At 9am Friday 30th of July, most of the agency have got on thier bikes at Clapham Junction and headed southwards towards Brighton on a all agency charity bike ride.

Wish us luck, by tweeting to us using #lwcbbike, sponsor us here and track those of us who are hooked up to the internet live here

We will publish some photos throughout the day, and maybe even some footage from the head cams!

Last week we wrote about Wieden + Kennedy (Portland)’s social media campaign for Old Spice – the phenomenal viral videos that had millions tuning in to see and receive personalised messages from “spokesperson” Isaiah Mustafa through social media channels YouTube and Twitter.

The cheeky campaign propelled Old Spice to the top of the Viral Video Chart, collecting over 90,000 Twitter followers, 700,000+ Facebook fans and smashing records to become the all-time most viewed sponsored YouTube channel, with a total of 35.7 million individual video views. Of the top 11 most popular YouTube videos on July 16, Old Spice had eight of them.

There is no doubt of the social media success of Old Spice, starring the “Most Interesting Man in the World 2.0”, but is Mustafa’s popularity translating into sales?

Warc figures show that sales of the Old Spice product Red Zone After Hours Body Wash, which is being promoted by the campaign, have fallen by 7% in the 52 weeks ending June 13, despite Mustafa’s beloved pecs appearing on TV screens since February.

However the campaign didn’t reach its social peak until 13-14 July, so it remains to be seen if Mustafa’s videos are driving people to the stores to buy Red Zone.

We know that high social exposure does not necessarily generate demand, as seen when Gatorade this year launched its Replay social campaign (also a Cannes winner), which tracked down members of two American high schools’ rival football teams – 15 years after their senior year – for a rematch.

The campaign generated a strong online following – with webisodes and Facebook pages about the players – and the 15,000 tickets to the rematch sold out in 90 minutes. However Gatorade’s sales for the year declined by 8.5% nationwide.

And while it remains impossible to prove any fluctuations in demand are caused by a social presence, what Old Spice has achieved is what it set out to – awareness and visibility. Mentions of Old Spice on Twitter exploded last week, with many celebrities such as Alyssa Milano, Ellen DeGeneres and Perez Hilton getting involved and spreading the word.

In the sense of raising awareness and bringing the brand to the top of our minds, Old Spice has certainly been a social success.

Written by Lauren Rayner, Account Executive

We quite like it that way though. Read article here

inferno won a place on the Keep Britain Tidy advertising roster as their lead creative agency in October last year and we were immediately energised by the great creative opportunity, fantastic clients and important cause! KBT briefed us in February on their main campaign for 2010: fighting the war on litter nationally.

The tongue in cheek ‘Bend over and think of England’ campaign – was intended for a larger, more holistic activation platform utilising PR, WOM, Ambient, Merchandising and a variety of ATL, however as the government changed over earlier on this year, so too did the rules and regulations (and budgets!) regarding government-funded communications.

To this particular campaign’s credit, it had already caught the interest of enough Local Authorities that they stood firm with their support of the campaign and generously allocated what they could of their own council budgets to fund the distribution of the creative throughout a range of local media including Bus Backs, 48-sheet sites, 6 sheet sites, postcards, T-shirts, bags, badges and A3 Posters, with a number of them also opting to have their own bespoke titles created including ‘Get Behind Essex’ and ‘Get Behind Northumberland’.

With the objective of expanding Auto Trader’s social media outreach, inferno created a Facebook-based competition whereby fans of Auto Trader could win an American road trip along Route 66.

Inferno developed the creative idea for the competition along with Facebook ads to complement other comms, such as an email sent to an existing opt-in database of 350k, promotion on AutoTrader.co.uk (which receives 600k unique daily hits), Facebook, Twitter and other social media such as blogs and forums.

Simply by ‘liking’ Auto Trader’s Facebook page and recommending it to friends, Facebook users were entered into the draw to win a two-week road trip for four people along Route 66 in America plus £1,000 spending money.

Auto Trader kept the momentum going on their Facebook page with regular interactive updates relating to the promotion, enlisting fans to discuss topics such as their ideal car for an American road trip, what their perfect track list would be, and random Route 66 facts.

These discussions showed a high level of engagement among fans, who commented on posts relating to the road trip and engaged in banter relating to the competition between each other.

This was necessary to the competition – running for just one week; it relied on viral sharability to accumulate fans. Facebook users spread the word – 5,000 fans were attained in just 2 days, and almost 12,000 fans were gained throughout the week.

