23 June 2009

I love this. Really I do.

Augmented reality has been kicking around for a while now but is starting to get used more and more. The campaign we're currently running for Paramount to promote their social media assets has just thrown up We Are Autobots which (with the help of a quick plugin download) allows you to see some cool bits via your webcam. Pictures paint a 1000 words though- so look at these:

07 May 2009

From today we're working on a little project with our friends at the BBC Natural History Unit in Bristol- getting word out about this awesome surfer clip
Super Slo-mo Surfer

Promoting the new BBC2 series, South Pacific, the clip is shot on a hi-def camera that was modded to sit in the surface of the water, allowing it to catch stunning shots above and below the surface- as the guy who filmed it says in the clip: " I watched it back and I've still got shivers in my spine because it's probably the best shot I've ever got in the water...without a doubt"

01 May 2009

Barely freshly shaven from his appearance on the BBC Today programme, Matt was kindly invited to talk a few things viral in front of Sky News cameras yesterday. It was through good fortune in our safe office surroundings that he was spared the tomfoolery of background dancers (poor Saatchi & Saatchi!).

This was all in aid of T-Mobile's latest 7000 person "Hey Jude" singing flash mob in Trafalgar Square (with token popstar Pink plunked in the middle). Through press attention and popstar power alone it's being talked about to buggery, yet you can't beat the authenticity of the original which made us all smile and share somewhat.


20 April 2009

Useful blog piece on hard metrics and anecdotal evidence for the value of social media.

Via Power Shift - Social Media Blog

Posted by Andy

09 April 2009

Useful article from this week's Economist about how the economic downturn is affecting marketing strategies. Final three paragraphs very interesting - snippets below.

"Interest in things such as green products and healthy foods will continue to grow in a post-crisis world, but customers will be less willing to pay a premium for them, and will demand more value for money when they do."

"The downturn will also accelerate the use of social media, such as blogs and social-networking sites, by consumers looking for intelligence on firms and their products [...] Social media make it harder for brands to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes, but they also offer canny companies a powerful new channel through which to promote their wares and test new products and pricing strategies."

"...this recession has triggered a wholesale reappraisal by shoppers of the value that their habitual brands deliver. The winners will be those that adapt intelligently to the new reality. The losers will be those who think they can win simply by telling consumers to 'Want It!'"

31 March 2009

Following the launch of our Today programme film for the BBC's flagship radio 4 show two weeks ago, the BBC had us back on to discuss the results our film had met with on-line. 50,000 views in its first week online, hundred of positive comments and twitters from fans, and a huge amount of debate amongst journalists and bloggers discussing the use of the word viral. All good stuff! Today's article summarises a complex issue well here.

Posted by Matt

Lego using social media well again: this is the launch video for a new Lego train (Emerald Night).

Lego trains have a very engaged and die-hard fan base - a true community, sharing things online and meeting in the real world.

The Emerald Night set is a premium-priced toy for children and adult fans of Lego; it was designed with fan input, has been tracked on blogs and forums for the last few months, and was launched at real-world fan events.

Interesting.

Posted by Andy

20 March 2009

This week saw the launch of a project we've been working on for a little while now.

We've worked with the pros at Torchbox on a few projects now but this is our first piece of production and we're really pleased with it.

Printer vs Bin takes inspiration from Tarantino, Mortal Kombat, and even Star Wars, and is an animation highlighting the need to
recycle Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. It encourgaes people to visit the Don't Bin it, Bring it Website

Matt shot the animation in 3 days using a digital stills camera and a laptop- go take a look at his work: Printer vs Bin

11 March 2009

New from us, here's a charming little film we've made for the Radio 4 Today Programme.

It's great to do work that reinforces the connection between people who've got a product or brand, and their existing customers. Sure, it's about repeat business and loyalty, but it's also about building up a brand that people appreciate and want in their lives.

Also, sounds cheesy, but I love the Today programme, and I love working on things I love....Lego, can we help you?

Posted by Andy

03 March 2009

Glabermania is an addiction to shaving- on ethat is being explored in a latest campaign for Nivea, via our friends at DraftFCB.

The multi-layered campaign involves a spoof clinic, product giveaways, japanese gameshows and some super-fetish shaving foam films with a XXX feel.

We're literally at day one right now, good content and a great client mean that we're excited to be working on this one and think it will fly.

by KirkH

20 February 2009

We were invited onto the Today programme this morning to chat about all this viral advertising lark, so I got up early and headed over to TV centre. Very nerve wracking all this live radio stuff, but think it went OK. You can see the pics below (it was very early, so apologies I look close to death. How they do this every day I don't know!). And hear Rubber Republic on the Today programme here and here. The section I'm in is 1 hour 45 mins in.







by Matt G

16 February 2009

..at least according to the 2009 Online Advertising Attitudes Report (via Paid Content) What they in fact say is that 22% of users only go to Niche, sector-specific destinations -like this blog- and only 25 (that's right, 2%) visit mainstream sites.

The other salient point for us in the article is this:

"The study, which surveyed 2,013 UK adults, could show what we already knew through our own experience - it's mighty easy to focus on content instead of web banners. Or the extent to which ads really do work could be under-reported by proud users who would rather say they ignored the pay-for spots. "

This sets up a slight conflict of interest though- and one that we encounter daily- for as long as advertisiers continue to pay CPM rates for web banners, publishers will continue take that easy money, rather than demanding quality ad-funded content for their users. In this case the supply of ready-money to the publishers is shaping the demand of that market. At some point, the cart and the horse will probably need to be swapped around to achieve a better effect.

by Kirk.

13 February 2009

How's this for a timely story? We've been commissioned by Paramount and MEC Global to run an online PR campaign that will fuel anticipation of the latest release in the iconic 'Friday the 13th' series of horror movies.

The purpose of the campaign is to start online conversations about the film, which hits cinemas across Europe on Friday 13th February -- that's today, folks!  The campaign's focused on five major European territories: the UK, France, Italy, Germany and Spain (EFIGS to the ITKs).

We've been equipped with a provocative and interactive viral film to get people talking: http://www.travelwithus.tv. In the clip, you join a 'live' webchat with a slightly fearful lady backpacker before she is, ahem, *cut off*.  You can also customise the clip to send a delightful personalised message straight from Jason to your friends -- or enemies.

The campaign follows the good work we did last year with the viral promotion for Paramount's 'Tropic Thunder'.  We've also been engaged to undertake a major online seeding campaign for the hugely anticipated 'Watchmen' which is released in cinemas next month.

Rory reckons: 'Paramount are pioneering what can be done within digital social-media and viral channels. They have recognised that the film can start well before the viewer gets to cinema - it's very exciting to be part of this when we can offer people genuinely engaging content.'

10 February 2009

ComputerTan.com, the hoax site we launched with McCann Erickson, could have easily been an advertisement for Something Awful's anchor "the internet makes you stupid".

It wasn't, thankfully. It was for the wholehearted cause of spreading awareness around the tanning risks of skin cancer. The anger of being hoaxed by something so preposterous was replaced with a little helping of understanding.

500k visits to the site, 100's of blogger mentions and a wealth of international press since it was launched 7 days ago make this wholly pro bono campaign deeply satisfying for everyone involved.

30 January 2009

We're doing a quick refresh of our case studies; one looking at the 'creatives grow better in the South West' campaign we did for SWRDA is below. More case studies coming soon!

Edit: it seems SlideShare's embed code and our blog don't get on so well. You can check out the case study on SlideShare while we try and resolve these minor technical difficulties.

23 January 2009

Following up my earlier post about "viral products", I thought I'd post some further musings about viral products as a concept. For me viral products are the Holy Grail of business and marketing - as the core principle behind viral products are that they're innately talkable products - like the iPod, Google, moo cards etc. - that people freely advocate, therefore massively lowering marketing costs. Of course, most products aren't viral products, and so require viral agencies like Rubber Republic to create a viral campaign to promote their product off the back of.

Over the last 12 months or so we've been working with our sister agency Delib to engineer a viral product of our own called aMap. aMap's a bit of an unobvious product, however it was something that Delib were working on from an academic perspective and it was something we thought we could help out with and extend into a consumer proposition and ultimately crafted into a viral product (something we'd been wanting to do for a while).

Throughout the process of developing aMap we've constantly been asking ourselves the question of what are the core ingredients to virality - and have always come back to 3 principles:

- Talkability: the idea's got to have various hooks for people to talk about.
- Shareability: the idea should be executed in a way that makes it easy to share and pass on.
- Wearability: ideally the idea should also be easy to embed / mash up. People should also want to advocate, and it advocacy should be made easy to do.

These are three very simple tenets which a viral product concept should always be tested against. Get these right and watch your products buzz grow, advocacy increase and sales rocket. It's as simple as that ; - )

20 January 2009

The Catholic Church are set to open a YouTube channel. The channel will feature addresses and other chat from Mr Pope. Its set to go live next week. That's a pretty ringing endorsement for the platform (as if it needed another!)

This dance off video for T-Mobile, by Saatchi and Saatchi, isn't that original or new - but for sheer scale and joy - you can't fault it. Made me smile - especially as it escalated to the point where pretty much everyone on the concourse was joining in. Took some planning I'm sure! Liked that it was shot on camcorders. Added to the sense of spontaneity, despite us all knowing that it wasn't really! It still opens a door into a little part of your brain in which commuters regularly have a little communal dance of a morning. I wonder if Toyota ever do this type of thing in their morning workouts?

12 December 2008

A campaign that has just grabbed my attention is the Youtube Symphony Orchestra.

It certainly seems to have captured the imagination of the sites budding musicians, with over a million views to the explanatory video. It gives you the chance to be part of a huge interactive orchestra: downloading the sheet music to practice, uploading your recital of it, and then being in with a chance of playing in an orchestra made from the best submitters live at the Carnegie Hall.

This project is a collaboration between YouTube, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Carnegie Hall, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, composer Tan Dun, and pianist Lang Lang, alongside many other classical music stars and leading institutions.

This is an interesting project as it shows people's acceptance of new media channels for communicating in the classical music world. This is also a very involving method of promoting the individuals and institutions involved. Encouraging the musicians to practice the piece so they can be involved in the final performance, will mean that they will be thinking of the campaign even when not directly watching the video. Their practice will also affect those in their close proximity creating an awareness of the campaign on a secondary level also, to people who may not have had any contact with the video.

Ally

Kudos to Faris Yakob, BL Ochman and That Canadian Girl for again highlighting why we should all be careful about our use of the term 'viral' and why it should be considered a verb.

Faris explains:

"Sometimes I get calls saying this viral isn't performing very well - what's the problem? We've seeded it to all the right places, it's on youtube and everything - where's our traffic? The problem is usually that they've made an ad that contains nothing people consider worth showing to their friends.

Unless you would be willing to send whatever it is to your mates - it's not viral!

But saying something is viral, we focus entirely on the content itself and not on the needs of the people that we are asking to spread ideas."

However, my favourite quote on this topic comes from Douglas Rushkoff:

"People don't engage with each other to engage viruses; people
exchange viruses as an excuse to engage with each other."

Perhaps some of us might be excused for shamefully ElfingOurselves this Xmas.

04 December 2008

FRANK, the drugs information and advice service, has launched a campaign raising awareness about the risks of cocaine use with a bang.

This year a fully integrated on & offline campaign incorporates a whole host of digital content, featuring videos narrated by, amongst others, a fatally wounded drug mule dog called Pablo and a talking bag of cocaine.

Our team's been tasked with distributing this online content to drive high-levels of awareness across the net amongst FRANK's target for this campaign of 15 to 18 year olds.

In total there are four pieces of content to seed: two specially commissioned online clips - a cryptic teaser and a viral - which complement the TV spot and another film highlighting the darker side of cocaine.

We've gone for a two stage strategy. We kicked the campaign off earlier this week with an exclusive pre-launch preview of the teaser and viral films to a discrete audience of culturally relevant bloggers (e.g. DJ / music blogs), and then yesterday, as the full campaign officially launched, we pushed the button on a blanket seeding strategy intended to generate high-levels of awareness quickly.

So far the strategy seems to be working with some good early advocacy for the campaign amongst the blogger community, and a good early surge in views of the campaign videos.

See the viral here: Baggie


and catch all the other pieces of content here: YouTube channel

03 December 2008

When you eat some dodgy turkey and your toilet's rank and murky, diarrhoea, diarrhoea...

he Food Standards Agency (FSA) has commissioned a viral video -- "Diarrhoea!" -- to raise awareness of the potential hazards of Christmas leftovers.

"Diarrhoea!" has been planned and produced by Farm Communications and is being seeded by Bristol-based viral agency Rubber Republic. The clip aims to spread the season of good will and happy stomach's message during the active viral video viewing Christmas season.

The 50 second clip shows an exaggerated, retro 70's home at Christmas with a family sat around, sad and stuck for gift ideas -- until an infomercial-style narrator suggests they give 'diarrhoea!'. The voiceover continues to 'sell' diarrhoea as the perfect Christmas present ('from ages 8 to 88') as one by one the family's stomachs disrupt the silent night. The clip ends with a simple three step guide to avoiding the perils of Christmas food poisoning.

Avoid spending this Christmas alone in the loo - with the gift that keeps - giving by taking heed of the following:

Watch the 'Christmas Crappers - Diarrhoea' Viral Clip

Seasons Greetings...etc!

28 November 2008

For those who haven't been introduced to the sport of Bearded Ladyboarding yet, Rubber Republic have created the concept to help promote the Oregon Scientific's ActionCam - the mini-everything-proof-video camera popular amongst extreme sports fans.

Bearded Ladyboarding pretty much does what it says on the tin - i.e. it's a sport involving guys with beards in wedding dresses on mountain boards.

To check out the campaign, visit:

The Bearded Ladyboarding site

The Bearded Ladyboarding YouTube channel

For more info, read the full press release below:

Oregon Scientific looks to boost ActionCam sales with 'Ladyboarding' viral campaign

Oregon Scientific has launched an online international viral campaign -- 'Bearded Ladyboarding' (http://www.ladyboarding.com) – to generate brand awareness and to increase sales of its rugged ActionCam.

The Oregon Scientific ActionCam was launched in 2007 as one of the world’s first all-terrain cameras. The camera's hands-free, shock-resistant, waterproof design and the fact that users could mount it on anything, recording any kind of action anywhere, meant it quickly became very popular among extreme sports fans.

Now, Oregon Scientific are launching the Bearded Ladyboarding viral campaign to introduce the affordable, fun side of the extreme ActionCam to a wider audience and to showcase its ability to catalyse good old-fashioned japery. The campaign, which is centred on a Flash mountain-boarding game but also includes YouTube clips and other assets, has been planned, produced and seeded by British viral agency Rubber Republic.

The campaign's creative is based around the as-yet non-Olympic sport of bearded ladyboarding, an obscure but accessible extreme sport in which competitors with handsome beards and beautiful wedding dresses tear down hillsides in pursuit of ladyboarding glory. Curious audiences can explore the concept through an arcade-style ladyboarding game, ActionCam infomercial, interview with one of the sport's prime exponents and even a selection of inspirational wallpapers.

The viral launches in four key European territories: UK, France, Italy and Germany.

Aylin Burnham, European Markeing Director for Oregon Scientific, said "venturing into virals is a new departure for us but we're very excited at the potential of this campaign to reach new markets and showcase this great product".

Kirk Hullis, account manager at Rubber Republic, said "working on a campign that has a broad range of assets and in mulitple languages allows us to use various methods to contribute to the awareness online of the ActionCam - be that through casual gameplay, YouTube video views or exclusive publisher deals to embed the game. We're chuffed to be working with such a great product".

Links to content:
Game:
http://www.ladyboarding.com

YouTube clip:
http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=4Cq4O_z5Blo

For more info, please contact Chris Quigley:

Chris@RubberRepublic.com / 07710 145575

About Oregon Scientific
http://www.oregonscientific.co.uk/aboutus.asp

25 November 2008

In the introduction to his talk last night, Malcolm Gladwell self-depricatingly announced that he hadn't given his talk a specific title. Usually, he said, he'd come up with some obscure title for his talks involving Freud - for example "Freuds's geology" - or put three random words together - for example "Elephant, Ice Cream, Jesus". The idea being that the more obscure the title, the more interesting the talk, therefore the bigger the pull. The crowd tittered at this thought, however these introductory words for me proved the most interesting of his whole talk.

I'll admit that I've never been a massive fan of Gladwell's. I think he's clever and I admire him for bringing the genre of popular social science to the masses, however each of his books seems to grate more and more.

The reason for this is that Gladwell comes across to me a as a bit of a one trick formulaic social science pony, who takes a simple central concept and then surrounds it by obscure anecdotes to make the concept sound a lot more interesting and important than it is. And the formula is roughly this:

1) Pick an "of the moment" concept that's been bubbling away in the back of public consciousness, but hasn't yet been articulated well enough for the public to "get it". N.B. this concept will generally be pretty obvious. Obvious enough to result in people going "Oh, I seeeeee!" once they'd read Gladwell's book.

2) Give the concept a catchy title / name (e.g. Tipping Point, Blink . . .) N.B. these are often existing names of concepts.

3) Explain the concept by using a varied number obscure real life examples / anecdotes to bring the concept to life, and flesh out the book so it's over 150 pages long and therefore merits being called a book and worth over £8 (paperback) or £15 (hardback).

4) Send the book to the Daily Mail to get previewed to ensure a gushingly positive review involving the words "inspiring" "genius" and "genre defining".

So, by being partly lost for something interesting to say to introduce his talk Gladwell made a Freudian-slip and revealed his inner-self - a self that's undoubtedly clever, but also hell-bent on making sure everyone knows he's clever. That's of course not a bad thing. Especially when the end product is as entertaining as his books, and he (and his formula) is such a Success.

20 November 2008

This is a story about a kind of advertising that we like a lot: about what Claude Hopkins called service, what Aesop allegorised as the sun, what Neil Perkin recently referred to as 'goodness and happiness'. It's a story about advertising that entertains and helps its audience, rather than bullying, brow-beating or bombarding them. It's even a love story, a tale of an irresistible match of message and content.

And don't worry: it's also a short story.

greatplaces2work is a charity that enables those looking for a career or change in career to match their strengths and skills within the hospitality, leisure and travel industries. They wanted to take a message of 'careers you'll thrive in' to their target audience in a way that reflected their desire to help people 'make the most of [their] skills and personality'.

Dudecorp is a darkly funny animated miniseries about office life (and death) that we made a couple of years ago because we had some scripts that made us laugh.

greatplaces2work saw in Dudecorp the opportunity to reach their audience and provide them with entertainment - all the while, articulating the thought that perhaps the corporate machine is, er, not the ideal working environment for everyone. We were not going to be the wall to this Pyramus and Thisbe and so were delighted to take on the work.

