Jay-Z and Samsung have joined forces where one million Galaxy S III, Galaxy S4 and Galaxy Note II will get exclusive access and a free copy of Jay-Z’s new album three days before its scheduled release on July 4th. All these lucky users need to do is download a free app related to the album titled “Magna Carta Holy Grail” on June 24th, according to an article on today’s Mashable. com.
This pairing with Samsung was announced in a commercial during game five of the NBA Finals last evening. The Samsung commercial can be viewed on YouTube or on MagnaCartaHolyGrail.com. The three minute commercial shows Jay-Z speaking to the emotion that is rap music and collaborating on his album with Pharrell Williams, legendary rap producer Rick Rubin and other huge names in the music industry.
Jay-Z is beloved as a rap pioneer and, in our opinion, certainly doesn’t need any help promoting his music. This initiative shows, however, that social media is an integral part of marketing for any brand and that even huge names like Samsung or Jay-Z can benefit from the power of digital marketing.
If you can’t give your husband, father or granddad some Burberry clothes or accessories for Father’s Day, you can at least show your love with style with a digital kiss from the British luxury brand. The “Kisses” initiative allows Google Chrome and mobile phone users to send kisses through a desktop camera or touchscreen device which can be enhanced with a Burberry lipstick color of your choosing.
The “kiss” correspondence is then brought to life with 3D animation using Google Earth and Streetview tools. The digital card’s journey from sender to giver can be shown to the recipient. In addition, the Kisses.Burberry.com site will have an interactive map of each sent smooch and can show which cities are sending the most love.
The company is moving forward on its pledge announced last year to make all its marketing “mobile first” and that all of its physical activity is mobile connected, according to an article on MarketingWeek.com. As for this particular campaign, it’s just another example how brands can use social media creatively to enhance a company’s presence.
Apple introduced several new products yesterday at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco with a film short and an ad spot reminiscent of the years where Steve Jobs was at the helm of the company. The short titled “Intention” is a simple, yet extremely effective, piece of filmmaking restating Apple’s brand philosophy in a piece that is done in all black and white with a collection of dots. There is no audio to the piece, just visual imagery.
“If everyone is busy making everything, how can anyone perfect anything?” is displayed in the 90 second video.
An accompanying television spot is done in color where individuals in the piece seemingly delight in the Apple products shown: whether it be a class of Asian children enthusiastically learning on an iPad, a couple in love taking a picture with an iPhone or a woman swaying to music using an iPhone on a subway. The piece emphasizes how the company focuses on a few products but its products make individuals feel very good. Both this “Our Signature” television piece and the film short “Intention” end with the following words displayed on the screen of “Designed by Apple in California.”
If you are the type of person that loves anything free and are willing to give out your Facebook information to corporate America, Pepsi’s new social media initiative may be of interest to you. Pepsi has developed a vending machine that is not powered by money but by “liking” the company on your smartphone or on the machine itself. Once you’ve “liked” the brand, a sizeable sample of Pepsi is then distributed.
Right now there is only one machine that debuted at a Beyonce concert in Antwerp, Belgium. We are sure that as the popularity of the initiative spreads, such machines will be popping up at sporting and entertainment events around the globe. Check out the video below where the narrator explains that “thanks to this new way of sampling, we know exactly who liked, tried and enjoyed an ice-cold Pepsi.”
Is a free Pepsi worth your giving up of personal information? What happens if you choose to “unlike” the brand after drinking the soda? We’d love to hear your thoughts about this new social media branding experience.
All we have to say here is OMG! The company that took a nation by storm last year with their hilarious video for their razor subscription service has made a #2 (video, that is) with a pitch for One Wipe Charlies, a wet wipe that Dollar Shave Club’s CEO Michael Dubin calls “butt wipes.” Unless you are the most priggish and proper of sorts, you just can’t help but laugh from this video that starts with the CEO sitting on a toilet next to a telephone.
The toilet paper industry is two times more profitable than the razor and blade industry, according to an article on Ad Age. The toilet paper industry is a $8.4 billion business while razors/blades bring in $3.6 billion. Although wet wipes have always been popular for the cleaning of hands, it has been less popular marketed as a cleaner of bottoms. Yet, a recent Dollar Shave Club survey shows that 51 percent of men use wet wipes on a regular basis with 16 percent using them in lieu of toilet paper. Nevertheless, men tend to keep their use of the wet wipe private with almost one quarter of men hiding them in the bathroom while another quarter purchase them online. Thus the “push” to add this One Wipe Charlie product to its line of subscription-only shave butter, and three types of razors and blades.
If it’s a sitcom starring Robin Williams, you just know it’s going to be utter madness. The legendary funny man is starring in a new comedy television show on CBS with Sarah Michelle Gellar called “The Crazy Ones” and the pilot shows how the father/daughter advertising duo seeks to regain business lost from McDonald’s with potential remake of “You Deserve a Break Today” by Kelly Clarkson. What daughter Gellar, a self-described Type A personality, doesn’t realize is that Clarkson instead wants to do a sex song about meat for the Golden Arches.
The song in question contains the lyrics “it ain’t the meat, it’s the motion” and “secret sauce, drive thru lovin’, drive-drive thru lovin’, booty shake booty shake, you didn’t get me enough ketchup packets.”
