Being Blonde

Here’s a wonderfully simple idea that I’m liking a lot. It’s called brand tags and it has already generated a fair degree of buzz. I notice, for instance, that over 1800 people have already bookmarked it on Delicious.

The project is the brainchild of Noah Brier, who is head of planning and strategy at Barbarian Group.

It describes itself as a “collective experiment in brand perception”. And the mechanic is simplicity itself. The site serves up a logo and you have to enter the single word or short phrase that pops into your head. It then serves up another. And so on. You can view collective spontaneous associations of all users in the form of a tag cloud, wherein the size of each word is in direct proportion to the frequency with which it has been associated with the brand. Well over 1 million tags have been entered thus far.

Here are a few snapshots of the tag cloud for Coca Cola, which show what a multi-faceted and mildy polarising brand it is.

There is also a UK specific version, although it’s clearly had much less traffic than the American original. Anyway I’ve asked for IRN-BRU to be added, which will be the basis of an interesting comparison with the above. Watch this space.

Moo news isn’t exactly new news, but I thought I’d mention them in despatches.

Moo’s slogan is “We love to print”. And they print some dinky things including all sorts of cool and useful cards. I just had some MiniCards made for a friend. We’ve also been using these as Blonde business cards whilst waiting to confirm our long term address.

What I really like about Moo isn’t just the nice printing ideas, it’s the nice touches that go with them.

My order is confirmed by “Little Moo” the print robot. Although Little Moo has a wonderfully personal tone of voice it reminds me that it’s “just a piece of software” and tells me how to speak to real people if I need to.

As well as the MiniCards I also ordered a little card holder to keep them neat inside a wallet or bag. Rather than just being boxed up with the cards, the holder comes with a “Yay!” sticker on it. As if Moo is sharing the little bit of excitement that greets the safe arrival of any online purchase.

Inside the card holder is a nice surprise in the guise of a “surprise!” card that tells me how glad they are that I’m taking such good care of my new cards.

And there’s more! Underneath the surprise card there’s a “hi!” card (they definitely do love to print). This one gives me, or someone I might feel inclined to introduce to Moo (which I clearly am), 20% off a first Minicard order.

There are plenty of brands in the post-Innocent era that are trying oh so very hard to capture that “there’s just the three of us having loads of fun doing business from John’s garage” feeling. Moo isn’t one of them. It has got the feeling but it doesn’t seem to be an effort.

Good luck to them.

During the Festival there was a busker whose picture I now wish I’d taken. He had taken a position at the corner of South Bridge and the High Street, and this isn’t him.

Rather than belting out the usual medley of Bob Dylan and Lou Reed greatest hits, this guy was making up songs on the spot about the people walking by. Songs with pithy titles like “The Girl In The Red Jumper (Crossing The Road With A Gap Bag In Her Hand)”.

Unfortunately I can’t remember any lyrics. But I do remember that he was enjoying  a lot of attention. Certainly from the girl in the red jumper. But also from everyone else in the vicinity, either because they were enjoying the voyeuristic experience of seeing how the girl in red responded to the attention, or because they were wondering whether they would be next. Either way this busker seemed to be doing better than most.

The episode reminded me of when a busking duo got onto a tube train at Hammersmith, heading for Heathrow.

Like our friend in Edinburgh these guys avoided the temptation to treat us to Now That’s What I call Busking 26.

Instead they performed a self-written protest song targeted at BAA, which bemoaned the difficulties faced by itinerant self-employed musicians when trying to make their ablutions in airport facilities. It was called “If You Can’t Have A Shave In A Toilet, Where Can You Have A Shave?”

By tailoring their content to their context and making it personal to the audience in the carriage, they too were doing rather better than your average busker.

In our game too, personalisation or the ability of users to personalise content themselves repeatedly delivers the goods when it comes to engagement. Witness our Coincidence campaign for Grolsch.

The Sun, The Star, Scotland on Sunday, The Daily Record and The Daily Express all picked up on the Ads That Never Ran section of the IRN-BRU site over the last few days. This led to a record day on Monday in terms of unique visits, time on site (over 5 minutes) and page views for the Ads That Never Ran section.

Hats off to Burt Greener for the coverage.

I beg your pardon?

These are the names of a few of the IRN-BRU ads that can be found in the Favourite Ads section of the new IRN-BRU website.

To say that IRN-BRU is a content rich brand via its advertising heritage is a bit of an understatement. But as if a mini-archive of ads that did run wasn’t enough, we’ve also included a section of ads that didn’t.