We've gently repurposed the existing Dudecorp site and assets to work with the greatplaces2work proposition ('get yourself a career you'll thrive -- not die -- in') and have been able to develop some great new Dudecorp content as well.

We're launching the campaign this week with a panoply of targeted seeding, clever embeddable content units, videos, games and, of course, the original Dudecorp microsite.

Now, we're watching and waiting for the happily-ever-after of people finding a career they love because they were entertained by content that advertised a service that was useful to them.

Maybe it'll set a whole new paradigm and put an end to the incessant, aggressive calls from recruitment consultants. Sorry, scratch that last bit, this isn't a fairy story.

14 November 2008

A lot has been written about the sheer amount of cash Barrack Obama's team has thrown at his campaign. Having raised over $600 million, Obama has been like a real life Brewster from Brewster's Millions - trying to spend all his cash in time to win the ultimate prize.

So was interesting traveling around the US over during the election campaign, seeing what the impact of all this campaigning cash has been.

And the answer is big. From local radio ads, to billboard ads to prime time TV slots, it's been difficult to escape the Obama marketing machine. Most powerful of all, however, has been his grassroots campaigning. With houses from Venice beach to Beverly Hills to New York's Greenwich Village being plastered with Obama's iconic Hope posters, and streets teams out in force handing out stickers and leaflets.

Perhaps the most bizarre encounter of Obama's campaign came one Sunday morning in the Playboy Hotel, Las Vegas, when we bumped in to 3 Obama foot soldiers getting ready to go about their business. We didn't ask what they were doing there, however it showed that even in Playboy heaven there was no escaping the Obama machine.

Given its heritage of sex-fuelled hedonism, maybe Obama's team thought the Las Vegas Playboy hotel was a strong symbol of his liberal democratic values. Or maybe he had a few last million to spend and thought splashing a grand a night on Playboy bunny suites was the quickest way of spending his way to the White House.

Whichever way, the Playboy bunny strategy seems to have paid off, as I write this Obama has sealed the Presidential deal - and even hauled in Nevada, a real coup for a Democrat candidate.

24 October 2008

Another fortnight has flown by: we have arrived at another Friday meaning a brand new MCM Net produced/Aardman designed Creature Discomforts game has landed.

It's the third in the series, and this time we see Tim the one-legged Tortoise attempting to use his crutches and his eye for physics to launch himself as far into a sweet shop as tortoise-ly possible. His sugar-hungry kids are demanding sweets and Tim is prepared to go to any lengths to get them!

It takes a couple of goes to get used to Tim's unorthodox longjump technique, but once you do, you'll be flying past jars of Barley Sugar and Humbugs five shelves high in no time.

As with each of the games, there are some super exclusive Aardman prizes being given away for the longest jumpers, and it's all for the good cause of the Leonard Cheshire Disability charity.

Play Tim the Tortoise at the leonard Cheshire Disability homepage.

15 October 2008

A recent study by Feed Company - entitled "Viral Video Marketing Survey: The Agency Perspective" - has yielded some interesting indications of where we could see the ever-expanding world of virals heading in the future.

80% of (presumably traditional) ad-agency executives and media buyers were accustomed with viral video, with some 72% say that advertisers were interested in utilising viral video in their marketing strategy. These figures correlate with 70% of said agencies and media buyers planning to increase their viral video marketing budget.

The report also states that agencies are turning to viral video due to its inherent value compared with traditional media and its cost effectiveness in the face of an "economic downturn".

While this undoubtedly being promising news for companies like Rubber Republic, the report also gives feedback on agency and media buyer qualms with viral marketing, and their suggestions for improvement in this area. Responding to the concerns and expectations of our clients will be key in maintaining these positive steps in the future.

I would like to see a study like this also take into account industry attitudes towards viral game content. It is surprising that - despite some of the great virals of the last few years being in game format and the platform's appeal and versatility - viral video still maintains a place as the 'default viral' form.

Nonetheless, this is a valued and insightful piece of research.

Read the study: Viral Video Marketing Survey: The Agency Perspective

Reference: MarketingVox

Ian O

10 October 2008

I am pleased to announce the Friday release of the second game in the 'Creature Discomforts' series, 'Peanut Pickup' featuring Millie The Mouse.

After Callum's 'Flyzzz' dilemma, you must now help Millie to feed the giant, restless Elephant some nuts. Make sure you don't don't try and feed him the green ones, he hates them! Be careful of the trunk, you may be mistaken for food and picked up!

MCM Net are releasing two more games in the four-part series over the next two fortnights. The games are made to raise awareness for the Leonard Cheshire Disability charity.

Feed an elephant today! Play Peanut Pickup.

01 October 2008

Do you think you have what it takes to bake, chill and explode a mix of your favourite ingredients into a Dairy Milk chocolate bar impressively enough to please a Parrot?

Oh, you've never thought of that before? Well here's your chance to see...

Hot on the heels of the infamous Gorilla and Trucks campaigns; Cadbury are giving you access to the Chocolate Dream Steam Machine and the opportunity to choose from a range of sweet, fruity, rich, nutty, subtle, and downright ludicrous flavours to mix into your very own personalised bar of Dairy Milk.

The only thing standing between you and your chocolate is the adjudicating parrot, if he doesn't like it, it goes straght to waste. If he stops it on the conveyor belt and flaps like a mad bird, you're up for the chance of winning your very own, dream Cadbury's Dairy Milk bar!

We are seeding this on behalf of Hyperhappen, and are super pleased to be a part of the ongoing Cadbury advertising innovations!

Get over to the Dairy Milk Factory and see if you can impress the parrot with your chocomagination!

26 September 2008

I am please to cut the ribbon and to announce the commencement of Rubber Republic seeding on a set of brand new viral games. The games have been produced by MCM Net, for the Leonard Cheshire Disability charity and feature Aardman's award winning (as seen on TV) 'Creature Discomforts' creations.

Each plasticine creature, each a different species and each with their own individual disability, share - the wonderful - signature Aardman plasticine look. A new game, featuring a new character will be released every fortnight!

First up, we have Callum The Chameleon, who due to his blindness, requires the aid and companionship of his very own guide-ladybird. The aim of the game is to help Callum get some dinner by utilising his extra long and malleable tongue to catch the flies and wasps that zoom around him.

Brilliantly, this game also features an 'audio only' version of the game, made specifically for the blind. In this feature, you must help Callum catch the flies by detecting when they are at their closest. This is determined by the sound of flies and wasps buzzing reaching its loudest point.

The top 5 scorers from each game will receive exclusive signed pictures of the respective Aardman character. These skilled individuals will also be entered into a larger draw, with the potential to win a "Money can't buy" Aardman suprise prize!

The games aim to significantly increase awareness and support of the Leonard Cheshire Disability and to challenge the way that people perceive disability. What better way to get involved than having some fun?

So get licking and help Callum get his fix!

24 September 2008

Drum roll . . . we're v.pleased to invite you to the official launch of the full-fat version of 4mations.tv

We're super chuffed with the site + content, and think the team of Aardman animations, Channel 4, Lupus Films and Reality digital have done a sterling job.

If you're keen to blog a post on our shiny new venture, there's a fuller press release below with loads more info about the project.

+ as a nice little prezzie for all our friends, we've created a launch goody-bag, with a whole heap of virtual goodies for you to wear and share:

Grab your free stuff from our rabbit hole!

Cheers!

4mations press release

Channel 4 have launched 4mations.tv, a new video-sharing site aimed at bringing together the best animation from around the world.

4mations is a collaboration between Channel 4, Aardman Animations, Reality Digital and Lupus Films and has a strong focus on rewarding animators who upload their work - offering cash rewards of up to £1000 for popular content, competitions, opportunities to pitch for commissions, and even the potential to get on TV.

The 4mations website is based around a video-sharing platform, allowing users to upload, rate and comment on content. Additional functionality includes the "Thinks" application, that allows users to quickly and easily create their own personalised animations. Thinks has been developed by the guys behind the cult web-app "Fuzzwich" (www.Fuzzwich.com).

The site was designed by Oscar-winning Aardman Animations (based in Bristol UK, and the brains behind Wallace and Gromit) and built by Reality Digital (based in San Francisco USA), and is based on Reality's "Opus" video sharing platform.

4mations' visual design is based around an iconic kitten-skull character called "General Tiddles", created by designer Gavin Strange and the Aardman creative team.

The marketing strategy behind 4mations is primarily focused online. Rubber Republic are leading the launch of the site with a strong focus on viral and social media marketing.

A series of virals have been commissioned for the launch featuring 4mations' kitten-skull character "General Tiddles", as well as a number of additional animated comedy series, interactive games and widgets.

Camilla Deakin, 4mations.tv’s Executive Producer, comments "4mations aims to be the animation sharing community. We built it so that people who like watching it can find it easily and people who enjoy making animation and showing it to other people have an easy and fun place to do just that. If you want to share your work, get feedback from a community of animators, or just look at some cool stuff, 4mations is for you.”

Jon Gisby, Channel 4’s Director of New Media and Technology, said “4mations will enable us to meet the needs of an audience that is increasingly online. It’s also the logical next step in working with the great creators of animation and we’re thrilled to provide an online home for such a vibrant community. This is another example of Channel 4 working with its partners to reinvent itself for a fully digital future”

Chris Quigley, Rubber Republic Director, comments "As 4mations.tv is so chocked-full of great viral content, it makes perfect sense to have the concept of "wear and share" at the heart of our marketing strategy - with the overall aim to encourage people around the net to "wear and share" 4mations content with pride."

Links to the site and content:

4mations.tv
http://www.4mations.tv

The Thinks "create your own animation" app
http://www.4mations.tv/thinkscreate.aspx

General Tiddles' "Suicide Kittens"
http://www.4mations.tv/clipgame.aspx?key=0DA495C0B36267E7

General Tiddles' "Driving Lessing"
http://www.4mations.tv/clip.aspx?key=12406A98EB5240C4

Hate animation series
http://www.4mations.tv/clip.aspx?key=ECFF40965A35FD34

08 September 2008

Get training- Sonic is back, baby!

Coming soon to Nintendo DS, Sonic Chronicles sees yet another return for my best friend from childhood (Seriously, I spent more time with Sonic than a lot of real people I knew at the time)

Aimed at a younger audience, the Training Widget has a series of challenges as player try to achieve Bronze, Silver, Gold and then....Dark levels. (Perhaps a new Olympic medal classification is needed to reflect this).

Similar to our Samba De Amigo campaign, the clearspring widget is designed for ease of sharing and embedding- we'll again be working hard to ensure many many instances of the game across the web over the coming weeks.

By Kirk

05 September 2008

We're currently seeding a widget version of Dreamcast classic Samba De Amigo for our friends at SEGA as the game is set to launch on the Wii.

The widget, built using the social media friendly Clearspring platform, is already proving very popular across the main social networks and game sites. As we continue to distribute it our scores are improving slowly through the odd play every now and then....

Try and beat the monkey (;-)) at Samba De Amigo You can even use the funky features to grab your own copy for your blog or profile.




Technorati Profile

26 August 2008

Returning the favour to Ze Frank for bigging up our Harvest film last month, here is Ze Frank's new atheist game, in which you can control your inner atheist.

21 August 2008

Drum roll . . .
Rubber Republic are pleased (and relieved) to announce the beta launch of 4mations.tv .

4mations is a video-sharing site aimed at bringing together the best animation from around the world. The project is a collaboration between Channel 4, Aardman animations and Lupus Films and there are all sorts of rewards for people who upload their work: cash prizes for popular content, competitions, opportunities to pitch for commissions, even the chance to get on telly.

So far there've been hundreds of animations uploaded. Over the next few weeks we'll be adding loads of new features and content as we get ready to for the full public launch in mid-September.

We'd really appreciate it if you checked out the site, and gave us any feedback - to help us iron out any problems before the public launch. As one of the first 400 invitees from around the world, we've created a cute "4mations 400" badge for you to wear (on your blog) with pride!

You can download your badge from our cat-friendly goody-bag here

+ you can have a gander at our blog here

15 August 2008

"Online advertising spend has outpaced advertising on mainstream TV in 2007, surging 40 percent to £2.8 billion, Ofcom reported today in its hefty annual survey of the British communications market. In comparison, ad revenue at ITV1, Channel 4, S4C and Five came in at £2.4 billion."

Read the full report on Paid Content.

Steve McLaren is viral, that's what.

In an age of increasing video clutter, it's sometimes hard to see what is truly viral. If we're looking for a film that is creating huge buzz with no ad spend behind it then we have to keep our eyes peeled....

Yesterday morning one of Team Rubber forwarded us a link to a video of Steve McLaren, former England football manager, giving an interview in a dutchified pigeon English that is excruciatingly embarrassing but also brilliantly funny (Schmoke and a pancake anyone?)

When the film first hit the office the youtube counter was at 12,000. 24 hours later and it has been featured on Capital FM by Jonny Vaughan and 5Live breakfast and is onto 160,000 views. We look forward to Soccer AM's treatment of it on Saturday morning!

No ad spend, no PR, no press release and it will go down as one of the greatest football virals ever! Watch those views go up...

How do you say...errr...Schteve McLayren?

04 August 2008

OK, so not the Tweenies, but Tweens (consumers aged 10-14) use the internet too, according to new research from the amazingly named Double Click Perfomics (surely Performics isn't a word)

Key points from this rsearch that are of interest for us:

- 83% said they spend at least an hour per day online

- Nearly half of respondents go online many times per day (more than three), and 87% usually spend at least a half hour each time.

- 72% have a profile on at least one social networking site

· 54% have a MySpace profile

· 35% have a Facebook profile

· 45% have some other social networking profile

· 64% visit social networking sites at least once per day

· 34% spend four or more hours per week on social networking sites

- Only eight percent said they read blogs frequently; another 31% said occasionally. Forty percent said rarely, and 20% said never.

(Data based on responses from 1,000 individuals contacted through eRewards' panel of more than 2.8 million active members)

by Kirk

29 July 2008

As we work on more and more campaigns with viral content, we constantly have to balance the need for great coverage and associations with the assets against cold, hard, measurable data on who interacts with it so that we can tell clients how the campaign has done.

In this week's NMA there is an interesting article entitled CPA vs CPM that explores the rise in demand for CPA (Cost Per Action) over CPM (Cost Per Mille or Thousand) for content publishers in order to clearly show this return on investment for online campaigns. The article gives views on both sides of the argument-

"Scott Gallacher, Sky's director of online says, "We've been pushing towards this model for over a year and we believe that's where the future buying model lies. It's truly performance media. Any organisation's desire is to look for media that performs against business targets."

and

"Brand advertisers use CPA selectively. For them the key is to appear in the right environment and associate with strong content. There's no obvious acquisition target for them." (Richard Martin, Account Director, MEC Interaction)

It's well worth a read to see the opinions of those interviewed as well as case studies of a couple of recent campaigns that have worked on both models.

In my opinion this is a horses-for-courses situation. We operate a CPA system with our Viral Ad Network publishers because it is a fair way to pay for their work as well as an incentive to give good content prominence, but we will also work with CPM publishers to ensure good coverage/association on campaigns where that is appropriate and within the clients stated aims. There is no doubt that CPA is on the up and that clients are demanding greater accountability for how and where their money is being spent- how this model might be applied to mailing list responses will be an interesting debate in the future....

By Kirk

24 July 2008

BMB's iPint ap for Carling has received alot of attention lately - and for good reason. Its a great and first to market ad distributed solely on the iPhone, with a viral mechanic to encourage sharing it with your (iPhone owning) friends. More here .

Incidentally the game itself looks remarkably similar to our game Euroball .

23 July 2008

A few months ago Matt came back from Bug 05 raving about a few films he had seen. One of which was the brilliantly simple, visually stunning and richly detailed zZz Grip . The brief: Shoot a live sequence to open a short film festival in Holland Nederclips - One take, no special effects, loads of hidden conceits/ jokes and a great soundtrack …Inspirational stuff indeed.

Until this . Shame on you Fiat, your agency and all those who agreed this would be a good idea! Apart from totally missing the elegance and subtlety of the original, it is yet another case of advertising underestimating viral influence and the proliferation of digital content.

I am not naïve enough to think the advertising has never ‘borrowed from’ the ‘art’ of others, and at times I am even prepared to stick up for the advertiser – Guinness Eskimo, Honda Cog and Sony Bravia Balls are all great examples of that. But when someone thinks they've seen something that they can just regurgitate to a ‘broadcast audience’ on the assumption that the latter hasn't seen the original, it smacks of utter laziness and worse, contempt.

I appreciate that Fiat and their agency must have got permission from the original filmmakers, so hopefully no-one's been ripped off here and no-one's got hurt. But it's a great shame when you see something that you thought was exceptional being degraded and one would have thought by now advertisers would know that the truth will out immediately.

It's an even bigger shame when the offending brand is actually making exceptional products – the gorgeous Fiat 500 and Fiat Punto (Europe's best selling car) – and still can't think of a single original thing to say about them.

22 July 2008

This is a great game that I found out about the other day: http://fantasticcontraption.com/ (thanks, Jay is Games!).

I love physics games anyway, possibly because I am terrible at engineering and enjoy the challenge but mostly because there's no 'lose' criteria, only 'try again'. However, the thing that really sets this apart for me is the really easy community aspect to it: once you complete a level, you can browse through anybody else's saved and submitted solution to the same problem; you can also rank these solutions and, perhaps my favourite of all, each saved solution generates its own URL so you can point people directly to check out different contraptions (this one, for instance, is very cool: http://fantasticcontraption.com/?designId=26084). This already seems to have fuelled a lot of forum discussion.

The interface and game controls aren't perfect but I love the way it's done that thing of considering the campaign and not just the game, as well as the fact that it makes it stupidly easy for the user (URLs you can copy and paste into browser windows) rather than the Flash/SQL developer (none of this 'simply take this generated widget code from within the Flash window which you have to select using the 'select' button and then input it into the location string field for the obscure Facebook application you have to install to run this sort of thing on your profile').

What do you think? Check out Fantastic Contraption.

03 July 2008

I was in the middle of writing a presentation on Social Media, when I found this video . . . .

Isn't this social internet thing great! People share ideas and stuff to make other people's lives easier and more fun.

My job's done! I'm back off on holiday . . .

01 July 2008

With Euro 2008 all done and dusted, we were just about to wrap our hugely successful EUroball game in some old sack-cloth and put it in a cupboard, like some souvenir tray commemorating the marriage of Wayne and Colleen. Fortunately for the game though, it has reared it's beautiful head once more- being nominated the official Adobe Site of the Day for today.

