I'm Steven Verbruggen, Belgian new marketing / cross-media professional currently working at Nascom as an interactive strategy maven.
I bridge the gap between marketing and technology. On this personal blog I talk about trends, implementations, best practices, .. on this subject.
I read about Better Place in WIRED‘s September issue, and man this is great. It’s about a visionary called Shai Agassi, once considered SAP‘s new CEO who started a company with the mission to end oil! The way: end oil in transportation, and switch to an electricity powered alternative.
I usually don’t buy these world improvers, there’s mostly not much body in their ideas. Sometimes it’s just not well thought, not feasible or just assumes people to give up certain stuff (like comfort). I know one thing: people won’t change attitude and certainly not behavior if you take something away from them. So just don’t bother, if that’s the condition: start over. Being kind of a petrol head myself I know I’m not easily going to switch over to a car that’s less then that I’m used to. Sorry guys, gotta do better!
Well, Better Place IS better. The idea is feasible and well thought, there’s decisiveness, we’re not supposed to give up certain things .. it’s just good! The big problem of electronic cars is always the charging. What if you run out of power? How fast can you charge? Who’s paying? Better Place solves these problems by dividing the ownership of the car from the actual power source. You’ll lease the battery. Refill station are able to change the battery in 5 minutes (the time you lose by filling up gas as well) and you’ll get a subscription for recharging. What’s in there for you: You’ll pay 3 times less for the power then for the gas, and save the planet an incredible amount of CO2. And: the prototype is doing 0-60 faster then my current car. The car will stay the same anyway, apart from the power source.
Kudos! You can read the entire article here online (as we can expect from the words most innovative and simple best magazine)
A guy takes a picture of himself everyday for the last 17 (!) years.
Of course this isn’t new. We’ve seen this about 2 years ago when Noah K became an instant youTube hit (and internet phenomena) by posting his "everyday" that you see here below. Viewed over 10 million times, geee! 6 years worth of pictures.
So of course mister 17 years must’ve feel bad when he saw his idea being executed by someone else for only 6 years. Too bad, time to market, ..
I’m bloggin this because I just found out Noah’s everyday was mimiced in The Simpsons, and that’s just great! Here’s everyday staring Homer!
I especially found the last shot very amusing. Showing the youTube end screen were more video’s are suggested. It shows 2 videos: the everyday Homer video with a rather poor rating and only 4400 views. And a video of "Kitten smokes on toilet" with 5 stars out of 5 and a views number of over 63 million! Aaah you gotta love The Simpsons
I was wondering why Ryan Carson was dressed like like Willy Wonka on twitter the other day, and now I know. He IS Willy Wonka, handing out a golden ticket to all Carsonified events next year. Read abut it here.
To make me Charlie, i need your help. To qualify I need 25 comments on this blog post! So bring it on.
What an excellent marketing technique! It’s totally in place, right target group, right execution .. love it! It’s not cheap, it’s right.
The Carsonified events are probably better known under the name “Future of ..” like Future of Web Aps (FOWA), Future of Web Design (FOWD), Future of Mobile (FOW) .. see them all on the website.
As for me, I’m attending FOWA in London in a few weeks together with my buddy Stijn (who’s applying for Charlie as well). Some excellent speakers, including Mark Zuckerberg and Kevin Rose (!!!).
Some post for my Dutch speaking readers.
If you’re interested in interactive marketing digimedia isn’t probably a new site for you. Where other initiatives failed, digimedia succeeded the last couple of years to build an excellent platform reporting on the what’s going on in the mainly Belgian sphere.
The website is run by the best possible editor in chief for this job, the excellent Jean-Paul De Clerck. Having a trackrecord in interactive media and publishing, there’s no one better thinkable.
But something changed below the surface. Digimedia was a joint venture between JP’s content company i-Scoop and the Best of Publishing concern. Only recently BOP acquired the full share of the platform.
JP is still staying editor in chief (as a contractor) and I’m very pleased about this. In my believe digimedia is what it is because of him, so I hope he’ll stay for a while. I also hope he made a decent amount of money out of the deal, totally deserves it!
New constellation, new look and feel. I’m not completely pleased with the job Tagora did (some bugs, some things I myself would do different), but this really is the site with content first. As for me, I usually visit the site once a week, after the newsletter kicks in. Although generally reasonable informed, I learn something new every week!
Following my previous sticky notes post, I found some interesting additional information about 3M’s involvement in, well, let’s call it grassroot projects. Jaffe think they should be somewhere involved in the new EepyBird project: “anywhere on the continuum of tacit legal endorsement to backstage producers”
A found 2 interesting other cases.
The post-it car
Some guy decided to cover a Jaguar with Post-it’s, resulting in some very cool pics he posted to flickr.
3M found out and asked him if they could use it in an ad campaign (which is very cool). The creator was pleased but asked more information (and a budget) and 3M responded they wouldn’t pay more than it would cost to do it over again themselves (sic). And so they did, without further notice. Copying exactly the original set-up, using in their campaign, and basically faking it was the same car (CGC). Oh my! Read about it here.
Post-it building animations Claudio pointed out in the comments this very cool commercial of MTN.
Sure, this is already a commercial, but even then I hope 3M did something with it (I just don’t know).
Remember the Mentos and Coke fountains? This one is from the same guys.They made instant internet history, but from a marketing perspective it was interesting (and sad) to see how long it took before Mentos as well Coke jumped on the hype. If I’m correct Mentos was the first to act, and coke was very hesitant. But in the end they decided that it was wise to jump on the bandwagon after all. Wise decision indeed, the original clip is viewed over 7 million times to date. That’s 7 million + brand impressions.
The new clip takes sticky-notes to the limit. Yes, it says sticky-notes and not post-it as we all call the generic today (we all agree that’s the best position a brand can get, right). The clip is very recent, but even then I can’t believe Post-it isn’t there. Especially since the guys found a sponsor in OfficeMax, a supplier. I guess they must have contacted 3M (the company that manufactures Post-it) but they didn’t say the power of it and didn’t catch the bait (or were to slow). Of course this is just a guess, because there is a sponsor and it’s not Post-it. And this is sad! But way to go OfficeMax, and EepyBird of course!!
Remember the Big Word Project with that dude Paddy I met? I just bought another word .. well word, I bought tripple x’s: xxx indeed.
That’s because TBWP just opened up and let you add words that officially don’t exist in the dictionary. A shameless commercial act, only to make more money. I love it and admire the genius of it !! :p
At $1 per letter I thought xxx would be great value for money (Yes I know, this is a blunt purchase, but I do care a lot about my previous and real word: context)
This also means you can start buying names, company names and so on .. go for it!