Dove Micro Site on MSN

Dove is soap.  Or is it?  Dove is an expression of self esteem.  Is it?  Dove would like you to think so.  Have a look at this very well produced micro-site (link here).

Dove has used the Internet to create a brand position in a way no other medium would allow.  Consumers of Dove can delve pretty deep into their concept of beauty and self-esteem.  Forums, expert Blogs, Widgets, and other tools provide Dove’s consumers with a way to interact with the brand that truly connects the consumer with the position.

If you think your products transcend the product benefit/need fulfillment and can connect to the consumer on an emotional level — or if your product is a commodity like soap and you need to create an emotional connection as a differenciator nothing beats the web to offer a robust engagement.  Have a look at the Dove site and get a feel — they are not selling Soap.  They are selling self-esteem and using the web do to is very effectively.

Mountain Dew Volt Micro Site

This is a very robust online campaign for Mountain Dew Voltage.  Check out all the details at ClickZ (link here).

A couple highlights:

• Visitors got to contribute with the making of this new product by voting on flavor, packaging, ect.
• The campaign leveraged advergaming, Facebook ap, mobile, banner, email — just about everything to surround the consumer.
• The micro-site is built on and in conjunction with Yahoo.  This is an interesting way to tap into the built in audience on Yahoo.
• The campaign uses a point system to reward it’s consumers with contests and prizes.  The more the consumer is engaged with the brand the more points. More points equal more rewards.  This is advergaming PLUS continuity

The soda companies are always a bit ahead of the rest of the pack in innovating marketing.  This campaign is a good example of leveraging just about every online stratgey available.  I’ll keep an eye out for any results data.

Go check out SproutBuilder.com right now.  Don’t even bother reading this post — go and start playing.  Sprout Builder let’s you very easily and quickly make some very cool widgets for iGoogle, MySpace, Facebook, or anywhere you’d expect a Widget.

This is an extremely cool application for a couple reasons:

• Widgets can be very powerful marketing tools and this ap lets you play around with the possibilities without paying a dev shop to make a custom ap for you.  Figure on paying $25m to $100+m for a custom widget.
• More important than the service that Spout Builder provides is the ability for the site to provide this type of interaction in a web page.  The entire notion that web pages are static information can be thrown out the window — web pages are APPLICATIONS.  This is a great example of that.
• As marketers we need to keep pushing the technology to provide the fullest potential to the business.  We can do that by stop thinking of our web sites as just marketing communications tools, which they are and always will be, but to also start to think of our web sites as extensions of the products and services we offer.

So do this now — go build your own custom Widget.  After that site back and take a long look at Sprout Builder and think about how far web pages have come in the last 5 years.

MeetMoi location based mobile dating

Back in 2001 I was working for some folks experimenting with WAP user generated content.  At the time we were running WAPdrive.com — a service that allowed users to create their own web pages for cell phones.  During a meeting one of the managers presented this idea of being able to set your cell phone to find a date.  The user would create a profile of themselves and what kind of match they would be interested in.  The service then would use the cell network to find the user a match in a given radius.  Very cool but way ahead of it’s time — I’m happy to see that this much needed service is now available.  Check out MeetMoi.com.

Here are some links to lists of other cell social applications:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_mobile_social_networks_redux.php

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/11/the-holy-grail-for-mobile-social-networks/

Thoughts:

• Social Networks are very hot right now.  Application publishers, media buyers, and big brands are all looking to find ways to tap into the audience.  Problem is the Social Networks aren’t profitable and the users aren’t receptive to ads.  Check out this post predicting trouble for Facebook by Tameka Kee. (link). Expect the mobile social network space to have the same difficulties.
• That said,  there is something fundamentally different between a PC based social network and a mobile one.  Specifically the fact that you are mobile — and now that the devices are aware of location there is a lot of cool this to be had.
• If you’re looking for the next big thing keep an eye on Mobile Social Networks.
• When a colleague has a wacky idea that seems 5 years too early — make a note of it and set a reminder to ping you in 5 years.

Macy

This comes to us from DMNew’s Chantal Tode.  For their “Believe” campaign Macy’s deployed a microsite at www.macysbelieve.com that included a feature that allowed visitors to create a custom e-card that could be sent to Facebook, MySpace, and cell phones.  According to the article,  250,000 visitors have completed the “BeClaus” process since early December.

The article also included some data points about Macy’s ecommerce activities:

- They have spent over $300MM in the last 3 years on their direct to consumer initiatives.  (Macy’s did $25B in revenue last year with 3B ebitda)

- Consumers that shop both online and at the stores spend twice as much as a consumer that only shops one of the channels.

- Online sales, mail, and phone orders are to add up to $950MM in 2008

Quantcast puts Macys.com at around 6MM visits per month with a holiday spike up to 8MM.

The process to create your e-card took 6 steps and was pretty robust.  The first image I selected to upload into the Santa maker was rejected for size.  The camera I took that picture with is a 3.1 mega pixel.  Which is about 5 years old — so that may be the experience of a lot of folks.  After I found a smaller image to use I completed the 6 steps it got stuck at 82% complete — I didn’t try again.

The 250,000 number is impressive — if Quantcast is correct (and in my experience it is close) that comes to 3% of their traffic sending an e-card.  The article did not mention it, but I presume there was an ad buy that also drove traffic to the microsite.

Macy