September 29, 2011
In an effort to garner attention for the Matrix brand, Toyota and their ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi L.A. let loose a viral campaign that was intended to target an already ad adverse demographic. In March 2008, an unsuspecting L.A. resident, Amber Duick, received an email from a complete stranger named Sebastian Bowler who seemed to know her. The email read “Amber mate! Coming 2 Los Angeles Gonna lay low at your place for a bit. Till it all blows over. Bringing Trigger.” At first Amber might have assumed this was junk mail and ignored it, however as a single women living in L.A. she may have become increasingly concerned when she received a second email that included her home address with a photo of the alleged Sebastian.
What Amber didn’t know was that she was the target of a prank viral advertising campaign. Perhaps this is where marketing crosses that fine line between targeted and invasive. Traditional targeted campaigns could leverage consumer insights and psychographic data to speak one-to-one with a consumer. Today, agencies and large consumer brands are struggling to gain the attention of people who simply avoid advertisements. In fact Toyota’s own research proved that males under 35 do not respond to advertising and are contemptuous of brands that try to mask the ordinary with a youthful edge.
As the campaign went on, Amber was subjected to further emails from her virtual stalker with links to his MySpace page that described him as a 25-year-old soccer hooligan from England who enjoyed drinking to excess. After several weeks Amber received her final email that informed her it was all in jest and she was simply a target (victim) of a virtual punking campaign by Toyota.
If you thought Toyota had problems with their brakes a few years ago, they now have bigger issues as the campaign came crashing down when this week a California court approved her $10-million (U.S.) legal proceedings against Toyota and Saatchi & Saatchi L.A., for intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligence, false advertising and other acts.
The internet is a great mass medium, but it shouldn’t be used to misrepresent brands or invade unsuspecting consumers with misleading messages. Let this be a lesson for clients and agencies looking to experiment with online marketing, think it through before starting the online engine.
February 15, 2011
Being our eBusiness Manager means that it’s my job to stay on top of technology trends and find ways to tackle our client’s marketing needs with unique solutions. When I was first introduced to QR (Quick Response) codes years ago, I felt a sense of déjà vu. It brought me back to the late 90s when I was developing eBanking solutions for cell phone users. I was an analyst then and thought “neat idea, but not the right time”. At that time of course, a BlackBerry was a text-based pager and Nokia users sported a 1-inch by 1-inch screen that made mobile eBanking painful at best.
Like eBanking, QR Codes when first introduced in the marketing world were ahead of their time. Although the QR code has been around since 1994, its use was primarily to scan large amounts of data for inventory management systems. QR codes, like their barcode predecessors, are images with encoded data but these little marvels of black and white squares have the ability to store 350-times the amount of data as UPCs. With this kind of capacity, marketers realized they could encode entire messages and URLs and then embed these in their marketing collateral. There were two problems with this approach: 1) the average person didn’t have a scanner to decode these images, and 2) when asked what these QR codes were, most people didn’t know what to do with them.
Today, smartphone sales outpace PCs and with these new smartphones come the required technology – a camera and scanning software – to turn any phone into a QR Code reader. Savvy marketers are leveraging these QR codes to drive their off-line marketing to the web to create an integrated marketing solution. Passersby are now invited to connect directly to product info, testimonials, and richer content – all via the click of their smartphone camera. People are starting to become more familiar with the QR Code
An additional benefit is that QR Codes are static and once they’re created, they can’t be altered. What can be altered however is their destination – which means that users who return to your site can be presented with different content (consider a restaurant QR code that links to the Lunch vs. Dinner menu depending on time of day) which helps cut down on printing or reprint costs. As marketers, we’re also interested in the tracking and measurement. These codes provide us with a better understanding of which campaigns are working and where best to invest future marketing resources.
And while the analyst in me still thinks we’re still a few years away from widespread mobile banking, the eBusiness guy thinks we’re about to see a surge of QR Codes in our day-to-day lives.