Some surprising outdoor advertising

I wrote about Mflow last week as it launched in public beta, with a few thousand participants. It is a great concept (which I'm intending to buy some music from soon... will report back) but I was really surprised to see what looked like an ad for them at Oxford Circus - it seems to be such a spreadable product (or will be once you can bring your social graph in) that this is far too early for mass media advertising. Well, if you can't currently import your social graph then surely this is a complete waste of money? Iron out the tech stuff while it is in beta, then scale?
and on the subject of spreadable ideas relying on advertising, the same train contained this slightly desperate plea to use one of the original idea viruses... Hotmail. MSFT are actually investing in paid media that promotes.... a spam filter. How are the mighty fallen

McDonalds interactive outdoor ads - Piccadilly Circus

Ha ha, love this!

It's the start of tourist season in London; over a million visitors heading here over the next three months, and seemingly all converging on Piccadilly Circus. So McDonalds have found a neat use of their digital billboard there to give people something interesting to do, which is designed to inspire creativity and sharing of home-made media. It looks a bit like this:

so gives people witty backgrounds to put their friends in. There's an official Flickr group, which does only contain 105 pictures so far (some of which look suspiciously like Leo Burnett folk might have taken them to kick the group off), but to be fair it only went live last week. Here's a couple of images: (photo credit - Flickr user Monty Verdi)

(photo credit - Flickr user Dan.Outram)
And a video....


I love the simplicity of this idea: taking the classic Leaning Tower of Pisa holiday snap, and inspiring people to go out and create their own. Let's face it, everyone who visits London ends up at Piccadilly Circus, and there's not that much to do there. Are branded holiday snaps a new media channel?
(HT to Alexander Wipf at Leo Burnett Frankfurt for the link)

Why aren't brands asking this?

Respect to Camden Council: it's the question that everyone wants an answer to.

(and another question: why is this the highest quality photo that my Blackberry can take?)

Yahoo Japan trials Minority Report billboards

I've been expecting personalized outdoor advertising to turn up at some stage ever since seeing Minority Report. I'd always expected that this would be based on some data privacy troubling RFID reading technology that could scan your mobile for web history and shopping preferences. However Yahoo Japan have developed face-recognition software that can identify the age and gender of passers by, and serve them *relevant* advertising messages.

The demo will initially run across 500 screens in Fukuoka, which will also play news and weather updates. Given that we already have the most videoed public spaces in the world in the UK, I can't see how this would theoretically cause too much problem if it was rolled out here - certainly far less intrusive than the RFID model. Whether this would actually work will be more related to how useful the ad content is, and how much the it adds to the environments where it exists. (so not holding out much hope there....). Will be an interesting one to watch though.
(HT to @deandonaldson for the link)

Advertising and recessions

I like this.... and not just because i've been talking about the same reasons to carry on spending through a recession for the last few months in just about every meeting i've been in!

The FT Advertising in a Downturn resource that this is advertising has a good mix of McKinsey and PIMS data, so hopefully it is going to reach a good number of FDs.....

Outdoor outdone

Shouldn't really lift from Meme Huffer, but if anything this is worse than the Stockwell one from Tuesday

Viral tactics? or am I too cynical

Pretty bad hey! and to be fair, taken down as soon as CBS realised what had happened. And before the days of 5mb mobile cameras, that would have been that. But it isn't, that wasn't, and this pic became this morning's car crash email. And there's a cynical voice in my head imagining the brainstorm where someone thought they could get away with it all being an unlucky coincidence...."no, CBS rep please take it down as soon as possible it's terrible" (we sent a grad out last night to get a photo).

Result: publicity....

No, marketers aren't that cynical.....