Influential Marketing Blog

I Like You, But Not That Way: How Retailers Lose & Win Back Customers

"3D Catalog" is a phrase you will see in a few articles about the retail industry these days. Unfortunately, it's not a cool new interactive augmented reality thing. This is a term that describes the fears of many real life retailers who are afraid of becoming a place where consumers just go to touch and feel products that they will eventually buy from Amazon or another discounted online store. There are plenty of reasons why this is an understandable fear.

Right now the most viewed and popular blog post on Forbes.com is titled "Why Best Buy Is Going Out Of Business, Gradually." In it, author Larry Downes argues that Best Buy is managing to deliver on none of the things like knowledgeable staff or better showrooms which could make them a destination worth visiting. Instead, he argues, it is a retailer of last resort or a place where you just go to see products that you will eventually buy elsewhere.

Borders Books went into bankruptcy over the past year, and one of the contributing factors was they had more browsers than buyers walking through their stores. This past Black Friday retail season, online sales were a higher overall percentage of consumer spending than ever before - and this has been the trend for the last several years.

The whole situation might remind you of a mismatched relationship, where one person just wants to be friends while the other wants more than that.  Those situations never end well. Best Buy wants to marry your wallet, but instead they are getting dumped after a one night stand. It is a sad story, with some fairly clear reasons for why it happens over and over:

1. There is better interactive product information online - with all of the online product demos, 3D product shots and direct information from manufacturers - you can often get the best information about particular products and the ability to comparison shop online.
2. Online reviews are highly influential - there is a reason that more than 80% of all consumers read online reviews before making purchase decisions. We trust in the opinions of others, even if we don't know them personally - and these online reviews are a huge factor in closing a sale, or losing a customer.
3. Retailers can't match lower prices available online - the most logical and common argument is that you can just get any product for cheaper online because the online retailers have much lower overhead to cover because of not having a physical store.

So how can retailers survive this pressure and avoid becoming nothing more than a real life catalogs fueling the sales of their online rivals? It comes down to understanding the three areas where a real life presence still matters, and trying to sit at the intersection of all three. When I think about the real life stores that I have gone to in order to buy a product that I could have purchased online, it was for one of three reasons:

1. Ease - the store was close to me, or the product was large (like a snow blower) and therefore the online channel was too risky or inconvenient and I went to my local store instead.
2. Relationship - I had a personal relationship with a person at my local store and therefore had built up trust in them and the experience that they offered me.  As a result, I continued to go there despite having other options to purchase online.
3. Expertise - In some cases, you just need to speak to someone who knows what they are talking about. Earlier this year when I went to buy a new tent and sleeping bag for a camping trip with my son, I went into the local store to speak to someone who knew our area and could provide useful advice on what to get.

Until retailers are able to find the right way to focus on combining these three together into an experience worth having and sharing, they will continue to lose out to the speedier and always available retailers online.

2012 Edition: 15 Marketing and Business Trends That Matter

Let me tell you a little secret.  I look forward to putting together an annual trend report the same way that some people look forward to having Turkey for Thanksgiving dinner. I realize that may sound a bit strange, but ever since I did my first trend recap last year I was hooked.  This year, the process of collecting the trends took all year.  I have a folder on my desk labelled "Trends 2012" and throughout the year I would rip out articles from magazines or printout webpages to save. Last November I started actually writing my trend presentation and finally released it on Slideshare yesterday. 

 

A few things surprised me about the trends this year. Here are a few of the most unexpected things:

1. Only 2 out of 15 trends are based on innovative technology (Trends #10 and #13). Given the prominence of technology in our lives and more and more digital tools, I expected that more of the trends for 2012 would be based entirely on technology innovation. That ended up not being the case as most of the trends focused more on either behaviours or the use of sites and technology that already exist and don't really require much innovation in order to keep growing.
2. Creativity and design are more important than ever. While it would have been too obvious to point this out as a trend on its own, many of the trends that were included in the presentation were highly dependent on encouraging more creativity and delivering great design. Measuring Life, for example, has taken off in part thanks to great product and interface designs. Pointillist Filmmaking or Social Artivism are clearly based on creativity and design. Even Retail Theater, Tagging Reality and Charitable Engagement are all trends that require creative thinking and  strong ability to use design to engage people.
3. People actively seek opportunities to participate, collaborate or experience something. Doing something together came up as a big motivator for many of the trends this year, as Social Loneliness led people to look for more opportunities to have great experiences or be part of something worthwhile. Pointillist Filmmaking, Civic Engagement 2.0 and Retail Theater are all examples where people are seeking the chance to participate in something. Charitable Engagement ChangeSourcing and Co-Curation are other trends where people offer their time and passions to collaborate together on something.

