VCCP’s binge drinking advertising premiere

 

VCCP invited me yesterday, along with a bunch of other bloggers, to the premiere of the Home Office’s latest advertising campaign to tackle binge drinking amongst 18-24 year-olds. Sadly, none of us got drunk!

 

The VCCP binge drinking ads form part of a wider government campaign aimed at educating consumers about alcohol. There are plenty of other good ads out there, such as the alcohol units campaign also by VCCP but also this print poster by TBWA.    

 

The meet up took place in Covent Garden at the bottom of Long Acre (towards Holborn) where there is currently a Selfridges-type window display with mannequins mirroring the TV ads. Passers-by can download a viral ad via Bluetooth on their phone, and also watch the TV commercials being broadcast in the windows.

 

 

 

Unfortunately I never received the Bluetooth ad – I think the poster should be a little clearer and let people know that they will firstly receive a push message and will then have to enter the code to receive the ad. How about giving a free number people can text to receive the ad instead?  Here’s the viral ad:

 

 

 

Binge drinking is indeed a very serious problem in the UK and advertising won’t solve the problem, but early education could mean prevention.  Hard facts:

• A recent survey shows that Britain has the most drunk teenagers in the world
• Around 40% of A&E admissions are alcohol related
• There are 1.2 million incident of alcohol related violence a year
• Alcohol related crimes cost £7.3bn

 

VCCP have come up with a series of print, radio, TV, and a viral advert targeted at 18-24s with the strapline ‘you wouldn’t start a night like this so why end it this way.’

 

I really like the fact VCCP have created two different ads for both male and female drinkers as male and female behaviour under the influence of alcohol is very different. I really like the concept of showing people what they look like when they are drunk as it works as a reminder of how they might have behaved/what they would have looked like after a heavy night out. 

 

The male version of the ad shows a guy getting reading to go on a night out, smearing food onto his shirt, peeing on his shoes, ripping his earring out and violently kicking his stereo.

 

The female version of the ad shows a girl ripping her tights and shirt off, throwing up, smearing make up all over her face, pouring wine over her jacket and breaking her stilettos.

 

Both ads convey a very strong message – binge drinking is disgusting and can result in disgraceful behaviour. In fact, the male and female ads almost made me feel sick! Am I being too squeamish?

 

Un p’tit bulletin en français pour parler de Cindy

Et un petit article pour mes amis bloggeurs Français expatriés. La Nouvelle Star vous connaissez ? C’est un programme de télévison sur M6 genre the X-Factor…

 

Un buzz de fou s’est produit autours d’une canditate cette année, non pas parce qu’elle a gagné, mais parce qu’elle s’est fait éliminer…

 

Depuis son passage à l’émission “Nouvelle Star”, Cindy Sander bénéficie d’une nouvelle notoriété, passant sur de nombreux plateaux TV. Beaucoup sont moqueurs et j’adore tout simplement cette parodie! Déjà-vu ?

Notre Cindy nationale s’est forgée un nouveau look et est entrée en studio pour enregistrer son nouveau titre électro Papillon de Lumière, un titre efficace et autobiographique… Comme le veut l’expression devenue culte, “Céline Dion c’est Céline Dion, Cindy c’est Cindy, un point c’est tout” !

Voici le titre que Cindy dédie aux internautes, à qui elle doit tant !

Bien que Papillon de Lumière ait fait un énorme buzz sur le web, seulement 1977 exemplaires ont été écoulés lors de la première semaine d’exploitation.

CONCLUSION: le buzz ne fait pas le moine (ou la chanteuse)!

L’été va être chaud sur les pistes de danse en France cet été, mais quant à choisir je préfère la Tecktonik !

Twitter is listening to its community!

 

It’s taken me some time, but I am now truly addicted to Twitter. I will post something about it in the coming days.

 

As a fairly recent user of Twitter I haven’t come across any major problems – OK, it is sometimes a bit slow at updating who you are following and your followers list, but apart from that, my experience has been pleasant.

 

But Mack reported a few days ago that Twitter went down but no one told the community why…

 

Well I am pleased to announce that Twitter has listened to its community! I just tried to send a message on Twitter right now (12.35 GMT+1), and saw this message on my homepage:

 

 

 

Well done for listening Twitter! Glad to see you’re trying to keep your community happy! Saying that are you talkig about your night or my night? Not everyone who uses Twitter lives in America!

 

Update: Twitter also have a blog

A little something light and fluffy!