You can see
Euroball honoured by Adobe here or you can play Euroball here

26 June 2008

Of course you could always reconcile this fact with a quick flick on the our fantastic Euroball game; as if you haven't already!

Or you can rejoice in that great British pastime, a stiff upper lip and a loveable jibe at oneself and nation. Check out this brilliant take on the famous football number '3 Lions', which has been adapted by Draft FCB to accommodate/reconcile for our epic no show this summer and aptly renamed 'We're Staying Home'. So while you watch Germany step up to another final this Sunday, rejoice another rainy Glastonbury weekend and remember to sing 'We're Staying Home'.

12 June 2008

"I want ad space that everyone can see, all the time!" shouts the impatient planner... well now he may have his dreams answered- we've seen projections on buildings, MINIs bolted to the side of the Roundhouse in Camden, writing on football pitches, paintings for online strippers on fields by airport runways and now FLOGOS have appeared in the USA.

FLOGOS can be made into any shape and create a foam and helium 'cloud' that floats up into the air they can, apparently, last for hours before evaporating into air (they have also been approved by aviation authorities!)

Go see for yourselves- proper 'blue sky' thinking maybe.... We'll all be using these soon.

Crazy American invention: FLOGOS

10 June 2008

Drum roll please . . . thanks to the nice people at Brand Republic we've now got a nice shiny new blog on the Brand Republic site called Rubbertopia , where we'll be sharing our pearls of viral wisdom with the digital marketing world and his dog.

We've started with a sneaky replication of a post from this blog, but we promise it'll get better and more original!

04 June 2008

Two simple formulae for viral success:

Finger puppets + Harry Potter = YouTube hit

Porny photo + XXX tag = Viral phenomenon

30 May 2008

We're always harping on about the ability for virals to target niche audiences, so we were particularly amused when monitoring Honda's latest ad (using Opinion Tracker ) we came across this post in Crossdresserclub.com, which seems to suggest that the UK cross-dressing community are particular fans of the Honda brand . . .

No niche is a bad niche?!

19 May 2008

Just to let you know that we've now published our guidance to the new piece of legislation (Unfair Trading Regulations Act 2008) that affects the process of viral seeding from May 26th.

To get a full understanding of the do's and don'ts, check out the White Paper section of Viral Manager for more information.

16 May 2008

We are currently working our seeding magic on a campaign for lastminute.com on behalf of the lovely people at Steel London. The film revolves around an unexpected performance at Stansted airport; with dummy airport staff, policemen and passengers breaking into a musical theatre production to the surprise and bemusement of the unaware terminal dwellers around them.

The viral is being used to promote the latest deals from lastminute.com; who are currently offering 50% off theatre tickets throughout May.

On Youtube, the video has had some great responses so far, with people even asking if it will be on TV. Could the Unexpected Performanceviral become one of those rare examples of an ad campaign crossing over to television?

I hope so!

15 May 2008

A quick note for some own-trumpet blowing. The Rubber Republic channel on Youtube is into the top 100 most viewed UK channels this week. Well done to our seeding team for great work and also to our creatives and agency clients for providing us with such top-notch content.

Rubber Republic Viral Youtube Channel

14 May 2008

Bigod! Impatient scientists have only left it a decade before splicing the genes of mighty crooner Frank (RIP) and home-wrecking, cannibalistic grey squirrels. Judge the results for yourselves...

Having just discovered that today is the 10th anniversary of Frank Sinatra's death, the time couldn't be more appropriate to show you how the legend lives on as the Sinatra Squirrel.

A new US web2.0 site launched recently called CreateDebate . As with many start-ups CreateDebate have little cash for a big launch, so have cunningly developed a nice little low-cost viral in the form of a diagram called "the 7 habits of highly effective internet users" - showing the relationships between web2.0 companies via basic internet usage habits.

Web-diagrams have become a fairly popular way of creating virality, largely because they very simply provide something for bloggers to talk about something - the key underlying principal of virality.

13 May 2008

On May 26th a new law affecting viral seeding is being introduced as part of the Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations Act 2008.

The overall idea of the new piece of legislation is to clamp down on unfair sales and marketing practices, and largely relates to brands faking positive brand messages - for example through through fake blog posting. The most famous example of this in recent times being the Sony's "All I want for Christmas is a PSP" campaign.

The new law states:
"Falsely claiming or creating the impression that the trader is not acting for the purposes relating to his trade, business, craft or profession, or falsely representing oneself as a consumer."

This is a strict liability offence and the IPA legal advisers have noted that it will cover activities such as:
- seeding positive messages about a brand without making it clear that the message has been created by or on behalf of the brand
- using "buzz marketing" specialists to communicate with potential consumers in social situations without disclosing that they are acting as brand ambassadors
- seeding viral ads on the internet in a manner that implies you are a simple member of the public

>> Viral seeding guidelines

To ensure our seeding process works within this new piece of legislation, we've created a 5 point viral seeding framework:

- Liability: The seeding agency should take full responsibility for all seeding activities, and liability for any breach of the legislation. The client should not be liable for any wrong doing relating to seeding activity.
- Video / content seeding: When seeding viral videos you should ensure the video is clearly tagged with the brand in the meta-data. All seeding will be done using established agency accounts. The same process should be used for game / content seeding.
- Blog seeding: when seeding to blogs, you should use standard online PR techniques unless an existing relationship already exists. These involve approaching relevant bloggers and openly communicating that you are seeding a piece of branded content, and asking them if they'd be interested in writing about the campaign.
- Forum / social community seeding: when seeding within forums / social communities, you should take 3 things into account: 1) you should have an established account, and be a regular contributor to the forum 2) you should make it clear within the environment that you work for a viral agency 3) you should only contribute content into the environment if its relevant.
- Training: All in-house seeders should be provided full training in the do's and don'ts of viral seeding with reference to the new piece of legislation.

By following these guidelines, your campaign will work within the Unfair Trading Regulations Act and give it a strong chance of going viral.

12 May 2008

With the announcement of Google Friend Connect things are really on the brink of changing dramatically in how we share what we're doing online with others.

While some will always be sceptical of mechanisms that can trace and display our online activities, many people will appreciate this new development (also being provided by Facebook under the name of Facebook Connect ) which allows any website owner to use a couple of lines of code that will add social networking features to their site so that people can share what they like more easily.

In the Google press release there's a great comment from the president of iLike, Hadi Partovi: "We want to bring ourselves to every eyeball, not bring every eyeball to us," With an increased ease of use (you won't have to create hundreds of accounts for every site with associated passwords etc..) this will make sharing content (and virals) much easier.

With hundreds of viral campaigns under our belts, we've been asked by the nice people at Knexus (the online learning community for marketers) to run an online workshop on viral marketing.

We ran a similar type of event last year, and so this year we're building on this and speaking about "Where content meets the social web".

For us social distribution of content is what viral is really about and so we're particularly excited to be talking at this event and splurging our pearls of wisdom on the marketing community.

If you want to come and hear what we've got to say, contact Knexus via their site.

1 in 10 of us watches online video daily, according to latest stats from the Leichtmann Research Group and this rises to 1 in 3 of us weekly (all this makes my own online video consumption levels seem greedy and sordid.)

Other key findings form the report:

* Among all individuals ages 18-34, 42% report that they watch video online at home at least weekly – up from 28% last year
* Among all individuals ages 35 and above, 15% watch video online at home at least weekly – compared to 13% last year
* Men ages 18-34 account for 40% of those who view video online on a daily basis, while comprising just 17% of online subscribers in the sample
* 9% of those who watch video online strongly agree that they now watch TV less often
* 52% of online video users typically spend ten minutes or less when they view online video at home
* 9% of all online watched a recent episode of a TV show online in the past week
* Among all online, just 4% strongly agree that they would consider disconnecting their TV service to only watch video online

(these were based on a study of 1250 households)

Most interesting here is the increase of 14% in video usage for those aged 18-34, a significant swing in the last year in the internet habits of this age group.

02 May 2008

We've been helping our sister agency Delib launched a new online opinion research service called Opinion Tracker .

To launch Opinion Tracker we thought it would be a good idea to run an initial trial of the service alongside the London Mayoral elections, and track the levels of online buzz and public sentiment of each of the main candidates.

Opinion Tracker's findings have been fascinating, especially the trends we've uncovered - our favorite being "Tube-Stepping" , a kinda mix between old school door-stepping and happy slapping.

Check out our final election analysis here

01 May 2008

We are proud and excited to announce that Ultimate Dog Racer has finally left the traps and is chasing electric rabbits as I type!

We made the game for Ward Lovet on behalf of the British Greyhound Racing Board and set it free on the web a week ago. An early beat-em-up style soundtrack, a selection of menacing-looking dogs and a plethora of bones, fire hydrants, meat and cats all trying to slow you down make Ultimate Dog Racer the perfect online time killer! Upping stakes, gambling your bone collection and slowing the other dogs down are the only way to become top dog.

As an added bonus the BGRC are putting on some amazing offers in order to persuade to people (when they are not online playing UDR) to spend a night at the dogs, at one of the associated tracks across the country...

Most probably the only dog-themed, bone gambling, hydrant dodging flash game on the web: Ultimate Dog Racer!

18 April 2008

On behalf of Sketch Associates, Rubber Republic are currently seeding a campaign on behalf of Safestore.

The film viral contains dark humour andd a little twist. It's short and to the point. I wouldn't like to ruin the suprise, so take a look for yourself:

Safestore: When Did You Last Visit Your Gran?

11 April 2008

Our online football game, ... Euroball- made for JVC, official sponsors of Euro 2008 football championships, has just gone through 1 million plays since it's launch, with 2 months to go until the tournament itself. The plays are made up of plays of the full version of the game as well as plays of the embeddable widgets that many people have added to their blogs. The figures to not account for the touchscreen version that is currently touring Austria and Switzerland in a UEFA display. WIth a conversion rate of 20% clicking through to the JVC football site from the game, we're delighted with the current sucess of the game and look forward to seeing it pick up as the tournament proper approaches.

Want to throw a party, invite everyone who's anyone and play the best tunes? Want to be known as the big cheese, Mr/Ms Popular, the party organiser extraordinaire?

...Yet are you strapped for suitable space in which to squeeze these aspirations?

We are proud to present a slick new solution to having your party crashed by Myspacers, Facebookers and the like. On behalf of AIS London, we are now seeding a campaign for O2 called 'Fill The Floor With Moby'...

This truly unique competition can only be described as a popularity contest as the guy or gal with the most friends will emerge victorious. This lucky socialite will then be given the opportunity to throw their very own party at the O2 Arena! Moby has been booked to headline the event; the support acts, the interior, the guestlist, the theme and even the choice of attire for the security staff will be entirely down to Mr/Ms Popular!

So, you think you're popular? Visit the 'Fill The Floor With Moby' site to prove it!

02 April 2008

You shouldn't just take our word for it about the effectiveness of the Viral Ad Network- a recent white paper from investment bankers De Silva & Phillips lays out how "Online advertising networks have emerged as an essential vehicle for monetizing the
Long Tail of the Internet. By aggregating traffic that was previously too difficult to buy or which was otherwise undesirable, ad networks provide small and mid-sized
online publishers with significantly more advertising revenues than would otherwise be possible."

That small and mid-size publishers can make revenue from ad-funded content by serving it to relevant niche communities is an underlying principle the Viral Ad network- and the interest shown in larger networks by the internet big boys can only reinforce the importance of ad networks.

Read the full Ad Network White Paper

Posted by Kirk

06 March 2008

I'm pleased to announce that Rubber Republic has begun seeding a game and competition for Galaxy FM, in celebration of their 'Love Music Love March' campaign. The game is simple but highly addictive, you must use the mouse to dodge the boss for as long as possible, but be careful, he becomes faster and more irate each time you duck his presence!

The best boss dodgers stand the chance of winning some absolutely fantastic prizes, like tickets to see Kylie in Paris, tickets to Sugababes and Girls Aloud concerts, annual cinema tickets, spa days, Ibiza trips and much much more!

Click here to see the Galaxy FM Love Music Love March campaign in full swing!

Wednesday 5th March marked 100 days until the kick off to the Euro 2008 championships. To help build the suspension and dry those non-qualifying bleary British eyes, we're proud to announce (now with 99 days to go) the launch of our campaign for JVC, EUROBALL!

Euroball is as nostalgic as it is addictive and as kitsch as it is tricky. Euroball takes you back to those playground days, for a spot of tabletop penny football and it's more chalk and lunchboxes than jumpers for goalposts. You can play as any of the qualified teams in a number of locations from greasy spoons to beerhalls to cafes, with glove puppet cheerleaders and referees and tabletop paraphernalia as obstacles; What more could a lad ask for?! The most dedicated Euroballers, i.e. those with the highest scores, stand the chance of winning tickets to the games of their choice during the summer tournament. So get flicking!

We're not the only ones that love it, click here to check out the Euroball buzz from the industry press in Brand Republic.

Now all we have to do is shout "Come on you Engl..." ...oh.

14 February 2008

Over the past ten years, the internet has affected many aspects of daily life, but arguably nothing has morphed quite as much as the state of the music industry and the attitude and trends of its consumer. At the turn of the century, the initial shift was catalysed by sites like Napster, the prevalence of online file sharing and the numerous loopholes in the law that allowed people - in a broad sense - access to music at home for free for the first time. Napster had even spawned a worldwide hit for Afroman with his song 'Because I Got High', after he put it on the site as a free download. As laws tightened the attitude towards the music industry had already begun to shift. By 2003-4 a wealth of artists were making their demos for free on their home computers and putting up their music free of charge on Social Network sites. In a sense, artists were managing to negate the need for A&R men and the necessity of label backing (and other 'traditional' routes) to make their music heard. Musicians had acquired their own marketing power in that they could actively seek out potential fans of their music, rather than waiting for support to find them through the reliance of third party promotion. This DIY ethic and process has gradually spawned successful and continually flourishing careers for many notable groups, DJ's and artists (Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen anyone?) and a more organically beaten path to success has become officially established.

Due to the already established points raised in my above - hugely inexhaustive, yet concise - historiography, a recent piece of research on the trends between physical (i.e. CD's, Vinyl etc) musical releases and the amount of online activity that surrounds them served to highlight these modern trends further, rather than reveal untold revelations.

Over 8 weeks, 108 album's sales ranking were monitored on Amazon, while a tab was kept on the online activity that surrounded each release, in order to discover if the power of the internet and it's users had as profound an impact as everybody suspects. 'Online activity', although potentially an immeasurable variable, was calculated by the total of articles, blog posts and Myspace friends each album/artist had acquired/written about them. The results found that albums on both independent and major labels enjoyed increased success from increased online activity, so much so that if more than 250 blog posts were written about the release, sales of over 6 times the average could be traced. A higher number of Myspace friends also correlated strongly with better sales, although not quite to the same degree as articles.

The research couldn't conclude whether online activity was the cause of better sales or simply a product of a band or artist being popular in the first place, as people who are going to buy an album are likely to talk about it before, during and after its release regardless. But obviously, a large volume of online activity is going to draw the attention of potentially new fans/listeners. The research also mentioned the importance of not discounting 'traditional' catalysts of better record sales; like an excellent review from a respected music publication for example.

What it can conclude however, is the continued importance of the internet, and the ongoing shift in the fluidity and the mechanisms of the music industry is as evident as ever. It will be interesting see where this goes over another ten years, and how many of the existing Major players in the record industry manage to adapt to this shift and maintain their position. Conversely, it will be equally as interesting to watch the ones that don't.

Details referenced from a blog post that can be found here.

Ian.

12 February 2008

If you're a Google account holder (e.g. you use a Google service like Gmail, AdWords, Analytics etc), you may have noticed a slight change to your Google search results in recent times. If you're signed in and search for something, the blue bar at the top of the results will likely start 'personalised results for...'.

I won't go into the full detail of this here (there's a good article at Searchengine Land that explains it very well) but the gist of it is this: Google monitors your activity and start customising search results based on your personal browsing preferences. That means that if you tend to go to Sky Sports (rather than, say, the BBC or the Guardian) for your sports news, you'll see Sky Sports start to climb the rankings in your search results, even if the terms are more precisely matched by another site.

The effect may only be small at the moment, but to my mind this ties in with a discussion we've been having internally recently about a 'marketplace of attention'. The phenomenon of Google and others' advertising centred around search has been marked out as a 'marketplace of intention' -- that is to say, when you search for something, your exact intention is made clear and results, content (and, yes, adverts) can be served up to match that intention. Thus it was that the most successful search engine was the one which was the most accurate.

However, there have recently been signs of moves away from this focus on sheer accuracy, with other factors being brought on-stream (see, for instance, the talk about social ratings of search results). In the case of personalised search, the factor being added in to the equation is centred around sites that you like and frequent. We are tentatively calling this idea of compelling destinations a 'marketplace of attention'; it's key to making successful virals because virals are something you discover or are sent, rather than search for (have you ever tried searching for something to make you laugh?) and it is, to get finally to the point, one of the reasons we've set up our Viral Ad Network.

Essentially, people are increasingly looking for things online to capture and hold their attention (like good virals), bringing interesting things to them rather than demanding they go out and find them (like good sites) -- this is part of what I think Google is recognising with the shift set out in its personalised search. To be able to take advantage of this shift, advertisers need to push their good content out to trusted, well-read publishing destinations and publishers need to have ready access to new, interesting content to hold the attention of their readers and keep their destination compelling. By bringing the two together, the Viral Ad Network facilitates the brilliantly mutually beneficial supply and demand of attention.

Posted by Ben.

08 February 2008

Who's the biggest Arsenal Fan?
Several thousand red and white shirted men in pubs across the country would nominate themselves for this title, but who would have thought a Subbuteo figurine could have ended up as a candidate? Watch the O2 Arsenal Opus video to see what I mean...

Get it now? Well, Rubber Republic has begun seeding this video - on behalf of Agency Republic - across the world wide web. This is to celebrate the release of the all-knowing 'Arsenal Opus', a book so dense that if it were a person, I would definitely put my pounds on it being the cleverest Gooner there is!

06 February 2008

As you may (or may not) know, we're a pretty learn-ed lot at Rubber Towers. To match our brainy and bespectacled appearance we've decided to launch our very own library - what we've rather imaginatively called the Rubber Library (see what we've done there?!).

To share the Rubber book love with the world, we've sent a whole range of books to industry friends to get them thinking and inspired. The initial selection we've chosen are 3: the Tipping Point (an obvious choice), the Long Tail, and the Google Story.

The interesting (and relevant) thing about the Rubber Library concept is that it's designed to be viral, in that we encourage to people to share the books (and ideas) with others once they've finished. And the idea already seems to be working, with people reporting back to Rubber Towers to tell us that they're already inspired to spread and share . . .

