Wow. Jaguar, Land Rover Make $1.6 Million Mobile Buy

Huge mobile marketing buy here and big news here from Jaguar / Land Rover. Interestingly they see the medium as not just awareness, but direct response. I'd agree completely. Even on a very basic mobile level it is super easy to interact and get information on basic information like weather/news and just as easy (and convenient) for appropriate branded messaging. I can't wait to see how this mobile marketing campaign comes to life in the marketplace. I'm also really curious about it's success.

Read the ad age article here >

Oldie but a goodie, What if Microsoft designed the iPod?

Tropicana pulls back new packaging after a few weeks.

So Tropicana redesigned their packaging and put it into market just a few weeks back.  Here's the thing, they promptly pulled it off the shelves after just about a month and went back to their original package design.

Did sales plummet?  Was the shift to an entirely new look and feel just too much for consumers?  To the left you can see the 2 designs, on the left he classic orange with straw inserted into it and on the right the new design.

Personally, i'm glad they went back to the original design.  It's a classic brand and classic design that everyone knows.  The new creative feel too much like a generic orange juice brand.  It's contemporary and attractive, but It just doesn't hold onto any of the brand equity or frankly, the heritage that has been established over the years by Tropicana.  So hit your local super market for this limited edition Tropicana packaging, get them fast, because they'll soon be gone.

What's Ping?

I came across this very cool site which allows you to manage all your social networks from one place. Most of us are on Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, LinkedIn, AIM or Delicious, Flickr. But, you can also manage your accounts on Plurk, Tumblr, Identi.ca, Brightkite, friendfeed, Jaiku, Plaxo, Bebo, Hi5, Mashable, Xanga, Wordpress, Blogger (hey that's what this blog uses), yammer, Vox, typepad and about 15 other social networks out there in the world.

Realize Ping doesn't give you "full" access to manage these account, but gives you in many cases the ability to update a status on particular social network, or All statuses on all your social networks that accept statuses. I actually could have posted this blog post from Ping, but wasn't sure how to add the nifty Ping logo above, next time i will.

Million Dog Mosaic in Brandweek.

Nice case study from Brandweek on Pedigree's Million Dog Mosaic below.

Case Study: Pedigree's Million-Dog Mosaic
Feb 21, 2009
-By Kenneth Hein

The Challenge
Every year, more than four million dogs end up in shelters. Pedigree decided to do something about it by creating the Pedigree Adoption Drive Foundation last year. The charitable organization is dedicated to helping shelters and rescue groups find homes for dogs. Now the issue was how could the Mars Petcare division raise awareness and money for its cause.

The Plan
The foundation and the "Million Dog Mosaic" were promoted at Pedigree.com, Dogsrule.com as well as at Milliondogmosaic.com/pedigree. Each time a consumer uploaded a photo of their favorite dog onto the site, the Pedigree brand donated $1 to the foundation. The mosaic was promoted via a custom Facebook application, the Westminster Dog Show Pedigree Pop-up dog store as well as integration with its advertising campaign, which features the hero adoption dog, "Oliver." Oliver is featured on the site comprised of consumers' uploaded photos. It was featured on a nonprofit channel on YouTube and targeted e-mails sent to an in-house database also got the word out. Catapult Action-Biased Marketing helped put the effort together.

The Results
In one month, there were more than 1 million page views of the mosaic. To date, more than 55,000 photos have been uploaded. It set the record for user-generated mosaic participation, beating American Idol. "It signified that Pedigree is a company that walks the walk when it comes to fully aligning with the values of its consumers," said John Anton, director of marketing at Pedigree. "A million dollars was raised for the Pedigree adoption drive. [The campaign] brought together dog lovers in a fun place where they could be entertained, do research on the best way to feed and treat their dogs, join a like-minded community and be rewarded for their engagement."

Mobile hotel bookings on the upturn.

Mobile hotel bookings rise

In an economy where the hotel business is on the downward trend there is one thing they are doing that's working. It's mobile hotel reservations. As users get more comfortable with mobile devices the convenience of making a reservation seems to be too much to ignore. It's clear that instances like this will be popping up all over, instances where the mobile option just makes it easier to communicate with the brand.

What's in store for in store marketing displays?

