Playgroup | Helping brands build genuine brand equity

I'd been meaning to shout about this site for a few weeks now but wanted to wait until I'd tested it out on my six month old baby. It's an example of brand utility at its best.

Plum are an organic baby food manufacturer and they seem to be working hard to develop real relationships with their customers. Plum Vision is their 'moving picture book'- a place where parents can watch short films with their babies.

This morning I scooped up my tot- Tess, and fired it up. The brightly coloured films flicked between farmyard animals, rotating objects, flashing coloured lights and gently inflating and deflating balloons. You can expand the experience full screen and follow the handy hints on ways to engage your baby with the imagery.

The response was immediate. Tess dropped the pen she was chewing and when the rooster on a bright blue background walked in she started squeaking in delight and wildly waving her arms.

By the time I had to head off to work I had bananas spinning infront of my eyes and was squeaking slightly too. Plum Vision is a wholesome sweet visual rush, perfect for parents who want to fill those difficult 20 minutes before a feed or nap.

At a time when everyone is talking about brand utility its good to see a smaller brand embracing the ethos in such a fresh way.

http://www.plum-vision.co.uk

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Now Obama has sealed the Democratic presidential nomination, it seems like the virtual battlefield was a key component to his success. Obama could be the first ever president of the social networks.

my.BarackObama.com has acted as his online HQ. The site is a brilliantly conceived social networking tool that has nurtured an unstoppable grass roots canvassing community.

To date the site has 500,000 accounts with visits peaking at 1.7 million in January. In comparison hillaryclinton.com only managed half in the same month.

Its success can be attributed to the variety of innovative social networking tools that allow supporters to find groups in their area, join or create their own, and rally supporters. To date over 30,000 visitors have created events through the site.

A 'Precinct captain training application' even enabled volunteers to manage and track their street level canvassing efforts- storing all community statistics in a central database.

With an online fan base this motivated and empowered its easy to see how the movement could be monetised into the killer punch. Half of the $265 million of funds came from online donations of $200 or less.

Comparing Republican presidential candidate John McCain's website to Obama's is a good visual representation of the different approaches between the two leaders.

johnmccain.com is exactly as you might imagine it- clunky looking and low on innovative features. Compared to Obamas well oiled social networking machine it looks tragically stuck in the world of Web 1.0. It will be interesting to see if the site overhauls its functionality in time for the big final push to the White House.

The Obama online campaign represents true mobilization of the masses- people power at its most effective. Soon web democracy may well be responsible for its first real world Democratic leader.

I wonder if similar social tools, in the hands of Cameron and Brown, can reactivate Britain's famously disengaged electorate?

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I've been playing with this pretty bonkers Java app called Firefly that allows you to see and chat to people on the same web page as you.

It's pretty flaky at the moment. The apps homepage is full of baffled messages from passers by which doesn't help much, but as a simple social tool I can see this being a great way to open up other channels of conversation within one environment.

Its a good example of how widgets and applications are changing the nature of how we interact within browsers. There's a great article on this and other next generation "post browser apps" on ReadWriteWeb .

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Six out of the top ten biggest sites on the web are now social. However behind the trailblazers is an increasing tail of debris. How should social media marketing be evaluated? The brains at Ryan Macmillan have come up with a new framework snappily pacaged up in a neat acronym: KUDOS.

The acronym stands for the attributes a piece of social media activity need to display to be successful:

Knowledgeable

Useful

Desirable

Open

Shareable

When you start applying it to real world social media campaigns its amazing how many fall short in a number of the categories- particularly 'Useful'.

Simple, sound principles.

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Just in case you hadn't gathered G.I.Jonny won a Webby last night, not just any old Webby but The Peoples Voice award.

The category was Rich Media Advertising- not for profit, and although the 'Try Drugs' campaign pipped us as the category winner, I'll take people power any day.

G.I.Jonny was created for the BBC to promote HIV and AIDS awareness amongst 16-24 year olds. The concept was based around creating your own action figure, arming it with the facts about HIV and sending it out to protect your mates. 

Congratulations Playmates, the BBC, and our friends at The Viral Factory. 

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Its so difficult to execute flash driven video concepts perfectly. Every now and then someone gets it right and it takes your breath away. Ikea have done it with this beautifully produced slo-mo microsite.

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The brilliant first episode of the new AMC series Mad Men aired last Sunday night, but are these dinosaurs of the ad industry still roaming the earth?

Set in a New York advertising agency in the sixties the recurrent themes seem to be smoking, boozing, sexism, and mass manipulation.

Secretaries are goosed indiscriminately, a client gets short shrift for being a woman, and the ad executives tip back the whisky before the big pitch. All vignettes from a distant era. Or are they?

Take away the pomade and the typewriters and the agency stereotypes still stick- they've just shape shifted a bit. Sexism in the workplace is still rife but less overt, drink has been replaced by powdered stimulants and oligarchic attitudes still pervade within the advertising industry.

As traditional ad agencies still scrabble to get to grips with digital and the democratisation of the consumer, Mad Men's retro styling actually looks like a thin veneer over the present.

http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/

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Here are some of my 'Googlescapes'. All the images are pilfered from Google image searches and lovingly assembled into distopian vistas. I start by searching for something quite mundane, however the imperfections of search throw up brilliantly unpredictable results sending me on wild tangents. The collages are a search driven stream of consciousness, and I never quite know where I'm going to end up. Each 'Googlescape' is named after the first search.

Barbecue

Playground

Wet and Wild

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