01 February 2008

Something Rubber Republic is itching to see is Michel Gondry's latest film Be Kind. Rewind launched next month, not least of all because of its excellent online (and offline) pre-launch publicity.

The film's premise takes user-generated content to whole new level as Jack Black & Mos Def have to re-film the shop's entire catalogue after it's destroyed by an overly magnetic Black. Recreating these films is a process called Swede-ing - or as Black's character explains “it's putting you into the things you like. The website takes this idea one stage further and encourages visitors to rebuild or ‘swede’ the world wide web.

In this post-ironic-life-imitating-art age that we live in there's already a proliferation of postings on YouTube . There’s even mention of a real life Be Kind. Rewind video store

Let's hope the film's as good as the marketing . . .

29 January 2008

Our watchful gaze over the web has recently led us to conduct some research on some Youtube statistics. As the leading example of a video sharing site, we have been intrigued by the nature of Youtube video distribution and the viewing patterns of its millions of users for a long time. We endeavoured to look into how many views Youtube videos get, including how many views the average video receives in its first month on the site.

We can decipher that a huge majority of Youtube videos receive a seemingly low number of views, yet a minority (around 1%) can reach figures of up to 500,000 in their first month. There are some interesting results that will hopefully spark some discussion and further study that could potentially lead us towards making some concrete conclusions and pattern observations from these aggregations.

Check out our paper on Youtube monthly statistics.

22 January 2008

Having just won a contract for the England and Wales Cricket board for a funky new viral that will come out in the next few days, we sat back to inspect our stable and realised the marvellous clean-sweep of top sports that we have produced virals for- for the uninitiated, here's a quick rundown

Our Rugby viral, flick'n' kick for the Principality Building Society has run for 2 seasons so far, alongside their sponsorship of the Welsh Rugby Union Team in the Six Nations Championship.

Our Football Viral, Euroball is flying at the moment for JVC, as part of their sponsorship of the UEFA Euro 2008 championship. This campaign is pan-european in a number of languages with great prizes up for grabs..

And now we have the ECB on board too, this time for Cricket Viral which will be up and running very soon, this time it's a film we're making that makes us chuckle plenty. Watch this space for more details soon.

...and we didn't even mention golf and football stuff done with other agencies.

Posted by Kirk.

14 January 2008

Net measurement firm Nielsen Online and Pew Internet have reported a notable growth in activity within the burgeoning online video sharing realm during the latter third of last year. Nielsen and many other observant eyes on the web are beginning to conclude that 2007 was indeed the year that video sharing went from taking tentative steps to leaping bounds on its journey to an established, every day form of media. Tim Wintle, our very own internet mastermind had pointed out these trends to us last week, and his data correlates strongly with that produced by the aforementioned web watchers.

So are we experiencing a genuine online revolution, or merely an inexplicable blip?

Well, the statistics and the graphs certainly suggest that a boom in online video usage is underway, with the news making national and international press. According to Nielsen, 48% of US net users visited a video sharing site last year, and interestingly, around 22% of Americans make their own videos and 14% of these share them online. Tim pointed out in his data that the number of views per video on YouTube alone had doubled its value during the final quarter of 2007 in when compared with the first. It wasn't just YouTube that enjoyed this rise in interest; according to BBC News , Crackle's average also audience doubled throughout November and December.

During these uncertain and early stages a number of ideas have been put forward to try and explain this flourishing activity:

Firstly, the consequences of the Striking of the Writers Guild of America (WGA). It could be said that due to the threat of, or a genuine lack of 'official' or 'traditional' entertainment being caused by the WGA strike since November 5th, many have sought an alternative through the creation or the consumption of online videos. However, as plausible as this is, the data suggests that following the announcement of the strike, a significant enough surge in activity to render this an explanation is somewhat lacking. This notion would also rely on the public, as an audience, reacting in unison, completely independently of one another during a very short period of time. I would expect that for a pattern to emerge from a factor such as the strike, the data would have to be studied over a much longer period of time, or at least until a 'dropping off point' (the tail-end of work - previous to the strike - drying up) had been established.

Secondly, this trend could be at least partially explained by a maturing relationship between online video and memorable TV moments, or as Chris put it, "Is TV the real internet star?". Many users use online video sharing sites to view the best bits from television shows, like a memorable line, a funny moment, a great goal, a funny blooper or generally people acting or behaving ridiculously; and many of these moments derive from Television programming. Sites like YouTube allow the viewer to neatly view, share and voice their opinions on these highlights at their will, and it is arguably these elements - as the defining of the niche - that have gradually driven people towards the benefits of Viral Videos. Consequently, this could be the beginning of a new generation (70% of YouTube users are said to be under the age of 30) of mutual dependence between Television and Video sharing sites; with good TV as the catalyst for successful virals. This can be further clarified by seeing the rise in online video activity following memorable TV moments of 2007 such as Miss Teen USA or Rachel on the X Factor as demonstrated on Tim's white paper.

During these early stages, it is difficult to determine the definitive reason for this trend, or to clarify whether this is a permanent change or a manic three months for Viral Videos. Either way, it is going to be particularly interesting first quarter of 2008 for Viral lovers worldwide, and maybe, just maybe, some real and permanent patterns will emerge from this very interesting development!

See Tim's white paper for more information on the changing trends in YouTube views in the final quarter of 2007.

Ian Ochiltree.

10 January 2008

We're currently entering our first seeding phase for a Hewlett Packard campaign. A cool video currently fronts the campaign, featuring a multi-tasking boss, doubled up as a conductor, leading his employees through a version of Mozart's famous 'Eine kleine Nachtmusik'. A classical orchestral arrangement of strings, brass and woodwind are shunned in favour of everyday office paraphernalia.

The film is part of a wider campaign for Hewett Packard, conceived and coordinated by Tidal-Wave (www.tidal-wave.com)

Check out the HP Happy People campaign! Create your own symphony in your workplace... and win an office makeover (maybe).

07 January 2008

At the end of last week we launched Debug- a fiendishly addictive game that has been designed to increase WOM and registrations for the InfoSecurity 2008 Exhibition , run by Reed Exhibitions.

The game has been made in a funky comic-book style with a malevolent computer bug who is rampaging, godzilla-style through a microchip city. The player is challenged to extract the bug as quickly as possible to get on the leaderboard- it's a great take on that childhood favourite "Operation."

Early days yet, but we love this game for it's great looks and simplicity- we have high hopes for it! Have a go at Debug and see if your hand is steady enough!

Posted by KirkH

02 January 2008

For as long as we can remember, any publisher rewards online have been gained by interrupting your readers with banners, sneaky advertorial links and Adwords. The Viral Ad Network turns this model on it's head by rewarding with real money for hosting games. Viral games are designed to entertain and engage people and are a great way of giving good content to your readers as well as converting each of their plays of the game into cash for you. Win-win!
Take your first step towards getting money for hosting games by signing up at the Viral Ad Network

07 December 2007

As a general rule, sex always seems to work when it comes to viral. So it makes sense therefore for Ann Summers to use viral to push its product - sex.

Nothing really worth talking about so far then. However, what is definitely worth talking about is the fact that Ann Summers have decided not to get an agency to come up with ideas for their viral marketing campaigns, but instead is getting the general public to develop ideas for them - with the prize being to see their idea produced with a budget of up to £25k.

The campaign concept they've developed around this is called "Viral Academy" (OK-ish name), and the idea's been done before - most famously by Virgin who got massively slated by the B3TA community for being lazy cheap-skate exploiters of the free ideas labour of the net.

However, unlike for Virgin, Ann Summers may actually get this "brand participation" idea to work for them. This is mainly down to the fact that Ann Summers still has some of that small brand appeal that consumers love to get involved, whereas Virgin is now seen part of the brand establishment.

05 December 2007

Commissioning or producing a flash viral? You'll need to know which version of the flash plugin to specify, otherwise people with older plugins won't be able to see your viral.

Our viral tracking reports the installed flash version for millions of unique views across our network. These handy free stats can help you plan your viral campaign.

Stats for November
Flash version:
8.0: 4%
9.0: 94%
All other versions: < 1%

Full historical stats.

Posted by Andy

29 November 2007

Last weekend we did some low-level seeding work for our friends at Park Village on a Greenpeace film they've made encouraging the use of energy efficient light bulbs. We're pleased to see the film has had over 40,000 views already this week and shows little sign of slowing down. Click to watch Sunshine.

26 November 2007

A while back we worked on a project for Fortis with the guys from Naked Amsterdam. Chatting to them it was interesting to hear that the success of Naked's amazingly successful campaign for the Number (more famously known as 118 118) was not routed in the creation of their famed wacky moustached 118 118 characters, but instead in a more fundamental piece of business advice - the advice to invest in buying the number 118 118.

This advice helped shape their business in a way that millions of marketing pounds couldn't have done - it was advice that made their business truly viral. Naked had turned the Number into a viral business.

Creating a truly viral business is every marketing manager and MDs dream. Owning a business with a product so unique or a name so catchy that it virtually markets itself is worth millions of marketing pounds.

Unfortunately most businesses don't have this, and so have to employ people like ourselves to try to cook up the viral magic for them. Which we do willingly (and well!).

Although interestingly we've been cooking up viral business ideas behind the scenes at Rubber Towers, and practicing what we preach. The first B2C business proposition we've been testing out is a sock subscription company called SocksforSir.com. We're still tinkering with the idea at the mo, however if you're looking for a present this Christmas look no further than our wonderful sock collection!

More on viral business ideas soon . . .

23 November 2007

On Wednesday evening our Triumph viral (made with the lovely people at e3) was aired on TV. Well TV off sorts - Nuts TV on Digital. Of course we're chuffed for our client to get their ad on TV for free, however we're even more chuffed for ourselves. As a viral agency our main goal is to generate the most marketing value for our clients - largely from free media placements, or "social media" i.e. people media.

So it's nice that our campaign not only has been pushing itself around the net (with nearly 400,000 views), but also has pushed its way onto TV. All via the power of word of mouth (mouse).

Perhaps more interestingly, is that the reach of views from a digital TV station is a tiny proportion of the reach of YouTube today, however getting on TV still has a good buzz around it and brings out the school boy in us all . . .

16 November 2007

Brilliant, those of you who sit and watch our Viral Manager stats will have noticed an increase of 2 million users in the last hour. This confirms 2 things:

1) We're top-notch.

2) That we've updated our system to include the 2 million-odd views that have been received by our oh-so-successful news series The Kensington Report on US site Heavy.com.

15 November 2007

Work has begun on a pan-European seeding campaign with a pan-European prize...

TeleAtlas Great Escapes campaign,, which we are seeding for Belgian agency These Days, invites people to win prizes by earning miles- you earn miles by inviting your friends to join the competition. The prizes are a big driver here- an all-expenses paid trip for you and six friends as the top one.

In a strange coincidence, this is our third campaign this month where we're seeding into UK, French and German markets - Linguaphone, here we come....

This week we've started work seeding for Glue London on the McCain Potato Parade viral.

Potato Parade was created in collaboration with Aardman animations, the Oscar winning team behind Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run. Together, Glue and Aardman have created a gang of walking, talking potatoes whose job it is to deliver messages in the form of a ‘personalised potato parade’ to friends and family.

As an FMCG brand, the majority of McCain's communications centre around their products. With this viral they wanted to take the opportunity to create something that wasn't product related and allowed people to interact and have fun with the brand.

The parade is doing the rounds of the office already and we're sure this will be a successful campaign for all involved.

Behind the scenes, our team has been furiously working behind the scenes to help Led Zeppelin fans take over the net - and generally cause some online mayhem . . . all in the name of rock n roll!

The campaign's been running for a week or so now and is really taking shape + we're starting hear some real rock n roll noise.

The overarching idea of the campaign is to help Led Zep fans "Zeppelise the net" by taking part in a whole range of activities all run through a central campaign blog www.theZep.net - run by Zep fan Ian Ochiltree.

The activity's that's been creating the most noise so far is our "Zeppelising" task run in partnership with NetDisaster in which fans can destroy websites around the net by flying digital zeppelins through them! So far, over 100,000 sites have been Zeppelised including No.10's (one of my favorite).

And check out the montage of Zep destruction.

The campaign's still ramping up - so stay tuned for more Zeppelising.

We launched the Kensington Report a few months back as part of a campaign to help launch US broadband channel Heavy.com into the UK.

The campaign's now had nearly 2 million views + many many plaudits from the web community - which is nice!

One key thing this emphasises from our perspective is the role good quality advertainment can play in the advertising space online. In the US brands and publishers are whole heartedly embracing this model - with people like Michael Eisner (ex Disney CEO) launching his online content studio Vuguru - and producing series like Prom Queen (an 80 show internet series).

The UK ad industry will catch up soon - however, as always we're the ones being led by the bold innovators on the West Coast of America, and endlessly buying banner ads when we should be out their making great content and entertaining the good people of Britain on behalf of brands.

07 November 2007

We've finally officially launched our "Viral Ad Network". The network has been developed for the last 6 months or so, however over the last few months we've been developing the backend management tools to help us manage large seeding campaigns. Viral Ad Network is now up and working and ready to rock.

We've also been extending the reach of the Viral Ad Network, which now means we can seed campaigns to over 14 million people (if necessary and budgets permit!) via our 2000+ publishing partners.

There'll be more developments on this front soon - with reach ever-growing, through more and more partnerships.

06 November 2007

Check out this new interactive spot from Ogilvy in Canada for Dove. It's part of their "Real Beauty" series and is a really great idea.

I haven't managed to find the interactive app which allows you to customise videos, however you should get the idea from this vid.

02 November 2007

Earlier this week I spoke to the National Road Safety Partnerships annual Conference in Buxton (where they make water). The idea was to show what viral marketing could contribute to the PR mix of a road safety campaign.

Interestingly, before my little skit, there was a talk from Clive Blair-Stevens from the National Social Marketing Centre who pointed out that for social marketing messages to penetrate through all the other messages pushed out to young people these days, the proposition needs to be "fun, easy and popular". With these words ringing in their ears, I was able to show just how virals can achieve this requirement.

Being invited to speak at this event reflects a trend we're seeing where virals are considered as a tool for raising awareness of social issues (See post about our Hepatis Film) as well as a vehicle for brands to advertise.

Posted by Kirk.

Our Viral Manager tracking of unique viewers across our network ticked through another milestone in the last few days - we're now well past 19 million views tracked and pushing up at a nose-bleed inducing rate. This last million has been achieved in 10 weeks, meaning 100,000 a week across our campaigns.

Posted by Kirk.

After a month of hard work, we've just shipped a great update to our Viral Manager service for tracking and seeding viral campaigns.

We'll post more soon - things we're excited about include more campaign stats than ever, clean new look, and a very exciting automated system for seeding to our network of key influencers.

Posted by Andy.

30 October 2007

It's not new insight, but it's true insight - sex sells, and definitely sells when it comes to viral.

Why do I mention this?

Well, because a viral for MTV our sister agency Rubberductions worked on with Ogilvy has just tipped over 400k views. There's nothing startling about those kinds of numbers, however with little seeding budget the campaign's sailed along getting serious amounts eyeballs of the back of the free social media gravy-train - the gravy-train that all brands want to jump on . . .

The Joy of Non-Sex is worth a view.

29 October 2007

To promote their new non-stop service from Dubai to Sao Paulo, Emirates have filmed a guy called Fernando Ferreira talking about his home country - Brazil - non-stop for 14 hours and 40 minutes non-stop (the time it takes to fly from Dubai to Sao Paulo).

From the bits I've seen through YouTube, Fernando really manages to pull this off well - creating an amazingly engaging film + also a great promo for Emirates.

Check out the full campaign at www.NonstopFernando.com.

Or watch the condensed Fernando YouTube clip.

26 October 2007

Posted by Andy.

I am working today (who takes their own advice?), but most of our staff have the day off for our 'not-quite-statutory', self-declared unofficial bank-holiday, Bristol Day.

Britain has not enough official holidays in our view. We can't change that across the country (Gordon Brown could, if he chose to), but we can give Team Rubber people one extra 'statutory' holiday. So we did, and our staff looked frankly gleeful as they left the studio last night. They've got a range of things planned: pleasingly, quite a few are taking a long weekend to see friends and family (which is what we hoped as that's supposed to be a GENERALLY GOOD THING), but really we don't mind what they do, that's their business.

Our business of course is running Team Rubber (Rubber Republic's parent company): our income comes from billable time, so the cost to us is around £6000 in lost billings, but we think it's worth it. One way to look at it is that £6k is less than the typical recruitment fee for a graduate, so if we can attract (or retain) just one person through this kind of thinking about our employment culture, that's a winner. Or we can look at the health and productivity benefits of giving our staff a break between August and Christmas, just when those dark days come in and everyone gets a bit under the weather. And if that doesn't convince, then it's still a great story that's got us good PR and is a nice thing to talk about.


Why is it Bristol Day? Because we thought it up in Bristol - the city that brought you an extra day off. We're not the only ones doing this either, thanks to the magic of Pledge Bank, Bristol Day has been adopted by a bunch of other businesses who are imaginative about their employment culture. We'll be doing it again next year, same time (October), same place (Pledge Bank).

So happy Bristol Day. Will you join us?

25 October 2007

"Brizzle iz gert lush innit bled?" I think what the Carling scented and Lonsdale attired individual is implying is that Bristol is in fact, well good.

And for the many companies who choose to occupy Bristolian offices there will be an extra bank holiday, aptly named 'Bristol Day' on the 26th October. That nice chap Andrew Parkhouse from media coolkids 'Team Rubber' thought to himself "There are no bank holidays between August and Christmas. How silly," and an energy efficient lightbulb illuminated and Bristol Day was born.

Well, nearly. Naturally he didn't want to look foolish and so he set up a Bristol Day pledge asking ten other companies to do the same. There's even a campaign group of Facebook devoted to Bristol Day which gained 133 members. And Andrew has great enthusiasm for the name of his annual holiday. "Because we thought it up in Bristol - 'The city that brought you an extra day off.'" Better than Vicky Pollard putting us on the map, eh?

By Joanna, the Bristolian coolkid.

Interesting post at mocoNews.net discusses 10% response rate in mobile. Most of our campaigns are web-based, but we've done some mobile and we know the issues for both are similar. Key points we liked:

• a 10% response rate would actually be considered pretty good by most advertisers (we think people should aim higher - our viral campaigns aim for a 10%-25% conversion rate).
  


• Relevancy is crucial: 53 percent of those polled said they ignored ads because they were not interested in the product being advertised. Targeting advertising is both an art and a science - and we're taking both very seriously.

Through our Viral Manager tracking service, we track millions of viral campaign interactions and collect huge amounts of data on the users who interact with our campaigns. Our team use this info to develop great campaigns.