The competition closed on Monday 9 July and winners will be notified by 23 July. There are plans for the winners to keep a video blog during their Route 66 road trip, which could produce further content for Auto Trader’s Facebook site. Watch this space…

Written by Lauren Rayner, Account Executive

The idea: ‘Anything is possible when your man smells like Old Spice’ rings true in this viral phenomenon.

This brilliant example of a social media campaign by Wieden + Kennedy Portland proves that ads can actually talk to you. Bloggers and fans were name-checked in personalised videos tweeted by Old Spice Guy himself; ex American footballer Isaiah Mustafa. He’s now an internet sensation racking up over 55 million views, making his channel the most viewed sponsored channel in history.

The Old Spice Guy made hilarious videos for well-known Internet folk,  including Ellen Degeneres, Alyssa Milano and celebrity blogger Perez Hilton. Anonymous people who had blogged, tweeted or commented about him in the past were also targeted.

The Old Spice Guy was even able to help Twitter user @Jsbeals with his marriage proposal. @Jsbeals tweeted this request to Old Spice Guy: “Can U Ask my girlfriend to marry me? Her name is Angela A. Hutt-Chamberlin.” Less than three hours later, Mustafa was holding a ring in the glow of candlelight and asking Angela to “make @Jsbeals the happiest man in the world and marry him in real life.”

The campaign is perfect for becoming huge virally. It taps into specific bloggers who have access to many followers allowing it to grow and grow. It creates an exciting platform that people are willing and excited to engage with as they are creating it themselves.

The first ad, ‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’, has racked up over 12 million views alone and went on to win the Grand Prix award in the film category at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

Article by Dani Brown & Paul Mann, Junior Creative Art Director and Copy Writer

Clay Shirky, lecturer at NYU, columnist and author of “Here Comes Everybody”, appeared at the RSA last week to promote his new book “Cognitive Surplus”. Like many new media commentators, the focus of his talk was the internet as the beginning of a major cultural shift of great advantage to mankind. I was one of the ones lucky enough to secure tickets to the event and so here is my summary and some thoughts packed into a blog post.

Firstly a brief explanation of the term: cognitive surplus refers to the cumulative attention/talent that is being pooled into collaborative projects enabled by new technology and the web. Not that interesting a concept in itself but is the momentum behind the shift away from pure consumption to production and sharing; a small shift that is having some quite dramatic effects. Where these effects are manifested in a negative way (Shirky gives the example of lol cats), there is a tendency to blame the tools. However, the cause of these effects lies in ancient motivations that are simply being channelled in new ways. This all seems a bit of a given to me but then I understand that this is still not something that is accepted by many of our distinguished tabloid journalists and other “guns kill people” type

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Bridging the Gap (BTG) is a club night, podcast series and music / design website run by a London-based collective of djs, producers and designers (including myself, an account executive here at Inferno). Surviving in the fiercely competitive London underground music scene is not easy, and building a meaningful brand is certainly key to that survival. It was decided from the very inception of BTG that the night / blog / music policy needed to stand for something, a way of differentiating itself from the sea of competition hungry for people’s attention. So how was the BTG brand identity decided? Here is some of the thinking behind it:

Technology has changed the way we consume and listen to music. The digital revolution seems to have turned us into a ‘playlist generation’. It’s becoming far more uncommon to sit down and listen to a whole album sequentially from start to finish, people would rather build a playlist complied of their favorite tracks. Another emerging pattern from the playlist generation is their reluctance to be defined by one specific genre. People seem to get bored very quickly (particularly in London) music scenes pop up left right and centre (Fidget House, Grindy, Big Beat, 2.2 Step, Surf Revival, Wonky, Donk) only to die before they’ve had a chance to make any kind of significant impact. This attitude also seems to have had a direct impact on the way music is produced, with many underground electronic musicians throwing elements of techno, hip hop, dub, and house into their productions, feeling bored with the same old formats.

Bearing all of this in mind it was decided that instead of representing one specific genre or scene, running the risk of becoming old hat at any given moment, the BTG brand wouldn’t adhere to any specific genre or time-span. BTG is known for supporting and playing music across a whole spectrum of genres, while still staying relevant to ever evolving music trends. This idea / identity is reflected in the name, logo, design and website content, all mirroring the BTG ethos and music policy.

The next BTG live event is at the Alibi in Dalston (3^rd July) featuring Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs as headliner, known for fusing styles such as jungle, electro, 80s boogie funk and techno.

Written by Rob Waite

Ahh the almighty Facebook, its reach on the internet seemingly knows no bounds. It’s how we find out what’s going on at the weekend, invite people to parties, conduct informal qualitative research, express our love for music, show off our holiday, share current events, jokes, games and occasionally catch up with friends. And whilst weaving its way into so many aspects of our lives it managed to simplify the two way communication between brands and their consumers; who wouldn’t want a piece of that? However, there have however been a fair few negative repercussions in the wake of the social media honeymoon.

