Plan UK is a non-profit organization that helps  children in third-world countries. A few weeks ago, Plan UK initiated the “Because I am a Girl” campaign, introducing a ground-breaking interactive ad on a bus stop in Oxford Street (London). The interactive billboard advertisement uses a facial recognition software with a high-definition camera to scan pedestrians and identify whether a man or woman is standing in front of the screen. Accordingly, it shows different content. Females will be shown the full 40-second video of the “Because I’m a Girl” campaign that promotes sponsoring a girl to receive proper education in a developing country. Males won’t be able to see the full ad and will be directed to Plan UK’s website instead. The aim is to highlight the fact that women and girls across the world are denied choices and opportunities on a daily basis due to poverty and discrimination.

This campaign has been a success mainly due to the attention that it has attracted over its use of facial recognition technology. However, it could also cause offence if it mistakes a man for a woman and vice-versa, which could lead to some awkwardness, or even more harsh reactions. Even though the facial recognition system has a 90% accuracy rate in analyzing a person’s facial features and determining their gender.

Wondering how long will it take until the first brands start using that technology. Or could it be that excluding some people from your reach is somehow suicidal from a marketing perspective? The only truth is that the use of technology in advertising (and not only) will keep on surprising us. Remember the virtual supermarket of Tesco:

Dimitris T.

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http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companies/2012/full-list

To be honest, I am not aware of all of them but I could definitely predict which would be on top of the list..

Enjoy!

Fay Panagopoulou

These photos are more like a reminder (hopefully not of how bad the analysis of my camera is)!!! I also tried to make a video of all the photos of the last session (and some other contents of the seminar)…Being a first timer, please show some leniency…(or let’s just all blame it on YouTube quality issues)!!!

Dimitris

“The other day someone tweeted me asking about current costs of phone calls versus the cost per Tweet for customer service,” Frank writes. “Ugh!” From this, you can tell that companies still see talking to their customers as a cost and they want to minimize it. They don’t actually want to talk to their customers. “Since they are worried about brand sentiment, they may appease you to shut you up. Sorry, shutting your customer up is not customer service and trying to expedite resolution isn’t a metric for the new world of consumer influence.”

Frank sees that companies look at the success that Dell and Comcast started having a few years back and think they can do the same just by adding a Twitter stream to the customer service call queue, and sticking an outsourced marketing person on Facebook. They think that by standing outside a fancy restaurant with a hamburger in their hand and letting the smells of the kitchen waft over them means that people will think they’re serving up prime rib. Frank says that most people are missing out on “the amount of work that went on behind Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. The true transformation of these businesses what not in taking to social network, but instead building the back end to start fixing the problems that created negative experiences in the first place.”

Frank says that companies need to start using smarter and more accurate measurements to unlock the true value of using social media customer service. Workers need to start telling executives the truth about how social media works. If they don’t know, they should stop lying and pretending that they do. Frank would like to see companies use metrics like the net promoter score of the social customer and tracking what products they’re buying.

“Huge ROI can be gained just by measuring changes that stem from listening. It’s sad to say, but the only changes I have seen are those due to large or threatening groundswells,” writes Frank Eliason. “And in my view, change was only made to silence the noise.”

So it’s still true that if you want to get your problems expedited, make a groundswell. For now, it’s still the only way to get companies to notice you, even though listening with a tin ear is costing them much more than actually making their product and service better.

Michael Porter (professor at Harvard University) has come up with this ‘Shared value’ concept. It’s about creating more value, by invloving the consumers more, by not only looking at pure economical value-creation, but also Social value creation.

“….companies remain stuck in a “social responsibility” mind-set in which societal issues are at the periphery, not the core.”

As corporate social responsibility is seen as a  ‘cost post’ to profit maximalization, and it is only limited to the CSR budget, Shared Value is about mobilizing the entire budget of the corportation.

It could be described as a new way of doing business, which i think would be an improvement in the efficiency of the contemporary economic system.

“Capitalism is an unparalleled vehicle for meeting human needs, improving efficiency, creating jobs, and building wealth. But a narrow conception of capitalism has prevented business from harnessing its full potential to meet society’s broader challenges..”

It is further explained in the article. Pleas read (not long)

“The big Idea: creating shared value” – Michael Porter and Mark Kramer

http://www.professoralanross.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/The-Big-Idea_-Creating-Shared-Value-Harvard-Business-Review.pdf

Here you can see professor Porter explaining himself  the problem pretty enthusiasticly, and the solution!

Rihan Warraich

Unilever is switching down its social media activity. This to focus more on creating fans by word of mouth. Because the fans on facebook are not all real friends but often people that liked the page for competitions and other things like that.http://consumerchanneldynamics.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Is this a smart move? I think they got a point. I also liked some pages in the past because I could win something there or just for something interesting. So shifting the focus more to word of mouth creation sounds good. But I don’t think they should stop with social media. Because it is important in creating the word of mouth that Unilever wants to create. So they should not stop with social media but shift their focus on the social media. It is a trend that will stay and otherwise Unilever will lose on a key playground for the future.

A fun example of good brand promotion is this:

http://www.culy.nl/inspiratie/facebook-humor-tussen-heineken-en-douwe-egberts/

It is in dutch, but basically what happened was that Heineken started with an ad of a heineken beer that looks like a coffee cup. And asked who wanted to drink, Douwe Egberts(coffee company) responded with: I will!. And so multiple companies started with reactions where they used their brands to suggest things related to the topic. I thought it was fun and a good way to raise brand awareness.

Cyriel de Bruijn