Let me know what you think about these trends with a comment here or on Facebook, or feel free to send me an email at influentialmarketing@gmail.com.  Next week I'll be starting my trend folder to gather stories for 2013 ...

If you would like to get a downloadable version of this presentation, you can find it on my Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/rohitmarketingauthor.

How Australia Uses Social Media To Celebrate Immigrant Experiences

Australia has a unique problem that almost no other country in the world would be able to understand. With a population of just under 20 million people, the country is one of the few places on Earth that anyone might be able to describe as underpopulated. The vast distances most people must travel to get from their home countries to Australia is certainly part of the reason - and the long history of violence against the native aboriginal people (much like the US history with the Native Americans) has led to drastically reduced native population.

Until just the last few decades, Australia was a place which also held onto a fairly racist immigration policy - legislating first against all immigrants, then against Southern Europeans (such as Greeks and Italians), and then against all others until finally in 1973 the country finally adopted the same open immigration policy as most other developed countries of the time.  Slowly, the country began to actively court people from all cultures to come to Australia. When I lived there from 1998 to 2003, I remember being struck by how invested the government was in getting people to join the culture and become Australian. They even had television ads where the call to action was "become a citizen."

Last year, the Australian TV channel SBS launched an interesting documentary series online designed to celebrate one sector of the immigrant experience - people who had come from Africa and built their lives in Australia. Told with an interactive website featuring videos of real people - the campaign offered an inside look at the success stories and real lives of African immigrants in Australia.

It is exactly the kind of campaign that every country should do more of. The immigrant experience is a critical part of the success of many countries, and recently it seems to be under a sort of undue scrutiny from many cultures as reactions to fundamentalist groups, potential terrorism and misguided fear mongering have led to a new rise in popularity for isolationism.

Preventing immigration is not the solution. Australia may have been one of the slowest countries in the world to realize the value of an open immigration policy - but now they celebrate it with campaigns like this one. Let's hope other developed countries can follow their example.

Can Coke Start A Trend To Make Inspiration A Form Of Co-Creation?

What if you could join your favourite band in studio to record their next single? For many, this is just a moment to dream of - but last month Coca-Cola partnered with the rock band Maroon 5 to do exactly that in a social experiment to create a new song in 24 hours. Fans could watch a live stream of the band working on a new song in the studio and contribute to the brainstorming process in real time via a Twitter screen that was broadcast live to the band. Check out the recap video below:



The end result was a single called "Is There Anybody Out There?" that is available for a free download from Coke. Aside from being an amazingly creative campaign idea, this could spark more brands to consider a new form of co-creation where consumers are invited not to create content themselves, but to be the spark for professionals to create content. In a sense, this is no different than real life where artists often take their inspiration from their fans.

Though Coke's efforts have cause some to raise valid criticism about whether the campaign can be considered all that successful since the views and audience seems small by Coke standards, sometimes the most forward thinking ideas aren't the ones which go viral right away. To me, the real power of this campaign is that it imagines a world where brands can help connect people with the artists they love in a way that empowers them to contribute to what the artists are creating.

Inspiration as a form of co-creation is not just a great marketing concept, but one which offers musicians and even filmmakers a new way to engage their audience on a deeper level and also get better ideas and inspiration to make their work better.  The only downside is that it leaves a lot of people to thank from the Grammy/Oscars stage ...

CBS Wants To Kill Demographics, Marketers Should Help

"There is no link, none, between the age of the specified demographic delivery of the campaign and the sales generated by that campaign."