 

Photo taken at The Cans Festival - May 2008

 

I was tagged by both Sandrine and Christine ages ago but never found the time to do these memes! Better late than never

 

Christine tagged me on the 4×4 about me. There are four categories and 4 bits of information are needed for each category:      

4 places I have lived in:

• Lyon, France where I was born and grew up
• Canterbury – United Kingdom, my uni town
• London – I started off in Bow, East London, then moved to Willesden Green in North West London, and I currently live in Clapham Junction,  South West London. Each area is so different - I guess this is why London one of the coolest cities in the world!
• 4^th – who knows?

4 jobs I’ve held

• Sales Assistant at the Galleries Lafayette in Lyon
• Barmaid in Baa Baars, Canterbury’s meat market (god that was fun!)  
• Dance teacher (ballet)
• Qualitative Researcher since I graduated

4 foods I really like

• Jacket potatoes because they are soooooo versatile!
• Veggie sushis (as I am allergic to fish!)
• Pizzas from ‘Pizzeria da Michele’ in Naples – they are delicious!
• My mum’s cooking!

 

Sandrine also tagged me on the bloggers’ most useless chain! Each blogger needs to list 6 totally random, uninteresting thing about themselves… Since Sandrine is French, I’ll write that meme in French:

 

•  Niveau musique j’adore tout ce qui est rock, Indie et Britpop
• Je suis souvent habillée en noir… certaines personnes pensent que je suis goth ce qui n’est pas du tout le cas!
• Je suis myope comme une taupe ! Je rentre à Lyon la semaine prochaine me faire opérer des yeux
• J’adore Sex and the City et Eastenders !
• Mes amis considèrent que je suis la plus anglaise des françaises ! On me prend d’ailleurs souvent pour une anglaise - je ne sais pas trop si c’est un compliment ou pas 
• J’adore l’Europe de l’est

 

And now I tag everyone! Just link back to my blog and I’ll leave you a comment!

A confession…

Photo: The cans Festival, London

 

 

Remember the cutie with an impressive spec? Yes, I am talking about the Xda Orbit 2. Well I have a confession to make… whilst I think it is a brilliant phone with lots of cool and useful apps, I have actually started using my old Samsung E900 again. Don’t get me wrong, the Xda Orbit 2 is a fab phone but I am a texter and I missed having a keypad. I found it really hard to text on the go… yes I am a girl and I multi-task!

Go and check the Xda Blog for more info about the applications that can be downloaded onto the phone.

UPDATE: Steve from VCCP left me a comment to ask whether I had tried to download the resco keyboard. The answer is yes, I have… it is easier to text with the resco keyboard however it is not the same as pressing buttons…

Damn fucking tasty!

Dutch Pizza chain New York Pizza, one of the Netherlands fastest growing pizza delivery chains, has launched an integrated advertising campaign with three short ‘mafia style’ films featuring flour, tomato sauce and a pizza delivery boy, to prove that New York Pizza makes the best tasting Pizza around with an unrivalled passion for the best quality ingredients.

Don’t you love the Netherlands? I cannot help but wonder how they always manage to get away with everything! Oftcom would probably choke on their pizza at the sound of the F-word!

The flour ad is my favourite – you really wouldn’t know that they are advertising pizza. The tomato on is a little bit too gruesome in my liking and I don’t really get the third one… Pretty damn good!

 

 

 

Goodbye landlines, hello dongles!

   The folks at 3mobilebuzz recently sent me a new mobile internet dongle to play with, and I have to say that I have been very impressed!

 

The dongle is very simple to install – just whizz it out its box, plug it in and within minutes you’ll be online. I travel a lot around the UK for work and it was a pleasure being able to send emails during my London-Manchester train journey. I did get disconnected at times, but overall I was quite impressed with the signal strength.

 

I think there is a massive opportunity to market this product to Londoners. If you pick up a free London paper on your way to/back from work, you would probably have noticed quite a few ‘3’ ads for the dongle.

 

As a flat sharer, moving into a flat without an Internet connection can be nightmare and being tied to a 12 months contract for both a landline and broadband is both expensive and daunting if you’re not sure how long you are going to stay in that flat.

 

Why not advertise the dongle as a cheaper alternative to landlines and broadband and the bonus of being able to move out without having to worry about where your broadband/landline is registered? I am sure this would appeal to quite a few consumers emotionally. Fair enough, it’s not as fast a home internet connection but it certainly does the job for emailing and browsing the Internet…

 

My only criticism would be that 3 introduced too many different formats of dongles too quickly. My flatmate bought a ‘matchbox’ modem last year and wanted to have my dongle as she saw it – like a lot of customers, even though both dongles do the exact same thing, she wanted the latest one out! I think that offering different colours is a great idea – there seems to be a trend for pinks as far as mobile phones are concerned – why not dongles? At least they’ll certainly stand out from the competition!

