+one turns the marketing monologue into a dialogue. Formed from members of King James, Atmosphere and Mnemonic we are a cross-discipline creative team that craft cunning cross/social and media-independent campaigns.
Advertising is changing and we believe our new environment requires completely new skills and approaches. +one is a formalised collaboration between experts from PR, advertising, design and the web, working as a tight integrated team across all disciplines to create unified yet flexible branded messaging.
As part of the Levis Loves Local campaign (which included a clothing range in collaboration with local illustrators) we created guides to the neighbourhoods of some of SA’s coolest creatives. The illustrated maps which can be downloaded from Facebook show the kind of places only locals know about. Check it out by clicking on the Levi’s Loves Local tab on their Facebook page.
As well as the maps we’ve also hidden some tees from the collection in various locations featured.
We recently hit Jo’burg to anoint a new Steri Stumpie Official Unofficial Ambassador – a young gentleman called Christo. We delivered him his very own fan club to reward him for his dedication for the brand (what more could any guy want?). The visit is part of an ongoing programme to reward brand fans in new and unusual ways. Check the Steri blog out for more.
Atmosphere and +one have just launched a new campaign for Softlips (a lip care brand). Aimed at girls in their early twenties primarily the Softlip Stylista search will give one person the chance to be a red carpet reporter for the brand (plus a bunch of other goodies including styling from YDE). The whole campaign is driven through Facebook (which is proving much more effective than building campaign microsites for us) and whilst only launches in media in August is already getting some good word of mouth buzz.
+one has just launched a new batch of Steriphenalia – the stuff we use to reward Steri Stumpie fans that interact with brands and do drops of products with to bloggers and bands.
The kit includes:
Mr Steri Stumpie head stickers (for customising Steri Stumpie bottles)
We picked up a PRISM alongside our PR homies at Atmosphere last week for Steri Stumpie. The PRISMs are the premier (and uh only) local PR awards and are measured on business results as well as creativity. As we picked up a bronze at the Bookmarks last year we hope our strategy of working our way through all the colours pays off by the time it gets to Cannes and the Loeries…
Seems like we always get some raised eye brows when we mention arbness as one of the key qualities of a good social media campaign. Of course not every campaign can be based around arb… we get that it’s probably not appropriate for KWV for example. But for fun irreverent brands like kulula and Steri Stumpie we push ourselves to be quite out there in our ideas. The reason why? we’re not competing with rival brands, we’re competing with this kind of thing (and lolcats, hitler rants etc etc):
The latest in our video blogs for KWV following progress in the harvest. This time we got some insight from some of the junior winemakers and cellar workers.
An example of how Twitter has become a powerful PR tool leapt out at the woodwork at us this Friday when messages on the kulula’s Twitter profile (which we run) started being quoted on the front page of SA newspapers. This came about following kulula’s tongue-in-cheek advert poking fun at FIFA’s draconian use of trade marks. Earlier in the week kulula received an unamused lawyer’s letter which we mentioned on Twitter: “oh dear letter from FIFA’s lawyers says we broke their trademark of the use of “South Africa” and think our non-WC ad was about soccer…”
This was the only external mention of FIFA’s blocking of the ad. It took a few days, and conversations on Twitter with various bloggers and other well-connected types, for this message to worm its way into the hands of the media. Resulting in a snowball of coverage – peaking with calls to our office (sister agency Atmosphere handles PR) from the Financial Times (UK) and BBC.
Online there was literally hundreds of messages of support for kulula from South African’s annoyed with the trademarking of the words “South Africa” amongst other things. Facebook and Twitter were used to answer questions and clarify information (which has a habit of getting distorted as it passes around the twittersphere).
A great example of what we knew already: Twitter is a great way to have public conversations on behalf of a brand without having to go through the more corporate and formal press release route (and much quicker obviously). It also really helped that we had the people crafting the ad/s, the PR people and social media all in one place and feeding information into each other.
Keep an eye out for more on this in the next week or two. Plans are afoot.
1: Content is more important than channels: as long as people look at the content it really doesn’t matter if they’re on the brand website, Facebook or YouTube.
2: If it’s worth creating a social media campaign, it’s worth booking some online media spend to support it.
3: Consumer-generated content is more powerful than brand-created content.
4: Managing conversations and communities in social media campaigns requires skill and experience (it’s not a job for the intern…).
5: Be current and be quick.
6: Go to where your consumers hang out; don’t force them to come to you.
7: The more arb the better.
8: The starting point for any campaign should be; what can we give the consumer of value that they can’t get elsewhere.
9: Flash sucks (most of the time)
10: “Virals” do too (as this is causing some debate, it’s worth clarifying that whilst i think getting content to go viral is great, creating a ridiculously expensive, flash-heavy piece of programming that relies on going viral to be successful, is asking for trouble. I think Sturgeons Law that “90% of everything is crud” certainly applies to the grubby genre of viral marketing – Dan).
It’s harvest time in the winelands so we’ve been busy documenting the behind-the-scenes action at KWV. The aim of our activity for them is to get consumers to feel closer to the people that actually make the wine and allow the winemakers and others involved to tell KWV’s story in their own words. One of the interesting things about KWV is that their head winemaker is actually an Australian (which would have been considered treason a few years ago no doubt). This is the latest video post in which he explains his background and role:
We’ve also been working on their Facebook page and have added in an application for our Global Dinner Party promotion (that will bring three couples from around the world for a dinner party in the vineyards later in the year).
Facebook applications are definitely our new favorite toy if you’re interested in seeing some more examples check out the excellent customfacebookpage.com
