Tassie teens got lucky last week when Jack McGinn won the Samboy ATEAM Facebook promotion and secured himself his own private cinema screening. 50 kids, 50 choc tops, a tonne of pop-corn and chip-loads of Samboy. B.A. Murdoch. Samboy chips? Who would you rather be holding onto while plummeting to the earth in a tank after exploding out of a plane?  mmmmm…I’d still go a pack of Barbecue Samboy. Sorry B.A. It’s not the haircut. It’s just that the chips are that good.

Found an interesting case study into Call To Actions for different messaging. Basically they found that when the messaging was changed to a more of a command they had more success (10%) as compared to a statement (4.7%). When the command was followed with an access point of sort (adding the word “here”) it had a 25% increase to 12.8% click through rate. I found this interesting for the fact that I guess the internet is still a relatively new thing for a lot of people so we still need to make things very obvious for people and not take too much for granted.

Check out the article here.
(learning already)

-Brett

If you are a social networking hick and love all things ville and wars you can now buy and redeem products at 7-Eleven and gain points on a virtual punch card to unlock uber gifts to share with friends on Facebook.  Trialing in the US & Canada for now, the promotion is like a fly-buys points program for convenience store shopping that rewards you with an online Zynga game challenge every time you buy specially marked products. The ‘Buy, Earn, Pay’ promotion in-game Zynga challenges allow you to gain Ville cred, and depending on what you’re into, there’s challenges for MafiaWars, YoVille and FarmVille. Each game has its own unique gifts with users scrolling over the items for more details. You can also submit your code via text message and activate the in-game challenge that way.

I don’t know if the flight to LA is worth it at this stage, but when the promo hits Australia you can bet there will be plenty of people waiting to uber-gift on Farmville, Fishville, YoVille, Vampire Wars and the recently released FrontierVille where you get to carve out a home in the wilderness and raise a family, fight bears and snakes…you can collect FrontierVille Facebook gold too. Fellow pioneers who have been Frontier’ing for a while, can someone please tell me if I should start counting my chickens that the price of my gold is going to go up? How long before the first 7-Eleven opens in the Wild West?! All this land clearing has made me super thirsty for a Slurpee.

-mike

I went to a presentation this weekend on Technology and Behaviour for the Creative Sydney festival. Mike Walsh was one of the speakers, and I was really impressed with his insights. He talked about some of the interesting trends happening in Asia specifically, including internet addiction, group buying, user generated (or altered content) and the future of mobile phones. I could probably write an essay on his talk because I found it so interesting! But I’ll just talk about one point.

One of the main points I took from the talk was the fact that our world will soon be filled with people that have always lived with the internet and will not know life without it (people born after 1994). The internet will not be something you “go to” but just something that is. From this we need to make the technologies work for us, and change with them. One example of this is in China where group buying has become a phenomena. If someone wants to buy a fridge they put the call out to find 300 other people that want that same fridge. They then set a date and store location, and flash mob it, demanding 300 fridges at a huge discounted price (shop owners are normally so afraid of having 300 angry customers in the store, that they usually agree! ha). Perfect aye!

Another example about this was from another speaker Rachel Botsman. She believed that we were moving from a hyper consumption market into a collaborative consumption market. Pointing out that as technology is advancing our behaviours seem to be moving back to old ways of bartering and sharing. Things like share cars, couch surfing and land share are creating experiences we want to share and show off rather than things or objects.

I was really inspired and optimistic after hearing these two speakers about the future of technology and social media. Basically I feel that we are moving into a more social world with technology, where everyone can share their social experiences, help others and feel good about themselves. The more we can use technology and trust it, the more it lends itself to us being able to make it work for us and really benefit our lives by making them richer and fuller.

-Brett

Good news comes in 3’s, and this week turned into one hell of a triple-decker whopper when was Pusher nominated for an Effie Award. Introduced by the New York American Marketing Association in 1968, the Effie Awards have become recognised as the pre-eminent award in the advertising industry. Now held in 39 countries around the world, The Effie Awards honour the most significant achievement in advertising and marketing communications: effectiveness.

The 2010 Australian Effie Awards attracted 154 entries from agencies and clients with Pusher making it as a finalist for the most effective small budget campaign (less than 500k). We’re not hegding bets just yet, but we’re hoping a million’ that it’s ours. Winner announced end of August!

 -mike