The last VW advert that featured the little boy trying his best to use the force to help with his daily activities, must have struck a cord with Star Wars fans around the world. This year VW has created another Star Wars themed advert, but not one you would expect.

Samsung have pulled out all the stops with their new Fact Checkers Unit (FCU) ad campaign. They have created a wacky series of videos featuring two guys that stop at nothing to verify different facts. Talk about breaking through the clutter! The videos really give the Galaxy Note a bit of character

The royal wedding will have its fair share of etiquette and protocol, more so than the weddings us normal folks would attend. So when T-Mobile had the idea of modernising the whole affair by taking lead from a viral wedding video, we had to take a look.

HP South Africa have just unveiled a new Facebook competition. Head across to HP SA’s Facebook page to enter their Back-to-School competition and you could win a sparkly new HP Pavillion laptop and an innovative new HP Multiseat solution for your school.

The HP Multiseat solution is a very cool product, essentially it is one PC that provides access for several users at once. A great cost effective solution for schools. Check out the video below:

So what do you need to do to win? Pretty simple, head over to the HP Facebook page, Like the page and tell them about your favourite school memory. Simple as that. So go check it out now.

If you have not been shot in the face by Mo the Meercat’s paintball gun or watched everyone from Elton and Jan to Michael de Pinna and BankoleOmotso (two guys from the old Vodacom ad’s) finding interesting ways to paint a blue room red then you have not seen any of Vodacom’s TV and print ads and have been living with that Afrikaans family underground beneath the Chicken Licken. I honestly thought they could have done something far more creative or at least had some slow motion footage of red paint splattering about.

“Over the years, the organisation has grown and the world has changed, and our customers have become more complex. So it is time for us to relook how we do things and perhaps become a younger company by looking at new ways of staying relevant,” Uys (@uyspj) told a media briefing on Friday afternoon, 1 April 2011, in Sandton, Johannesburg.

“Power to you” the new controversial slogan and swopping out of “fone” for “com” on the Vodafone logo has led to Vodacom spending over R200 Million bucks on red paint. You might wonder how they could remain the sponsors of the blue bulls but when you are throwing that kind of money around anything can happen. Funny enough Cell C was the first company to apply for “Power to you” to be registered as a trademark in South Africa. They were quite perplexed to discover the ASA ruling in Vodacom’s favour.

“The ASA has found in favour of Vodafone which is an international company over Cell C which is a South African company in our own territory even though we strongly doubt whether South African consumers would recognise ‘Power to You’ as being associated with Vodafone,” Cell C CEO Lars Reicheltsaid.

More recently Reichelt (@nowires ) tweeted  “I’d rather be in the black than in the red… since Friday that feeling is particularly strong ” which I am sure will be the first of many interesting competitive angles Cell C will use to their marketing advantage over the next couple months.
 

Well the Red is here to stay and we will be plagued by these ad’s in between CSI and the last few episodes of Two and a Half men. The only thing I can advise is PVR your shows and practice using the fast-forward button.

Digital marketing has caused quite a stir across the marketing landscape over the last 20 years. A totally different beast to traditional advertising (TV, Radio, Print etc), digital marketing has grown over the years from a tactical/experimental execution into an essential part of every campaign’s media mix (often taking preference over other traditional channels).

With digital forming such a huge part of everyone’s lives, you would think that digital marketing would be widely understood within traditional marketing and advertising agencies, however it is not. Traditional above the line (ATL) ad agencies still have no clue about how digital really works and of the multitude of channels available within the digital ecosystem. I believe that many traditional advertising and media agencies still see digital as a threat, an unfamiliar and complicated medium that is filtering away more and more of their campaign budgets.

I have a different view; digital marketing is the glue that holds a full 360 degree campaign together. While there is a lot of digital advertising that follows the formula of ATL media (reach, frequency, impact etc) there is one medium in particular that is entirely unique. Search engine marketing (SEM).

Search has revolutionised the way we use the internet and the way that we acquire knowledge in general. Search engines provide direct access to the information that consumers are searching for within seconds. Search marketers are able to target specific keywords and display relevant adverts to the users searching for those terms, providing endless targeting ability based on consumer behaviour and insights.

So why should traditional agencies care?

SEM provides a strong call to action and an instant gateway to any campaign. What this does is it allows agencies to be far more creative than ever before when creating executions/campaign for high reach mediums like TV and outdoor. Gone are the days that a billboard needed to feature the company name, the product or service and other vital information. Today advertisers can focus more on creating impact and standing out from the all the clutter. If the campaign is creative and manages to capture the consumers attention, all the consumer needs to do to find out more is type a few phrases into Google on their phones or PC’s and they can be transported directly to all the campaign information.

Have a look at the Telkom Mobile Heita campaign. Bold creative outdoor executions and TV teasers provided a lot of interest and speculation about the campaign without the need to display a traditional call to action (URL, Facebook page, in store etc):

This call to action was included within a SEM campaign that captured consumers interest in the campaign and directed them to the official channels where they could view more of the campaign:

Would this be possible without search, I suppose so – but not nearly as effective, in this case search provided the ability for users to instantly find out what all the hype was about. In addition this permanent always available call to action allowed the creative agency the freedom to do something creative in ATL media to create the impact and hype that they were looking for without totally confusing consumers.

Do you have any other thoughts or idea about this? Let us know in the comments section.

Now there have been movies about toys, bugs, ants, wooden puppets, dogs, cars… the list is endless. But never before has there been a movie about a tyre. Yes, please welcome the latest to join the ranks of Michael Douglas, Audrey Hepburn and Clarke Gable: Robert the tyre.

Don’t know how I feel about this, but one thing is for certain I will be glued to the Oscars next year to see if he wins. For more information take a look at the official movie website. (According to the website it premiers on April 1st.. could this be a prank? Guess only time will tell.)