Neville’s posterous

Volkswagen of America is launching the newest-generation GTI exclusively on an iPhone app, a cost-efficient approach the automaker said is a first for the industry.

How cost efficient? When the marketer introduced the GTI in 2006, it spent $60 million on a big-budget blitz with lots of network TV. By comparison, an executive familiar with the matter estimates the annual budget for mobile AOR services is $500,000. And while an iPhone-only strategy may seem limiting, consider this: In September, Apple reported there are more than 50 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide. By comparison, CBS' "NCIS," the most-watched show for week ending Oct. 18, reached 21 million viewers and commands an average price of $130,000 for a single 30-second spot.

The automaker's Real Racing GTI game for the iPhone and iPod Touch in the App Store, unveiled at a press event last night [Oct 21] in Manhattan, includes a motion-controlled car-racing game play like arcade or console counterparts, as well as a virtual showroom. The brand conceived the mobile strategy, which also includes a six-car giveaway for game players, with independent digital agency AKQA.

Volkswagen licensed the game from Australian developer Firemint, which built a pared-down version with fewer race tracks using only GTI's, the high-performance variation of VW's Golf brand.

Not only does choosing a mobile platform over a customary 30-second spot reduce marketing cost, but licensing an existing game also means savings. "It's a clever idea," said mobile-marketing consultant Raven Zachary, president of Small Society and founder of iPhoneDevCamp. "Licensing game technology saves VW considerable development cost and time to delivery. And the cost of six cars is not bad considering the cost of doing a print campaign or TV campaign."

Understanding who your market is and what may appeal to them. US only.

In January 2010, a team of three travelers will begin an unprecedented journey. A mission. An expedition. A quest to visit in 365 days 206 countries where Coca-Cola is sold. These three travelers are more than mere explorers–they are Happiness Ambassadors, and they will seek and share the optimism and happiness of Coca-Cola from Aruba to Zimbabwe and everywhere in between. They will participate in some amazing events including the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the FIFA World Cup in South Africa and the World Expo in Shanghai.

Bold and ambitious.

Details in an AP story where I first saw this: Coca-Cola to send 3 bloggers around the world in marketing campaign; 206 countries in a year.

“[Twitter] has changed the culture of our company,” [Comcast CEO Brian] Roberts said. Comcast has for a while now been using Twitter to scan for complaints and engage with customers. The idea was not his, but rather rose organically when someone in the company realized that a lot of public complaints were being sent over Twitter.

Roberts went on to note that “Famous Frank,” also known as Frank Eliason (Comcastcares on Twitter), now has 11 people working under him simply to respond to information about Comcast being broadcast on Twitter. Roberts says that it’s an entirely different kind of dialogue coming in then the usual phone complaints, and he seems very pleased about the work the team has done with the customers on Twitter.

He also noted that it’s not just Twitter the company is using now to engage with customers. They also use Facebook and some of the other networks.

A great example of a carefully-planned approach to using social media to achieve measurable business goals.

[Later] I expanded on this with some commentary in a blog post: The Twitter effect on organization culture.

An Estonian music star is attempting to publicise her new single in the UK by creating her own newspaper.

More than 50,000 London commuters will be handed copies of the ‘Daily Hannah’ tomorrow from glamorous distributors in the usual freesheet distribution spots. The paper will point readers to Hannah Ild's website, where they will be able to download her new single and get more information about the singer.

Quite Great Communications' senior press officer Ben Titchmarsh, who is handling PR for the stunt, said: ‘PR firms in the music business often face the challenge of promoting a star who is massive abroad to the UK media so we had an idea - why not generate column inches ourselves with paper devoted solely to the artist we're promoting?'

Ild is being managed by 19 Management and works with producers Bimbo Jones and Steve Booker, the writer of ‘Mercy’ for Duffy.

The newspaper will educate readers about the singer, as well as providing information on Estonia and Tallinn’s upcoming European City of Culture 2011 status. Readers will also be able to win a five-star trip to the country.

The main story will be that the Estonian Embassy has announced Ild will be the face of the country’s tourism campaign.

Reaching your audience with tools they're comfortable with, appropriate for commuters and the environment in which they'll consume the content. Imaginative.

Good luck, Hannah!

A European youth magazine is tomorrow publishing an issue featuring augmented reality content supplementing its editorial, which includes interviews with teenagers from around the world.

