whatleydude

Right, watch [the first 30secs of] this:

See that there? At around the 23second mark? Hang on, here’s a screen grab -

See that? That’ll be an iPhone 4 and, just to the right, a pair of Beats by Dre in-ear headphones. IN A VIDEO GAME TRAILER.

While in-game advertising is nothing new, in-game product placement is. However brazen, it does – in a weird way – kind of work. I spotted it, admittedly, as my marketing/advertising eyes and brains are trained to spot this stuff a mile away. However, it wasn’t exactly in your face per se, in fact it was quite subtle.

Best of all, if Lara Croft was a real person then I bet she probably would be an iPhone4 user (and would no doubt be rocking the Beats by Dre also).
So it kind of works. Ish.

The question I have is whether or not this placement is purely for payment/sponsorship purposes or will the game developers (completely blind-side us all and) make the handset itself integral to the progression of the game?

My money is obviously on the former. As I’ve already made clear, game development is costly and any kind of media partnership like this has to be sold in pretty quickly so as to capitalise on the opportunity to its full potential.

As a side thought, Apple ‘famously’ don’t pay for product placement*, but I wonder if Dre did? And if so, how much does eight seconds in a close-to-a-million views YouTube video cost?

The question doesn’t need to be asked – this is the start of a new trend and, as new home systems and games start rolling out to the masses, more and more placements will be occurring before our very eyes. Some subtle, some not. We could be verging into James Bond territory here, hell – we may even end up like The Greatest Movie Ever Sold.

Be certain of one thing, ever since Modern Warfare 2 had an ‘opening week’ bigger than Harry Potter, hunting season has been declared on this marketplace.

Watch closely, it’s coming.

*I can’t remember where I read it, but the word is ‘payment’ refers to an actual exchange of money. No mention at all of equipping every man, woman and child in the office with brand new iPods/iPhones/iPads/MacBook Pros etc…

A week or so ago, while en route to see X-Men: Class, I happened upon this piece of advertising for BRINK.

I don’t know what it is about this image that is so striking (or in fact what it actually says about my brain’s stimulus/response mechanism), but for some reason it makes me want to find out more. Of Brink, at the time, I knew nothing. Further exploration has uncovered that it’s a new first-person-shooter (FPS) and that actually, apparently, it’s not very good. Translated: I asked a fellow gamer and he said – “Well, it’s alright.”

The image above has stayed with me. If there was a demo, I’d download it -  as a hook, it got me.

However what has yet to happen to my nascent advocacy is any kind of pick up.

Advertising like this is crying out for integration. And by that I’m not just talking about having print, TV and outdoor all matching, I mean having a demo available, having monitoring tools in place picking to pick up any mention online, some kind of a social presence/activation/engagement strategy – something, anything that is there ready to spot that I have an interest.

As it stands, my gaming schedule(!) currently consists of re-visiting Modern Warfare 2, playing to the end of Red Dead Redemption and slowly getting drawn into the world of L.A. Noire. Room for another game in my life, there is not.

But Brink really does have me thinking; both about the advertising campaign around it and of course, the game itself.

————

Incidentally, sometimes it works the other way around – this piece of engagement for Bulletstorm for instance fell on deaf ears. I had no idea who or what Bulletstorm was or is and found myself googling it to try and find out more. Frustrating really; I loved the asset, but the whole thing lacked any kind of personalisation. It did actually drive me to download the demo mind, but still – it left me feeling somewhat empty.

I spotted the above ad on the tube just over a week ago…
You may have seen one like it yourself.

I knew exactly what it was for, instantly. But that’s me; I read film blogs, subscribe to Total Film magazine, I write about the films I’ve seen – basically, I’m into my film.

The other 2.6m people using the London Underground every day however might not all be self-confessed movie geeks and may not have jumped to the same immediate conclusion, and that’s no bad thing. Allow me to explain:

If you are one of those people then let’s quickly get this out of the way; that there above – believe it or not – is a rather awesome advert for the new Bradley Cooper film, LIMITLESS. The film is about what happens to a guy when he’s given the chance to become more than who he is. To become the best he could ever be. All achieved simply by using the full potential of his brain. A potential that’s unlocked thanks to the swallowing of a daily pill.

A clear pill.

It looks good right?

I thought so too when I first saw the trailer. However, what they’re doing with their marketing campaign is fantastic. This film could’ve easily just slipped out without anyone noticing and before you know it, it would’ve come and gone by Easter. But with this whole ‘NZT‘ drive, they [the studio, the agency behind the campaign, everyone involved etc] are onto a winner.

