ok, i admit it, i totally love reebok’s new ($30 million, multi-platform) campaign announcing their community site www.goruneasy.com. i’ve been seeing their billboards all over town, and even just watched an ad on their site, and it’s so fucking clever and cute and makes me laugh every time i see some new bit of their creative.
here’s one of my favorite images from the campaign:
The Run Easy campaign is a breath of fresh air from Reebok in a category obsessed with an obsessive attitude towards athletics. Nike has been successful positioning its brand to serious athletes, thus attracting millions of other consumers who admire but do not imitate this level of dedication. Too often both Reebok and Adidas ad campaigns have looked like pale clones of the original Nike strategy. This new multimedia campaign from Reebok aims to position Reebok squarely with casual athletes. It is a risky but worthwhile endeavor.
way to draw the running-shoe consumer identity line, and fucking stake your claim, reebok!
interestingly, here’s nike’s community site: www.joga.com. a site for hardcore soccer enthusiasts, and with a definitvely non-english url… what is it? i’m guessing like…. portuguese for “game”? (it’s juego in spanish… anyone speak portuguese?)
could the community sites of two companies that sell essentially the SAME freakin’ thing be ANY more different?
good to keep that in mind, that the community strategy approach can be just as varied as any other aspect of a campaign, and depend just as much on the kind of user you’re aiming to engage.
yet another question to throw into to the cauldron where that “how to measure the effectiveness of social engagement” mess is stewing: well, did your strategy engage the right audience in the right way?
LIB07 went off with nary a hitch, and wild success a week ago…finally! i liken the process of working on a music festival to going through labor with 20+ people for 5 months, and when the baby’s delivered it graduates, and moves off to college.
so we ushered LIB off, and in the aftermath, as per usual, i got insanely sick. full on can’t-get-out-of-bed sick, the ground moves when i get up sick, my sinuses are on a rampage sick, there’s a symphony in my lungs sick, etc…. this generally happens after every big production. back when i was managing the circus, we would all get sick after big performances, as if on cue. maybe it’s a matter of immunity being the first to get dumped overboard once the momentum throws a mutiny, or maybe it’s a matter of the celebratory champagne bottles that get passed around the whole crew at the end of the weekend. either way…. it’s been like that for the past week, and i am finally now starting to head in the direction of health once again.
there is a LOT of new news coming up in the next couple of weeks. changes are afoot, and on their heels are a some new projects that i’m gonna be wrapping my head around–and hopefully, a few of them are going to be MY projects, which should also be an exciting change.
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until THEN, however…. i wanted to make a belated little mention here about…
the Spring 2007 Do LaBAritst Network email that we put out just one day before the festival doors opened. in the ensuing madness i didn’t have a chance to post anything about it here before, but it’s something i’m tremendously proud of, and keep getting prouder of with each issue. (this is the second. the first one came out in Winter 07). we put out this online arts publication showcasing the best of the creativity emerging from the Do Lab’s community on a quarterly basis and i’m very happy to be able to report that as the Do LaB’s email list keeps growing (now, a full 30% larger than it was back when we did the first issue of the AN, just 4 months ago), our open and click-thru rates get higher and higher. the Spring AN email, featuring some kick-ass videos, had the highest open & click thru rates of any of our emails, with almost 3 times as many people actually checking it out as did the first one).
and furthering the community- generated direction that this project is heading, the design for this issue of the AN was created by the winner of the LIB Poster Contest, Albertico Acosta. having different graphic artists within the community participate in creating the AN is definitely something i’d like to continue. albertico’s winning poster entry (chosen by the community’s vote):
For a Marketer who doesn’t identify as a Geek, going to SXSW Interactive is pretty similar to getting sucked into a passing acquaintance’s personal blog. It’s full of curious information, titillating details, and makes you feel an undeniably voyeuristic amusement in the certainty that the author wasn’t really prepared for you to be reading any of it quite so out of the context within which it was written.
This may sound like a sort of far-fetched analogy at first. After all, half the premise for interactive media is exposure. You’d expect those most deeply involved in its development would be aware that their industry isn’t a filtered post. And you’d be quite surprised at what you’d inadvertently discover.
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SXSW is a conglomeration of festivals. There’s the Music one, which everyone knows. There’s the Film one, which heard that music was throwing a party while its parents were out of town and showed up too. And then there’s interactive. The little orange kid on the right, waving his hand, going, “Hey! Me too!”
People get really passionate about movies, and people get really hardcore passionate about music, but “Interactive” refers to a kind of tool that enables a process. For most people, it’s not the tool or the process of Interactive that gets them all hot and bothered. It’s the experience!
And yet it’s the experience of interactive that seemed to go almost unnoticed at SXSW-Interactive. Your favorite movie is not a choose-your-own-adventure, and your favorite band is not going to let you sit in on gigs. Interactive holds the promise of precisely that kind of meaningful, resonating, participatory experience you’re craving with all that has previously been inaccessible, but all it wants to talk about is the application.
At the event’s opening remarks speech, the audience was split up into key populations. First the designers in the room were asked to stand up. Then they sat down and the programmers were asked to represent for their team. Next, the “money people” were asked to stand. They got to stand up for longer than the other two groups so that everyone could remember who they are better.
And that was it.
That’s apparently all there is to interactivity. There’s the design of the tool, there’s the development of the tool, there’s the funding of the tool, of course, but as far as an understanding of the people who use the tool and the impact of how they’re using it and what they’re using it for–what would that have to do with a conference about interactivity?
It’s kind of like a camera festival with movies thrown in for bullet points. Or an amp festival with rock and roll as a liner-note afterthought. I mean, hey–there’s absolutely nothing wrong with getting excited about cameras and amps, but if you were actually interested in creating an opportunity for a lot of forward-thinking, curious, innovative individuals to converge (“convergence” is the new “2.0”), wouldn’t it make sense to develop the focus of this meeting ground into more than just about… uh… equipment?
You don’t need to be a filmmaker or a musician to appreciate movies and music. Why should you be expected to be a technologist to appreciate interactive media?
Ok, ok, you get it. Fine. Enough bashing Interactive for missing the point while busily staring into the source code of its navel. There’s another culprit here as well that’s just as guilty.
That’s right, Marketing, I’m talking to you!
Watching the panelists on “How to Build an Online Fanbase” describe their personal discoveries of promotional strategies as if they had individually invented the wheel of marketing, it was difficult not to feel frustrated by the evident segregation keeping the two industries apart.
John Batelle, of Federated Media, hit the nail on the head during the panel on “Why Marketers Need Conversational Media,” when he said, “Marketers are scared of not being in control.” Considering that this interactive tool and the process it enables seem to accomplish something that is completely anathema to the industry that invented “Spin Control,” of course Marketing would be reluctant to play nice with Interactive.
Well….Deal with it, Marketing. Interactive’s not going away, so why don’t you go and hang out with it? Maybe go check out a festival or something. Get drunk together on free booze, and make out with it in some dark corner of a crowded club. Might even be fun!
And that way maybe next year Interactive will even consider asking the marketers to stand after the “money people” sit down.
campaign announcing their community site www.goruneasy.com. i’ve been seeing their billboards all over town, and even just watched an ad on their site, and it’s so fucking clever and cute and makes me laugh every time i see some new bit of their creative.
