Dixons: the last place you want to go...

I'm loving this new Dixons campaign, but I don't know i'm loving it in a healthy way. It's the sort of 'summarise the brand challenge' insight that turns into a whole strategy - sort of like Pot Noodle being the Slag of Snacks. I like buying tech toys as much as the next geek, on the few times I've had to go into Dixons I can safely say that it really is the last place you want to go for them. It doesn't feel properly dirty like Argos, so feels worse for pretending to have customer service but offering insultingly thick people who can't operate a camera trying hard sell features and benefits of cameras.

What it is doing though is getting people talking about Dixons, and evaluating their consideration list into 'research' (which Dixons would never have been on) and 'purchase' (which they may well stand a good chance of getting onto simply by gaining attention through humour and/or conversation). Selfridges and John Lewis make up the tension & the humour in this work, while the real target is Amazon, Pixmania, etc - everyone else on the 'purchase' side of the market.

So how is it working so far? It doesn't seem to be shifting huge volumes of searches, but Harrods are helping out with some free publicity by threatening to sue. And there's a love hate debate going on between people who see the ad - I tweeted about it when I first saw it, as did lots of other people. And the verdict is pretty positive so far - 66% positive on Twitter in London over the last few days
And the number of positive or negative (ie actually care) tweets currently outweighs the neutral ones - suggesting that if the strategy here is all about being talked about more than other cheap places amongst techie London Twitter type people, who might re-evaluate Dixons, then that positive sentiment is well deserved.

(you still wouldn't catch me in there though)

Comic Relief - what people are saying in real time

This is a post about data visualisation and Comic Relief. It's really not about Twitter...
As the UK gears up for the BBC's massive charity bash tonight, I thought that there might be some interesting Comic Relief style conversations going on. Neoformics data guru Jeff Clark has just released a tool that builds word clouds out of searches on Twitter (covering the last 200 references to a search query) - so allowing you to see in real time exactly what people are saying on Twitter.

Also really interested to see that basic sentiment analysis is included - seems to be at a word level (ie 'awesome' or 'funny' are automatically counted as positive regardless of context, and 'weird' shows up as negative) but any non-human based sentiment analysis is a major development in a free tool. Basically positives show up green and negatives red.

So then you can dig deeper into the data by clicking on any word in the cloud to add it into the search query: this is what 'comic relief weird' looks like
At this level there are much more references to Chris Moyles.

Given the levels of buzz there has been around TV shows in the last few weeks (Heston Blumental and Masterchef are two that I've joined in, and sure that non food geeks are doing this too), this type of application seems perfect to be added into backchannel visualisations from the major broadcasters.

Conversations, media agencies and Bill Bernbach

We Are Social have been hosting some great debate about the past, present and future of advertising over the last few days, centred on the question of what the role of great creative is in an increasingly networked world. Having resisted the urge to drop my favourite 'conversation' quote, from a Cory Doctorow piece on downloading movies, in to the comments, I'll paste it here:

Content isn't king. If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you'd choose your friends -- if you chose the movies, we'd call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about

and as recent great work such as VCCP's Meerkat for Compare the Market (Disclaimer: client) and the T-Mobile flashmobbing at Liverpool St have proved, content that is talked about leads to business success specifically because of the talkability, as well as because of the content.

Another comment on Robin's post referred to Bill Bernbach, and reminded me of a quote of his that I believe everyone working in advertising should think about on every piece of work they are involved with:

If your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.

It cuts to the heart of the problem that we are all trying to solve in an attention economy, and I think it is particularly relevant for media agencies. At some dim and distant point in my past, someone who I believed knew what they were talking about explained agency departments to me like this:

Planners identify the problem, creatives solve the problem, account people make sure the solution happens, and media people make sure the solution gets noticed.

Having only ever worked in a media agency, I can't vouch for whether this is true, but I've been known to put this together with the Bernbach quote if feeling self important. It is possibly what is at the root of my hatred of reach and frequency, the twin pillars of media planning, being bandied about as objectives in communication plans. Leaving aside arguments about how they are measured (not going to link, too boring, Google it), they are useful guides to the POTENTIAL to achieve objectives, but they are essentially hygiene factors. There's an important disclaimer hidden away in the definitions. Reach is the percentage of a target audience having the OPPORTUNITY to see an ad. Frequency is the average number of times they had that OPPORTUNITY. From a media person's perspective, EVERYTHING is about actually taking that opportunity. If an ad goes unnoticed, everything else is academic. Media planning STARTS once the hygiene factors are in place: to make sure the solution IS noticed.

And to drop in another nugget of 1950s wisdom, Word of mouth is the best medium of all. I'm not saying that advertising is the only way to generate it (that would be a whole other post), but I don't believe advertising can succeed if it doesn't.