You would expect a conclusion like that to come at a consumer rights type of event. Perhaps even at a social media event with marketers who are fighting the status quo and encouraging others to think differently. But when this point of view comes from CBS Corporation's Chief Research Officer David Poltrack - it is downright revolutionary. At an event earlier this month, Poltrack presented findings from new research that he conducted along with Neilsen that challenges some very long held assumptions about not only TV advertising, but about advertising and marketing itself.

Among the conclusions the report shared - according to an article in AdAge:

• "Reliance on the 18 to 49 demographic is hazardous to all media and marketers, partly because it doesn't strongly correlate with purchases and partly because it's declining fast."
• "A growing amount of data that matches audience measurement with purchase information shows that using demographics to target commercials is 'essentially invalid,' Poltrack said, 'resulting in a misallocation of television advertising investments.'"

It has long been a dirty little secret in marketing that the targeting that is used throughout much of media buying is based on information that is readily available instead of information that is most important. As technology starts to bridge the gap and offer better insights into consumer behaviours, attitudes and intentions - why should the industry still rely on old and outdated demographics to determine where and how they spend on media?

Apart from a few situations (like targeting 18-19 year olds because you know many of them are preparing to head off to college, for example) age based demographics ARE completely useless. Social media and digital advertising has already been leading the way with methods for buying media that are inherently more focused on behaviour (keyword text advertising) or attitudes (targeting by interests on Facebook). It's about time that marketers had similar options for a more sophisticated way to target who they want to reach through other mediums such as TV.

The temptation from the industry may be to dismiss this research from CBS as being self-serving or flawed in some way. The smart marketers will get behind it immediately. Ultimately we all should.

7 Predictions For How Healthcare & Our World Will Evolve By 2020

Most trend predictions that forecast beyond a year into the future are doomed to inaccuracy simply because of the pace of change and unpredictability of innovation. The rightfully skeptic among us are therefore likely to condemn a report that promises to predict how the world might look in 2020 as a work of optimistic fiction at best, and an exercise overstretched vanity at worst. That was the lens I brought to a report that some colleagues of mine at Ogilvy CommonHealth recently shared with me called 202020 VISION, a digital-health report outlining 20 scenarios of what digitally driven healthcare might look like in 2020. The report is surprisingly brilliant.

Reading through the scenarios, it was easy to imagine a distant future where technology and healthcare finally begin to work together to create a better world of care for us all. Though we cannot share the full report here (see the bottom of this post for details on how to get the full report), this post highlights seven of the most powerful ideas from the report along with some potential implications for anyone in marketing and communications:

1. Exhaustive Behavioural Targeting Transforms Health Messaging.

In a world where nearly everything will become measurable, marketers will have exhaustive behavioural information about each of us, including our lifestyle behaviours, or how often we walk past an enabled sign will all be stored with the purpose of targeting more messages to each of us. This higher level of behavioural targeting will require regulation to prevent abuse, but it will also create the ability to create targeted offers to customers in real time that are based on that customers individual behaviour.

 

2. "Auto-Triage" Aids More Efficient Care.

In an emergency room environment, significant time is wasted trying to identify where a patient needs to go and what type of treatment they require. In 2020 this information will be handled by computers and automated based on data input into the system in the field by ambulance and emergency teams. Electronic medical records will be sent in advance of a patient, and this automated system will allow patients to be prioritized and seen more efficiently and quickly by doctors.

3. Supermarkets Become Centers For Healthcare.

Local supermarkets are already hubs for everything from groceries to pharmacies to banks to gas stations. In the imagined supermarket of the future, the food items we buy will have assigned "health points" and these points will be used to incentivize people towards healthier food choices. Combined with smart data delivered through home appliances such as connected fridges, supermarkets will be able to make real time suggestions on products to buy based on what we already have in our fridge at home.

4. Personalized Videos Bring Diseases To Life.

A big challenge for current healthcare professionals is to convey the gravity of a disease condition to patients. Unless patients feel this urgency, they don't change behaviours. By 2020, personalized video will enable healthcare professionals to equip newly diagnosed or non-compliant patients with customized videos that show patients like them dealing with similar conditions. Seeing the potential impact of not taking care of themselves through these computer generated videos will help patients make the necessary lifestyle changes, and stick to them.

