Advocate Advertising - Latest News

BECOME A FAN OF FACEBOOK APPLICATIONS

30/07/2010 11:28:39 a.m.

There is no doubt that simple, well executed facebook applications can produce really big responses, bringing in fans (likes) to you facebook wall.

When you want to work on building engaged fans and followers on Facebook or Twitter, promotions like sweepstakes, contests, coupons, and giveaways should be up around number 1 on any clients priority list. Brands that run contests have twice as many fans as those that don’t. According to Razorfish’s FEED study, by far the biggest reason that consumers fan or follow companies is to access deals and exclusive offers.

The trick to success in these platforms is to keep it very simple and allow people to interact with your application engagement by allowing users to engage in acts like voting, or having group prizes ie. 5 tickets for you and your friends. This way people will invite their friends to vote for them or to also enter to increase the chances of the group winning and sharing the prize.

Its also important to engage people based on their passion. Target people that are mad about their pets, babies or children, fashion, sports or fitness. Passionate people are more like to engage and share, than broad generalised prizes aimed at no-one in particular.

All these applications are relatively cheap to implement and can work wonders in building up fan bases that you can then 'talk with' through your social media channels. Even campaigns run without any or with little advertising spend can generate really good responses if the offer, topic and execution are done well.

Melissa Ramdin
Digital

Have your cake and eat it.

21/07/2010 3:36:53 p.m.

When we approached our client Wendys Supa Sundaes with an idea to sell them on-line, they were not at first convinced. How do you sell ice-cream and hot dogs on-line?

We told them - it’s all about the cake. The icecream cake. How many people were aware they made fantastic cakes from icecream? What an untapped opportunity. With around 36 outlets around New Zealand, we believed there was real potential to push sales on this one product.

We launched the site with a small google adwords campaign over 8 weeks – and cakes started to sell. While on-line sales did not set their world on fire – the 35% increase in sales in-store ,for the same period last year, certainly did. This trend has continued and cake sales are still rising.

The results of a strong on-line presence are not always measurable through the website, but the bottom line will reflect a well-executed web strategy.

If you would like a chat about how web strategy can ice your cake, please feel free to call Melissa 09 367 1131 or send me an email by clicking here.

Fetch Wag. Good Dog.

21/07/2010 3:09:39 p.m.

We are very pleased to announce that Advocate has this month formed a strategic partnership to form a new agency - Wag The Dog Agency. WTDA is a partnership between digital creative and media company Wag The Dog, creative agency Advocate Advertising, supported by accredited media planning and buying agency MediaR (who will remain under the MediaR banner). The merger brings a number of blue chip clients, combined billings of $20 million and 23 staff.

In founding the new agency, we are responding to the needs of our clients and we believe signals where the market will move. The new structure has client objectives at its centre.
Experience has shown that you can’t ask traditional agencies where digital is going, and don’t ask digital players to integrate with ‘old media.’ The mindsets are just too far apart and often in competition for budget. Full integration at the idea creation stage is critical, rather than paying lip service to multimedia.

The partnership adds to its full service capability to become a true cross-platform agency that has a core competency in digital. The agency has attracted blue chip clients such as ASB and Mercury Energy, because we don’t start the creative process with preconceived outcomes in mind and we measure results against clear targets.

The Group’s six-step process and cross functional ‘think tank’ sessions enable formerly conflicting but complementary disciplines to generate results that would previously have not been possible. With no one ‘owner’ of creativity, the innovation stems from the wide range of backgrounds, from direct to agency, media, digital, technology, mobile and web skills.

The new agency is starting off with a dream team of clients such as Mercury Energy, Les Mills International, ASB, Westfield, Unicef, Vero CIS, Lumino and Charlies, through the network of the three agencies.

The combination of the traditional and media agencies add strength to the digital offer.

Watch this space!

Home sweet home!

1/04/2010 1:08:21 p.m.

We’ve made the move across town, finally! We’re now bedded down at 31 Dacre Street, where we already feel a whole lot better. Must be the natural light, air con and space. A year in a garage (basically) can do that to a team.

SO – from now on, this blog will be coming to you c/o a bunch of folks, and as such cover a bit more ground than it has to now and hopefully be a bit more regular.

First step is the shabby ‘upgrade’ which you can see in our new header, up the top there. Jamie, Sammy and the guys in the design studio have worked on him to make the old fella look a bit perkier, a bit more ‘waggy’ and generally a bit less lopsided in the cranial area.

Hope you like him. As you can see, we liked him so much we put him on the wall!

Tom
Wag The Dog

Who's a good blog then?

