Transforming Advertising - Campaigns that shape behaviours

Idris Mootee is one of my favourite bloggers who I have been following closely in the last 2 years. His thinking has been leading in innovation, reading future trends, and thoughts on business strategies. For me, he is refreshing and thought provoking.... like this post:

Transforming Advertising is the ability to shape behaviours - "(We) often use mass advertising to educate and shape social behavior. The results are often mixed and we all understand it is not easy to have a change in human (public) behavior."

Case in exampe:
In Latvia, the government briefed a local agency to develop a campaign against speeding and aggressive driving with the goal to in reduce the number of car accidents and casualties.


Current behaviour:
Target audience were those who consider the speeding part of their lifestyles and polices have a hard time chasing them down.

Insight:
Agency believed that the reason for speeding is very social, fast driving is considered to be cool among large groups of the society particularly male age 20-35. Trying to educate them is useless.

Breakthrough:
The agency thought of another social problem - shortage of organs needed. The idea is during the campaign aggressive drivers are asked to sign their organs to those who are waiting in line for a transplant by signing Organ Donors Certificate. Certificates were issued directly to aggressive drivers during raids by the Latvian road traffic police. So instead of getting a ticket which cost whatever $50, you will end up giving a liver away for driving above the speed limit!!



Results:
Not sure how they enforced that but it was effective. Number of victims dropped by 29%. You may not remember the ad, but you will always remember the day you signed your Organ Donors Certificate and devoted your organs to somebody else. Campaign raised as well the discussion of another social problem - the sortage of organ donors, Transplantation Center was very thankful and client had nothing against combined solution, since the main task was to save lives.

*Post is an edit from Indris Mootee post. Highly recommend to read if you can decipher his thoughts!

224 Days until the Baby arrives!

I've just came back from our first ultrasound and baby is due to arrive on the 11th of June 2009!

Baby is about 7 weeks in and we should find out the sex during our week 12 scan.

I still remembered how time flew when my first daughter came and thought a nice countdown clock will give me a reality check on how far off before Baby arrives.

So I had a look around and surprisingly, there are a lot of crap out there.  Crap design, blatant ads, no design flexibility, etc.

While I'm thinking of building a custom countdown clock, I thought it'd be pretty cool to build one for other important things in my life too:

Arielle's 18th Bday - 5082 days
Fifa 2010 World Cup - 588 Days
Transformers 2 - 239 Days

:) :) :)

Maradona is the new Argentina Boss... WTF?

A huge turnaround for the world's greatest football player (a term Pele probably disagrees)! He would have been among the most likely to OD list considering he was a use by date star that was obese drug addict hating the western world less than 5 or so years ago.

Now The Sun Football (a source for trusted football gossip :p), is reporting Maradona is now ironing the details before putting pen to paper.

I'd love to see him do well and wish him the best. It shouldn't be a hard job with one of Argentina among the world's best squad managed by Argentina's world's best player of all time. Most of the squad would consider him a living idol.

Maybe even teach them a trick or two!

Maradona Ball Skills - Funny home videos are a click away

"What do you wish for by the end of today?"

I came across this very intriguing project by Boom Design Group where they asked fifty people in New Orleans one question: "What do you wish for by the end of today?"

The project aptly named fiftypeopleonequestion.com.

They took to the streets of New Orleans and beautifully shot one on one interviews with random people. Here is the video:


Fifty People, One Question: New Orleans from Benjamin Reece on Vimeo.

I felt the video did brilliantly in capturing the moment where everyday people are so busy with what is happening now that they haven't paused to think what do they wish for by the end of today. A simple question that caused reflection. Some responses were selfish, most wished to be millionaires, some wished world peace, some just wished to be happy and some wished more sex!

But what was fantastic was the question was so much more inspiring that it spread globally and the community responded with what they wished for. There is a sense that we all have problems and wish for the better.

I wish I could be free from worries and enjoy life with my wife Grace and watch my children grow.

What do you wish for by the end of today?

Monday Nokia daylight savings madness!

Thanks to a Nokia glitch on Monday morning, I woke up 1 hour early, had a shower 1 hour early, ate breakfast 1 hour early, drove to work 1 hour early (wondering why there were no cars on the road), got to work 1 hour early, before realising Nokia decided it was daylight savings!

So 7:30am at work gave me plenty of time to catch up on my emails and some blog workout.

Twitrratr - twitter tracker

From what I hear, this little baby only took 58 hours to build. It allows users to track what people are saying on twitter but categorises by sentiment. So it allows marketers to track if people are saying positive or negative things about their Brands... albeit not 100% accurate, it gives a good indications. Don't trust a computer to do a human's job!

Check it out>>
http://twitrratr.com/

5 Creepiest Advertising Techniques

An old post from my old blog...... but i like it! :)

http://www.cracked.com/article_16434_5-creepiest-advertising-techniques-near-future.html

And how scarily true it is. The technology already exists and I'm already using some of them.

The question is: is this good or bad for the consumer?

Marketers see this as providing a better service for the consumer. I don't have to spam them with crap, non-relevant ads. I'm giving consumers a greater choice and respecting who they are.

On the flip side, consumers feels a strict invasion of their privacy. Scarily revealing targeting leaves everything open. Marketers know which bits I am replaying while watching on my TIVO.

A great example is the US judge which has ordered Google to reveal all log-on names and IP addresses of the tens of millions of people who have watched video clips on its YouTube website.

Consumers has a natural addiction to voyeuristic relationship with social sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, etc. Embracing the empowerment of the community ironically also empowers media owners with consumer behaviors data.

"Blogging is like going to the gym"

My colleague Tamir Berkman, wrote a post on the FRANk blog... and he mentioned an interesting thing..."blogging is like going to the gym".

At first, I just have to do it. Procrastinating it doesn't benefit me or the blog. So I have to find a time for it. And, when I do find the time for it, it's a drag. Excuses follow...

"What should I write about today?"
"There isn't anything interesting to write about today"
"I don't have time today."
"I haven't uploaded my photos yet."

But once we start posting habitually... once every 2 days. It starts becoming natural and feeling good. People notice a difference and start visiting your blog. They start commenting how good your blog is... which only encourages me to do more!

So right now... my blog is like the Biggest Loser

and I want to turn it into an Arnold Schwarzenegger!