The Daily Mail published an article claiming that “Facebook could increase your risk of serious health problems by reducing levels of face-to-face contact” (Based on an article by psychologist Dr Aric Sigman who is concerned that the lack of face to face contact could lead to an increased risk of heart disease, stroke and dementia). These claims are certainly to be taken with a pinch of salt; the amount of carcinogenic risks according to the daily mail are too many too keep track of. However many observers are convinced that using social networking sites can lead to social isolation and loneliness which can in turn cause further health complications.

Another reason people are questioning / rejecting Facebook is the ever unfolding privacy settings issue. Facebook claims to have revamped their privacy settings by essentially making them simpler. In actual fact, the new settings are intended to encourage people to open up more of their personal information to the world. This issue has lead to a serious amount of bad press for Facebook and has resulted in a backlash from Facebook users and the wider social media community. Various web applications have started popping up in retaliation to Facebook’s disregard for people’s privacy, applications such as Facebook Suicide which can kill your entire social presence on the internet in less than one hour.

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All too often an agency is accused of being creative just because we like being creative and because we like filling our cabinets with awards. But finally we can prove to clients that it’s not just because we enjoy it, but because creative work actually works harder for them!

A recent study conducted by IPA and Thinkbox has proven that award winning creative does deliver better results. It found that overall the campaigns that had been rewarded with the greatest number of accolades for their creative work were 11 times more successful in delivering positive results, in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.

The report also pointed out that the majority of successful campaigns were emotional rather than rationally based. Which is often something that marketers tend to forget. We’re always striving to give consumers a rational reason to buy into our brand, forgetting that a large proportion of consumer’s decision making is based on emotional reactions to brands.

So long live creativity!

Written by Andrea Phillips.

Data sourced from IPA; additional content by Warc staff, 17 June 2010
http://www.warc.com/News/TopNews.asp?ID=26851&Origin=WARCNewsEmail

A few months ago the idea was born to ride to Brighton for charity. ‘Why not?’ we thought, it can’t be that far and around 15 of us cycle in to work every day on everything from 1960’s racers to neon fixies with 2 spokes and less gears. Turns out it is quite far, and hilly, so we set out a plan which included an option for the fair weather riders.

So here it is…

On July 30^th 2010 we take to the road to raise money for charity by cycling a mountainous 54 miles from London (well, Clapham) to Brighton.

Our charity of choice is The Kids Company who provide support to vulnerable inner city children in and around London (please check out their good work here http://www.kidsco.org.uk/).

Cyclists will begin the ride from Clapham Junction at 9am and a Routmaster bus will be departing a few hours later for the non-cycling “supporters” as they diplomatically will be known.

The ride will be completed in three sections, broken up by two stops for refreshments and high fives.

For those wanting to ride but not the entire way a middle section of approximately 15 miles will be available.

Now, to make this a success we need your help.

Please give as generously as you can to support, this is not an easy task and is far in excess of the sub-7 miles commutes we usually take.

http://www.justgiving.com/Inferno-LoveWhatCouldBe

If you would like any more information please get in touch.

Sonia.t@inferno-group.com

Love What Could Be

x

The Chip Shop Awards were held in London last week. The awards pride themselves on ‘creativity with no limits’ and this certainly rang true again this year.

From a light-hearted event set up as a humorous alternative to D&AD, the Chips have become an international event with entrants from around the world. There were Chip finalists from Australia, Germany, South Africa, Thailand, Kuwait, Amsterdam, and Poland.

The event was live online (I didn’t see it as I was watching A Single Man on DVD, definitely not as much fun.) Not only that, while Colin Firth was failing to get an Oscar, we picked up a ‘finalist nomination’ for our ‘Squeeze Bus’ ad. We did it as a piece of intro/spec work for Macari’s Musical Instruments in London.

Creative by John Peacock and Alastair Scully

You can see the rest  of the entries here. Well worth a look!

John.

Broadcaster, early adopter and leader of a 1.5million twitter entourage Stephen Fry, has been at the Hay Literacy Festival, and has been perusing through tweets entered on the festivals twitter page to find the most beautiful ever written. He found it, and it was from Marc MacKenzie from Canada, who wrote this tweet little gem.

“I believe we can build a better world! Of course, it’ll take a whole lot of rock, water & dirt. Also, not sure where to put it.”