5. Health Tourism Becomes Mainstream.

What is currently the realm of Hollywood stars and the wealthy will become mainstream by 2020. Health or Medical Tourism will no longer be a choice simply made based on the promise of getting cut rate medical care, but a preferable alternative because of the combination of quality of care, ability to focus on a recovery and generally more pleasant resort-like conditions at many health tourism locations that will allow patients to recover faster. Earlier detection of conditions will allow planning for this type of travel to happen much more frequently as well.

6. Gaming Connects Patients & Changes Lifestyles.

The power of gaming to transform medical care is already being explored in many different ways. The future of gaming will include the ability to create entire communities around specific disease conditions where the end goal of adherence to medication or lifestyle changes will be enabled by connecting experienced patients with the newly diagnosed in a gaming environment and allow them to support one another. Gaming will also enable the development of real skills as part of rehab programs and dexterity exercises. The reward systems built into gaming will also incentivize patients to take positive actions for their own health.

7. Communication Enabled Through The Power Of The Mind.

The terminally ill or severly handicapped struggle with the most basic of communications, yet by 2020 the growing field of brain-computer interfaces will have progressed to a level where these patients can communicate with others via their thoughts. This will enable them to significantly improve their quality of life, let the terminally ill "get their affairs in order" and otherwise transform long term patient care environments.

How To Get This Report:

If you'd like to see the full report, send an email to 202020@ogilvy.com to request a copy and mention that you read about the report on this blog. Read the official release about the 202020 VISION report on the Ogilvy site.

Disclaimer - This report was written by a team of people from Ogilvy CommonHealth, a division of Ogilvy. Though I work at Ogilvy and do often work with the CommonHealth team, I did not contribute to the creation of this report, nor do I mean to take any credit for the research and thinking behind it. My opinion of this report is based solely on reading it after its publication and being inspired by the ideas contained in it. I have not been incentivized or asked to write this review by anyone else.

5 Crowdsourced Consumer Trends To Watch In 2011

Almost anyone you meet in marketing will usually be a fan of getting their data and insights about major trends in consumer behaviour from research reports. After all, we generally pay a lot of money for them, and (ironically) many of the most authoritative are BRANDED either by a research organization, or by an authoritative institution such as a renowned business school. To some degree, this is valuable and much needed ... since anyone can publish the results of any unscientific poll or survey done hastily on Twitter and more weight to the "data" produced than they should. Yet you don't need an MBA in analytics to have a voice in spotting hot trends.

For those of you who actively read and digest information about the world around you - Trendhunter.com has a home for your thoughts. Whether you happen to write your own blog or prefer to remain a participant instead of a creator, the site has built a platform for what they call "Crowdsourced Consumer Insight." Last week they released a sneak peek at their 2011 Trend Report which takes individual examples of interesting trends and applies a filter to identify some top level trends that they may point towards. 

The team at TrendHunter was kind enough to share an exclusive link to a sample of the report with the TOP 20 TRENDS and lots of great insights for FREE and you can get the 35 page report right here.

As I read it this weekend, there were a few trends in particular that caught my eye and will definitely be useful for me in the coming months as I help several of our clients with building and executing their own marketing strategies for 2011. Here are a few standouts:

1. Charitable Deviance. As I read this report about how charitable organizations are using more attention grabbing methods to capture attention, I thought of the recent Digital Death campaign that I profiled on this blog. Getting people to pay attention to world changing ideas is (and has always been) a marketing challenge. Finding a solution to these challenges through creativity is something every marketer should find some time in the new year to participate in ... even if it lands outside of your day job.
2. Brand Reversion. I have a live example of this in my own home, as my six year old son has become a huge fan of He-man - an animated series that was popular when I was a kid in the late 80s. This larger trend is about the return of the old, in many categories from fashion to art. Nostalgia will always be a part of us, but as social tools allow us to reconnect with our pasts in ways such as rediscovering lost grade school friends and purchasing those toys we used to play with on eBay - this trend will only continue to rise. Super Mario Brothers anyone?
3. Next Besting. One of the more brilliant terms to come out of TrendHunter back in 2008 was this term which described the consumer behaviour of finding slightly cheaper, but still good alternatives. Being number 1, in this world, can be a big liability because consumers may be more willing to trade down for your next best competitor. I agree with the report's assessment that this trend is on the rise again and will likely show no signs of slowing down in 2011.
4. Democratic Selling. A term that they assign to the process of consumers voting for products to get made - I think this trend speaks to something that is even larger, beyond selling to donations, or content creation, or even advertising. Consumer creation or co-creation as it is often called is extending into unexpected areas and I think we will continue to be surprised each time it creeps into a new area of the world we didn't expect.
5. Discreet Consumerism. I have a theory about this particular one in the sample report, and why it is placed last. If you happen to work in marketing, you will probably have the same reaction I had right after you read this trend ... that you need to get the rest of the report. Discreet Consumerism speaks to the idea that there may be a backlash growing against brands and our overly branded world. This is something I have been thinking about for some time as well, and the reason for this rebellion comes down to distrust. The challenge for marketing is how to regain that trust without relying to gimmicks or luck to do it.