Slowly over time we'll be open sourcing this information to help other marketers plan and commission the most effective campaigns.

The first bit of information we've opened up is on the usage of Flash versions amongst web users. If you're commissioning a flash-based viral campaign, you need to know what flash version to specify, otherwise people may not be able to see your viral.

You can use our handy free stats to help you plan your viral campaign. » Check them out at ViralManager.com.

02 October 2007

Like all the greats of music, Radiohead are not only geniuses at music but also at marketing. A few years back, Radiohead pioneered the use of video on the net with their blips (30 second music videos) for OK Computer, and they've launched their new album "In Rainbows" by letting fans decide how much they pay for downloads.

This is a fairly canny approach to the digital download issue which record companies have been wrestling with for a while. Thom Yorke has been a fairly strong voice promoting free file sharing in the past - regarding it as a great natural way to promote music (against the likes of Guns n Roses who think all file sharers should face the death penalty).

The main reason I regard this as canny is from my own experiences of democratic / honesty pricing. A few years ago I visited a bar in East Berlin where customers weren't charged for their drinks at the bar, and there wasn't a pricing structure as such - all people were expected to do was pay as much as they thought suitable to the doorman as you left. If you had a good time, then you'd pay more. A bad time, less.

According to research (I don't know by who!) punters are more likely to pay more than less when an honesty system is put in place - so the East Berlin bar and Radiohead's model makes sense. Having said that I haven't been back to the East Berlin bar since, so I'd be interested to see if it's still thriving - or even open! Likewise, I'd be interested to see if Radiohead's record label is happy with the results - although with all the buzz generated by it, I expect they'll come out on top . . .

28 September 2007

This recent blog entry, has appeared that shows just the sort of conversations we hope virals will spark.

The comments below about the cartoon are really powerful and show the difficult balance that is to be struck when using a viral to raise awareness of a touchy topic.

Some comments:

"I agree humour is not something you'd normally associate with a potentially fatal virus, and I sympathise with the loss of your husband. However a dry straightforward video about the risk factors is going to struggle to get attention, and would probably never feature on a site like this. If it takes off the wall humour to get an important message across then so be it. "

"Satire: from the word satura, meaning a mixed bowl of fruit. I used to explain it to my students this way: you mix the sweet (humor) in with the bitter, to make your point.
It is sad and I am sorry for your losses, but if a silly, satiric cartoon can save ONE person from making a mistake, it's totally worth it, don't you think?"

"I got Hep C nearly thirty years ago in a transfusion after an accident. Five years ago I was cured with PEG-Interferon and ribavirin. I still suffer memory loss and neurological problems from the treatment. The idea is to make people aware of it so they don't get it. I didn't have a chance. I got my transfusion more than ten years before there was a test for it in the blood supply. The only way to really win against this disease is not to get it. Don't tell me about offensive-if it spreads the word, who cares?"

"I found out I had hep c after donating blood at work.I thought it was a mistake[.........] I think any information is good information. In fact I need to remove my razor from the shower now as my daughter is beginning to ask if she can shave her legs. I never thought about that until I saw this story.Thanks"

A Guardian special Report, earlier this week outlined the trends and growth of online advertising which confirmed a lot of what we're seeing in the viral industry and supporting our claim that viral is a most effective way of reaching consumers online.

A few interesting points from this report:

-The value of online advertising passed the total spent in the country's national newspapers last year and, by mid-2008, Google will suck in more ad pounds than all of Britain's TV channels put together, according to Mindshare and Initiative, two top media-buying groups. That will mean that Google is taking in morethan £1bn of UK ad money.

-86% of UK internet connections are now broadband and, by the end of next year, two in three households in the UK will have broadband, according to internet researcher agency Point Topic.

-A third of Europeans watch less TV once they have broadband, according to Forrester Research. The average European spends 14.3 hours online each week, compared with 11.3 hours watching TV. The growth of online video beyond the low-quality (but hugely popular) clips on YouTube looks to only accelerate as more homes gets broadband.

This associated article, flagged up some other good stats:

-A study by ad agency Carat and released by the Internet Advertising Bureau says money spent on online advertising is 2.4 times more effective than the same amount of money spent offline.

-Many web surfers are actively filtering out requests to "click here" on banners and skyscraper adverts. The latest figures published by advertising researchers at AdTech show that only one in every 500 banners are clicked on.

A final thought from the articles:

All too often advertisers simply reuse their conventional 30-second TV ad on the internet - widely regarded as lazy and ineffective. The trick is to adapt content to your internet audience - make it shorter, quirky and engaging and you're onto a winner. Marketers worldwide are now looking to the medium as more than a direct response tool - it's great for brand-building, too.

We hate to say we told you so....

It's been pretty crazy at Rubber Towers over the last few months, helping push out virals for brands and agencies across the UK.

Our latest viral seeding campaign is for the BBC's Electric Proms - which takes place in Camden in late October.

The campaign is based around two viral activities, and has been masterminded by the guys at Fallon, together with the digital gurus from their sister agency Hyper Happen.

To check out the first in the series, visit: www.newmusicexperience.com

The strategy behind the campaign is to target core music-fans of the 80 different bands performing at the event + also reach across the wider music loving community at the same time.

Bands performing at the Electric Proms include Paul McCartney, Sean Lennon, Sigur Ros, Ben Westbeech, the Kaiser Chiefs and Jamie Cullum - so a really eclectic line up.

Enjoy!

27 September 2007

In one of our favourite projects this year, Dennis (not sure where the name came from) has been brought to life in an animation to raise awareness of World Hepatitis Awareness Day.

The simple, cute animation has been an instant hit as Dennis sets out on his quest to catch Hep C., little realising he may already have it after some wild (and not so wild) times.

Dennis has is a mainstay of the WHAD website and will be seen soon giving an interview for the event - it seems a long time since we were sitting down, trying to work out how you could make something that was funny about the ways you can catch hepatitis (without offending an awful lot of people).

Still, Dennis lives - for the time being at least - so go have a look at WHAD.

07 September 2007

Viral specialist agency Rubber Republic have been awarded JVC Europe's UEFA Euro 2008(tm) football campaign after a competitive pitching process.

The campaign will launch in October 2007 and run during the qualifiers and through to the finals of the European Championships in June 2008.

JVC are the Official Partner of UEFA Euro 2008 (tm), and the campaign will run across Europe in order to drive awareness of JVC's official football website www.JVCfootball.com.

Bart Somsen of JVC commented "We're pleased to be working with Rubber Republic on this campaign as they've got a strong track record in delivering great viral creative and intelligent seeding strategies."

Chris Quigley, Managing Director of Rubber Republic, commented "JVC obviously have had a strong and long relationship with the football community with their official partnership of Euro 2008, and we're excited to have the opportunity to strengthen this relationship further online with this campaign."

04 September 2007

24 August 2007

You've gotta love viral marketing. An ordinary woman puts her 18-month-old baby in her bullet-proof buggy invention, opens fire with an automatic rifle, and then retrieves the baby unharmed.

On sale by the fictitious company Bulletproof Baby are a wide selection of goods for the paranoid parents such as "My First Riot Helmet" (in which a testimonial claims saved their baby from being hit in a baseball game). Conveniently all their goods are out of stock so you'll have to make do with their not-so-bulletproof Cafepress gear.

Hate to rain on anyone's parade but the video is clearly staged (and if it wasn't child protection surely would've said something by now) - the site is actually a great marketing campaign for forthcoming Clive Owen movie "Shoot-Em-Up." Yet Metro newspaper were either heavily bribed or just a bit naive by running an article deeming the whole stunt true. Surely the "Copyright Shoot ‘Em Up Holdings" on the BPB website gave it away. But still, check out the staged shooting here.

17 August 2007

Break out the champagne! We just hit 18 million unique viewers on Viral Manager - our little tracker on all our viral campaigns! It's one of the first milestones we've actually been awake for (that little number keeps on rising all through our bedtimes) and lets hope the visitors keep on coming. Well done us!

Furthering our post detailing the increasing amount greenagers populating the internet we at Rubber Republic have jumped on the eco-friendly bandwagon in the launch of our new game for the kid's network Webbliworld.com, a site made by Enable Interactive with funky design by Aardman Animations.

The "Wij's Polar Peril" game allows the young online environmentalists to shoot eco-baddies with their highly efficient EcoZappa. It's also designed so your aware just what kind of an environmental impact you'd have if you were to input these practices in real life.

The Webbliworld community has been labelled "the new Myspace for kids" where interactions include personalising Webbli character and sharing interests with other users, earning virtual currency known as Webbles as you go. It really is too cool for school.

09 August 2007

Internet usage in the United Kingdom is showing no signs of slowing down according to this report as the online population is said to be 63 percent of the total UK population (aged 15 and above) which equated to 31.7 million unique visitors in the month of June. The average member of the online population is also said to have spent an average of 35 hours surfing the web during that time.

There have also been significant increases in unique traffic in comparison to May, the most being seen in Mozilla.org whose main program Firefox is the second most popular web browser behind Internet Explorer. Channel4.com's traffic increased by 39 percent likely to be caused by the launch of Big Brother 8 and their 4 On Demand service where you can watch their shows on your computer for free. Facebook also showed growth of 25% making it the fastest growing social network of June.

It's also worth noting that Mozilla's Firefox and Facebook are both open to users developing 'widgets' allowing full customisation and expansion, meaning their services are effectively constantly updated.

Another colourful map of the interweb has been released resembling the Tokyo Metro network. Now you can hop on the various lines such as the busy Music or Social News line, stop off at the high traffic Junctions and browse the visitworthy Stations. The map also gives you the forecast at each destination - whether the future looks bright or if there's a storm ahead.

And for those who are familiar with the Tokyo Metro you'll be sure to find the positions of certain websites rather amusing, particularly Shibuya's station (a popular and fashionable haunt for young people) being YouTube on the web map.

02 August 2007

Contrary to the belief that teenagers are all heavy smoking anti-social types - the next generation are developing a growing environmental conscience and are now more receptive to 'green' advertising.

According to a this report 38% of online teenagers have environmental concerns and of those 15% are labelled as "Green Teens" who are seen as being especially responsive to online marketing. This group also are more likely to buy products online and use other online services such as chat rooms, mobile content websites and digital photo services.

They're also good advertisements themselves - 45% of them liked to be the first to hear about new products and their self-proclaimed popularity made them trendsetters among their peers. If we need evidence of the rise of the greenager, our sister company Delib recently launched an environmental game aimed at this age bracket called MyAbodo for Defra and has received over 100,000 views in the past fortnight.

01 August 2007

During our Ashes victory over the Aussie's in 2005 cricket fans were left slightly bemused over the 'new sponsors' of The Ashes - an unknown company called Jamodu.



One clever-clogs had gone about setting up a blog under the name of Jamodu and is offering your company "to be part of the craze that is currently sweeping the country" in the form of advertising space, just to earn back the cold hard cash he has said to be spending for his own advertising. Jamodu even got a heads up from Henry Blofeld on Test Match Special. While the Jamodu blog hasn't had a post in nearly 16 months, new BBC TMS discussions have led to a new wave of traffic and discussion about this mysterious company...

And for reference, the domains Jamodu.com and Jamodu.co.uk have been registered by a company in the radio frequency sector. I wonder if they're benefitting from the free advertising from npower, and now us of course.

24 July 2007

With 1 in 4 web users playing online games, Google are making moves to deploy Adsense more strategically, reports GigaOM.

At present, games can be played with strips of adverts around the outside- the player is able to ignore the ads easily and revenue from those adverts remains low. In their “AdSense for Games” presentation at last week’s Casual Connect conference in Seattle, Google outlined plans to integrate Adsense into flash games to ensure people see them a little bit more.

As the report says, "An AdSense optimized to Flash and other game-centric platforms would mean more revenue, would mean more companies jumping into this space, would mean tremendous shifts toward an audience of casual gamers which is (as the presentation noted), upwards of 200 million. The size of this audience cannot be understated: 1 in 4 of all Web users visit gaming sites, primarily to play casual titles. So a system which monetized this usage better wouldn’t just influence the game industry, but the development and direction of the Web in general."

We've just launched a new viral series called the Kensington Report for Heavy.com - the US-based entertainment site.

Check out a couple of clips from the series here:
Racist Cheese
Alien Babies

The Kensington Report is a series of 8 short Chris Morris-syle satirical news reports ,taking a look at phenomena such as Mindjacking and posing questions such as "Does eating cheese cause racism?".

The answer's of course yes . . .

The series has already had over 400,000 views - so is flying around the web and doing its job of establishing Heavy.com in the UK.

More advertiser sponsored Kensington Reports are in production at the mo - with the next out in a couple of weeks. Keep tuned . . .

23 July 2007

As the British summer is looking so darn awful it's definitely time to escape the eternal rain, so you might want to choose a lovely location from around the world by putting a pin into a map of the world and jetting off there!

But if you (like us) are addicted to the recent social networking phenomena like Facebook and MySpace you may want to take a look at this new Social Networking map to escape... and place your finger on the next sunny virtual destination - rather than real one . . .

This treasure style map, created by the guy behind xkcd.com, provides a creative depiction of the mass of online communities that have been conquering the internet in recent times.

We have already seen map-like depictions of countries based on pretty much anything: worldwide gasoline prices, polluting nations, income, internet diffusion... or the other way around! Similar to these, this nifty map of Online Communities shows how sites like Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Xanga, Orkut, and Second Life dominate the world.

The actual design and geography are not as random as it might initially look like...
Country size and position are significant. Each community’s geographic area represents its estimated size, and the ‘compass-rose’ next to the "straits of web 2.0" gives clues as to what each quarter signifies:

* Practical’ communities in the North.
* Nerdy and intellectual ones in the South.
* Communities connected to real life on the West.
* Those with a focus on the web itself on the East.

To check it out, visit: XKCD here

19 July 2007

Here's some interesting stats from inside Facebook re: the Facebook apps phenomenon.
Here you go (thanks to Nick Denton of Valley Wag Valley Wag for this):

- There are a total of around 1,131 apps
- Of the last 500 approved, only 5 have over 100,000 members, and none have over 200,000
- Only 5 within the last 500 have between 10,000 to 100,000
- Meaning that 489 out of the last 500 apps have less than 10,000 members
- The two main reasons for the slow down in virality of apps are: 1) Saturation 2) Facebook clamping down on allowing members passing apps to their whole address book

So there you go, as with much of web 2.0, Facebook apps are more hype than reality, and certainly aren't the route to rapid virality now that the Facebook team have limited the networking routes.

The message for any brands (or anyone else for that matter) who are thinking of developing a Facebook app is therefore: is it a risk worth taking? Especially given that a Facebook app without Facebook isn't worth the code its written in . . . This situation may change in the future, however for now Facebook's ability to generate true app virality is limited.

17 July 2007

WPPs GroupM report makes interesting reading about the projected growth of internet advertising (and the demise of more traditional forms)

Perhaps the most interesting prediction though is that, while online growth is expected to be about 34% this year this will slow to 30% next year. A factor behind this slow-down is the move of internet users into social networks which are more difficult to access with traditional online ad methods.

Advertisers licking their lips at the prospect of breaking into these networks are increasingly looking to the 'viral effect' to achieve this....

13 July 2007

We've launched our latest viral campaign in partnership with entertainment site Heavy.com, this time to promote the Sci-Fi channels "Who wants to be a super hero" programme.

The film "Superhero next door" is the latest addition to our Kensington Report series of spoof news documentaries.

The film was shot by our sister company Rubberductions, and all creative was developed in-house in partnership with Heavy's team in New York.

The viral is similar to our recent Triumph campaign, taking a longer format at around 3 mins, and is designed as true advertainment - by incorporating the product within the creative.

Check it out here

04 July 2007

Viral video is finally coming of age. Historically viral videos were the bastard son of TV ads, and generally run if a client didn't have the full budget for a TV campaign but liked the idea of creating a video commercial. Because of this, viral videos tended to take the same format - usually a 30 to 45 second spot, structured in a similar way as a TV spot, but generally with a surprise Easter egg at the end.

Five or so years on, and virals are starting to slowly move out of this format and mature into their own longer and often more engaging medium - a change largely driven by broadband and YouTube.

Our recent campaign with E3 for Triumph motorbikes is a great example of viral getting longer. The campaign runs at 3 minutes long, and takes a documentary format. And the results prove that this works not only from the numbers (180,000 views in the first 3 weeks) but also from a brand engagement level, with over 7,200 positive online conversations being started about Triumph as a result of the campaign.

The recent arrival of Heavy.com's ad proposition to the UK isles is also something to watch in this area. We've worked closely with Heavy.com in the US on a series called the Kensington Report, which is based around a true "advertainment" model - where product messages are integrated into the film creative - and will be doing more in the coming months with UK advertisers.

We predict that longer and more engaging creative is definitely the future of viral over the coming 12 months - and hopefully much of it coming out of the Rubber stable . . .

02 July 2007

Waitrose are set to announce plans to create a 'Facebook for foodies' as part of their website redevelopment.

By joining the network, members will be able to share recipes, create scrapbooks and upload pictures of themselves with dishes that they have prepared. Waitrose are not the first retailer to look to harness social networking to engage customers, we reported last month on anewmovement.com from French Connection which, having had a VERY slow start, has picked up numbers in more recent weeks.

The plans will be unveiled on Wednesday following the £1m-plus website revamp.

Waitrose, under the leadership of self-confessed “chubby grocer” Mark Price, aims to become Britain’s premier food networking site by allowing the 1m visitors to its website each month to debate hot topics including fair trade, organics and food miles, and trade culinary tips.

This is yet another sign of the growing usage of the internet by older consumers- and the desire of retailers and brands to attract their attention.

Source: Time Online 1st July 2007

26 June 2007

Our viral campaign, made in association with E3 Media, for Triumph's Rocket III is really flying! The numbers having launched it around 10 days ago are now over 160,000, with amazing feedback from people around the world - both posting comments on YouTube and also sending us emails direct asking us if we were the brains behind it!

To check out the campaign, visit YouTube here

20 June 2007

Earlier this week we launched our latest campaign for Polaroid Sunglasses in conjunction with marketing agency Marketing Zone.

Full credit to the team at Marketing Zone and Polaroid for letting us do what we did with the campaign, but the results I think you'll agree are both stunning and impressive.

The campaign is called "Polaroid Labs" and can be found at www.Polaroidlabs.com.

The objective of the campaign was to communicate and raise awareness of the benefits of Polaroid's polarized sunglasses - and so the obvious creative solution was to chuck a bunch of random stuff (cakes, jelly, kittens and water balloons) at a model and film it in slow-motion.