 

3 currently have the cheapest tariffs out there and will even offer you a discount if you are already have a mobile phone contract with them. I think that ‘3’ could try to kill two birds with one stone by using their dongle offer to get consumers to switch mobile network… ‘3’ could also talk more to the very large Aussie community in London to sign up as ‘3’ is also available in Oz – and I am sure no one would say no to free calls back home with a Skype Phone!

It’s all about design…

Steve left me a comment asking me to define what makes a phone masculine, feminine or gender neutral…

I did a bit of research to see what phones were currently out on the market, and found this page in a Carphone Warehouse Brochure, which perfectly illustrates the different design trends…

The curvier the phone, the more feminine – take the example of the Ted baker HTC phone… pretty girly shape right? Well, fair enough it’s also purple!The Xda Stellar looks slightly more masculine than the Orbit 2 – probably because of its squarer shape as well as the buttons on the front of the phone…I think the Orbit 2 is gender neutral l – slightly rounder than the stellar but not as curvy as the Ted Baker HTC…

What do you think?

A few thoughts on seeding programmes

    Steve at VCCP asked me a while back how I felt about the 3 Skypephone seeding programme. The timing is perfect to share my thoughts as I have just agreed to take part in another seeding programme…

1)    Pitch it right

In case you didn’t know, my name is not Darryl and no I don’t live in the US! I am not quite sure how I would be able to blog about a US product when I don’t have any knowledge of the market… Read my blog (or at least pretend to read it!) and understand what makes me tick and what doesn’t. In the 5 minutes that you take to customize your pitch, the chances of me blogging about your product has gone up from 1% to 100%…

2)    So I’ve agreed to write about your product…

Comments and feedback about my posts are always welcome – it shows that you’ve bothered checking your links and that you care about what I have to say. I would suggest leaving comments on both my blog and your blog – it allows conversation (blogging is all about sharing ideas, right?) and will probably increase traffic on your blog.

Both the O2 Cocoon and 3 Skypephone campaigns were well executed – good pitches, interesting ideas but overall I felt that that the online discussion was one-way when I would have liked to see a two-way conversation i.e. people bouncing off ideas of each other, rather than a list of all the posts/reviews. As a researcher, I like to understand the why’s and how’s therefore when criticising a feature, I would have liked to know why the bloggers felt this feature was bad and how/what could be improved in future phones.

The 3 campaign was cleverly orchestrated using a number of successful web 2.0 sites such as flickr and youtube, however (sorry guys!) I didn’t get involved beyond the phone review, partly because I am not the target market for the 3 Skypephone.  

Both the O2 and 3 blogs look great however, my main criticism is that they are hard to find and I can’t see a link on the networks’ websites – consumers should be able to find these blogs easily and I would suggest that O2 and 3 put a link on their homepage which should hopefully increase traffic hence online interaction.

Kudos to O2 for allowing consumers to co-create (i.e. write posts) on their blogs – this blog could be a useful resource covering phone reviews as well as an online troubleshooting portal. If marketed properly, the blog could become a real strength for O2…

Looking forward to reading your thoughts on this   

Don’t mess with the French President! (the best viral ever!)

 

Ryanair has landed in hot waters again…

President Nicolas Sarkozy’s spokesman on Monday assailed as “unacceptable” an ad campaign for budget airline Ryanair featuring a picture of the French leader and his girlfriend Carla Bruni.

In the advertisement published in the popular daily Le Parisien, Bruni and Sarkozy are seen smiling dreamily as a caption next to Bruni reads: “With Ryanair, my whole family can come to my wedding.”

Elysee spokesman David Martinon said: “We are looking at all possible legal venues because this is unacceptable.

“Ryanair’s market director for France, Matthieu Glasson, apologised for offending the president and said he was surprised by the strong reaction.“We are surprised because if you look at the ad, the photo shows both of them in quite a positive light: they are smiling, we aren’t making them say anything stupid,” he said.

While recognising that the photo was used without the couple’s consent, he said there was “nothing aggressive” about the ad campaign.“

You could even say that it helps the president by showing him as close to the people, living a similar life, using the same brands,” said Glasson, adding that he had not been contacted by the Elysee.

How could Gasson not think that Mr Sarkozy would get offended? Our president is more of a fierce Rottweiler than a cute French poodle…  

Although intended as a print ad, this Ryanair ad will probably become one of the best virals I have ever seen! Sorry Mr Sarkozy, Ryanair have done a great job here! Although if I were Carla Bruni, I would probably be offended!