blog till you drop!
A cocktail of advertising, social media, and technology
Valentine’s Day at Piccadilly Circus
Feb 12th
Last year, I had the opportunity to work on the relaunch the McDonald’s Piccadilly Circus sign through Social Media using Facebook, Flickr, Delicious, YouTube, whilst also engaging with a few London-based bloggers.
By standing on the pavement at Piccadilly Circus, you can have a unique and quirky picture taken right under the sign.
McDonald’s have just added some new executions bang on time for Valentine’s Day including a ‘I love you balloon’, ‘Be my Valentine’ and 12 red roses.
Why not pop down there at the WE to check them out? The ‘I’m loving’ it’ catch phrase fits quite well with the whole Valentine’s theme… Saying that you might end up getting dumped if you take your GF out for a meal at McDonald’s on V-Day 
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* Any other day is OK though
A year since Londoners danced; T-Mobile’s new advert
Jan 15th
2010 is already proving to be an interesting year in terms of Social Media; I clicked for the first time on a Facebook ad the other day, and I am now responding to a mass mail out from T-Mobile’s YouTube channel, which I subscribe to.
It’s exactly a year since Londoners danced at Liverpool Street station for T-Mobile. To celebrate this anniversary, T-Mobile have a special 3-minute commercial going on TV tonight on Channel 4 at 9.30pm, during Celebrity Big Brother.
The commercial features 1107 people from around the UK who joined Josh’s Band and recorded a song together.The song can be purchased from iTunes, Amazon and Play.
T-Mobile making an interesting use of the social media space, as Josh’s Band is both on Myspace (a really awesome Myspace page too!), Twitter and a (personal?) Facebook Group to help Josh’s Band hit the Top 40.
This is an excellent example of digital outreach with minimum effort and maximu impact.
I am very impressed indeed!
Relationship status – it’s complicated
Jan 7th
Here are a few questions I’d like you to answer…
- Have you ever ‘liked’ a Facebook advert?
- Have you ever clicked on a Facebook advert?
- Have you ever blogged about a Facebook advert?
If you’ve answered ‘no’ to these questions then we’re not dissimilar. Except, today I am blogging about a Facebook advert for the first time since this blog was created.
Facebook advertising effectiveness is arguable, but i did however manage to find a few Facebook advertising stats on Dan Calladine’s blog.
Blake Chandlee of Facebook EMEA Commercial Director points out that:
- CPMs [cost per thousand impressions] on Facebook’s home page are three or four times those of Yahoo’s
- On click-through, the engagement levels we’re getting are 10-15 times that. Not 10% more, 10-15 times Yahoo’s click-through rates
- 80% of Facebook’s Ad Space Units are driven through a self-service auction model; they sell 50bn of them a month in the UK
50bn ads sold each month in the UK!! Imagine how many ads you see when within a month just on Facebook. How many of these ads do you act upon? Hardly or never, as far as I am concerned.
Until yesterday when I saw this ad for Meryl Streep’s latest movie, It’s Complicated.
I thought the copy was spot on for Facebook (pretty funny if you ask me) and the fan page is very well managed with polls and a few extras such as behind the scene interviews.
This ad has made me want to see that movie and is a great example of successful Facebook advertising. They also managed to bag an extra 1000 fans since I screen-grabbed the advert yesterday… not bad.
La main la plus sexy du monde
Dec 21st
AKA the sexiest hand in the world, is a revamped commercial for Perrier, which originally aired on our screens in the 1970s and was censured for being too saucy.
The ‘new’ advert is generating a nice bit of buzz at the moment, combining both traditional advertising, and a digital campaign which includes a dedicated micro-site with video archives from the 1970s, a Facebook Fan Page, viral vids and a few other goodies including an upcoming ebay auction.