Amazing augmented reality campaigns

Recent efforts show that marketing success with this new tech is well within reach

The challenge of using new technology in marketing is numbing yourself to the novelty of it and finding a genuinely good idea. And though most fail, a few succeed brilliantly. We’ve been looking to use augmented reality in an upcoming project and did some research to see what has already been done. What we found were some amazing applications that solve the target’s needs, while wowing them with shiny things at the same time.

Here are the best campaigns we’ve come across and why they were a success. Maybe they’ll inspire you to come up with some brilliant applications of your own that you didn’t even realize were possible. 

Slap a virtual watch on your wrist
So you’re thinking of dropping a chunk of change on a new watch, but not quite convinced it will look as dashing on your wrist as you imagine. Why not try on a digital model first? Tissot is betting you’ll want to take their new range for a test drive. It starts with a paper watch you cut out from their magazine ads (you can also download it from the site). You put the paper watch around your wrist, go to the Tissot site to download the software and hold it up to your webcam. You then see a 3D model wrapped around your wrist. You can cycle through the new range and even test out some the watches’ features. It’s extremely cool, has drawn loads of media attention and fills the need of potential buyers to try out a watch before buying beautifully.

The dude is unsettlingly devoid of emotion, but the watch is nifty
 

Take a BMW for a spin on your desktop (the wooden one)
They could have just gone with creating a nifty 3D pop-up model (like Mini did), but for the Z4, BMW kicked it up a notch and created art. Or rather, they let you create art. Using a simple printout, a Z4 pops onto your desk and you can drive it around, leaving colorful tire tracks in your wake. When your street art is complete, you can save and share it via YouTube or Facebook with one click, thus expanding the campaign's footprint and making it spread organically simply by virtue of being fun and drawing fans more intimately into the BMW experience. 

Such pretty donuts. Mmmmm....donuts.
 

Explore the 3D world on your tongue
Since augmented reality springs to life just by using a simple pattern, you can slip it into almost anything. Even the tongue of your shoe. Adidas has created a 3D city (complete with the Death Star) that springs to life when you go to their website and hold the shoe up to your webcam. You can then navigate the city and play games using the shoe as a controller. It’s pretty dang cool and adds a unique selling point for their sneakers in an overcrowded market. The brilliance of the idea is that it adds a whole new digital dimension into the product itself, instead of creating a one-off gimmick that’s glanced at and forgotten. This way, the 3D world is always on the tip of your tongue. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. 

3D city! Storm troopers! Lasers! Overstimulation!
 

Enroll in alien police academy  
The film District 9 used a highly interactive augmented reality app to spread awareness and deepen fans’ experience of the sci-fi world. By visiting the website for Multi National United, the fictional government organization in charge of policing Earth’s alien inhabitants, you can go through an augmented reality training simulation on how to deal with day-to-day tasks, like non-human arrest and shooting at monsters. The campaign is a clever take on the film world and adds depth to the story, increasing viewers immersion and extending engagement beyond the cinema. 

Working for the man is fun when they give you a machine gun.

Get your own mud soccer cheerleader 
In the most ambitious campaign I came across, UK brand Dairy Crest have set up an elaborate mud soccer contest. In order to win a slot for you and 5 friends in the Frijj Swamp Soccer World Cup 2010, complete with your own Swamp Soccerettes cheering your team on, users hold up a Frijj bottle in front of their webcam to enter a real-time environment. Oh, and a swamp soccerette crawls out of the bottle and does a cheer for you. The campaign cleverly capitalizes on the World Cup fever among its target and encourages them to get involved in a footie tournament of their own while their blood is boiling for some action. Plus, it’s so quirky you can’t resist seeking out more info to see if it’s real. 

The connection between mud and milk is left mysteriously unsaid
 

Inspired yet? If so, check out this article for some great practical tips on creating an augmented reality campaign before you get started. And if you’ve seen any other great augmented reality campaigns, share them in the comments section below.

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

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The best use of keywords is not SEO

Supercharging your site with keywords isn’t nearly as effective as building it around them from the ground up

Working on several SEO projects here at The Duffy Agency, I’ve come to realize keyword research has an even better use than optimizing a site for search engines – it should guide the entire focus of a site from day one.

Us SEO geeks usually start projects by doing some intense keyword research to make sure we’re optimizing an existing site for the search phrases with the greatest potential. This does help your content get found by a whole lot more people, but your chance to reach the masses may already be out of reach.