Reasons why this works:

• Bradley Cooper’s most recent ‘hit’ was The A-Team, however he’s probably known to most for his leading turn in the epic post-bachelor party comedy, The Hangover. Those films aside, he’s only ever really played supporting roles which means for a very short time – to the public at least – he has one of those faces.
  You know he’s famous but you can’t quite place him. Just the sort of celebrity face you’d see adorned on a piece of two-bit above the line advertising. A point proven just yesterday when someone in my office held up the equivalent advertisement in her copy of Metro and asked “Hey, wasn’t he in The Hangover? He can’t be doing too well [if he's doing ads like this].”
  -
• The advert itself is brilliantly written. It is just like one of those shoddy medical ads that you would see on the tube. The call to action, while completely nullified as it asks you to SEND AN SMS WHILE YOU ARE UNDER THE GROUND is AWESOME as it ASKS YOU TO TAKE A PHOTO OF THE AD TO REMEMBER and, that itself is actually quite compelling because the copy and the thought behind it keep you thinking long after you are outside and above ground – your interest is piqued enough to genuinely follow through on it.
  -
• It’s a word of mouth, dare I say it – ‘viral’ marketing campaign, that genuinely inspires conversation. How? By offering up a point of entry to a story that you don’t know exists yet. This is not your average movie poster, oh no. In fact the only clue that this might not actually be what you think it is is the URL ‘showfilmfirst‘ which is a site set up to offer early screening tickets to [from the looks of things] films that don’t have the traditionally large studio backing. However, what you take away is THE CLEAR PILL.
  -
  Google that and what you get?

That URL (or that call to action for that matter) isn’t anywhere on the ad, but still people are sharing it -

In fact, if I was writing the wrap up document for this campaign say in about a month or so from now (after the film has hit and the numbers have come in), I’d include that very screen grab.

Bam! Sale! Job done! Cheque please!

Go spend some time poking around the clear pill website, my favourite part so far is the epic ‘we don’t give a stuff about you’ small print.
I’m off to buy my ticket for Limitless. Like I said, it looks pretty good.

–

Minor addendum; the plot reminds me of the short story Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes. That’s worth a look too.

–
–

I found this yesterday via one of my favourite blogs, Brandflakes for Breakfast.

It’s a great ad. Not because of the product it’s selling, or because of the star that features (although I doubt anyone else could pull it off quite like Dafoe) but ultimately, it’s a wonderful story – extremely well told.

Admittedly it’s arguable what the video is actually selling; it’s obviously Jim Beam, but it could quite easily be Greyhound too – especially given the language structure around choices and decisions etc.

Either way, it’s a stellar piece of film-making.
Good job.

I read this article last week entitled “Why 2008 won’t be the breakthrough year for Mobile Advertising”. It was originally published in the middle of Mobile World Congress.

It makes for very good reading and clearly outlines the one caveat that is currently preventing the mobile advertising boom that has been promised for the past seven years: Advertisers simply don’t have the money to buy mobile ads. Nate Elliott also goes onto theorise that interesting things may happen in 2009 and the real (European) breakthrough will come in 2010.

After spending a few days digesting, I have to say that it is one theory that I buy into… It’s nearly here and the recently announced Mobile Ad deals laid out in that piece show this. Combine that with the consistent month on month growth rate of companies like Blyk – who have bet the farm on this particular return of investment – and you can see that we’re almost at tipping point. But, again, as the article points out, we’ve been almost at tipping point for just shy of a decade.
By way of comparison, in the UK there’s a TV programme called Skins, (it’s young, a bit good, knows its audiences and once you’ve watched a few you’re hooked) and recently E4, the younger, digital sister channel of Channel 4, started airing Season 2.

This in itself is really no big deal. However the amount of cash spent on the blanket marketing is.

You can’t get away from it!

And not in a bad way either. The TV spots are stylised; hinting at character development and yet still keeping the dark, surreal undertone that flows throughout the show. The ‘skincasts’, Podcasts containing interviews with the cast members are there for you to download to your MP3 player of choice, the community is there.

One of the interesting side effects of the first season, and something the UK media like to jump when there’s a slow news day, is the amount of young teenagers throwing themed ‘skins parties’ and, if you’ve ever seen the show, they don’t leave much to the imagination.

The new campaigns around season 2 are aimed at these people. Tapping into this (youth) market, this mindset is a genius move that has (probably) done wonders for their ratings. And it’s not just TV ratings these days either. Other KPIs include web hits, unique visitors, content downloads, podcast listeners, community members etc… There’s a lot to be measured.

So what about Mobile? Is all the money in mobile ads? Probably not.

Is there money to be made from mobile ads? A little, although not the billions that everyone thinks. Not yet anyway. Not without some joined-up thinking around context vs content etc…

2yrs ago I was told “Content is King”, I said then what I still say now. Context is King. You can send me as much content as you like but if it doesn’t speak to me, I ain’t buying.

I digress.

Taking a look at the E4 mobile proposition.

Simple, optimised content which is easy to consume – Basic Mobile Web 101 (but I’ve talked about this before)

Taking a closer look – There are three tabs: Telly, Goss and… SKINS!

Brilliant – Not only that but you can watch a clip from Skins Episode 3 right now – one click away.

That’s great. Not just for the end-user experience but it speaks shedloads about the level of internal buy-in from all parties within the offices of E4.

Skins is clearly their “hero” show for this season and is one of the channel’s better IPs.

This is a fantastic example of a blanket marketing campaign.

Mobile advertising needs to adopt similar thinking. You can’t just throw something into the mobile web and just expect it to work. You need strategy and process. Without this mobile advertising will never be the goose that will lay the golden egg. But it could well be a part of a few select bronze egg laying battery chickens.

The point I’m trying to make with the Skins example is that agencies and big media brands are finally coming to realise the amount of potential that lies in digital media. Mobile is part (albeit a new part) of this space.

And it won’t be long until they catch on. It just needs someone, or something, to make that first leap into the unknown.