Slick, sassy and effortlessly cool, ‘True Originals’ is a somewhat mysterious campaign from London based creative marketing agency ‘Think Espionage’ . The videos follow a Prada adorned ‘Euro-man’ across the world in pursuit of the world’s finest bartenders. Each one seems to be an expert in their field and able to create some seriously awesome cocktails with of course…Bacardi. Thankfully you never get to see a single bottle though, the videos are all refreshingly unbranded which instantly makes me nod in smug approval. Kudos to Bacardi for signing that off.
So what’s it all about? Well, following on from the experiential Bacardi bespoke platform they rolled out a few years ago, this campaign seems to be aiming to bring to life the experience of Bacardi -- but with all the benefits of a digital platform. Whilst Bacardi Bespoke was a very cool idea, its only problem would be a lack of reach. I am sure they intended to target ‘influencers’ but anyone who is anyone should be wary of nonsense like that. This campaign seems to be largely rooted in Facebook and with no dedicated website -- which is really interesting. These videos look super expensive; if there’s cash for execution, where’s the cash for the media? A great example of content-over-media and an indication that Bacardi must have faith in social.
The only gripe I have is that there’s definitely a touch of the Man from Delmonté going on about the narrator, but the quality of the production and the nicely cinematic storyline make up for it. I’m really keen to see where they go with this campaign, hopefully some bad-ass cocktail tournament a la Enter the Dragon or something.
Anyway, enjoy (responsibly), the ‘Outsider’ or the ‘Samurai’ are my favourite vids of a very cool campaign
Stefana Broadbent is a visiting researcher at the Department of Anthropology at UCL. Between 2004 and 2008 she was responsible for the development of the User Observatory at Swisscom. The Observatory runs ethnographic studies on the evolution of users? practices with information and communication technologies in Switzerland. Previously, she was in the Management Team of IconMedialab a multinational digital consultancy listed in Stockholm and was in charge of the hu-man computer interaction competence. In 1993 she founded CB&J, a company specialized in hu-man factors and user research that was acquired by IconMedialab in 1999.
In the last 15 years of applied research, there have been two main areas of investigation: the evolution of digital activities at home (information, leisure, communication and self expression) and the analysis of complex and highly automated work environments in aviation and process control. All of these projects had in common an ethnographic approach to capture evolving social practices and a design intent to inform and support the conception of new tools and services
Found this really cool slideshow from a company called Socialbees – here’s their blurb:
Socialbees was founded in November 2008 with the mission to provide brilliant and affordable Facebook Fan Pages, social ads and engagement strategy for small to medium sized businesses.
The slideshow from Social bees below outlines some things to think about.
I’ll be honest, I’m yet to really bite at the idea of Facebook Fan pages being a truly useable tactic in consumer/brand social engagement. Although branded content is quite prominent on Facebook (I see people share videos, share experiences, share websites – all the time), I have doubts about the degree of engagement that specific Fan Pages can nurture. My personal experience of joining such pages and groups is that at first – I’m all over it… loving it. But then it all slips by the way side and on my monthly ‘clean out’ (I’m pretty anal with Facebook) I tend to remove myself from groups/pages that have done little to involve or interest me.
There’s a definite challenge for brands with Facebook pages to :
keep people interested
keep peole engaged
keep the likelihood of ‘share this’ / ‘invite a person to join’ – UP.
Furthermore, there’s a need to think about the long term useability of such tactics – granted, people are all over Facebook now, but is this going to be the case in a few years? In a wickedly fast flowing attention economy such as social media – it’s paramount to keep your brand on the radar in up to date, interesting and relevant ways.