If you want to build a massively successful website in today’s overcrowded cyberspace, you need a cunning strategy. Keyword research is your secret weapon in crafting a strategy to give you a leg up on the competition. Without this research, you’re leaving your fate up to wishful thinking, hoping that your target is already searching for exactly what you’re creating and that you can steal traffic from competitors. But by taking a close look at what your target is searching for, you can tailor your content so that it gets placed where millions of targeted individuals are looking for it. But there's a catch: your site’s core content might not end up being what you had planned.

I can sense your skepticism. After all, if you want to sell bikinis, why should you go and make a website about swimming, workout tips and dieting instead of simply setting up an optimized webshop?

Because there aren’t many people searching for bikinis. Moreover, your webshop would be competing against every other company in the category, and the best SEO in the world won’t put you in front of the global giants. On top of that, you’ll only be fighting for the people typing “bikini” into search engines.

When you do the research, you see that most people interested in upgrading their beach-look are between 13 and 40, they work out, they dream about vacations in the Bahamas, and even though they want your product, most of them never search for it

. But they are searching for pictures of beaches, reading blogs about working out and trying out diets to lose a couple of pounds before bikini season. In other words, you discover swimwear is actually a small part of a bigger need your customers are trying to satisfy.

So instead of creating the website www.wesellswimwear.com you create www.getreadyforthebeach.com.

And instead of targeting the keywords "swimwear," "bikinis" and "bathing suits," which are being intensely fought over by a slew of competitors, you use "beach," "vacation," "work out" and "diet tips," since they get millions more hits and are less contested by the competition. 

There’s still competition to deal with, but you won’t be competing against other webshops struggling for their piece of a small audience. You’ll attract customers from a huge group of people who want your product, even if they aren’t looking for it directly. And you’ll still have pages on your site devoted to your webshop where you can fight for a place on the first “bikini” search results page.

The moral of this little hypothetical tale is that keyword research shows you what content your audience is out there looking for, and it’s likely not what you’re selling, whether it be a product, service or obscure amusement. You can’t do a whole lot with that information after your website is up, so doing the research in the beginning and engineering your site to give your target exactly what they want, where they’re looking for it, will lead to far greater results on search engines and higher traffic in general. Maybe a site that is all about you is exactly what you need, but you won’t know without the research. And if you don’t do it until after you’ve poured your time and money into making a site, your golden opportunity may have passed you by.

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Please don’t follow me

How to work with (not around) Twitter’s 2,000 follow limit

Spammers have nested in Twitter’s dark underbelly since its earliest days. Fully aware of this, Twitter imposes a limit to the number of people you can follow all at once to hinder spam accounts and bots. Since that limit is 2,000 people, it’s not much of a hindrance to your average user. But for those of us trying to connect to as many relevant people as possible through Twitter, it can be a bother.

I’m going to offer some advice for cracking the 2,000 following limit, but first let’s consider why you need more than 2,000 people sending you 140 character messages to begin with.

This is about 2,000 people. Now imagine them all shouting at you. That's what following 2,000 people is like.

 

The line between spam and interesting content is thinner than you think

Honestly take a look at where you fall on the spam spectrum. We think of spam as bots, or companies pushing their offer into the world without restraint, but if you’re bulk following people you aren’t really interested in, or spending far more time shouting than listening, the Twitterverse doesn’t consider you much better than a bot. Almost all of us are guilty of this to some degree. If you’re swaying too far toward the spammer end of the spectrum, you should rethink how you use Twitter before you start strategizing how to get more followers. 

Who really needs to follow 2,000+ people? 

You could argue that no one does, because no one can actually sustain a conversation with that many people at once. Refining your list to a smaller network you interact with daily may be more beneficial than having 1 million people auto-follow you back who aren’t listening. Moreover, how many tweets do you have time to keep up with? If the answer is not nearly enough to stay up to speed on your Twitter stream, consider what the actual benefit of following more people is. That said, there are thousands of interesting people out there (here's how to find them) and if you’re following them for the right reasons, expanding your network can be a good idea. The whole point of Twitter is, after all, making new connections with interesting people. 