Twitter is what you make it, some people prefer to retweet links and share information publicly, some people just prefer to watch and listen. Some people like Marc MacKenzie prefers to use the medium as a way of expressing his ‘odd thoughts’ that come to him, and amuse him, and make him want to share.

That is just one of the things I like about Twitter, it is many different things to many different people, and it has made 140 character prose writing into a modern art form.

Having endured a world war and nearly a century  of rapidly changing lifestyles, the Stork brand turns 90 this year. Last weekend Inferno launched an in-store campaign to celebrate this milestone and remind people of the pleasures of home-baking.  With the brand harbouring so much nostalgia -everybody  knows a parent, aunty or grandparent who uses stork- it seemed only right to take visual inspiration from their charming advertising of the 20s, 30s and 40s.

We were very pleased with the look, which we think leverages the brand history and gives great standout. As part of the in-store campaign we gave away a cake recipe from an original 1950s Stork recipe book, some traditional fairy cakes and the chance to win pastry baking lessons together with a very fancy (and expensive) food mixer.

We are very proud to show you our latest 360º campaign for Unilever Hellmann’s.

Our brief was to bring Hellmann’s to life over the summer BBQ season, and show it as something more versatile than ‘just a dip’. So we devised the campaign ‘BBQ’s Love Hellmann’s’. We worked with Unilever and an award winning chef to create 11 delicious recipes that use Hellmann’s as one of the integral ingredients.

We then exploded the BBQ thought and the recipes across all consumer points, print, on pack, in store point of sale, in store activity tastings, promotional and online.

Watch this space for the results, and in the mean time, why not enter the competition to win the ultimate BBQ party in your back garden or browse through our delicious BBQ recipes?

With facebook having recently changed its fan pages to ‘like’ pages - part of an ongoing process to make interactions across the network consistent but also part of their strategy to extend social connections across the www - the more cynical of us (not me guv), might also wonder about another underlying motivation.

Most brands don’t have that many fans and the fans they have are often hard won, acquired through in-site advertising. Not many brands are loved, that’s not to do them a disservice, because you don’t need to love all things, but you equally need many things as part of daily life.

Facebook exists to make money, they’re a business with a dominance gameplan, but they also want to increase their worth as an advertising platform. As such it’s much more likely for a customer to say they like a product, service or thing than to say they are a fan. That helps the bottom-line for a brand wishing to invest campaign money there. Like is a broader, more inclusive, but also a more superficial, ephemeral expression of sentinment. Clicking ‘like’ might just mean your customers are never going to look at your brand’s page ever again.

I still think being a ‘fan’ of something has value. It’s not right for everything, but it suggests deeper engagement with a product, a cause or a topic. As such, ‘like’ just feels like a flattening of positive customer response to the lowest common denominator.

Back in the 70’s/80’s, where I come, nobody had a vacuum cleaner. It’s not that we were scruffy, it’s just nobody ever said ‘vacuum cleaner’, we all had a Hoover instead. Regardless of what make you owned, it was still called a Hoover.

Digitally, the same thing has happened, as we no longer hear people say ‘get on the internet and search’ for something, we just hear ‘Google it’.

I believe it won’t be too long before the entire Internet will not be referred to as the Internet, but just ‘The Facebook’, because the internet will entirely fold into Facebook just about everyone, everything, and every brand, every website or microsite and even every software application, will be inside Facebook.  And as for the parts of that are not folded in? Well, they will still have a firm virtual grappling hook gripped into Facebook for safety.

Facebook have announced that as early as this month it will become a location based social experience, where people can ‘check-in’ like they can on Foursquare. This is because it is becoming more clear that people are prepared to disclose more and more about themselves, even their exact location, and this is a huge commercial property, and that is of course where brands need to be. And they will be there because there is nothing more valuable to brands than a source of real time crowd sourcing collective wisdom. Facebook, along with Twitter and other microblogs is becoming the most relevant, and valuable data available in the world.

The recent Open Graph API system has given every page on the internet the potential to have all of Facebook’s functionality built in, meaning that all activity we do on the internet could potentially be shared via Facebook. Spotify launched it’s new software version last week, allowing users to connect with Facebook and view all their friends play lists and listen to their music choices, and visa-versa.

This morning I signed up to Microsoft Docs Beta, which is giving me the whole Microsoft Office suite as an application within Facebook so I can now work within Facebook, and share my docs with my friends an colleges, via Facebook.

I am a fan of all things bright an new on the internet, but in my opinion, because of the ever advancing functionality it offers, Facebook is, again, the brightest and newest thing on the Internet.

