The Winklevoss Twins "Get Crackin'"

Author's Note: From time to time I will look at recently released ads that I think are interesting. The ad may be amazing, horrible or mediocre, but for some reason or another I think it is worth discussing. I hope you do also! As I share my reaction, please feel free to share yours in the comments section.

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss had an exciting summer: their second lawsuit against Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg was dismissed, they were called assholes by the President of Harvard University, and to cap it off they became spokesmen for Wonderful Pistachios?

Wonderful Pistachios has made the Winklevoss twins, who notoriously sued Mark Zuckerberg claiming that he stole the idea for Facebook, the stars of their first aired commercial of the 2011 “Get Crackin’” campaign. They are the latest in a line of celebrity spokespeople who leave many scratching their heads and intentionally stir up a storm of publicity.

The ad features the twins sitting with a bowl of the nuts in front of them while they poke fun at their legal troubles with Zuckerberg.

As far as recognizable personalities go, the Winklevoss twins are not what you would call “beloved” or even really liked, especially following their portrayal in The Social Network, the movie which tells the story of Facebook and the law suit, and the remarks by Harvard President Larry Summers.

Most brands wouldn’t let these guys near their product. But then again, Wonderful Pistachios isn’t just any brand and they have never shied away from provocative figures. Last year, they launched their campaign with a spot staring an even more contentious character, Rod Blagojevich.

“The company sought out the ex-governor's services because it was looking for personalities who represent ‘every corner of the fabric of U.S. society, ‘and didn't mind his conviction for lying to the FBI, said Dominic Engels, Paramount's vice president of marketing,” reported Mary Ellen Podmilik and Andrew Grimm of the Chicago Tribune.

A spokesperson who has been convicted for lying isn't what most companies would choose; the goal of a such a person, after all, is to have the customer trust them.

It is obvious from their decisions to use Blagojevich and the Winklevoss twins that “no publicity is bad publicity” in the mind of Wonderful Pistachios. And that publicity has completely overshadowed the content of these commercials in the public discussion.

Showing how the Winklevoss Twins cracks a pistachio (they do it “cautiously” by the way) echoes of an earlier campaign demonstrating how everyday people ate a very different product, something which very few have picked up on in the industry press.

Reese’s showed the unique way that people ate peanut butter cups in their “There’s No Wrong Way to Eat a Reese’s” campaign from the 1990's. Even having seen this spot dozens of times, "how Mr. Sullivan eats a Reese's" is still more charming and surprising than the obvious joke of how the Winklevoss twins crack a pistachio.

With such predictable jokes -- Would Kermit the Frog really crack a pistachio any other way than "greenly," as they state in another ad from this year? -- the only surprise left in the "Get Crackin'" campaign is seeing who will be controversial enough to earn a role in 2012's leadoff commercial.

Here’s my vote: “Charlie Sheen does it winningly.”

Study Finds that Facebook Users Rarely “Un-like”

Yesterday Constant Contact and research firm Chadwick Martin Bailey released “10 Quick Facts You Should Know About Consumer Behavior on Facebook,” the results of a study that revealed that 76% of Facebook users have never “un-liked” a brand.

Up to this point, the consensus among marketers was that Facebook users were very fickle in their brand love—post one status too many and they will “like” you no more—and best practices had pointed to 2-3 status posts per week as the sweet spot for engaging, but not annoying fans.

Of course there were always exceptions to this rule, like the incredibly successful Skittles Facebook page, which posts its random messages, most unrelated to the product, every day.

Knowing that the majority of FB users have never un-liked a brand, and seeing more brands have success with a Skittles-like model, other marketers may start to reconsider the 2-3 posts per week guideline.

Another tidbit of information released in this report was that people interact with their favorite brands on Facebook more than any other social network.

No, this is not surprising. What is surprising is that following Facebook, online community forums are the next place people go to interact with the favorite brands (9%). Twitter comes in third, at surprisingly small 4%, and that what brands should take note of.

Many brands have been on the Facebook bandwagon for sometime now and are anxious not to miss the next hot thing. Because of all of the buzz in the media, many believe that is Twitter and they are pushing their Ad/PR agencies to start tweeting for them.

Yet if only 4% of consumers are interacting with brands on Twitter, maybe marketers should take a deeper look at what kind of brands successfully engage on the platform (are there certain industries that have more success) and what targets are the most active on the site. The likelihood is that Twitter isn’t a good fit for every brand.