The special augmented reality edition uses the technology to augment print features about the choices and ambitions of teenagers by allowing readers to see video interviews and other content.

Readers need to visit the magazine's website at Colorsmagazine.com and aim the black and white codes printed on the magazine's pages at a webcam to see the extra content.

Fabrica has applied for a patent for using augmented reality with a print magazine and the patent is pending.

Colors is available at newsstands and bookshops in three bilingual editions (English combined with Italian, French or Spanish) from tomorrow [Oct 20].

Imaginative.

[...] freelance sports writer Norman Giller implies that he has the inside track on the "small bands of sworn-to-secrecy internet-savvy News International journalists and webmasters preparing for the paid-for launch." He writes:

"As I understand it, general news will still be free but exceptional columnists such as Jeremy Clarkson, Steven Howard and the big-name celebrity 'writers' like Terry Venables, Harry Redknapp and Ian Wright will only be available in the paid-for package...

"Sports will be a key seller, particularly with The Sun service. Subscribers will be offered a free direct-to-your-mobile results service, there will be videos of goals and cut-price offers from all the sports goods and clothing manufacturers.

"This, wrapped up with Page 3 girls at their most alluring, bingo and puzzle games offering huge cash prizes plus a promotional link with Sky will, they hope, make it an offer too good to refuse."

As I've been saying for a while in various posts on my blog about the future for the mainstream media, if you offer something that some people will find compelling and willing to pay for it, you might have a viable business model.

Sounds like News International know their customers.

[...] It's the people with the expertise who have in some ways always been using real-time technologies. IRC channels, for instance, were originally used by IT to keep updated about projects. It's a tool similar to instant messaging and activity streams of the real-time web, But it had pretty much been inaccessible to most business users.

A new generation of user interfaces are changing this dynamic. Tools that had been inaccessible are now fashioned in a manner that users understand. People use the social web. They get the notion of the status update. The enterprise applications that have adopted this style are the technologies that get better use.

Machine-to-machine technologies that integrate the social web may help close the gap. These are tools that people are required to use for projects. By adding a "people" element, social applications may have more use for the business person.

[...]

Nice points of view in the full piece. I've highlighted just this snip as it plays to a simple view I have - it's not about the tech and the tools, it's always about people and what they want to do with them.

From direct mail to web design, A/B testing is considered a gold standard of user research: Show one version to half your audience and another version to the other half; compare results, and adjust accordingly. Some very cool examples include Google’s obsessive testing of subtle design tweaks and Dustin Curtis’ experiment with direct commands and clickthrough rates. (”You should follow me on Twitter” produced dramatically better results than the less moralizing, “Follow me on Twitter.”)

So here’s something devilishly brilliant: The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.

Headlines have always played the most promotional role in news, charged with selling readers on the articles they adorn, so it only makes sense to apply the best tools of market research to their crafting. Think of it as a more rigorous version of magazines adjusting their covers based on newsstand sales.

Paul Berry, chief technology officer at The Huffington Post, spoke briefly about their real-time headline testing on a panel at the Online News Association conference in San Francisco earlier this month. When I talked to him afterwards, Berry said the system was created inhouse, but he wouldn’t disclose much else about how or how often it’s done. He did say Huffington Post editors have found that placing the author’s name above a headline almost always leads to more clicks than omitting it.

Headline are what attracts a reader's attention especially if you see a headline among a sea of other headlines competing for that attention, such as in an RSS reader.

Clever.

 

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.

The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament. Legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret.

The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

Extraordinary and astonishing.

[Update Oct 13] Ban overturned and a victory for freedom of speech. BBC's report is a good summary of the whole farce - When is a secret not a secret?

Over the past week Google has been rolling out the first invitations to its latest service, a complex "real-time communication and collaboration" system dubbed Google Wave.

Instead of sending messages back and forth, users create web-page-like documents called waves that others can modify or comment on, using a combination of features more usually seen separately in email, wikis, instant messaging and social networking (see a video introducing Wave).

Early reviews have been positive, and demand for invitations outstrips supply (Google says ours is still on the way). But even for those who have tried and liked it, Wave's potential is still hard to assess. The problem is that most talk about it is focussed on technology, not people.

A terrific analysis by New Scientist. I've just got an invitation to Google Wave (thanks again, @jas!), so this is a useful article.

See also - Watch your communication-ness soar.