Ok, I get it, you still want to follow more people

2,000 isn’t the absolute limit, it’s actually based on a ratio – once you get close to 2,000 followers, you’re only allowed to follow 10% more people than are following you. If you aren’t close to having that many followers, unfollowing people is the obvious way to open up spots for new tweeple. People you should stop following are the ones who are either not contributing anything interesting or who have more or less abandoned their accounts. Here you can find tools to bulk unfollow people, but I wouldn’t recommend getting rid of people just because they didn’t follow you back - they may in fact be your most relevant follows. And you can get them to follow you back by listening to what they say and responding.

Focusing on generating great content and making sure it’s found will help you get more followers organically, and as such raise your follow limit. Using hashtags is a great way to help others with the same interests find you, as is promoting your account through your other social media assets like Facebook and LinkedIn, along with email sigs and business cards.

Do NOT auto-follow people back

This habit severely undermines the value of your Twitter stream and fills up your limit with fluff. There are tons of people bulk following others to try and boost their numbers with no intention of listening to anyone, including you. Following back can be difficult to resist as people can get snippy if you don’t. I’ve been publicly called out for not following someone back, and was forced to publicly state that I didn’t think they were very interesting. I was promptly unfollowed. I was perfectly ok with losing a follower, given that his main interest was fly fishing and, having never touched a rod, I had no insight to offer. So if you don’t share any of the same interests as me, please don’t follow me, neither of us will get anything out of it. Even if it makes our numbers look good.

The 2,000 follow limit is there for good reason. When you hit it, you should start refining your list, not finding ways to subvert the system. After all, 1 follower who really cares what you have to say is worth 2,000 who are just padding their numbers. 

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

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How an independent agency can reach 3.5 billion people

New network alliance creates a viable option to global advertising conglomerate – minus the baggage

One advertising agency by itself, even if it’s filled with some of the best and brightest in the industry, can’t give you global reach. That’s why so many companies turn to global network agencies (think Ogilvy, JWT, BBDO) despite the hefty price, inflexibility and bureaucracy that are often part of the package. But today many clients are discovering that when independent agencies around the globe work together in harmony, that independent creative shop around the corner turns into your brand’s gateway to brilliant global marketing, without all the baggage.  

This new independent solution provides more options to clients with global brands. Instead of having to choose between one global network agency or hand-picking individual agencies in every market, you can now go to an independent network to get centralized leadership with local expertise in one package. This strategy is becoming an increasingly popular one. 

Our goal has always been to be a lithe independent agency that can take on challenging international projects. That’s why we’re a member of the ad agency network TAAN. It allows us to partner with other top class independent agencies in markets around the world to take on multi-national campaigns. Since each agency is carefully selected and immersed in only its local market, with all of the unique nuances that entails, TAAN has been a godsend in making many of our projects successes for us and our clients. 

TAAN’s reach recently made a huge leap forward thanks to an alliance with the San Jose Network – the world’s premier Latin ad agency network serving global clients across North, Central and South America. The new alliance creates a network of independent ad agencies with combined coverage of 65 countries, 87 markets and 3.5 billion people. TAAN president Peter Gerristen said of the new partnership, “This alliance is truly a game-changer for today’s brands and will provide expertise, local knowledge and insight into economically important regions and cultures.”

Since it’s vital to meet face to face with our network partners to see what skills we can each add to projects, we bit the bullet and made the trip from perpetually overcast Sweden to the sunny shores of Miami. The meeting was the first gathering of the combined networks to establish relationships and get the ball rolling on some exciting new collaborations.

San Jose Network founder George L. San Jose with Sean Duffy (TAAN EU President, founder The Duffy Agency),  Rich Wahl (Managing Partner of The Duffy Agency Boston) and  Peter Gerristen (TAAN Global President) at the conference in Miami

The biggest impact the new alliance has for us is the added depth in Latin American markets. We can’t wait to dive into new projects that will take advantage of this expertise. 

With combined annual billings of $1.5 billion USD, this new independent constellation would easily rank in the world’s top 10 of Ad Agency Networks (combined billings were revised up from 1.1 billon since the alliance was announced in February, 2010).  “No matter how you look at it, that is a business entity to be reckoned with,” said Sean Duffy who, together with John Reisky, serves as president of  TAAN Europe. 