Ron Conway, (who makes buckets loads of money cashing in on online trends) agrees with me. Well, let’s be realistic, I agree with him.

I’ve been reading loads of blogs about the election, all scrutinizing the marketing campaigns of the leading parties (most of which has been pretty unoriginal and unexciting I hasten to add). The big debate so far: is this a new media or old media election? See here for a recent example.

After the 2008 U.S. election people predicted that this one would be led from the bottom up, online and over social networks. But then when they announced that we would be getting the leaders debates on TV, the emphasis shifted to the power of television and how historically this has been an indication of the winning party.

The truth is this is the same old hackneyed debate that has been going on for some years but applied in new context. To discuss which is the most effective is entirely missing the point. Where people attribute the rise of the Lib Dems in the opinion polls to the TV debate, they are blinded by the fact that this was a TV first and missing what was going on online at the same time. Let’s not forget that this was also a first for Twitter which recorded a record number of tweets.

Moreover, people weren’t just tweeting from their phone or PC away from the television, they were watching the debate at the same time. Following the excitement of the event and over the course of the next couple of days, thousands of people joined the group “We got Rage Against the Machine to #1, we can get the Lib Dems into office!” on Facebook, fuelling the poll rise even further. It seems completely clear to me that the two are not working in parallel universes of old and new media. Where TV works to raise the profile and awareness of a cause, online is effective at generating discussion, intensifying buzz and cementing opinions.

A great editorial article from Brand Republic in response to Mckinsey’s recent “A new way to measure word-of-mouth marketing” piece. If nothing else, proof that it is possible to pick apart any WoM measurement methodology.

Measurement based on such disparate discussions is a necessity of our marketing world, but it will never be perfect. It’s an approach that tries to add control to the uncontrollable. I mean, we’ve been OK with the fuzzy logic of brand tracking and TV ads for decades, and yet marketers now have to be held accountable for tracking sentiment? They might as well say “measure society” and look at the mess governments make of that!

So, instead of continuing to approach word-of-mouth with some kind of control as our raison d’etre, which leads trying to measure and quantify impacts, do we acknowledge that in an open setting, meaningful participation is our raison d’etre? After all, that’s what customers ultimately appreciate.

Suggesting the future of advertising is “integration” is a little like suggesting the future of personal computing is the floppy disc.

In reality, the most progressive people and agencies in our industry were tackling integration 10 years ago and things have come a long way since.

And my reference to 10 years is not a convenient round-number.

In 2000 our industry (along with most western economies) was in the throes of dotcom mania and although the ensuing crash caused a lot of pain it also witnessed an emerging divide between the agencies who genuinely understood how to integrate ideas across multiple media touch points and those who slapped a web address on their TV ads as an afterthought and called it “integration”. That’s not “integration”, that’s “matching luggage” and a well trained monkey with a set of crayons can probably do a similar job.

I can make that assertion with more than a little confidence a) Because I was working at a large London network agency at the time and more importantly, b) Because 2000 was the year inferno opened its doors for business, as a genuinely integrated agency intelligently blending traditional advertising with DM, SP and of course, digital.

Back to the point.

I guess I have two main beefs.

The first is the simple difference between capability and ability, and they’re too often confused when it comes to integration.

Brother and sister agencies with funny names who take care of the non-TV work are far too often the way traditional agencies “integrate”. Too many agencies continue to simply bolt-on integrated campaigns to their TV ads and try and use retrospective logic to justify it.

In truth, real integration involves the talent, the agility, the willingness and (perhaps most importantly) the ability to execute great thinking in whatever mix of media best solves the client’s business problem. Without media bias, and well beyond simple capability.

Integrated agency groups with multiple P&Ls often present a very compelling set of capabilities to prospective clients, but we all know that once the initial briefing meeting is over and Mr or Mrs Client has left the building, a nasty scrap kicks off as the different group agencies battle for creative leadership and their share of the budget. Which probably isn’t in Mr or Mrs Client’s best interest really.

Which leads directly into my second point:

The future of the advertising industry isn’t integration, it’s ideas. Ideas that can run anywhere from a supermarket promotion to a global sponsorship – not just TV scripts. And just as importantly, those ideas need to come from agencies that can make them exciting and effective in those myriad environments.

The most seamlessly organised and integrated agency on the planet won’t last very long if its ideas are inflexible, short sighted or media biased.

And finally; we need to be prepared to share our ideas with consumers, the media, anyone. Technology has seen off the days where advertisers can simply shout their ideas at consumers and sit back and hope for the best.

Smart advertisers are welcoming not only feedback on their ideas and beliefs, but involvement in the very shaping of them.