Digigen & The TinMan

Oil manufacturer Castrol has launched the UK’s first personalised digital billboard which uses traffic cameras to advise drivers about the right oil for their cars. The initiative will encourage drivers to drive past specially installed cameras safely in order to get ‘flashed’. Rather than identifying cars driving over the speed limit or which haven’t paid the congestion charge, the cameras will help drivers by spot checking cars, and will flash a personalised engine maintenance message to the driver on a nearby billboard. (Interesting Snippets)

In an age where everyone talks about the death of outdoor, I think it is actually becoming one of the smarter advertising channels. It is meshing digital technology with great copywriting to deliver really clever, progressive ideas. Castrol have seemingly jumped on this, providing a cool outdoor platform for drivers to gain a quick health check on their car.

Having been banned from driving for 6 months, I have an inherent fear of speed cameras. However, I am sure I would be more than happy to get flashed by these cameras as it provides such useful information.

“Castrol’s “Right Oil, Right Car” digital billboard campaign delivers targeted messages to motorists. A camera records a passing car’s registration number, which is then matched to the make and model of the car via Castrol’s access to the U.K’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency database. Castrol can then deliver the correct oil recommendation for the vehicle on the digital billboard located further down the road.”  Digital Signage Expo

Just a thought from me, but isn’t that Wisdom of Crowds simply… if you get enough people to discuss something at some point it will average out at the right answer? Wisdom of Crowds should have been a one pager called: “The Wisdom of Crowds – take the mean of a large group and its more likely to be right than the mean of a small group”

Alot has been made of the Wisdom of Crowds. From Derren Brown to James Surowiecki, we cling on to the hope that the “many are more powerful” than the few. I’m no scientist but to me the fact that you can get 1,000 people into a room, and they are more likely to get an answer than 10 people of similar quality doesn’t astound me.

Blink is another book which I feel could have also been resolved in one page… which would have said “Blink. You should go with your first instinct”.

A new series from me, kicked-off with a really exciting new product design/manufacturing/distribution company, Zazzle. Billed in Fast Company as the potential new “Amazon of custom goods” Zazzle is a really exciting company to have a look at. One of the problems I feel sometimes with projects I work on is that we often ask companies to customise a product, create a new product etc. However, clearly for clients this does cause issues, they can’t just flip the switch on a machine and get it to create something slightly different. My gut feeling is that Zazzle could provide this service to these companies at a fraction of the cost.

Although it seems pretty basic on the face of it, zazzle.co.uk, there is plenty of potential depth to the site and opportunities. Keds is the first obvious example, although Disney were actually the first brand to use the company. Keds allows shoppers to customise all elements of their shoe to give every single customer their own unique shoe. “Zazzle integrated both software and hardware into their factory in China”. There is clearly a massive commitment from Zazzle to make this work, something that all potential retailers/manufacturers could think about.

I see a number of different ways brands could use this, here are some of them:

1) Creating customisable prizes to competitions. Imagine Little Big Planet allowing customers to design a new character and then the one which is most voted is turned into a vinyl toy. Little Big Planet could then go on to sell this in stores like Magma and Forbidden Planet.

2) Creating customsied, campaigning t-shirts. Giving consumers who participate in a campaign the opportunity to print their own tshirts based on numerous designs. This could have been perfect for something like T-Mobile Trafalger Square where all users could have customised t-shirts to say “I was there”

3) Customised products. We talk alot about co-creation, but often brands treat it as a nice to do and don’t follow through. The Zazzle platform would allow brands to truly co-create and customise with consumers. I see it being pretty efficient as well.

p.s. you can order that t-shirt here on Zazzle

http://www.zazzle.co.uk/digigen_youve_read_the_blog_now_get_the_shirt-235530760484313059

I have been avidly reading NYT’s coverage of the NetFlix $1m competition. If you don’t know anything about this, NetFlix hosted a competition to create an improvement in its service.. the prize $1m. The team winners were a 7 man team, who had exactly the same response as the second place losers….except they delivered it 20mins earlier. As the article points out, that is a very expensive 20mins. ($50k per minute)

The good news for all your losers out there, is that these losers have come up trumps. The team from Opera have managed to drum up an additional $10m worth of business directly from the learnings they discovered in the NetFlix process.

I’m sure this isn’t what they originally hoped when they entered but its quite an interesting way of thinking. e.g. Let’s enter this competition and see what learnings we can take from it. If we win great, if we don’t great.

I also wonder how many of these competitions we might see cropping up. Building improvements to eBay’s auction model, Facebook sourcing a new platform design from within its community, the list could go on and on. Perhaps we might even see Craigslist redesigned by someone who has got work through the classified board.

Either way its a nice story to bring a close to a Wednesday workday…

I have been studying social media pages for awhile in my role. We have some real success which we have been running for clients, no more so than Skittle Skuffle on Facebook. One of the most successful brand pages they have run. I think therefore that I have hit on a pretty smart model which I believe demonstrates what brands should be doing. Essentially it shows the real cost of running social media pages, through ad, human and content spends. Of course this needs refining somewhat and we are already on the fifth version. However, here is an original version.