Month: February 2010

branding

New TV ad for Drench

These guys have done some very clever ads which I have to say are helping them build a realy powerful brand in a very crowded sector of Bottled water.

It’s well filmed and constructed and reminds me of the childhood game of mousetrap and the domino rallies we used to create (but not with Goldfish)

Have a look and see what you think.

For those of you who haven’t seen the others, here’s another brilliant one. A very brave 1:30 Ad featuring the dancing skills of Brains from Thunderbirds.

If you read the background intro to the brand which is owned by Britvic, it says this “drench® is 100% clear, crisp spring water from a spring deep within the rolling hills of Yorkshire. drench® can be found on the shelves of major supermarkets in 2L, 1.5L. 750ml and 500ml packs, providing a range of packs suitable for different occasions to ensure you remain topped up throughout the day, helping your brain and body work at its best.”

There are so many other ways that this could have been interpreted. Their decision to NOT make it all traditional and ‘Yorkshire’ does go to prove that there is still some real craft left in our industry. It doesn’t look like a cheap ad to produce, but it certainly wasn’t ludicrously expensive and yet, by playing out their own fun element of the brand they have managed to differentiate themselves from all the rather more dull and traditional adult oriented water products in the market.

branding, Social media

Facebook is the biggest waste of time in our universe – it’s official

According to some new figures by Nielsen the average Facebook user spent seven hours of their precious time on Facebook in January. That sounds like about six hours and thirty minutes too much to me, but then again, I’m not generally stuck for things to do in the evening.

Top 10 Parent Companies/Divisions for January 2010 (U.S., Home and Work) - facebook is the biggest winner in the time wasted in front of your computer
Top 10 Parent Companies/Divisions for January 2010 (U.S., Home and Work) - facebook is the biggest winner in the time wasted in front of your computer

Perhaps even more amazing for Facebook is that this time absolutely dwarfs the time spent on the other top ten platforms made up from their parent companies of:

Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, News Corp. Online, InterActiveCorp, Amazon, Wikimedia Foundation and eBay

With the nearest rival being Yahoo at two hours and eight minutes. That is weird. Why would anyone spend any time on Yahoo at all?

And again it shows that time spent on ALL of the other platforms is falling month on month. When you consider in large parts of the world, January was a snowy month, with loads of kids off school, logic would say that all of them would have spent more time online.

So from this I draw two possible conclusions:

1. Facebook has become the dominant web application of its generation. Yes Google is one we use a lot, but clearly not one we connect too and even the launch of their Buzz product may not be enough to make an impact on the strength of Twitter or Facebook.

(I registered for Buzz, but not sure why, what it does or even how to find myself on it! If anyone can help, that would be nice.)

If you own a brand and want to build a future, trying to do so without a sensible Facebook strategy, will ensure you have afar worse chance of succeeding.

2. Kids are learning how to play again. Maybe this is a bit of a stretch on my part, or maybe its just me being hopeful, but I have to conclude that all of the kids in the snowy northern hemisphere chose to go out and play in the snow, rather then veg out in front of their computers. I like this conclusion very much, it’s good for our future.

I would say that we are currently getting more enquiries about social media than any other area of our business and along with iPhone Apps can see that we have many fun hours in front of our computers spending time devising strategies to get kids to engage with brands – or hopefully getting them to engage with brands that live outside.