Despite their combined size, networks of independents retain a level of agility and adaptability that is valued by clients large and small, yet has proven difficult for the the WPP and Interpublic Groups of the world to copy. The failure of the global ad agency conglomerates to keep pace with the changes that have taken place in the market over the past decade is making networks like TAAN a more attractive option than traditional global agency network chains. We believe this trend will continue. 

Do you see the rise of independent networks shaping the future of the ad biz, or will the industry continue to be dominated by Sir Martin Sorrell and Michael Roth? 

Read more about the TAAN and San Jose Network alliance. 

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SEO and Twitter: How to get your page ranked

Adding search engine optimization to a website is as essential as good design and content. SEO is the cornerstone of making sure a website is found by search engines, which helps increase site traffic and authority. Most people are catching on to SEO these days, but they still don’t associate it with Twitter. Which is a shame because they’re missing an easy opportunity to increase their exposure. 

Twitter is highly indexed by Google and taking a few simple steps will help your Twitter profile appear on the first page of results when someone searches for you. Too often we’ve done research for clients and found that a company’s Twitter page doesn’t appear in the first few pages of a Google search. If that applies to you (go and check, we’ll wait), by making a few changes to your profile, you can boost your ranking.

Profile name - Picking a username is one of the most important things you can do. A username should either reflect your industry, a name you’re well known by or your company. This is how people will find your profile and associating your account with a name that is already associated with your industry will increase its value. Avoid dashes and try to keep the name as short as possible. 

Your website - Don’t bother adding “www” in front of your url. Twitter will add “http://” so the shorter you can keep your url the better. Twitter will only show the first 20 characters and the first 7 are pre-filled in. Just use the domainname.com. Avoid using url shorteners like Bit.ly or Tiny Url. 

Bio keywords - With only 160 characters allowed in your bio, don’t waste characters with words that don’t add to your value and have no search relevance. Your bio is a short introduction to who you are and will be displayed in the search results. It should tell people who you are, what you do and what you’ll tweet about.

Avatar - Most people don’t think about this, but Twitter doesn’t rename your profile photo like some sites do. By giving your profile photo a correct name, it will appear in search engine image results. This is important when it comes to making sure people are using the correct version of your logo or picture.

Use your account - Now that you’ve set up your account to maximize search engine results, use your account. The more active you are on Twitter, the higher Google and Bing will rank your profile in search results. This will lead to more people finding your profile, getting more followers and increasing your brand authority. 

After making these changes, let us know how it changed the search results for your Twitter profile.

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

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5 lessons Hollywood taught me about social media

Summer blockbuster season has kicked off with Iron Man 2 hauling in bucket loads of cash. Social media has been a big part of movie promotion this year, allowing film studios to get eager movie goers more engaged with their stories and characters than ever. Every campaign site I visited had a Facebook and Twitter account attached, so they aren't anything that will set a campaign apart any more. While most weren't anything to write home about, a few of the campaigns for this year’s big films have been downright brilliant, generating widespread buzz across the internet. As there are some great concepts in these campaigns, I decided to pick a few of them apart to see what the rest of us trying to market through social media could learn. Here are 5 examples of social media campaigns done right and what lessons there are to take away.

1. Toy Story 3 taught me to think laterally 
Beyond promoting Toy Story 3 directly, Pixar “leaked” bizarre retro TV spots for non-existent toys on YouTube. It was a brilliant move because it showed Pixar understood what gives a video viral appeal, making them feel like obscure, hilarious discoveries that you want to share with everyone you know. With millions of views on YouTube, articles written about the campaign on blogs and websites both big and small, and buzz stormed up on social media networks, Pixar showed us that you don’t have to say a word about yourself to get the internet talking about you.  

2. Iron Man 2 taught me to let fans become the hero 

This site easily took the longest to load (and it doesn’t appear to work in Chrome at all), but it was worth it when it did. Using an augmented reality app and your webcam, you can finally see yourself as Iron Man or War Machine. The app tracks where your head is (don’t ask me how) and places the Iron Man helmet over it, moving around as you move. You can also get an inside view of the helmet with all the futuristic interfaces Tony Stark uses in the movies. It’s a big kick for fans of the movie to see themselves as the hero, and there’s nothing that draws more attention than appealing to people’s vanity. If you can find a way to let your target become the star, it’ll earn you a lot of goodwill. 