The question one would likely ask is why McDonald’s would allow its brand to be used in such a questionable way and why CBS would check with first with the company to see if it would consent to the product placement. Anyone who watches AMC’s “Mad Men” remembers how British car company Jaguar was placed into a plot line where Jaguar would not hire Sterling Cooper Draper Price for its advertising needs unless a SCDP employee, Joan Harris, first slept with a Jaguar executive. Furthermore, one of the SCDP partners, Lane Price, tried and failed to kill himself inside a garaged Jaguar but the car wouldn’t start. Jaguar reportedly did not learn of the product placement on the series until after the episode was aired.
Ad Age posits that the reason CBS got permission from McDonald’s is because the restaurant chain spent over $72.5 million last year in advertising alone on the CBS network. McDonald’s did not seem to mind the free advertising in this instance. The “brand was portrayed in line with its values and commitment to its customers in a fun and interesting way,” said a McDonald’s representative to Ad Age.
Do you really think McDonald’s brand here was portrayed in a good light? Certainly the trailer makes one laugh, but does the phrase “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” really apply in this situation? Take a look at the video below and let us know your thoughts.
Domino’s Brazil and video rental stores in Sao Paolo and Rio de Janiero teamed up to launch an olofactory and visual experiment where the top 10 video rentals were coated with special thermal ink and scented varnish that caused a hot pizza smell upon use in a DVD player and turned the disc at the film’s end into an image of a baked pizza. The Domino’s cheese-scented DVD miniature pizzas upon completion of the movie have the words: “did you enjoy the movie? The next one will be even better with a hot and delicious Domino’s Pizza.”
Below is a YouTube video of the pizza scented DVDs at work. It is always great when we see companies using digital to promote their brands and Domino’s is definitely the big cheese when it comes to this innovative idea. The only potential glitch with this idea is the dying retail video rental business.
Now infamous for being the first restauranteurs “fired” by Kitchen Nightmares’ star Gordon Ramsey on last Friday’s episode for being unable to work with Amy and Samy Bouzaglo, the owners of Amy’s Baking Company are currently embroiled in a social media nightmare where the owners are claiming their Facebook page has been hacked.
Last week’s episode ended with Ramsey walking away from the restaurant owners and claiming he was unable to work with the Bouzaglos because they do not listen to criticism. The owners of Amy’s Baking Company admitted to firing 100 employees and were alleged to have stolen tip money. Since then, the couple reportedly took to social media to respond to critics. Instead of replying in a calm and collected fashion, the person who posted on Amy’s Facebook page responded to critics in an increasingly bizarre and somewhat abusive fashion, callling detractors “trash”, “pathetic” and that “G-d was on their (Amy and Samy’s) side with Samy calling his wife “a jewel in the desert.”
In an interesting twist, Amy’s owners are now claiming their social media sites were hacked with the following post on Facebook: “Obviously our Facebook, YELP, Twitter and Website have been hacked. We are working with the local authorities as well as the FBI computer crimes unit to ensure this does not happen again. We did not post those horrible things. Thank You Amy &Samy.” This may be possible. Highly doubtful, but you never know. Remember that Anthony Weiner claimed his Twitter account was hacked before fessing up that he did, in fact, send pictures of his crotch to a follower on social media.
Amy’s needs to rebuild its brand by apologizing to its customers for letting this debacle deflect from the real business of serving quality food to the public. They need to thank the customers that have stuck by them and the 50,000 plus Facebook fans that like them. Then they need to get off social media and not allow themselves to be baited by those who expect to see them explode. If they can’t do this, once the foot traffic of customers that will come into the restaurant to witness the madness subsides, the restaurant will be long for this world.
Our advice would be to make the big, public mea culpa and zip it. If budget permits, bringing in a dedicated and experienced public relations person to rebuild the brand would be a good move, too. So long as they don’t fire that person.
AT&T has hit a digital home run with the release of a Mother’s Day video that has a suit-clad gentleman asking kids in a classroom who gives the biggest hugs. The unanimous answer, of course, is that mommies give the best ones. After one girl says that her mom is a “really good snuggler”, another piping in that her mom “hugs her really tight” and an adorable little boy demonstrating his mother’s hugs with accompanying noise effects, the ad ends with “it’s not complicated, Happy Mother’s Day to the best mom ever.”
The video is part of a series of BBDO’s “It’s Not Complicated” campaign for the phone company, according to an article on Ad Age.
You can personalize the card to your own mom at the link below and at the end of the video. The clip will be up through Mother’s Day in case you want to add a digital component to your card giving this year or you just plain forgot to get out to the store in time to mail one. You can send this digital card to mom through social media including Facebook or via email.
JCPenney is looking to reconnect with its customers in the wake of a 25 percent sales slump last year and the recent replacement of CEO Ron Johnson after leading the company for a mere 17 months. To that end, it has released a very public mea culpa utilizing traditional and social media outlets admitting mistakes and asking customers to return to the brand.
As part of the campaign to win back the hearts and minds of the American consumer, it has released an advertisement on television, Facebook and YouTube. “We heard you-now we’d love to see you,” says the female narrator. The Facebook campaign titled “We Are Listening” garnered almost 57,000 likes in just six days and approximately 3,700 Facebook users shared the video with other users of the social media platform.
JCPenney also took to Twitter with the hashtag #jcplistens. Star Jones, former co-host of The View, tweeted her support of the campaign and praised the company’s fashions as good for working women. Jones, branding guru Donny Deutsch and Padma Lakshmi all gave positive feedback about the new apology campaign during NBC’s Today Show.
Everybody likes a good comeback. It would be nice to see one happen for this iconic, yet affordable, American company that first opened its doors in Wyoming in 1902. With over 1,100 stores now in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, many livelihoods are depending on a rebound.