To download the full 35 page PDF sample report, use this exclusive link for Influential Marketing Blog Readers. Also, stay tuned as the rest of this week I will be exploring a few other interesting trends not included on that report which I think will be worth watching in 2011.

Why The "Digital Death" Campaign Failed Despite Celebrity Support

Last week on December 1st to support World AIDS Day, a small group of celebrities with millions of fans led by Alicia Keyes decided to sacrifice their digital lives to try and save real ones. The campaign, cleverly called "Digital Death" was supported by posters, online ads and a well branded microsite. The premise was simple: a group of celebrities forego using Twitter or Facebook until $1,000,000 in donations are raised for their cause. Anyone involved with the idea might have guessed that this would last for a day or two before the target was met. It has been five days and the donations still haven't even hit $300,000.

This idea isn't bad. The celebrity support is top notch. And the branding is really strong. So why did a campaign like this which has all the individual pieces it should need for success fall flat? Here are a few reasons:

1. Inherently egotistical idea. The premise of this entire campaign was built on what is a fairly egotistical idea: that fans care so much about the tweets of their favourite celebrities that they would be willing to donate money to a cause in order to get them back. For core fans - this premise likely holds true ... but there are likely many fans of the celebrities who just don't care THAT much.
2. Asking for too much. When I first saw this campaign last week, they had a minimum donation of $10. Immediately that struck me as a huge strategic mistake. Currently it has been reduced to $1, but this choice likely cost them many supporters who might have given a buck or two at the beginning of the campaign when the buzz was highest, but would never give $10. Even the American Red Cross raising money after the Haiti earthquake had a minimum of $5. The initial minimum of $10 was a big hurdle, and even though they corrected it - it likely was too late.
3. Unclear connection to cause. The campaign was understandable for what the celebrities were doing, but the connection between stopping the use (or overuse) of social media and helping keep kids fighting AIDS alive was a very thin one. The best campaigns are ones where the themes work together, and in this case they didn't.
4. Going against cultural trends. There is a big cultural trend today towards feeling overloaded. People are bombarded with marketing messages, tweets, updates, followers and friends. Most of us just want a bit more simplicity, so when a group of relatively prolific celebrity Twitter users decide to "go dark" - more than a few fans likely breathed a sigh of relief. For those folks, paying to bring back the noise would be like writing a check to someone to punch you in the nose. The money might go to a great cause, but I still like my nose too much for that.

How could this campaign have worked and still made a big impact? One core thing I would have changed is to use the power of all these celebrities Twitter accounts for something more than silence. What if they all chose to spend 24 or 48 hours ONLY tweeting about Keep A Child Alive? Or how about donating some of their own money for everyone who asks them to stop their digital death? 

This campaign had a chance to be something great - but now the only thing left for us to see is how the celebrities participating will come "back to life" online and quietly leave this behind them.

Update 12/6/10 4:06pm - Usher breaks his "digital death" pledge prematurely.

Update #2 12/6/10 9:02pm - Looks like the campaign miraculously went viral and raised over $700k in less than 24 hours so they are now at over $1 million raised. Either that or some of the celebs put up some cash to get their own digital lives back.