 I. Am. Iron Man.

3. Shrek Forever After taught me if I let fans build their own content, they will happily share it 

The campaign site for Dreamworks’ 4th Shrek movie is stuffed with the usual content, but its build-an-ogre feature makes it a standout. It invites you to join the ogre resistance by creating your very own ugly green soldier. There’s actually quite a lot of options for customizing your ogre. The franchise lost my interest after the second film, but I still found it great fun to see what combinations of silly faces and fierce weapons I could come up with. It’s even made me a bit curious about what this resistance is and how it plays into the film. But the really brilliant part is that Dreamworks realized people were far more interested in sharing their own creations than someone else’s, so they gave them a way to make something highly customizable of their own that promoted their film at the same time. 

This is my Ogre. I call him Steve.

 

4. Jonah Hex taught me to plant teasers where the target will find them 

In support of the upcoming theatrical release of Jonah Hex, DC Comics and the WB have created a web series of animated motion-comics covering three new story arcs. I had never heard of Jonah Hex, but the motion-comics look kick ass and have gotten me intrigued enough to look into the film and ask my friends about it. The motion comics are available through Amazon, iTunes, Xbox Live and the Playstation Network – most of the places their target go to satisfy their entertainment cravings. By creating exclusive content to hook potential new fans, they’re generating a higher level of anticipation for the film by immersing people in the Jonah Hex universe. If you put the effort into creating great offshoot content, people will happily download and talk about it – even if they have to pay for it.

5. Despicable Me taught me if you’re just gonna do a campaign site, do it exceptionally well 
The best way to get people to share your content through social media is simply by giving them great content. Universal poured a whole lot of effort (and god knows how much money) into their campaign site for Despicable Me to give visitors much more than the usual, forgettable movie site. I usually hate it when a website has music playing in the background, but Despicable Me’s theme song is too much fun to find annoying. And that’s the crux of this whole site: things that are usually throwaways are done well enough to be endearing. Each section is presented nicely and has several options for sharing the content. The games are particularly slick. They’re based on classics but with amusing tweaks, e.g. when you play tic-tac-toe various landmarks pop up along with amusing soundbites. You even have an extra incentive to keep playing as winning games unlocks prizes, like desktop wallpapers. There isn’t a revolutionary idea in the site, but it certainly has me excited to see this film just by how much fun it is.

Those are just a few of the campaigns for this summer's big movies. Did we miss any of your favorites?  

Jason Ross is a copywriter for The Duffy Agency. He loves working on both traditional and social media projects and speculating on the future of the ad industry.

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State of the Union in Social Media

The 2010 Social Media Marketing Industry Report by Michael Stelzner of Social Media Examiner was released a couple of weeks ago. Stelzner interviewed 1,356 marketing professionals in order to understand how marketers are using social media to grow and promote their businesses. It confirms what many of us working in social media already knew, but also contained several surprises. 

A staggering 91% of the marketers surveyed say they are using social media for marketing purposes. That’s much higher than I think most people would have predicted. Sure, social media is hot right now, but many companies are reluctant to get started even if they feel they should. The common perception is that more B2C companies are using social media than B2B companies. It turns out that 79.5% of B2B companies use social media, with only 68.7% of their B2C counterparts on the bandwagon.

The majority of marketers are using social media 6 hours or more a week. This shows a growing number of businesses are investing their time in social media – and with great results. Over 73% of marketers using social media for over a year reported that it helped them close business, which is an increase of 12% over 2009. 

 

Additionally, businesses using social media saw the following results:

• An increase in their search engine rankings
• Greater exposure for their business
• Created new partnerships
• Generated qualified leads
• Reduced overall marketing expenses
• Increased website traffic

 

Naturally Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are the most used social media tools. Look to blogs and YouTube to make big strides in the coming year as many of the marketers surveyed planned to increase their usage. But the tools they really want to know more about are social bookmarking sites (i.e.; Delicious) and smartphone marketing. 

Social media is quickly becoming a marketing staple, which means your customers will be less and less forgiving if you don’t have a presence there, and potential customers may miss you altogether. If you aren’t developing a social media marketing plan this year, it will be harder to catch up. 

In our business, Facebook, Twitter and blogging have been instrumental in helping us make contacts and increase our footprint beyond what a small agency could normally create. But we’re always looking for innovative new ways to connect with people. What social media tools have you found particularly effective?

Stefan Halley is the Digital Project Leader for The Duffy Agency. He loves to talk about social media.

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