The results are undoubtedly v.fun! + what was made more fun, was the fact that both me and Kirk got to launch the various objects at the model - our job can really suck sometimes!

11 June 2007

So everyone has heard of MySpace, and if you are reading this you are also very likely to have a profile on the popular social networking site. However since its introduction in the UK, Facebook has seen it number of users increase by exponential figures and is challenging MySpace for market share.

A clash between these two online titans for the title of most popular site is inevitable, as the amount of people using Facebook has been growing steadily and is forecasted to surpass Myspace soon.

A very interesting article was recently published on Mashable entitled "Facebook hammers MySpace on almost all key features" . While the title says it all it also provides a very detailed review of some of the factors that contributed to Facebook's success over the last 9 months.
MySpace has been a great site for quite a while, but it's now inundated by spammers trying to make friends, while the developers also seem to have lost interest in its innovation, meaning its functionality is limited.

08 June 2007

Factual documentary has taken its first steps online. A partnership between Digital media house E3 and viral specialists RubberRepublic has launched a ground breaking online documentary for iconic British motorbike marque Triumph.

The film, available to view on YouTube shows the ins and outs of production of the worlds largest motorbike, the Rocket III, allowing viewers to understand the machine, and shedding light on modern production methods.

The film is aimed at the niche audience of motorbike enthusiasts and is part of a new wave of long form content for brands.

In its first few hours, the film has gathered an impressive 32,000 views and is gathering plaudits in the comments below:

"Best birth of a bike vid ever..."

"The best viral marketing ever?!"

"Classic British humor, I love it!"

04 June 2007

This is a v.interesting blog article about the highs and lows of social networking sites.
Basically it points about that what goes up often comes down (with a plateau inbetween), and this is especially true of community-driven sites.
The key thing to consider about social sites is the "social" bit of them. They're essentially like bars on the high-street, and we've all seen the latest trendiest bar come and go and often make money riding the trend.

Check out the blog post here

30 May 2007

Last week the guys at Facebook unveiled a latest revolution in Social Networking Websites: Facebook Platform.

By opening its doors to external developers it aims to create a new generation of applications that can be deeply integrated within the 'social graph' created by Facebook, now counting more than 25m users. This represents a major step in their growth strategy and also offering a huge potential to build opportunities for new businesses - one example being content distribution.

Third party developers can create 'gadgets and widgets' that can be integrated into users' personal profiles just like existing applications on facebook (like Photo, Events, Groups) even by replacing the original ones.
Needless to say that in less than a week hundreds of applications have emerged, some created by Facebook, some by software houses, and some by students with a Facebook profile.

It is now possible to upload and share files, check out what movies friends want to go see, view pictures hosted on other servers (e.g. Flickr) and edit-crop-fix them online, create playlists and listen to friends' music.

24 May 2007

A new report from Media-Screen finds that broadband users spend an average of 48 percent of their free time online in a typical weekday, reports the Center for Media Research. The percentage measures out to about one hour and 40 minutes.

On average, online broadband users devote 27 percent of their time online to leisure/entertainment, 27 percent for communication, 9 percent on information searches, 15 percent on personal productivity, and 12 percent on shopping.

Among younger users, 48 percent report they learn about new entertainment mainly through peer-powered sites like social networks, review and video sites, and blogs.

Two media activities - sending email and visiting sites for personal reasons - are more popular than watching TV.

More details from this study study are available at MarketingCharts.

23 May 2007

"I will give my staff the day off on 'Bristol Day' - an unofficial bank holiday, 26th October 2007, but only if 10 businesses or other organisations will do the same."

What's this all about then?

There are no bank holidays between August and Christmas. How silly. It's great to be productive, but days off are great too.

Contribute to the happiness and well-being of your staff and employees and give them the day off - if cost to your business is a concern, consider the overall productivity & staff retention benefits!

Show your support by signing up at the rather nifty Pledge Bank, or join the Facebook group. Or just spread the word...

Want to know more / debate the idea? Give us a call or drop an email to andy@teamrubber.com.

Why is it Bristol Day?

Because Andy (a director of Rubber Republic) thought it up in Bristol - "The city that brought you an extra day off."

17 May 2007

New research from Nielsen/NetRatings show young women, which comprise 18 percent of the population, are the most dominant online group in the United Kingdom, the BBC reports.

The study accounts for women between ages 18 and 34. Their online presence accounts for 27 percent more than computer time elapsed by male counterparts. Of males, the age group exceeding 50 is most prevalent over the Internet.

Childrearing sites dominate the top 10 most popular for women ages 18-34, but high-end stores and social networking destinations are also popular choices. Top sites for the group include Huggies, BBC Parenting, FCUK, and iVillage Parenting Network.

Analyst Alex Burmaster of Nielsen/Netratings pointed out, "if you asked the question 'who spends the most time on the computer' - most people would still answer 'men'."

He notes the data represents a "seismic shift" from the "techno-geek" days of the Internet domain. Speaking of geek, women also represent 42 percent of online gamers. A recent Forrester study also reported that online clothing sales have finally elapsed those of computer equipment.

MarketingCharts provides more NetRatings data, including charts.

Source: Marketing Vox

16 May 2007

Long tagged the pursuit of choice for teenage males, the profile of today's gamer casts a broad demographic net, reports Ad Age. Today, teenagers account for only 17 percent.

The popularity of online gaming comprises the source of the shift, according to an NPD study entitled Online Gaming 2007: The Virtual Landscape.

Advertising in games is a $200 million industry, with multiplayer online games accounting for just 19 percent of gamers. Casual gaming, or card, puzzle and arcade games, accounts for 44 percent of all gamers. This category has been especially savory for advertisers.

Seventeen percent of gamers keep online casinos afloat, while at the other end of the spectrum, 20 percent of gamers include kids aged 6 to 12. Fifty-four percent of gamers are console owners, while 41 percent are on a handheld system, like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.

Surprisingly, women represent 42 percent of gamers and typically play casual, single-person games online. And finally, 80 percent of online gamers hail from middle class backgrounds, pulling in between $35,000 to $75,000 per year.

Source: Marketing Vox

15 May 2007

From the country that gave us the term 'smorgasbord' we have a major pick'n'mix viral served up by Volvo. Want a game? Great. Want a film? Fine. Want a funny app that will make you computer speak? Tuck in.

The campaign for the new C30 asks you to decide if you 'love it' or 'hate it' (hmm.. heard that one somewhere before) and to help you has a number of activities based on TV ads that they commisioned from different directors .

While creatively impressive, any visitor needs to concentrate- it is not always clear what you're supposed to do but then if Volvo want people to engage with their brand for a period of time, they've certainly managed that.

Find out if you love it or hate it at www.volvocars.com/freewill

French Connection have entered into the world of social networking with the launch of their anewmovement.com website. I stumbled across the site getting a slagging in the Sunday Times Style supplement, which wasn't the best endorsement . . .

The site itself is fairly simple in its format - and leaves much room for User-generated content. The main problem is that it's a complete ghost-town, without very much going on and seemingly very few people engaged in the campaign. It'd be interested to see the real numbers behind the campaign - but at the mo it seems to be a turkey.

Where French Connection seem to have gone wrong is in assuming that as a big brand it's got the pull and the relationship with its consumers to be able to create their own walled-community. This is a big mistake, and one I've seen a number of brands fall into.

What brands should be doing is creating brand related content to be distributed via existing social networks (e.g. Facebook / Myspace), rather than trying to create their own social networks from scratch. The BBC are spot on with their strategy here. At no point has the BBC attempted to create a massive BBC network. Instead, it sees itself as a content / entertainment provider, whose content is consumed by whoever wherever. And it's the "wherever" bit that's most important - hence their creation of the Radio 1 Music Cube project, which embodies this to the full.

11 May 2007

With sore heads to prove it, we're pleased to announce that we've been short-listed as one of the companies up for the Arena Magazine / O2 entrepreneur of the year award. Hurrah!

The sore heads came from the great evening me and fellow TeamRubber Director Andy spent having dinner and drinks with the Arena and O2 guys down in Bristol last night. All v.fun, and of course v.drunken.

Apparently we'll be told whether we've won in the next couple of weeks - so fingers crossed! If you want to check out what we (well Andy) looks like - check out the latest (June) issue of Arena, and you'll see our profile . . .
Check the mag here: Arena

09 May 2007

ClickZ reports that CBS online are slimming down their emailing list by removing "passive recipients."

This decision is based on the beliefs that large mail-outs can be damaging for a brand's image and that efforts are better expended on the more engaged, active recipients.

To improve the quality of their list, on April 23, CBS SportsLine notified opt-in subscribers of its program guide newsletter, called "This Week on CBS SportsLine.com," that they would stop receiving the mailing unless they took an active step to re-subscribe by April 30. It was a one-time mailing, and those who didn't reply to it by the deadline were removed.

Another firm, marketing agency Future Now, recently "wiped out" its database of 40,000 e-mail addresses. saying that the move was driven by a desire to emphasize audience engagement over volume.

Patrick Herde of CBS said"Now that I've cleaned up the subscription list and I'm going to put out a much better content product, I can reallocate those dollars and focus on growing that list again... even winning back our old subscribers."

07 May 2007

Dan Sheinman, SVP of Cisco's Media Solutions Group (via CNET), recently noted social networks are the best way for media practitioners to understand where media is headed in the digital age.

Cisco acquired Linksys for $500 million and set-top box maker Scientific Atlanta for $6.9 billion last year, marking a pricey leap into the consumer electronics and home entertainment markets, unfamiliar territory for the company. In the near future they hope to reap the rewards of that commitment.

Its eyes are set on social networking, which it believes is the ultimate marketing portal to consumers.

With the aim of reaching consumers where they play, the tech industry is focusing a number of resources on further developing consumer-powered technologies - evident in such companies as Google, Skype, MySpace, and YouTube.

Additionally, the position of user-generated video in advertising has changed from something generally avoided to something sought-for. The Coke-Mentos experiment on YouTube is a case in point.

Cisco is also developing products for the user-driven mediaworld. At present it is poised to launch a line of branded set-top boxes, anticipating the connected living room of the future. The notion of a next-gen connected household has been in the works for some time, but Scheinman notes that broadband adoption is bringing the idea increasingly closer to home.

Broadband use is presently at 35 percent in the United States.

"A giant IP network is what's between content and user," said Scheinman. "That's one of the reasons we acquired Linksys and Scientific Atlanta."

Source: Marketing Vox

23 April 2007

Australian IT reports that there is concern over US army plans to sponsor a shoot-em-up game to drive a recruitment campaign.

The idea that having enjoyed the experience of war in a game you might like to experience the real thing has upset a number of anti-war groups.

The US Army hope that there 2.4 million dollar investement will be money well spent as their key target audience of 17-24 year old males will be attracted to the game in droves.

Rumours of a Captain Birdseye recruitment drive being supported by a fish-gutting game have been dismissed as pure Rubber Republic speculation...

18 April 2007

Saatchi and Saatchi have put together a genius buzz campaign to promote Mallorca. The campaign, dubbed "The battle of the surfaces"is based around a tennis match at Palma Arena in which tennis stars Rafael Nadal, the "king of clay", and Roger Federer, the "king of grass", will battle it out on a half-clay, half-grass court.

A truly great idea, and so far amazingly executed with partnerships from sports management company IMG and spanish television network Antena 3.

Check out the site covering the event at www.battleofsurfaces.com

The horrible Virginia Tech happenings of the 16th April, have lead to an incredible flux of emotion and solidarity from people all around the globe. On social networking sites like Facebook, known for its huge Student community, members have demonstrated their respect and sympathy by creating and joining groups to honour those that passed away.

More than 500 groups have been formed in the 24 hours following the massacre offering support and remembrance, seeing a huge support and involvement.

"A tribute to those who passed at the Virginia Tech Shooting" was joined by more than 200,000 people in less than 48 hours, at a pace of thousands every hour, leaving more than 20,000 wall posts.

"A tribute from Canadians to Virginia tech", "A tribute from Muslim students to those that passed away at VT", "UK loves Va Tech" . . . to name a few.

Many VT students managed to communicate with their families and loved ones via the website's wall, or discussion forum, and a student from another American College founded a "Pick a Hokie" grouping encouraging members to pick a random VT student out of the directory and to send that person a message of condolence. The group had almost 600 members as of Tuesday the 17th.

Most users also demonstrated their mourning by replacing their profile picture with a Black Ribbon and the VT emblem.

17 April 2007

Iconic toy manufacturer Lego is partnering with independent MMO game developer, NetDevil, to develop a MMOG based on the Lego building blocks toys. No deal terms were disclosed. The two companies have declined to outline exactly how the game will work, but industry sources believe it will be a game in a similar vein to the ubiquitous 'Second Life', allowing users to socially interact and construct their own in-game objects and content using virtual Lego bricks.

The game is aimed at both children and older online gamers, with Lego saying the virtual world will have a strong emphasis on safety and fun. NetDevil was probably chosen as the development partner due to its previous experience with destructible in-game environments, techniques that would be used to mimic the building and re-building of Lego objects. "We are developing new and engaging ways for them [children] to interact with our brand," says Lego Group executive Lisbeth Valther Pallesen.

Source: MarketingVox.com

16 April 2007

22nd March: The WPP CEO set out to define the 2 major changes- and challenges- facing media-owners and agencies, in a video-link address to the SHOTS forum.

The first is one of geography- with mushrooming populations in the east, companies in these locations have massive subscription bases and influence (China Mobile alone has 300 million subscribers)- he pointed out that this in itself is not a problem, as long as projects are run efficiently.

The second, larger, challenge lies in embracing new technology. Sir Martin spoke frankly about this: "...there has to be a shift, and it has to be a very rapid shift amongst the agencies to embrace new media." He argued that companies that fail to do this will lose out "the more established you are, the worse it is or the more difficult it is to deal with. The companies that start with no legacy systems, with no history, that start with a clean sheet of paper, are clearly advantaged in dealing with the issue of technology."

Rousing talk of young, aggressive, hungry agencies that work comfortably with new technologies showed respect for the growing influence and usefulness of digital agencies. He was confident that moving with the times will reap its rewards too, "Wherever the Internet advertising is it's 6 to 7 % of the worldwide market, 5 or 10 years ago it was zero, and our view is - you want my view? It's 20% of our business now, it's gonna be a third of our business in fairly short order."

It seems that some brands are taking the concept of advertainment to a whole new level- well maybe not that new...just product placement in a new guise.
New Media Age report that Ford and Nike are setting off on a 3-month trial to showcase new products in games for the Wii, Xbox and Playstation and are putting up significant budgets to do so- no doubt looking for a slice of the expected $1.8 billion in-game ad market predicted for 2010.

While Unilever look to squeeze Sure deodorant into one of these games, market-nemesis Proctor & Gamble have pushed ahead with the filming of a whole series called ‘Gillette- Young Guns’ for prime-time ABC, say USA Today . With episodes costing around $150,000 to produce, these can be more economical than a 30-second national ad at nearly $400k.

So the lines blur further still between ads and entertainment- but then we've been showing that for a while now..

05 April 2007

All those Second Lifers who've escaped the terrors of the real world for the virtual got a shock yesterday as whole territories within Second Life were flooded as part of a virtual PR stunt designed to raise awareness of climate change charity Adventure Ecology.

The brainchild of the guys at Ogilvy interactive, territories that were flooded included Ibiza, the Netherlands (obviously!), Mallorca and Japan. For those who weren't around for the flood, footage of the virtual catastrophe can be seen on YouTube here. Photos of the event can be seen here. And check out the buzz it's already created on Rocketboom

A genius online buzz concept + well executed. The only question is - if your avatar hadn't learnt to swim does that mean they'd virtually drown and go to cyber heaven???? And that begs the question - does Second Heaven (or Hell) exist???? Such deep meta-questions abound in the world of Second Life . . .

03 April 2007

Since the hullabaloo around the concept of Saatchi and Saatchi's LoveMarks, many agencies have been touting around concepts along the LoveMarks theme. We're one of those, advocating the joys of brand participation and getting some success with clients - most notably our work for Fortis.

Well, it's good to see an agency practicing what they preach at last. US agency Via is rebranding itself at the moment, and getting its clients and the public at large to get involved in the process. They're doing this through their new company website ThinkPlaid.com and also through their blog www.brandflakesforbreakfast.com.

This is a really interesting move for an agency, and probably a wise one given that the the general perceived wisdom is that agencies are at their worst when marketing themselves . . . so getting the public and your clients to do it for you is obviously a winning idea!

02 April 2007

Thresher's have launched their second viral coupon campaign following the success of the campaign last x-mas.
It's interesting to see that this time Threshers (or at least their online buzz machine - Hugh from
GapingVoid.com) have openly admitted that this is a pre-meditated campaign, rather than last time when they spun the fact that it was an out of control marketing mistake that sped out of control - resulting in huge amounts of newspaper buzz about the campaign.

Last time round they claimed the campaign racked up over £15 million in sales. I'm intrigued to see whether without the might of offline press (garnered through their spin machine) the campaign will do anyway near the same numbers.
Although given that the campaign is based around word of mouth, and the production costs of the campaign are close to zero, anything above zero sales could be counted as a success . . .

Check out the campaign
here

22 March 2007

Tila Tequila, arguably MySpace's most famous user, last weekend ran afoul of site founder Tom Anderson, who demanded the removal of a media player and online store that Tequila had added to her page to promote her music.

At issue was a widget called Hoooka that Tequila had added on her page, allowing users to hear her music, as well as buy it, the New York Times reports. Hoooka was created by a Los Angeles startup Indie911. MySpace has a partnership with Hoooka-competitor SnoCap. Naturally, Tequila turned to her blog to vent her frustrations: "The reason why I am so bummed out about MySpace now is because recently they have been cutting down our freedom and taking away our rights slowly."

MySpace angered users last year by blocking the embedding of YouTube videos on member pages. The site defends its actions by saying that it blocks third-party software, such as widgets, if they lead to the sharing and spread of copyrighted material.

Such moves have many users wondering whether, since being purchased by News Corp., the site has veered from its original stance of embracing its user community of users. "You guys used to be so cool," Tequila wrote of MySpace. "Don't turn into a corporate evil monster."

20 March 2007

It's interesting to see Sony's Playstation 3 buzz start rolling. The campaign, through TBWA, has started (as far as we've seen) via a mix of unbranded TV ads that link through to a campaign teaser microsite -
thisisliving.tv - including what looks like a film trailer, and a "sign up for more" function.

As a strategy this is a great use of pre-campaign buzz, whetting the appetite of key influencers / brand advocates before the launch of the main campaign.

The creative of the campaign is also pretty spot on - which you might expect from an agency like TBWA. I love the drama of the film trailer-esque clip on the microsite - with it's teasing narrative set up which makes the viewer ask what next, compelling them to sign up for updates, and starting them on the campaign / brand narrative . . .