For those who manage social media, you may find yourself wanting to use these findings to optimize your strategy. With relatively little research out there still I don't blame you, but take this all with a grain of salt since the study collected data from only 1,491 U.S. consumers.

The sample size, in relation to the Facebook audience of 600 million visitors per month, is very small and only accounts for the behaviors of U.S citizens, which is something to consider for global brands.

That is not to say that these findings don’t hold merit. This industry is young and there is no set formula for success yet. Using these results may help you or they may not. 

And I guess that is the exciting thing about social media: there are no rules and it is still one big experiment.

Click here to view the entire report on Constant Contact's slideshare page.

A History Lesson via SmartPhone

Author’s Note: This is one of a series of blog posts that are related to assignments from my business reporting class.

I hear Wall Street and I think of people in business suits yelling on a crowded trading room floor. Well it’s that or the movie by the same name. Wall Street, however, is much more than that as I learned on Tuesday when my class went on an interactive tour of New York’s Financial District. 

Marching like revolutionaries through Stone Street.

The tour, put on by StrayBoots, took the form of a scavenger hunt. But unlike a traditional scavenger hunts where each team is given a list of things to find, our class’s three teams were given clues via text message. Each team would follow the clue and text the answer or a photo to receive the next clue and a fact about the location. 

I was surprised to find that the area was packed not only with landmarks of the financial world, but also with landmarks rich with in American history. When we stood at the cross streets of Pearl St and Coentities Alley, for example, we found ourselves between the site of Thomas Edison’s first power plant and the Fraunces Tavern where George Washington bade farewell to his officers at the close of the Revolutionary War. Other stops on the tour included the oldest continuously operating building in New York, St. Paul’s Chapel, and the Federal Reserve where 25% of the world’s gold bullion lies in five floors of underground vaults. 

It was a nice change of pace to be outside learning about history instead of sitting inside listening to a 2-hour lecture (although I probably would have enjoyed that too because I’m a bit of a history nerd!). And I always love a chance to compete for a prize! 

I thought that this was a great way to learn and an interesting example of how games are being used in our lives these days. 

Having spent time in the marketing these past few years, I know that games and specifically “gamification” is a really hot buzzword in that industry right now. But it is no way limited to that world, as I saw with this interactive tour. 

Reading the "Money" section of USA Today.

If you have not heard of “gamification” before you probably have used some program or platform that employs it. According to Bunchball, a gamification industry leader who works with Warner Bros., Comcast, and Hasbro, it is “integrating game dynamics into your site, service, community, content or campaign, in order to drive participation.” 

Even more than participation, they note, the end goal is to engage, motivate and create loyalty among consumers. This engagement and loyalty is created through game mechanics, which include things like points, levels, challenges, achievements, status, badges, virtual goods, and real-world goods. 

When most of us hear that description, we immediately think of Foursquare or Farmville, but things like airline loyalty programs and Coke Rewards make the cut by that definition. 

Brands have been getting a lot of press for integrating game mechanics in their campaigns, but the use of game mechanics in education has also been a hot topic as of late. Personally, I think that the use of games in education is a natural fit. I know from the experience of Tuesday’s scavenger hunt that the competitive nature  the game made me more engaged with the content we were asked to find. And because I saw the sites that I was learning about first-hand and created a memory around them, I know that I will be able to recall what I learned for much longer than had I read it in a book. 

The only way I think that the game could improve would be to better outline how we were being judged. We knew that there was a winner, but we were not sure how that winner was decided. Was the contest timed - did we have an hour to answer as many clues as possible? Was it the first team to get a clue that led them back to the starting point? Or was it the first team to reach clue number 20? 

In some cases, like in Foursquare, not knowing how you might achieve a certain status or badge is fine. These achievements function like Easter Eggs; you get one and you are so excited by it that you keep playing in the hopes that something you do will earn you another. But in this case I think not knowing how the winner would be decided left us feeling a little confused and like there wasn’t much finality. 

But despite our confusion in the end as to who had won (we found out later that we had tied!) the game was really enjoyable! It gave us a chance to leave the classroom, get better acquainted with our classmates, and get our bearings in the Financial District. I enjoyed it so much actually that I might try another one. Anyone up for the tour American Museum of Natural History: Man vs. Wild?