1/04/2010 1:06:37 p.m.

We like you too, facebook (but what do we call fans now?)

As reported all over the place in the last day or two, facebook is changing the terminology behind how users interact with brands. In the future, users will be able to indicate they ‘like’ brands, as opposed to being ‘fans’ of them. They say it’s a more natural action – and we have to agree.

The good news for brands is that as a result of the change the perceived endorsement threshold is lower (like is an easier action to ask users to take than to become a fan, we think, and we’ll get more ‘likes’) and yet the meaning of a ‘like’ in terms of brand opportunity to engage with users is the same – brands get the same functionality in terms of building a database of essentially opted in consumers with whom they can engage, and those consumers interactions with the brand are still promoted virally through the wall to their friends.

The interesting result of the change by facebook is this – what do we call our pages and our users now? The aren’t ‘fanpages’ and ‘fans’ anymore…..what do you think? We’re struggling - ‘Likers’ doesn’t exactly work….?

Tom
Wag The Dog

We dont like to skite but....

19/03/2010 9:37:00 a.m.

Advocate have been cleaning up on the stoppress competitions of late. A list of current victories...

Send in your doppelgängers and collect massive booty

Alan Houghton, Group GM (Houghty to his mates) took out the prize for best doppelgänger with this winning shot. You can view the other entries here.

Not sure Alans mate was overly impressed with his surprise appearance in on-line competition - but his mum is proud.

Melissa Ramdin has taken out two prizes in the last month with following entries

Pen ridiculous chocolate review. Win Barista@home coffee

Its willywonkers, gone quite bonkers.
Sun and lumps and throw up chunks.
Scrape the kids off of the walls.
The colour rush makes V blush.
Its weird and strange and I dont know how, but I like it just like Ali Mau.
Not sure if I will make the swing - but milk to yellow could be my thing.
All in all a lot of fun – thank you yellow your job is done.

You can see the other entries here

Stunning new research shows old research was correct

Stoppress wrote: Controversy still rages over what this decade should be called. What will replace the noughties? Will it be the Tweens? The Tenties? The Adolescents? The Puberties?

The best suggestion to be put on the comment wall below will receive a stylish diary from 2009 so you can relive the last decade. And we’ll throw in some Monteith’s Pilsner as well, because you probably haven’t had enough alcohol over the last few weeks.

Melissa Ramdin took out joint 1st place with this witty little snippet:

Wash your mouth out with soap D – we are advertisers and marketers – of course we have to have a name for everything! How do we talk about it when we are in our cups recollecting the good old days? I like the Teens… spotty, moody, unpredictable, likely to blow up at any moment.
Check out the other entries here

We shall be blogging our way to more victories over the coming weeks with a bit of luck and a sharp pointed pen. Addiction is forming to the delivery of prizes to the front desk.... although one wonders what Alan will be doing with all that simple face cream....

The Advocate Roving Reporter

Is Pivot a turning point for web exploration?

18/03/2010 12:00:51 p.m.

Gary Flake, Technical Fellow at Microsoft, and the founder and director of Live Labs, demos Pivot, a new way to browse and arrange massive amounts of images and data online. Built on breakthrough Seadragon technology, it enables spectacular zooms in and out of web databases, and the discovery of patterns and links invisible in standard web browsing. View the short video below - its a fascinating watch or follow this link to watch it on TED. Although this technology has been around for quite some time, Microsoft are looking to make it into a commercial application. The jury is out as to whether this can work on a general user platform due to the difficulty in tagging relevant data. As a tool for research, there is no doubt it could help make links between data that have not been visible before. Pivot is an really impressive looking program, what this demonstration shows most is how powerful data can be if it's computer readable, i.e. semantically tagged. Once you have a large dataset which a computer can ask questions against, then it's (relatively) simple to manipulate in useful and revealing ways.

Pivot runs using Sivlerlight, you can see a working example of Silverlight, the technology that Pivot uses on http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/ - so this way of data sorting is not new.

One blogger on Ted raised a very interesting point. "Imagine using Pivot for open-science research to sift through thousands of complex biomedical arrays and assays from a plethora of papers and databases, semantically described and tagged with metadeta, to produce visual representations of real science. Complex trends in areas like systems biology and pharmacology could be quickly identified and new avenues for future research could be identified at breathtaking speed, laying the path for things like new drug discoveries and scientific paradigms to boot. This prospect also serves excellent promise for science learning on a universal level, and could also be just the trick to really engage the 'layman' in what science is really up to.

Obviously there are issues with quality of research and this is where peer-review science can really be put to the test. The real question is how can the scientific community use these modern tools to finally transform itself into the 21st century? I have faith in science to work this one out."