This section is the subject of a separate post, but suffice to say here that it has enabled to tap into an even richer seam of content, based on the fact that the ads that did run are just the tip of a creative iceberg going back over more than a decade.

Here’s a more comprehensive list of ads from the two sections…

Bitches, Suck, Dick, Laid, Ass, Snog, Mad Ferret, Hard Core Prawn, Nookie .

I challenge you not to…

A couple of hours getting very dusty in a spooky storage facility in Granton turned out to be time extremely well spent. We were raiding the archives for IRN-BRU poster concepts that, for one reason or another, failed to see the light of day. This is going back to 1994, so there was potentially a lot of stuff.

Some of the old files were missing or in the wrong place, but we came back with nearly 70 pieces of paper ranging from hand-rendered scamps to fully worked up presentation visuals.

Some of the concepts are recognisable as coming from the same stable as ads that have graced the bill boards of Scotland over the last decade or so. But some are the basis of entirely original campaigns that have never been in he public domain before. Until now that is.

The new IRN-BRU website features an Ads That Never Ran section, and we’ve launched with a selection of 12 concepts. More will be rolled out over time. Here are a couple of examples to whet the appetite.

We’ve just launched the all new IRN-BRU brand website. The launch coincides with that of the new “IF” TV commercial, which, not surprisingly, features prominently on the site.

But there’s a lot more to it than that.

There is other advertising based content, housed in two sections named Favourite Ads (ads that did run) and Ads That Never Ran (ads that didn’t - in case that isn’t clear from the title). These sections will be the subject of separate posts.

From a digital strategy point of view the most interesting section is one that we’ve called the Community Centre. The idea behind this is to give a platform to the healthy number of consumer fan clubs and IRN-BRU communities that exist in social media. They are doing a good job of spreading the word about the brand. Now, via the Community Centre, the brand can return the favour by spreading the word about them.

Fan club and brand group administrators can upload details of what they stand for, a link to their site or page and a representative visual. The result is the digital equivalent of a customer ad display in a newsagent window.

We’ve also provided access to a range of visual assets that can be downloaded and used on these sites.

So, rather than jumping in feet first and setting up official brand spaces on the likes of Bebo, Facebook and Myspace, we’re hoping to help grow the membership of unofficial communities. These have more credibility and tend to express their pro-brand views in forthright ways that would make even a brand like IRN-BRU blush.

As well as there being a lot of active IRN-BRU communities out there, there is plenty of IRN-BRU news and chat, not to mention a good smattering of colourful interesting blog posts. Via a Google News feed we’re pulling this news into the site. It’s a good way to introduce dynamic content on a daily basis, and it confirms the impression of IRN-BRU as a talked about, happening brand. The vast majority of comment is positive.

Watch this space for news on results.

I spent two days at Turnberry last week for the annual A G Barr management conference. This covered a review of the past twelve months and plans for the year ahead. It’s a good opportunity to catch up with what’s happening on brands other than IRN-BRU and Strathmore and to mingle with Barr people from beyond the marketing department.

This year the conference also included interesting presentations from Sir Matthew Pinsent on winning (something he’s done a lot of in his time) and The Prince’s Trust as well as after dinner entertainment by The Proclaimers - un-be-liev-able.

New content on IRN-BRU’s SFL sponsorship site.

A discussion forum with three sections. The first is an open forum wherein the fans can set the agenda. The second features an enigmatic character called The Gaffer. He’s a professional writer with the inside track on the live SFL issues of the day. He’s our official “firestarter” and, by protecting his identity, we’re looking to generate some Top Gear, Stig style mystery around him.

Finally we have a section of match reports. The reports are written by amateur writers who are dedicated home and away fans of SFL clubs. We’re looking to have a reporter for each club so that we can spark some comment and debate based on two alternative views of each game. The forum only went live a couple of days ago and we have high hopes.

An interesting point of view from our friends at Face Group the other week. How likely is it, they ask, that someone who knows enough to inform opinions about the latest mobile phones will also be out there informing opinions about mortgage interest rates or hand cream? Answer - not very. There is a definite tendency to talk about opinion formers as a single, amorphous, universally targetable group, regardless of product category. It doesn’t make sense when you think about it.

Face is a youth marketing agency that believes in “audience first, discipline second”. They specialise insight, co-creation and advocacy. Through their Headbox online community, we’ve also had some interesting conversations with them about campaign amplification and seeding.