Friday Five – Page 148

It’s Friday — huzzah! — and as good a day as any to wrap up comments from the Global Marketing Summit. Here are five more takeaways from that event:

I’m not as digitally savvy as I thought I was. At the opening of her talk, Google’s Maureen Schumacher gave us a 25-question quiz to gauge how “digitally connected” her audience was. I scored a lowly 13 out of 25, because I don’t have a Slingbox, a wireless network at home or a Second Life avatar; I’ve never bought or sold on eBay or watched a mobisode; and I don’t own an iPod (although I have two other mp3 players). On the plus side, I do text, blog, buy music online, use a VoIP phone and IM at least once during a typical day. Schumacher said 20 percent of the MBAs who apply for jobs at Google routinely get 20 or more points on this question.
That eye-slitting scene from Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou (YouTube vid) is just as disturbing today as it was when i first saw it in a college film class. A couple of ad guys showed the eye-slit clip as part of a session on shock advertising.
I can see the value of shock advertising for certain non-profits for raising awareness (.i.e., about AIDS or the dangers of smoking) but I’m having a hard time seeing how shock advertising might translate to the higher ed sector.
The most fascinating session of the day was one on advances in neuroscience to predict how consumers might engage with a brand in a TV ad. This session was presented by representatives of two Boston-based companies: One to One Interactive and Innerscope, an MIT Media Lab spinoff. The presenters discussed their research on using a “smart vest” that measures a subject’s heart and breathing rates, skin conductance and motion, combining those readings with eye-tracking measurements to determine how a subject reacts to a test commercial. As an example, they showed us a test they did for Heineken and overlaid an “engagement map” to show when the audience was most engaged. This white paper offers more details on the technology behind the research. It’s fascinating work, even if it does sound a bit like something straight out of A Clockwork Orange.
An executive from MTV — Todd Cunningham, the senior vice president of brand strategy and planning — talked about how that megacorp manages to think globally while marketing locally. He referenced MTV’s “Circuits of Cool” research into what role technology plays in “coolness” for young people. He ended with four suggestions for maximizing the role of technology in young people’s lives: 1.) associate with the things that matter (make sure the technology enables or supports those things); 2.) make it easy to make the right choice; 3.) help consumers manage their future occasions (a la Facebook); and 4.) make your brand experiences time well spent (people want simple experiences; avoid “feature creep”).

Let that be the end of the matter. The Global Marketing Summit is now officially a wrap.

Viral is all the rage, it seems — in video, in marketing, in sickness. Or at least it’s enough of a rage to give me enough Friday Five fodder.

Let’s start off with SCADshorts, a viral video campaign developed by the Savannah College of Art and Design. Developed by the Dandy Dwarves, a group of SCAD alumni who put their video production education to work, the campaign consists of a series of oddball videos — one a month — that are part of a puzzle prospective students must solve in order to win an iPod. Morgan Davis of erelevant offers his take on this clever campaign.
More about viral video from Karine Joly, who discusses how Vancouver Film School made the most of one graduate’s video, “Piece of Mind” (YouTube link), by creating and releasing on YouTube it’s own “making of” video (YouTube link). “In this 7-minute video,” Karine writes, “VFS manages to let this talented student promotes the Canadian institution, its professors and its offering – all this done by presenting the work that went into ‘Piece of Mind.'”
Great writing, unfiltered. Seth Godin extols the benefits of infectious prose that is free from corporate filters, and creates a mini-virus by uncovering some pretty decent, linkable bloggage. “The filter,” Godin writes, “is important, sometimes. It keeps us focused and on time and from veering too far in the wrong direction. But in a Long Tail world, the filter is actually better off gone.”
In what we hope will become a viral campaign across campuses, 70 presidents of U.S. colleges and universities have signed the Presidents Climate Commitment, a move to make college campuses more sustainable.
Virality is not confined to cyberspace. Take the underground press movement. It’s alive and well on a campus where you’d least expect it: right here at UMR, a predominantly engineering- and technology-oriented university. While the official student newspaper (The Missouri Miner) is threatening to sue the university and student council for cutting the paper’s budget, a group of students have created an alternative newspaper called The Mineshaft. (Tag line: “Where the real news is buried.”) This weekly publication sprang up in December. In the fine tradition of Soviet samizdat newspapers, The Mineshaft is printed on 8 1/2-by-11 paper, photocopied and distributed throughout campus. All the writers use pseudonyms, but according to the latest edition, that may change. (Writes Sybil, the editor in chief: “While we initially thought that anonymity would allow for all discussion to be on our content, we have found instead that the issue of who we are has just become even more controversial.”) The writing and reporting isn’t terrific — as I said, most of our students are here to study engineering, and we have no journalism program — but the spirit behind The Mineshaft is right.