How Coke Is Reimagining The Future Of Social Events

It is easy to complain about the trivial nature of the majority of social media content, but it is rapidly becoming a fact of life that the socially connected among us can't help sharing our lives as they happen with our virtual networks. One place where this sharing behaviour becomes particularly accelerated is at live events. People tweet more often, take more photos and generally become more social both online and off.

At Coca-Cola Village in Israel recently, Coke tried an interesting experiment in social sharing by offering over 600 teenagers a wearable wristband that contained their Facebook profile details. Then throughout the weekend, these teens could automatically tag themselves in pictures, check in to various locations and generally post and share to Facebook without needing to use a mobile device or computer ... which was a good thing since the Village looks a lot like Spring Break. Here's an interesting promotional video:



While the photo tagging gets a lot of attention in the video, the biggest idea for me was the "wave your hand to like something" feature that these RFID tags allowed the teens to do. Imagine if this could be recreated on a larger scale at all kinds of events or even retail locations. Just wave your hand/wristband to like a page on Facebook, or join an email list for promotional offers. No lists to add your email address to and no URLs to remember. When following, friending or finding a brand becomes as easy as a flick of your wrist, that would really be something for marketers to get excited about. I can already see the signs: wave here to join our community.

FIFA World Cup 2010 Marketing Roundup - 10 Marketing Lessons From South Africa

Now that the Round of 16 is over and we are down to the final 8 teams that will be playing in the Quarterfinals of the World Cup - most of the marketing that has accompanied the games has been played out and it's a good time to try and look for some lessons from the International phenomenon that is the World Cup. To help, here is my round up of 10 of the most interesting marketing campaigns from this World Cup as well as some marketing lessons that they offer:

#10 - ESPN3 Live Streaming

Offering live streaming for sporting events is certainly not new, but the way that ESPN has integrated their streaming with cable providers has been excellent. For many soccer fans, watching the World Cup Live might have been their first experience at a "pay for streaming" service online. Hulu is paid for by ads, and YouTube is omnipresent - but ESPN3 took the riskier step of integrating with cable providers. By doing so, they not only managed to prove their value to their cable provider partners/subscribers - they also managed to create a great user experience because they didn't force consumers to pay again for something they were already paying for through their home cable subscription. Big win for ESPN.




#9 - Coca-Cola History Of Celebration
Coke is an official sponsor of the World Cup and has the stadiums plastered with their logo as you would expect. Continuing with their theme of happiness that was so nicely brought to life through viral videos such as "The Happiness Machine,", their World Cup spot focuses on the story of Roger Milla and his dance of celebration during the 1990 World Cup that sparked a revolution in goal celebrations (as the ad claims). The video is set to the official theme song of the FIFA World Cup 2010 and the voice over is from an announcer with a South African accent (nice touch). The last shot of Roger Milla in the stands enjoying a Coke while the voiceover talks about how he "showed the world how to live" is pure World Cup melodramatic magic.

#8 - KIA Motors South Africa
As the official automobile sponsor for the World Cup, KIA had fertile ground to do a lot of great things around the World Cup. Unfortunately, their actual effort seemed uncoordinated and confusing - with KIA Motors South Africa running a promotion all about offering an exclusive experience to people who engaged with the South African page or Twitter account, while the global marketing team seemed to focus on the new Soul car with a 1 minute video (embedded below) asking "what's your soul app?" and randomly talking about anti-gravity apps. The US KIA Twitter page doesn't even mention anything about the World Cup, the global Facebook page offers disconnected polls and the pieces of this campaign just seem out of sync in the unique way that can easily happen when global teams work in their silos and never collaborate. One commenter on their YouTube video summed it up best in their response to KIA's question ... "My soul app is the one that blocks these kind of ads." Ouch.

#7 - Cisco Around The World
Continuing their Human Network campaign* Cisco uses an engaging ad showing a soccer juggling trick they call the "around the world" that spreads from country to country through young soccer fans watching a video and trying to recreate that moment. As a kid, I remember watching Jürgen Klinsmann in 1994 score an amazing goal against South Koreans and spending months practicing and trying to perfect the same move. Cisco managed to tap that moment that many soccer players and fans could relate to, and demonstrate how their global network makes sharing moments like that possible in a faster and more real way than ever before. (*Full Disclosure - Cisco is an Ogilvy client, but I did not work on this campaign).

