Who is in control of your brand?

You’d think a mobile company like Optus would understand how people use mobiles, they’d also know what devices their customers use. Somehow they seem to have forgotten these two key pieces of information when doing today’s SMS campaign.

Here’s how it went

1. I’ve got an iPhone.

2. They just sent the following SMS promoting their iPad plans.

3. Good concept…

4. They promoted a webpage to view the plans

5. The webpage wasn’t compatible for mobile

6. Good concept but Optus DM Fail!

A simple solution & lesson for us all.

When sending an SMS to your database with a URL make 1 or 2 pages compatible for mobile.

And not to mention…

The SMS doesn’t even make sense, although I guess that’s what telecos do well… complicated bills and apparently now strange iPad plans too.

“…Get Unlimited Data within Australia for $50 recharge…”

When you look at the plan webpage there’s nothing about $50 or Unlimited Data.

I’m confused.

Natalie Tran, of Australia’s most subscribed YouTube channel Community Channel, takes on the science used in some advertising to make a product seem more awesome.

This episode kinda reminds me of Seinfeld.

Laziest blog post ever.

Yesterday Toyota announced that they’d selected 5 advertising agencies to pitch for their social media activity where the community would determine the winners, the two best performing agencies would get more work in 2010.

B&T Today revealed last week that Toyota is running the social media pitch, pitting eight agencies against each other with four agencies then to go head to head with their ideas in the public domain. Following on from this, the two best will produce further work in the new year.

Background

Having worked on the digital account for Holden (held by Visual Jazz) for some time now, I’ve been keeping a close eye on who’s doing what. Interestingly enough, Toyota have recently been putting a lot of effort into Facebook – in particular – buying advertising and growing their fan base.

Toyota

They have also developed an application, called ‘Toyota Promise Forest‘, aligned with the Prius. The concept looks good, one of the best in Australia, however, it doesn’t work – and it hasn’t for quite some time. You’ll see when you use the app that YOUR NAME is TIMOTHY and the friends aren’t my friends, and you can’t actually use the app.

Now we assumed, when we first found the application, that it was new and being repaired, however, it’s been a couple of months now, and still it’s not working.

It makes me wonder why Toyota are ramping up their social media when their current efforts are so broken? That aside, how can you have 5 campaigns in market and effectively measure the performance of each activity separately? Would you run 5 TVCs at once to see which one works best?

Ford

I’ve also heard rumblings that Ford have also just selected an agency to roll out a social media strategy. Whilst at the same time they’ve developed ‘MyFord‘ a social media hub for their brand, however, it’s kinda broken…

Others

Lots of the other auto’s are in the space, but nothing noteworthy at this stage.

Summary: the Australian auto category will be an interesting one to watch in the coming 6-12 months

It’s not damaging or terrible but they’ll surely be losing potential fans because of it.

This advert appeared and appealed to me this morning, a $75,000 would be awesome!

So when I clicked through I’d expect big & clear instructions on how to get my hands on that $75k and probably see other people suggesting their ideas. But alas I didn’t, and it wasn’t until I returned to their page that I noticed a small piece of text explaining the situation.

So I went off to their website to see if I could find anything more about it… again I found nothing.

They paid for my eyeballs and I was ready to be converted, sign up and connect with Pringles, it was just all too hard. Also, people who organically found the fan page wouldn’t realise the enormity of the party competition.

Update: 21st September 2009

The campaign was still running, so I click on the ad and attempted to participate, and this time there was a page about the competition. I gave Pringles permissions to post messages to me, on my wall and to my friends (which is a big ask) and I was all ready to do whatever this campaign was but after I’d done all this I discovered the comp was over.

I’m guessing I had a pretty unqiue experience due to bad timing, as their fan page has increased from 90k+ to 240k+, a pretty good result.

What they might’ve done:

• wait until the comp was ready to announce
• use their fan page image & news feed to advertise the full details of the comp and what to expect
• added some information to their website about it
• created some way for me to signup via email or mobile to receive annoucements about it
• turnd off the competition adverts when the campaign was over
• changed the competition page to say ‘competition closed’ before I entered my details, not after

I think woops would be a bit of an understatement when a guy at Google stuffed up on the weekend. (According to the Gaurdian)

He was updating the ‘blacklist’ which indicates which website’s might be harmful and when you search for them it warns you before you visit the site.

He accidentally added a forward slash ‘/’ which in Google speak aparently equals the entire internet.

This is what you would’ve seen on all search results on Google.

So for about 40 minutes over the weekend the entire internet was ‘down’ according to Google.

Thanks to Mumbrella for picking this up.

You can read more about it here on the Google Blog.

It’s scary to say the least that such a major event can be triggered by a tiny mistake.

Well atleast they’ve tried something different by taking over their corporate site, and by hiring a random person to rant. But even with a non-Becks person blogging its so heavily branded in Becks (and built in Flash) you can’t help but feel put off.

Steve Hall outlines a series of stuff ups throughout the blog…

“And the most annoying aspect of the site? In order to gain access, you must jump through the age verification hoop. Oh sure, there’s a box to check which, one assumes, will cookie your computer so you don’t have to jump through the hoop when you come back. Alas, coming up with a reason to return to this blog is a head scratcher.”

http://www.adrants.com/2008/12/becks-launches-blog-does-everything.php