How about digital signs that actually read customers? This display knows whether customers glance at the signage, stops to read it or ignores it all together. pretty interesting stuff. See the full article on the CScout Japanese site here

very small game

Pouring BudTV down the drain

According to this AdAge article Bud TV is ceasing to exist.  I'm a little surprised that it lasted as long as it did.  I think we all remember when it launched, it was a big deal, but it's had a lot of competition in the video space. The production of original content was just too much.   In comparison, It's funny that Hulu had press about it that it could never succeed in this pace and it's a great site.

Txt your revelation

If I could get a few of my twitter statuses on a coffee cup, I'd be a
happy man. Txt cup to 30241 to share your revelation.

The future implications here are huge. The opportunity to interact
with a brand like green mountain while doing something as simple as
drinking your morning coffee.

My revelation. "I need to get back to my work".

I love Wordle

If you have a moment check out Wordle.net. It's a really fun app that allows you to add text which in turn creates some really cool typographic layouts. The text you place can come from anywhere, like another website or perhaps your favorite song. Heck you could even paste in the lease on your apartment. The sky is the limit. The layout options are very cool too, change colors, type and composition of text. Give it a whirl.

Crayon Physics

Let's rethink gaming for a moment here.  Crayon Physics is a problem solving game that is not just fun, but also quite relaxing to play with.  Do all that you can to get the little red ball to touch the star.  Using physics, things you draw will fall, roll or draw a hinge to have another item you draw swing. This game is probably best played on a tablet or with a mouse, but they also have an iPhone version.  I like this app a lot, (although my fingers seem to get in the way.)

In the mood for something different?  I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Breaking the desktop paradigm

For so long we've all worked within some pretty traditional constructs of what we call our desktops - whether on a Mac, PC, Linux or Commodore 64. We've all worked with the basic file structures and architectures that compose our virtual working/living world on our computers and how we interface with them.

With advancing web technologies and continually evolving interface design we've certainly seem some breakthroughs but they have mostly been at the site or application level, not on our day-to-day computer desktops. Neither OS X or Windows Vista have evolved things that much. That is until now (or soon hopefully).

Check out Bumptop. Designed by Anand Agarawala. BumpTop represents a paradigm shift in how we can think about our virtual desktops and allow them to become more intuitive and more important productive. Not to mention it's about as cool as you could imagine! While this is in beta now, follow it's development and sign up for a beta as the developer gets closer. I for one am hopeful to get a sneak peek!

Help Us Help Dogs

Our client Pedigree(R) Food for Dogs is on the 5th year of it's campaign to support dog adoption. This year, it is supporting it in a big way with a superbowl spot which you can see here. To amplify this traditional marketing activity, we've created an online extension of this work, featuring "behind the scenes" back stories for the crazy pets and their crazier pet owners featured in the Super Bowl TV spot. And to mark Pedigree's commitment even more explicitly, we have built in the benefit to the user that each video watched will result in additional donations by Pedigree to support dog adoption through their charity, the Pedigree Foundation.

Funny stuff, great cause.

Add Ballista Blog to your RSS reader

Add Catapult Marketing's
Ballista Blog to your google, yahoo or other RSS reader. It's easy and the fastest way to keep up on the postings.

http://marketingballista.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Twitter related apps and websites.

Not sure where to begin, so many twitter apps and sites and just not enough time. Between location based, the ability to set groups, delay tweets, search tweets, the options seem endless. Twitter is turning out to be pretty awesome and the technical problems from early 2008 seem to have gone away. If you're not into twitter now, i'm sure you will be in 2009.

Article here

See what's happening -- right now.
http://search.twitter.com/

Sling Media to bring live TV content to iPhones

We met these guys last week at CES in Vegas. Sling media is the company that brings your cable tv to your computer. And now they bring it to your mobile device too. iPhone support is coming very soon in the next few months. A little birdy at CES told us that although the they officially support the product on AT&T's 3G Network, it will still work for us "original iphone" owners.

Here's an article about what Sling Media is up to these days.

The Shorty Awards

Check out some of these tweeple if you have time
The best producers of short* content in 2008
*140 characters or less, on Twitter
Finals voting is open! The finals will last from January 12-23.

http://www.shortyawards.com/

NEW URL for Ballista!

http://marketingballista.blogspot.com/