All super interesting + I wait in eager anticipation for the next steps of the narrative, which is due out on March 23rd.

19 March 2007

As Election 2008 draws nearer, candidates are going to be looking for any way possible to reach voters and MySpace will help fill that need with the addition of a politics channel focusing on next year's Presidential election.

The channel will be similar to MySpace music and video channels, the New York Times reports. Called the Impact Channel, the section will include links to candidates' MySpace pages and their blogs. Voter registration tools will also be available.

In theory, joining MySpace should help candidates reach voters in the sites' younger age demographic.

In 2003, Howard Dean leveraged the blogosphere to get an early advantage in the 2004 elections, and many experts say most candidates this time will make a serious push to use social media tools to reach voters.

14 March 2007

Our campaign for easyJet was finally launched last week. Ever since we've been slowly seeding the campaign around the web. The seeding process will run over a 4 week process, with a mixture of natural seeding through free sites, and also paid for placement on key tactical sites.

There already seems to be a buzz around the campaign, with industry mag Brand Republic carrying a piece on it.

The campaign itself is called the Ningotiators and is aimed at promoting easyJets new hotel venture easyJetHotels.com.

Check out the campaign
here

Check out the buzz
here

16 February 2007

Much maligned blog ad network PayPerPost is to launch new ad offerings including the video capabilities.

Not a huge amount of info is available on this, however the first stories coming out of industry site ClickZ report that there will be three video ad offerings: advertisers will be able to pay bloggers to create videos about their goods and services, as well as run pre- and post-roll ads around blogger-produced spots.

In a viral marketing environment where seeding / media placement is becoming critical to get initial eye-balls, this is an interesting development. When I first heard that PayPerPost were adding video capacity I'd imagined that they may be looking to move onto the viral seeding territory - paying individuals to place content for brands, however PayPerPost seem to be stuck in a product-based mentality.

Predictions for the next year, include new services which offer a more formalised pay-per-placement service, helping guarantee eye-balls for virals - something which clients are now demanding.

07 February 2007

At Davos last week Chad Hurley, one of YouTube's founders, announced that video sharing mega-lith will be sharing its advertising revenues with content creators.

This moves down the same path as similar, but less popular, video sharing site Revver - who started out in 2005 on this premise.

Hurley said the idea behind the revenue sharing model was a way of "improving the content" on the site.

It's an interesting move for YouTube to do this, and definitely a wise one as after the billion dollar acquisition by Google there was a wiff of jealously in the ranks of YouTubers, so sharing some of the revenues seems like a good way to placate users and spread the YouTube love.

The most interesting aspect is how the addition of advertising into YouTube will affect its use by brands launching their virals. Will brands want their branded content sanwiched between an other brands advertising? The answer to that is probably no, however it's an indicator of how viral / the online content space is maturing into a space that looks scarily like TV.

31 January 2007

This viral's been around for a while, and is a classic example of sub-viral really creating a great buzz around a product.

www.cillitbangremix.com

Before this spoof techno re-mix, Cillit Bang were renowned for one of the biggest online marketing faux-pas's of the decade when they accidentally insulted a blogger by posting a message from Barry Scott in reply to a piece the blogger had written about his long lost dad. It was a truly bizarre incident and created masses of bad publicity for them.
Check out the story
here

Anyway, this techno re-mix spoof certains lightens the mood for them and is a truly viral piece - in complete contrast to the previous attempts by their big-buck agency (who I think are JWT).

30 January 2007

There's definitely a really thin line between genius creative and utter sh*t when it comes to viral, and this great new ad from the US proves it - check it here.
In the past I've always questioned whether DR TV and radio jingle creative was creative at all, however in the last few months I've really been warming to joys of these cheesy addictive ditties and think that they can be a really effective viral tool. One great example is from a US marketing company called Buddy Lube, who've created their own company tune that's certainly got me talking and is slowly on its way to going viral. To check the Buddy Lube genius, click here.

15 January 2007

December saw the release of a really interesting report from DoubleClick the online market research company. Entitled ‘Influencing the Influencers’, the report concluded that influential people are far more likely to engage with advertising and new media platforms and create valuable word of mouth both online and offline. This is good news for us viral marketers as the whole business hinges on interactions with these influential individuals. Therefore, the essential skill that a viral marketer must develop is an ability to identify as many of these individuals as possible, to get them to engage with virals and to get them talking. Our full report on DoubleClick’s findings can be viewed here.

05 January 2007

This is a classic media industry viral - definitely worth a look if want an insight into the media agency / owner relationship! Check out the film on YouTube here

02 January 2007

This is a v.interesting rant about the Web 2.0 and the new culture of narcissism it's breeding - with MySpace and blogs feeding people's infatuation with their own lives and thoughts. I particularly like his description of MySpace as a "hall of mirrors".
Interestingly, I wrote a similar, if not less vitriolic, piece in my brand participation blog 12 months back - where I talked about the fact that we now live with the "me-generation".
Not being too self-obsessed myself (of course not!), I'd say I was on the money with my insight - especially in a year that YouTube, the home of self-obsession, was bought by Google . . .

20 December 2006

Last month a website was created that brought serious embarrassment to Sony. The site, AllIWantForXmasIsaPSP.com was set up to look like a genuine fan site and featured a video of a character named “Cousin Pete” who performed a rap in which he talked about how much he wanted a PSP for Christmas. The online community quickly got suspicious and when they asked the site administrator if it was fake they issued this cringe making statement: "We don't work for Sony. And for all you dissin' my skillz I'm down for a one on one rap off or settling it street stylez if you feel me playa." However, The site’s creators stupidly hadn’t covered their tracks and a simple WhoIs lookup of the URL revealed that the registrars were none other than Sony Computer Entertainment US. When key online influencers, bloggers and gamers got wind of this embarrassing news it spread like wildfire. While it’s difficult to speculate whether or not this will affect pre-Christmas PSP sales it is a textbook example of how a stealth marketing campaign can seriously backfire. This is not unlike the shameful campaign that cleaning product brand Cillit Bang attempted with it’s Barry Scott blog.

The Sony site was quietly pulled last week.

15 December 2006

Here's a clever new viral from Scottish softdrink brand, Irn Bru. It's a play on the famous scene from the classic christmas animation, The Snowman. The landscape has been changed from snowy rural England to a Scottish winter wonderland and the young boy has been replaced with a cheeky little red-haired Irn Bru drinking scamp.
Irn Bru are renowned for pulling off slick and funny ads and this viral is no exception. As well as being distributed online, it also appears to be on Scottish television.

Last night I went to Mashup's Advertising 2.0 event. Apart from being seriously impressed by the number of people at the event (over 100), and impressed by the guy chairing the event (Michael Bayler) the top 5 things of note were:

1) Esther Dyson: apparently a real ball-crusher of a woman and early investor in Yahoo, Esther's most interesting insight was that she's just invested in a new US service which people sign up to and get paid to be sent email marketing from brands. The ultimate in permission marketing.

2) Adify.com: this is a nice concept based upon a "Build-your-own-network" basis - allowing publishers to manage their own ad inventory.

3) John Taysom: this guy has a beard and is super savvy. Follow his money - which seems to be focussed on music-based marketing through MediaGraft.

4) Apparently everyone hates Pay-per-post, and there's a company who wants to kill it - which is kinda cool - called CreamAid (bad name good site).

5) I met Irfon from Coull.tv who are doing some really interesting stuff with object tagging in video.

08 December 2006

Interesting article highlighting the potential of mobile viral ('mobisodes').

"Don't advertise where all your competitors advertise...

By and large, traditional marketers are not aware of the impact of mobisodes. And even if they are, they don't recommend it because traditional media planning companies only operate in a traditional way. They don't get remuneration in the form of fees and commissions from contagious mobisodes, so why should they suggest it?"

Meanwhile check out our own mobile/web series DudeCorp.

07 December 2006

05 December 2006

With our help, a new company called O2GO has launched a microsite to help broadcast their “drink more water” mantra and act as a sales platform for their innovative product.
O2GO rightly states that we need to drink 2 litres of water every day to maintain a healthy lifestyle and that very few of us actually do this. They also rightly state that this can be a fairly dull process.
What they have come up with is a range of mineral rich little sachets that contain nice flavours which enable you to turn boring tap water into something far more palatable and healthy. It’s an interesting proposition and hopefully our site will help them help all of us to achieve a healthier lifestyle whilst making them a packet.

The American Marketing Association (AMA) has conducted a survey that will be of great interest to those in the world of viral marketing.
The most striking conclusion of the survey suggests that children don’t like consumer-generated content (CGC) in ads. It also appears that older people aged between 25-64 find that CGC campaigns make a company appear more innovative and customer-friendly. Those between the ages of 18-24 felt that a company that uses CGC is less trustworthy, less socially responsible and less customer-friendly. Another surprise that I read recently was that 50% of YouTube users were over the age of 34. In light of this, it could be suggested that younger audiences dislike CGC in ads because they are loosing a sense of ownership over the content which they are largely responsible for creating. One can imagine this group feeling that they are the victims of corporate high jacking. A cumbersome invasion of their cool territory.

30 November 2006

Wowsers! Our very own Team Rubber man (or should I say celeb) Dan Hilton has appeared on an excellent webcast from a conference in Somerset. As first speaker he does a sterling job of dispelling the myths and hype that surrounds Web 2.0 at the moment whilst compounding it’s virtues in a sensible “how can it work for me” kind of way. Great stuff Dan!

Habbo, the brilliantly styled teen entertainment brand, has decided to expand into social networking. This is a logical progression with 64m people in 29 countries being registered to their online assets. Habbo’s creators, Sulake of Helsinki, have been running since 2000 and things have been looking up ever since. Back then they created a revolutionary form of Shockwave interactive chat which allowed its members to customise their appearance and walk around in the virtual Habbo Hotel.
They have kept these features and its lovely pixel art graphics in their new tie-in social networking project, Habbo Home. Habbo Home will feature friend lists and links to other Habbo's profiles. Users can decorate their profile pages using backgrounds, customisable stickers, sticky notes and widgets. To interact with other Habbo's users can click directly on to other Habbo Home users' profile page or use the console instant messenger service within Habbo Hotel.
Whilst the majority of Habbo users are in the 11 to 18 year old bracket, a considerable proportion of its users are 25+ designers, tech and media types who are members simply because they admire the concept and styling so much. This surely stands as proof that Sulake are on to something very cool.

27 November 2006

London's Dazed & Confused magazine has just announced their intention to step up their online presence by adopting social network and file sharing within their site. While they already have a MySpace page, they hope that this move will help build a greater sense of community and increase loyalty to there brand. They have also pledged to ally themselves with online public service initiatives and charities; they have already done so with the (RED) aids campaign.

24 November 2006

Totally Viral TV, a soon to be aired show by UKTV, promises to be the most exciting and edgy show around. Whilst this isn't the first attempt at creating a viral TV outlet (website b3ta.com managed to create one pilot show), it is the first attempt that has serious backing. There is also an accompanying website which will presumably act as the source of content for the new show.
It airs at 10:30pm, November 27th on UKTV G2. We await with baited breath.

15 November 2006

Probably a first, The United Church of Canada has launched a viral to support its WonderCafe web campaign. The £5m campaign aims to encourage discussion on issues such as gay marriage and sinful sex in an effort to increase membership to their church. The decision to encourage discussion is a good one, with today's youth shying away from the dogmatic elements of spirituality. If this campaign proves to be a success we may well see virals from other denominations. Although its hard to picture Benedict XVI bashing down the Rubber Republic door.

07 November 2006

Zango, the prominent but highly manipulative viral site, has finally got it's comeuppance. The site had became one of the world’s largest distributors of adware. It did this by using alluring but deceptive banner ads which encouraged users to download almost un-removable software so that they could view enticing video clips. The well known banners said "click here to see what happens next" and most commonly featured a guy about to jump under a bus.
Thankfully, they’ve had to pay $3m to the Federal Trade Commission for their underhand tactics. Tactics which have clearly been making them serious amounts of money in advertising revenues.

06 November 2006

Logitech, the PC periphery manufacturer, have just released another of what is clearly going to be a series of virals to promote their webcam range. This new clip, entitled 'Our Secret' features the same characters as the first viral. We see the man in his office having a conversation with his girlfriend who is at home. After exchanging 'sweet nothings' she embarrassingly makes him call her a series of pet names and act like a little puppy. The man's humiliation is complete when he discovers that all of his girlfriend's mates are watching and laughing at him. Silly fun.

30 October 2006

For so long marketers have associated viral marketing with the classic exponential curve - oh how they dream!
Having analysed the performance of over 30 past viral campaigns, we've come up with what the viral curve really looks like:

This basically breaks viral activity into 3 distinct stages (as shown below): the initial viral surge as early adopters get hold of a campaign, followed by a period of community buzz as conversations are lit within blogs and communities, followed by a long tail in which the campaign carries on being active around cyberspace.

Possibly the most interesting aspect of the viral curve is the long tail, as this is an aspect of viral marketing that is conceptually new to the advertising world. In traditional media, a campaign runs it's course once the media budget has been spent. With the free nature of social media, campaigns run and run for as long as the campaign is useful to the social capital of these networks.

To check out thoughts on this in greater detail, check out the research docs in ViralManager.com

A new web 2.0 marketing company named Crayon was launched this week. It claims to be the first company to launch on Second Life simultaneously to its real world launch. This is interesting because they have wholeheartedly embraced new marketing from their inception. The second life office environment is something that we are bound to see more of in the near web 2.0 future. Have a look at theirs here.

27 October 2006

Today is the day we launch our new game for the British Greyhound Racing Board (BGRB). Race Doggles is an exciting and slickly styled flash-based flying game. Fly your Biggles like greyhound through the hoops whilst doing your best to keep up with the ever receding Baron Von Hare. It gets increasingly hectic as you progress through the levels. Chocks away!
Technorati Profile

26 October 2006

Having distanced themselves from the phenomenon for so long, Coca-Cola have finally decided to jump on the Mentos-Diet Coke bandwagon. The viral craze has been going for a year or more now and involves adding numbers of Mentos mints to large Diet Coke bottles – the results are quite spectacular. Originally, someone discovered that if you add the Mentos to the Coke a huge fountain erupts from the bottle. Over time, people became more adventurous; they started setting off multiple fountains and even created rockets and bombs. Of course, all of these endeavours were filmed and met with massive viral success.

Mentos were smart because they voiced their appreciation of the craze straight after its inception. They actively encourage the spread of these viral videos, taking the line that any publicity is good publicity. Coke’s initial reluctance to acknowledge the phenomenon was due to the fact that they didn’t want to damage their brand. Now however, they realise that they are loosing control of their brand by not acknowledging anything. Therefore, they have got stuck in to creating their own superior and highly elaborate virals. Here’s a preview for one that’s being released soon:
Experiment 214

17 October 2006

Rubber Republic is proud to announce the launch of our latest product, Viral Manager. ViralManager.com is essentially a hub where you can access all the viral marketing tools you need. In the strategy section you can access a wealth of free information, research and inspiration on all things viral related. You can do competitor analysis using our past campaigns database. Viral manager also contains unique seeding and tracking systems which allow you to plan, launch and monitor your campaigns.

To check out viral manager click here. To get a free demo of our tracking dashboard contact James.

11 October 2006

It’s official. Google has acquired YouTube for a staggering £800m in stock.

The deal is being hailed as the most important internet acquisition in history. It is an amazing tactical move that positions Google as the world’s leader in video distribution.

Astonishingly, Google have acquired YouTube for nothing! In the last couple of days, Google’s share value has already exceeded the value of the stock they acquired.

Analysts are saying that although Google could have paid for the deal within six years by simply placing AdSense ads on YouTube, they are going to introduce a wealth of exciting new advertising models to the site. Watch out for amazing new advertising systems in the shape of paid content syndication and interactive product placement.

One thing’s for sure, this is going to be the talk of the town for a long time to come.

03 October 2006

Here's a viral quiz game we've just launched:

British Computer Brain

It was designed with the aim of encouraging membership to the British Computer Society (BCS).

It's a tough little against-the-clock tech quiz in the style of those fiercly addictive pub quiz machines.

Good luck!

Last Thursday, Rubber Republic MD Chris Quigley gave a presentation for the viral marketing session of AdTech 2006. His presentation provided insights into a number of different areas of viral marketing, including: the real viral effect, the impact of seeding and target viral campaigns.

Chris presented alongside Kim Moller from Bang and Olufsen who talked about his new concept of "chatvertising", and Fergus Hampton from Milward Brown Precis, who talked about the importance of influencers in igniting virality.

To download Chris' presentation, visit the strategy section of ViralManager.

To check out comment and debate on the presentation, check out ViralMeister .

02 October 2006

The Viral and Buzz Marketing Association (VBMA) re-launched last week, with Rubber Republic as one of its 14 founding trustee companies. After a rocky start 2 years ago, the VBMA has for the moment toned-down its aspirations and is starting small with Andrew Corcoran (Lincoln University) as its chair and an initial smattering of specialist companies and consultancies across the world forming its core.


Other founding trustees include: Justin Kirby DMC (UK), Fergus Hampton Milward Brown Precis (UK), Tina Wells Buzz Marketing Group (USA) and Xavier Lesueur (France).


Check out the launch site here

19 September 2006

Hats off to Gary Brolsma; he’s done it again. The internet hero, creator and star of the massively popular ‘Numa Numa’ clip, has turned his fame into profit by heavily merchandising a follow-up music video. Naturally, the message board Nazis are trying to discredit his efforts by saying that he is a “fat looser”, that “he has sold out” etc. However, people must remember that this is an archetypal example of viral marketing success: An overweight nobody became a global icon overnight; he spawned thousands of copycats and has cleverly and humorously managed to turn himself into a merchandisable brand. If he’d done this a little earlier he might have made a lot more, but good luck to him!

12 September 2006

You've probably already heard of the global phenomenon spawned by the 21 year old Lucy Gao but it’s so good it’s worth a mention.

Lucy is an intern for Citigroup bank of Canary Warf, London. She recently sent an email to 39 of her “friends” giving them very detailed instructions on the schedule for her 21st birthday celebration at the Rivoli bar in the Ritz hotel. It gave them staggered arrival times and told them what to wear and even what to say. The email is studded with conceited comments such as “A specially made birthday cake has also been ordered and the Ritz waiters will kindly serve you each a generous slice with Ritz cutleries, etc... also on me.” Another; “I will be accepting cards and small gifts between 9pm to 11pm” Gold dust!