#6 - CristianoRonaldo.com

Voted the FIFA World Player Of The Year in 2008, Cristiano Ronaldo (and his often photographed abs) may also be the best looking player in this year's World Cup ... or so I'm told. To capitalize on the attention, he relaunched his website during the World Cup and last week I got a launch announcement from a PR team announcing his new site as a place where they would be "pulling dialogue between Cristiano and his 5 million fans on Facebook and Twitter." After Portugal lost a close Round of 16 match against their neighboring rival Spain, Ronaldo was featured heavily in the news for his comments about feeling like a "broken man." Unfortunately, he isn't sharing this despair in any sort of dialogue with his fans and his Twitter feed has been silent since before the Spain match. The lesson it brings to light is the central pitfall in creating this "revolutionary" new model for dialogue between a celebrity superstar and his fans: the whole thing falls apart if the superstar just doesn't feel like talking.

#5 - CNN + FourSquare World Cup Promotion
CNN jumped into the geolocation bandwagon around the World Cup and launched a promotion with Foursquare where they are offering special badges to people who check in at locations within South Africa as well as at viewing parties at various locations around the world. Though they are not broadcasting the games, this is an interesting chance at experimentation for the brand and if it works I imagine we will begin to see this used by other Turner Network channels like TNT around college basketball, as well as potentially around large newsmaking events that draw a crowd at viewing parties as well, such as national elections.



#4 - Bud United House Party
You have to give Budweiser credit for not giving up on the BudTV idea even though their idea of a 24 hour online network fell flat. Around the FIFA World Cup, they leveraged their sponsorship to create the Bud United house where they invite one person from every one of the 32 finalist teams to live in a house together during the World Cup. The only rules were that when your team was eliminated from the World Cup, you were too. The result is an engaging online reality show that has a great premise, interesting content and a unique sponsorship activation. The only problem to see with this campaign is that they focused all their TV budget on running the same ad over and over where the fans try to distract the soccer player with an mosaic image of beer in the stands. If they used some of that budget to drive TV audiences to check out Bud United, they would have likely increased their engagement dramatically.





#3 - Pepsi "Oh Africa"

Pepsi was one of the sponsors that some felt "ambushed" the games to take away attention from the official soft drink sponsor (Coke) and got great buzz for their TV spot and viral video featuring people making a soccer pitch for several soccer superstars to play against kids in a soccer challenge. The not so subtle message is that Africa can achieve great things (like defeat international soccer stars) if her people can work together.

#2 - Nike Write The Future
Nike's online long form ad with the tagline of "Write The Future" can only be described as epic in how it manages to take all the top tier talent they sponsor and roll out a story that not only talks of their impact on the game and culture, but how what happens on the World Cup stage often does write the future for all of us. The World Cup is special in its significance to the world and watching this ad helps you understand and live that. If there is one ad most closely associated with this World Cup, it has to be the Write the Future campaign. Adidas still had a strong global showing  and for "real soccer players," Adidas remains the brand most focused on soccer and stands to realize big revenue gains from merchandising as a result of the games. They made the uniforms and the often debated . But for Nike to grab just a bit of the spotlight through great creative and storytelling isn't bad for a brand that was not the official sponsor.

#1 - Brand South Africa
After the games finish and the world turns its attention to the next big sporting event, the biggest winner from these games may very well be Brand South Africa. The country has had an ambitious nation branding and marketing effort in place since 2002 - and one that in part led to their selection as the host nation for Africa's first FIFA World Cup. The games have gone off perfectly and the biggest controversies to date have been the Jabulani ball and the inconsistent officiating - both having little to do with the host country. Using music and dance as a way into their culture, coverage of the games online and on television were filled with African rhythms and clearly stood out from anything else. Though the South African's didn't progress in the tournament as far as they liked, the country invited the world to their doorstep, brought out the vuvuzelas, did a disika dance and showed the world what Africa was truly capable of.

Amongst a World Cup filled with good and bad marketing lessons, South Africa deserves to stand at the top of the list with pride. Good marketing helped them get selected to host the games, and great marketing will help them inspire people to visit and invest in their country long after the final match is played and a champion is crowned.