Foursquaropoly Makes the City Your Board Game

Ad agencies are used to pitching large out-of-the-box ideas to clients. But last week a group of recent Miami Ad School grads grabbed the attention of advertising agencies around the world with a video pitch for an application that has yet to be created or even funded.

Their idea is simple: reinvent a beloved board game for a Web 2.0 audience by combining Monopoly with Foursquare. Deanna McDonald, Sean Tiraatanakul and Jaclyn Shelton are the brains behind this new and eagerly awaited app – “Foursquaropoly.”

In their own words, via their introduction video: “In order to bring the board game back to life, we introduce Foursquaropoly, a gaming app which uses Foursquare to make you the game piece and your city the board.”

The app will take the location-based information provided by Foursquare check-ins and let players buy and sell properties (check-in locations) with virtual dollars. Once a players owns a property he will collect rent from other players who check-in there. The players who manage their properties the most effectively will collect large sums of money that they can use to buy the most coveted landmarks in their city. So if you thought being a mayor was good, can you imagine being the owner of the Statue of Liberty or the Chrysler Building?

While the idea of overlaying a game on a platform laden with game mechanics may seem too complicated, never fear. The app will not be built within the Foursquare application. According to the ClickZ News article “They are building [it] on Foursquare's API, just as Zynga and other game developers have launched products on Facebook.”

And similar to the way that brands jumped at the opportunity to advertise within Zynga’s games like FarmVille and CityVille, Deanna McDonald told ClickZ News that agencies have been calling her and her partners about running promotions on the application. But they were prepared for that, as she told ClickZ, "We imagine companies getting involved. There can be benefits [to the consumer] for buying the locations."

A Social Gaming Future for Foursquare

While this application seems to have opened up a promising future for these three creative graduates and a new avenue of advertising for major brands, a more interesting question is what this might do for Foursquare? 

Up until now, Facebook has been the platform of choice for social gaming and it has been a good situation for all parties involved. Developers gain a 500 million-person audience with Facebook and it is an audience that attracts in-game advertising dollars. Facebook, in turn, receives social gamers who spend long periods of time playing games on Facebook, which also attracts Facebook advertising dollars. A PopCap study found that 4 in 10 gamers participate in social gaming for 1 to 5 hours weekly. This is a small amount of time compared to the average Facebook user who spends an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes per month on the site, according to Fast Company.

Foursquare needs this kind of social game to amp up its consistent user base. The platform started with a big bang, and has been able to attract some big name brands like Gap and Pepsico to partner with them, but their user growth has been slow. According to a 2010 Forrester Research study, 4% of U.S. online adults have used Location Based Social Networks, like Foursquare, and only 1% use them more than once a week.

Foursquaropoly may just be Foursquare’s Farmville, but ultimately it will depend on how the application actually plays once it is developed. It has all of the right components – simple and already understood game mechanics, a landscape ripe for competition and just a touch of nostalgia. My only question now is where is “Go” and when I pass it will I get $200?

Check out the "Foursquaropoly" video posted by McDonald, Tiraatanakul and Shelton on Vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/28431085

Hello and welcome to Madison Valley...

Author Milan Kundera once said, "Business has only two functions - marketing and innovation." Here I will discuss both. Sometimes it will be one or the other, but more often it will be where the two meet: the use of innovation in marketing and the marketing of innovations. These functions are my passion.

From a very young age, marketing fascinated me. When many kids were playing make believe and house, my stepsister and I were writing our own commericals for Bonnie Bell Lipsmackers. So it was no surprise that I worked at an advertising agency following my graduated from college. It was in the agency world that I received my second education. I learned psychology, strategy, branding, media channels and, of course, what goes in to a great piece of creative. That education only helped to grow my curiosity and love of marketing.

It is also through this education that I developed an interest companies and entrepreneurs of my native Northern California. In recent years a myriad of new media emerged from this area and I have been fascinated by the ways they have changed the way that we live. These platforms are built with specific uses in mind, but ultimately it is the consumer that decides how these new mediums actually work. That is the part that I am interested in...how does it all play out in our culture and society.

Madison Valley is the place in my brain where these two facets of business meet: the intersection of Madison Avenue and Silicon Valley. 

Enjoy!

Mallory