Anyway, the point in mentioning the story on our blog is to highlight the way in which the story itself spread. Naturally one of the stunned “friends” who received the original message was compelled to pass it on to a colleague. She then forwarded it to 12 friends who passed it to their friends etc. Within hours, the message was landing in the inboxes of most of the bankers in London and was well on its way to going global. This is a classic case of a real-world user-generated, albeit unintentional, viral. It proves to us that if the content is right the largely false view of exponential viral growth holds true.

The poor girl’s certainly found fame must have lost her dignity in a big way. This reminds one of the case of legendary Ghyslain “Star Wars Kid” Raza; the boy whose parents recently settled a cyber bullying lawsuit against his tormentors and claimed $351,000 in damages. It’s a pretty grey legal area as it’s difficult to quantify the cost of serious mental anguish –Star Wars Kid’s landed himself in a psychiatric facility for his Light Sabre larks.



Below is Lucy’s email in all its glory:

Dear Friends,

Thank you for all your replies and I am glad all of you can come this Friday to celebrate my 21st with me. Please read ALL the following to ensure your entry into the Ritz.

Lucy's 21st Birthday Party at The Ritz Hotel London
Friday, 18th of August
9pm Champagne Reception
10pm Photo Shoots
10:30pm Blowing Candles
Mid-night Pangaea, Mayfair

I have arranged the Ritz to host a Champagne Reception with a selection of Ritz Champagne for all my guests, this will be on me so please come and indulge.

A specially made birthday cake has also been ordered and the Ritz waiters will kindly serve you each a generous slice with Ritz cutleries, etc... also on me.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR ENTRY:
* When you arrive, take the Hotel entry on the opposite side of the Green Park tube station [Please refer to your arrival time at the end of this email]

* When asked "how can I help you Sir/Madame?", you reply "I am here for Lucy's Birthday Party at the Rivoli Bar"

* You will be escorted to the lounge area next to the Rivoli bar, where you will hopefully see a gorgeous group of ladies.

If you experience any issues getting in or getting to the Ritz, please call my mobile on 07782 205 450 and my PA Ms Gill will kindly deal with your queries between 8:30pm to 10pm.

STRICT DRESS CODE:

Gentlemen: Jacket, shirt, and please also bring a tie (no jeans, trainers, flip-flops, polo-shirts)
Ladies: skirt/top, cocktail dress (no denim, min-skirts, flip-flips, bad tastes)
Advice 1: It goes without saying that the more upper-class you dress, the less likely you shall be denied entry.
Advice 2: Photos will be taken between 10pm to 10:30pm, and these will be distributed once processed, therefore you may want to be well-groomed! ;)

Finally...
I will be accepting cards and small gifts between 9pm to 11pm... hehehe

I very much look forward to seeing you all at the Ritz this Friday.

Lucy

ARRIVAL TIMES: [Please stick to these as best as you can, thank you]
9:00pm: Lucy, Sophie Sandner, Kajai, Mandeep, Preet, Sanami, Su, Lisa, Kate.
9:15pm: Phoebe, Sophie Seugnet, Theo, Dmitry, Ed, Nikolay, Paul, Nick, Harry.
9:30pm: Marco, Andrea, Jess, Ovi, Yuki, Olga, Kim, Marcelo, Ulyana, Krystal, Dan.
9:45pm: Sunita, Alan, JingJing, Emma. 10:00pm: Anthony, Rachel, Roger, Uli, Yogi, Gharzi

25 August 2006

Facebook, the UK’s teen based social networking site has just signed a deal with Microsoft. Microsoft will supply banner ads and sponsored links to Facebook using their adCenter technology, which was launched in May, as a rival to Google’s AdWords and Yahoo’s Overture PPC advertising systems. The cost of the deal is undisclosed at this point in time but the payments are expected to run through till mid-2009. The amount is bound to be considerably less than the $900m deal that Google struck with Facebook’s rival MySpace – MySpace boasts 100m registered users whilst Facebook has a much smaller 9m.

09 August 2006

In response to the potential bid by Viacom for Bebo, Google and MySpace are set to join forces in a three year deal that will give Murdoch’s Fox Network - the owners of MySpace - $900m in exchange for exclusive advertising rights on the social networking site. Fox are set to receive the $900m in revenue share payments by 2010.

MySpace, wisely bought by Fox’s News Corp for $580m, is now attracting more than 250,000 new users per day, and is expecting to reach 100m worldwide users by this week. It’s no wonder that Google have been anxious to strike up a deal with the world’s largest social networking site as the guaranteed watertight advertising revenues will be a welcome relief from the fraud riddled AdWords / AdSense model that Google has come to rely on so heavily.

Last year Bebo lost out on a bid to buy MySpace to Fox’s News Corp, which bought the social networking site for $580m. But Viacom could be back in the running; rumours abound that they have almost made a deal with rival social networking site, Bebo.

Although Bebo has just a quarter of the members that MySpace has, it could be immensely lucrative as the majority of its members are fairly well-off individuals in the highly sought after youth market.








game

02 August 2006

London based digital agency Unit9 have just created a viral game for Virgin Mobile which promises to give players the chance to win tickets to this summer’s Virgin V Festival – which incidentally shifted all of its tickets within the first three hours of sales.

The simple but good looking flash based game requires its players to base-jump from a crane onto a bus that’s headed for the V Festival.

31 July 2006

YouTube, the leading online video hub, announced last week that a hundred million videos are being watched per day on their site. Estimates suggest that this accounts for 60% of all video watched online and that it accounts for a whopping 29% of the US multimedia entertainment market.
Not surprisingly, the massively popular MySpace is nipping at YouTube’s heels with a 19% share of the online video market. Whilst the video portals of Yahoo!, MSN, Google and AOL only take 3-5% slices of the market each.

27 July 2006

Fox, the American film giant is launching an entertainment and social networking site called Fox Atomic.
Fox’s main motivation in doing this is not just to promote its upcoming films, but to generate advertising revenues via a large and tight knit online community. Fox has allied with viral aggregator Stupidvideos.com, which will provide the bulk of the site's viral videos.
Fox will also be joining forces with Jumpcut.com who will provide a web-based video editing service dubbed 'Blender'. Blender will allow users to create their own short films by splicing together clips from upcoming Fox films and their own clips. The hope is that this will create user loyalty and empowerment through high levels of engagement.

10 July 2006

These stats are based on the only comprehensive survey that has been conducted on viral/shared media. Although the survey was conducted in the US and the results may be slightly different from the UK market, they still reflect universal trends and give us a good overview of the viral landscape.


Frequency that internet users share content

Daily or most days
23%

Several times a week
23%

About once a week
15%

Several times a month
11%

Several times a year
15%

Never
11%


Number of people with whom internet users share content

1 to 3
41%

4 to 6
34%

7 to 9
13%

10 to 20
9%

20 +
3%


Likelihood that internet users will share branded vs. non-branded content

More
12%

Slightly more
31%

Slightly less
35%

Less
17%

Will not share
5%


Impact of brand sponsorship on whether internet users will share content

Positive
19%

None
74%

Negative
7%

Interestingly, the study found that the most likely person to share content – and to share it widely – is a female in her thirties to early forties. Plus, 64% of females share content at least once a week versus 58% of males.

The study also found that education is only a slight influence, with 64% of those without higher education sharing weekly versus 61% with degrees. Marital status, the presence of children, and household income prove not to be factors, neither is the length of time someone has been using the Internet.

Supermodel Kate Moss has become the new face of Agent Provocateur. The racy lingerie company is aiming to launch four virals which will be called ‘the four dreams of miss x’. Agent Provocateur is well known for its virals. Indeed, it could be said, that their recognition as a global brand can be based entirely on their viral marketing campaigns. In little under a year they managed to turn themselves around from being a fairly well known London boutique to a global phenomenon. The first and most famous campaign that they launched was the one that featured the scantily clad Kylie Minogue riding a bucking bronco.

It is little wonder that Agent Provocateur wish to continue riding their successful viral wave. Watch out for the clips in September.

20 June 2006

New number, same great team. Reach us (for pennies!) on 0845 680 1220 for all your viral, buzz and ghost-busting needs.

19 June 2006

The New York Times recently published an article stating that America’s oldest ad agency JWT has purchased all of the ad space on The Huffington Post homepage for one week.

JWT are using this ad space to showcase nine of their best TV spots in the hope that they will “go viral”, an effort that the agency hopes will shake off its stuffy, stuck-in-the-past image and help it keep up with the latest trends in the advertising world.

However, it’s a pity that they had to use the stuck-in-the-past methods of traditional media buying to try and achieve their viral aspirations. Ultimately, the most important thing that will result from the actions of JWT is the clear message that viral marketing is still a growing movement and is here to stay.

article

16 June 2006

A collaborative study conducted by Yahoo!, OMD Insight and Skive has revealed that advergames are becoming increasingly effective at boosting brand recognition.

The study - “Game On” - revealed that players of advergames are more likely to be affected by brand messages because they have allowed themselves to be drawn in to the game’s content. Gaming is deeply immersive and is far more engaging than the experience consumers have with traditional brand building efforts.

Interestingly, the study also found that a third of online adults have played an advergame, with 31% of those gamers either registering with the brand or making a purchase from them.

12 June 2006

Having waxed lyrical about the pros and cons of Content 2.0, one of the most interesting parts of the Content2.0 conference was the interview of real (yes, 100% GENUINE) young people - two kids (17 / 18ish) called Rory and Dot. The following is a brief account of what was revealed during their interview which I thought made really interesting reading:

Rory likes Photobucket (over Flickr), Apple and Myspace. He doesn't watch much TV but uses Shoutwire for news and info instead. He likes socialising with friends over doing this online, and likes his iPod - although he has had problems with it, which was made up by good customer service. He loves Skype because he can talk to his family in Australia and uses YouTube for up to an hour at a time. His main source of marketing info is through word of mouth, through friends or forums and has never clicked on an ad banner or Google adwords. He loves wikipedia, because he can participate and add to it, and downloads pirate content to his hearts content (he has 350GB on his hardrive), although would pay a supplement (of around £5) to his ISP to download. He first got into the internet to cheat homework at school - and believes he's done better because of it!

Dot likes Flickr (over Photobucket), Apple and specialist Journal networks (over generalist MySpace). She doesn't watch much TV and uses the BBC website and indy blogs instead, as well as downloading TV programmes to her computer (legal and illegal). She's a gamer and links in with various gamer networks and has an iPod. She is v.wary about commercialisation on the net, to the point of suspicion, uses YouTube and word of mouth is her main marketing point of contact (e.g. checking out what's top of Delicious). She is happy to download pirate content, and says would pay for it if it was made easier. She is v.wary about privacy on the net, and of her digital footprint - to the extent that she rarely publishes on blogs or forums.

07 June 2006

The Content 2.0 conference yesterday was a mixed bag of insight into the future of digital content (specifically user-generated content), online marketing and social networks. From a marketing perspective the event was pretty uninspiring, however from an insight into what the big players and big thinkers are thinking it was pretty good.
Thoughts / points of note included:

- the concept of the web as a bunch pipes and not as a channel, and how this challenges major media brands and the way they approach internet media domination (or not).

- the attempted monetisation of MySpace through selling brands a way of targeting key influencers within online social networking

- examples of how brands are successfully handling the concept of co-creation to generate product innovation and effective sales e.g. the Lego Santa Fe train

- examples of the deep impact of blogs (and other social media) on large corporations e.g. Microsoft and Robert Scoble

- an insight into Yahoo's internet search strategy - based around social search - and why their recent acquisition of Delicious and Flickr are so important to them (because of their social aspects)

- the concept that the best social networks are based around selfish needs - a point made by Matt Locke (BBC)

- the ridiculous business models of content2.0 companies like Last FM, whose main revenue stream seems to be based around Google adwords - not the most sustainable business model I've ever seen. Although Last FM does seem like an amazing service.

- the insight of youngpeople2.0 and the fact that they are increasingly engaging with content2.0 (more on this in future blog articles).

The event ended with a beer & innovation session involving Tony Wilson interviewing Tim Clark - Robbie William's manager - who provided thoughts on the issues involved with Music2.0. Amusingly this session ended in somewhat of a slanging match with a number of the beer-fuelled audience taking the concept of brand participation to heart, fueling a truly participative and heated debate.

02 June 2006

We've launched Rubber Republic's monthly Viral Intelligence newsletters. As a specialist viral agency we're constantly monitoring the viral and advertainment marketing landscape, and have created Viral Intelligence as a way of sharing this insight amongst industry friends.

Read Viral Intelligence on the web here ...or subscribe with the handy form at the top of this page.

01 June 2006

On the 26th May US based comScore Networks released a press release about the state of online video use. comScore based their findings on results from their new service Video Metrix. The service measures user participation in both advertising and content video materials.

Although the results were drawn from the US, they still highlight universal trends in digital media uptake. These trends are good news for those of us in the world of viral marketing; with comScore’s findings telling us that the number of minutes spent watching video had increased by 18% over the six month period between October 05 and March 06. CEO of comScore’s Media Metrix rightly states: "Video consumption on the web is rapidly approaching the tipping point for advertisers."

The web has become a domain in which we are increasingly living our lives and the boom in broadband is offering us massively rich experiences which put the user in the driving seat. Burger King’s Subservient Chicken campaign is a perfect example of the internet’s power to reach consumers through interactive web-based video technology. So far the website has clocked 460 million visitors.

On demand entertainment is clearly far more rewarding than the linear and dictatorial nature of television and its advertising methods. This is evident when you look at the fact that visits to the top 10 online video sites have increased by 164% in the last three months.

24 May 2006

Today's announcement of Benchmark Capital's £8 million investment in student networking site Bebo marks the start of the teen social networking turf wars.

Given the fickle nature of youth surfers it will be interesting to see how the social networking landscape will change in the coming 12 months. MySpace is certainly not the best piece of social software on the block, so perhaps with additional working capital in the bank Bebo will be able to carry on chipping away at their user-base and come out on top.

The key thing about Social software is that the "social" people bit is a thousand times more important than the "software" techy bit. People use these sites because their mates and people like them hang out in these virtual spaces.

Bebo have a lead on MySpace in this respect in that Bebo is based around Student and School networks (a bit like Friends Reunited), so their social networks already exist and are fairly easy to market to in a targeted way. If Bebo spend their money developing their software functionality, as well as marketing into schools then MySpace definitely has a problem on its hands.

19 May 2006

Here’s a very interesting article from Justin Kirby of DMC. A veteran in the scene, Justin paints a picture of the past present and future in the viral/connected marketing landscape and illustrates the fact that there is a growing divide between marketer and connected consumer; brands are “simply failing to keep up with the play”.

One of the most interesting things he points out is the need to generate solid ROI from viral campaigns, and reach beyond the spotty Russian teen kid audience that most un-targeted viral campaigns hit. Unless you're a worldwide acne brand, then getting a million visits from this kind of audience won't do much for you in marketing ROI terms.

We're constantly advocating the need for good strategy and well targeted campaigns to clients, and offer clients complete transparency in our seeding strategies. This doesn't mean that teenagers worldwide won't see your campaign, however it does mean that they see it alongside a high percentage of your target audience.

15 May 2006

Having delivered around 50 viral campaigns over the last five years, we've seen (and made) a fair few marketing mistakes on our way.

Based around this knowledge and know-how, we've developed a guide called "21 Common Mistakes" of what not to do when putting together a viral campaign.

These include:
2) Thinking that viral is about tits, ass and the "ick" factor
8) Thinking viral is just about the internet
12) Commissioning a campaign by saying "I want a game" or "I want a film"
13) Trying to do too much with a single execution
17) Numbers - getting your ROI metrics wrong

Because we've seen it all, and made a fair few of these mistakes ourselves, these should give the marketing community a good platform to improve the quality of virals around the net.

To download a .pdf of the full 21 Mistakes guide, click here

22 March 2006

As part of our recruitment drive to find some talented young things to join the growing Rubber Republic team, we've launched a wee viral campaign involving our dear DudeCorp friends over at www.dudecorp.com.

To check out what you shouldn't being doing at work click here.

09 March 2006

Rubber Republic, together with Principality Building Society, have been entered for a prestigious New Media Age award for their work together on their immensely successful Flick n Kick game.

Fingers crossed to see if we come away with a trophy or two!

03 March 2006

As part of a national drive to increase electoral registration amongst young people, Rubber Republic have launched "elejumper".

Backed by the Electoral Commission and the London Borough of Lambeth, elejumper is an addictive viral game involving an elephant on jet-propelled roller-skates, designed to create a buzz and drive traffic to a new service called Election Alarm Clock.

09 January 2006

It's Chimp week -- so the BBC are featuring our Chimp Challenge on their front page. Play (and learn) with monkeys here.

05 January 2006

eMarketer have a great article about reaching 12-21 year olds with gaming.

Great statistics include:

• 90% of 12-21 year olds who own 'entertainment-related electronic products' own a gaming device.


• 75% of them play online and offline games on their PC.


• 80% of young consumers visit game-related web sites.


• 65% of young consumers tell other people about products they like.

** data from Forrester research.

22 December 2005

"If it feels good do it again". Just in time for christmas we bring you two new Dude Corp episodes and a Photocopying game. Sounds too good to be true?

Check it out at DudeCorp.com

More Dude Corp coming soon to a screen near you!

15 December 2005

For our latest buzz game, we've stretched out our massively creative arms across the Severn to embrace the culture of our near and dear Welsh neighbours.

Working with Principality Building Society, the sponsors of the Welsh Rugby Premiership, we were tasked with unleashing the Welsh passion for rugby on the interweb -- and guess what? We've only gone and done it, in the form of the best online coin-pushing-inspired rugby game ever!

Flick 'n' Kick is that game, and, Tom Jones, it's good, boyo! Play it, love it, rarebit.

--

Update 19th Dec 2005: Great coverage on Flick 'n' Kick in key local press.

30 November 2005

Bag yo booty is a teen-targetted viral game for clothing label DilligafUK.

09 October 2005

We've been working with the Delib e-participation team to create a buzz for think tank Wave Network. P*mp my Party is a fun way for the public to have their say on the future of the Conservatives!

Proving the power of buzz, the project was covered in depth on the BBC Daily Politics show on 5th October. Check out our case study!

(we'll just emphasise that we're non-partisan at Rubber Republic, so Labour, Lib Dems, UKIP - why not commission us now!)

09 August 2005

We've created a viral portal. As well as bringing you the best content on the web daily, Rubber Shorts is also a great way to get your brand in front of key audiences using our viral and buzz creative.

>> Rubbershorts.com

06 June 2005

Not only have Team Rubber launched a great sock subscription service online, its only got a super addictive socktastic game into the bargain! Why not try your luck against the tricky butler man and see if you read his pesky butler mind to get the highest score.

Check out SocksForSir.com