in terms of revenue share and technology implementation. Each publisher runs its own system, but these do not share data fluidly with agencies. There is no creative interface. No unified planning, delivery, reporting… the practicalities of checking each creative per publisher or trafficking each one is one thing – and publishers soon learn its a headache they are not geared up for – but pulling data? The time taken by agencies to collate multiple sources is prohibitive in its own right, but also to de-duplicate sources and analyze is another, let alone compare it against web reach. All in all it’s preventing any kind of scalability for the medium desperately needed to promote agency adoption. This is what agency focused ad serving brought to bear prior to the turn of the millennium, and the fortuitous growth we have all enjoyed in the medium since is testament to that. Now as we are about to turn yet another decade, a new device needs the same boost. Digital already is getting far too complicated, with an agency split between social media on one direction, content creation for an advertiser on another and new interface platforms like mobile pulling them in yet another direction - any kind of simplification of this process is a welcome addition indeed.

What is needed is an agency focused mobile ad serving platform to mimic the way online works. It is only then that the headaches that have been seen within mobile to date have any chance of wiped away. There are benefits for publishers too, releasing the creating and data analysis pain points to the respective agencies to assist their focus on buying and targeting, whilst publishers can focus their attention on selling media and developing their offering. What is needed is a simple work flow solution that is easy to adopt and fits in with existing processes to set a solid foundation for the growth of mobile. Eyeblaster is currently testing such a solution with leading agencies.

One thing is for sure, it won’t take 10 years for mobile to reach the same point as the internet is now – and with quadruple the reach – expect an overtake in penetration even sooner than that. Yes this is year for mobile – and it’s very, very exciting!

Dean Donaldson, Director of Digital Experience Strategy

This article originally appeared here for DM EXCO.

In this webinar, Ross McNab discusses the challenges facing advertisers and the different video techniques that can be used to increase brand engagement.  Click here to begin the webinar or read the entertaining synopsis below.
 

It may have been easier to measure brand impact in the past when there were few media channels and people spent time together having meals together, waiting together for Dallas to come on and then sitting in front of a TV for hours – but this is not the eighties!

We grew up and two devices came along. First, Microwave Ovens. I was out with friends, I was saying ‘leave it in microwave.’ Mother was going crazy – we don’t sit together to eat anymore. This fuelled the fast food culture, eating on the fly…

Second Video recorders came along. ‘Can you video this and I’ll watch it when I get back?’  Now we weren’t sitting together watching TV anymore. And we were fast-forwarding the adverts.

So where are we now? Internet – instant this, instant that. Need information, fast. Search information, find information – even on the iPhone I can be sitting in a cab, and see an advert which prompts me to search immediately. I’m getting entertainment content all over. Or I’m downloading content on Apple TV, stripping out ads on Tivo, or watching TV shows on my iPhone - our TV viewing has become fragmented.

It’s a busy world and so much is fighting for our attention. We are in the instant digital world. It’s fast-paced learning. Time is now even more precious. Now in this fragmented world it is about grabbing a few moments of my time.

We have to learn to build brand moments.

I believe you can build brand in a digital world and here’s why. Branding is about changing perceptions. People learn by repetition and more so when linked to an emotional connection. Teachers don’t just talk or show videos, they get you to write things down, get you to talk about it in groups – they get you involved, which strikes deeper connections. That is what helps you remember.

Basic psychology suggests the more senses involved, the more you are likely to remember things. A picture says a thousand words; a moving picture with sounds says millions. That is why TV and video work – they develop stories that strike an emotional connections – linked to a person or event – and that is when the change starts to happen. Traditional media has two senses involved – TV: sight and sound. Print: sight and touch. Digital connects all three – sight, sound AND touch. And none has demonstrated ths more effectively than rich media.,,,

Ross McNab | Director of Business Development

Want to hear more?  Click here to view the full webinar.