If this is the future of web browsing, do we have to re-think how we are going design, build and cross reference data to ensure stand out in this new browser technology? I think this is a case of 'watch this space' - it could revolutionise the way we define web.

MELISSA RAMDIN
Avocate Digital

How a web design goes straight to hell...

16/03/2010 4:29:32 p.m.

There is nothing like a little comedy to get us through the day, and nothing is as funny as a web designer frustrated. For those considering a new website, a little insight into the designers brain.

To see more click here.

MELISSA RAMDIN
Avocate Digital

Marketing with branded content in 2010

16/03/2010 1:48:16 p.m.

Nows the time to really understand and utilise all of the media verticals available, from the more traditional forms such as TV, Radio and print through to online, mobile and emerging points of distribution.

Embrace them all in differing ways by becoming an audio visual storyteller on behalf of your brand. First you identify the brand story-line and come up with the big idea. Then using the audio visual medium as your vehicle you develop a way to take what traditionally may have only been a TVC shoot and extrapolate differing stories for all the different verticals. This will enable you to achieve different results.

Two great examples:

Extreme Sheep LED Art from Samsung

Over 11.5v million views on you tube alone.
View video

"Sing A Long"

T Mobile in the UK's recent audio visual viral campaigns in Trafalgar Square with 2.7 million views and rising.
View video

First and foremost listen and understand your customers needs, desires and how they want to interact with your brand, from then the ideas will begin to flow.

So what exactly is branded content?

From Wikipedia:

Advertainment is a relatively new form of advertising medium that blurs conventional distinctions between what constitutes advertising and what constitutes entertainment. Branded content is essentially a fusion of the two into one product intended to be distributed as entertainment content, albeit with a highly branded quality. Advertainment, unlike conventional forms of entertainment content, is generally funded entirely by a brand or corporation rather than, for example, a Movie studio or a group of producers. However, it can be argued that this is just a new name for the same type of marketing that was pioneered by soap manufacturers in the early days of radio and television with the soap opera.

The technique

The notion of an advertiser or company producing something engaging for the consumer in order to sell more product has been around for decades. The term branded content, however, really took hold as a new marketing technique in 2001, when The Hire was produced and distributed on the internet and DVDs. It featured a series of short films by Hollywood "A-List" directors, with the BMW car as the real star of the action.

The popularity of these films spurred other marketers to create films, music, games, interactive content and real-life events. This content merely exists to entertain and educate the consumer, keeping their attention long enough to market a product or service. The most successful branded content programs are able to blend the advertising message in a seamless and transparent fashion, while still getting the information across to the consumer.

DAVID ROSE
Avocate Digital - Youth Media Specialist

Planting seeds in the desert. SEO and social marketing.

26/02/2010 3:44:08 p.m.

Why blog for business?

Mention bloging and social media to many clients and their eyes glaze over. It seems to be in a 'too hard' or 'too weird' box for many. Those that are bravely taking the leap and planting a seed in the desert of their web media strategy (yes, there are such things) are finding that the search engine and social media game is not just very exciting, its also yielding results.

There are several potential reasons to blog for business. Blogs are no different from other channels like print, tv, audio, etc. They all deliver varying results. Business bloging is about building stronger relationships with target groups. Its about talking to them in open and honest ways and building brand equity in a way that is impossible through traditional advertising pathways.

Show yourself as the Expert in your field

Position yourself and your company as the thought leader of your business. Let people know you are not afraid to talk, show your skill and expertise.

Create Genuine Customer Relationships

When your main objective is not to sell (blogs are not for selling, only for discussion and responding to comments),you will begin to create a personal relationship between you and your customers. Blogs are a quick way to join in customers' discussions, provide tips and insights or receive feedback.

Media Relations

Create a channel where media look to see what you have to say, rather than media just being passive or indifferent and the recipients of endless boring press releases.

Great for Recruitment

Show your company as a leader in ideas - other people in your business will pay attention. They read and discuss what you have to say. There is every chance you will be seen as a forward thinking, intelligent employer.

Test ideas or products before taking them to market

Blogs are informal conversation places where people usually can comment. The blog can provide a measure of value. Use your blog to publish an idea and see if it generates interest. Does anyone link to you? What do they say? You can track comments or feedback about existing products and look at how to improve your product based on feedback, before taking that product to market. This is one of the best kind of (free) honest consumer testing.

Search engine rankings

Google and other search engines rewards sites that have new content and link through to other sites, and, very importantly, that has many inbound links. Regular blogs on your web site will boost your ranking.