MCCP Irish youth culture trends and insights

From the great folks at MCCP Ireland

My Easter!

Had some Alan Partridge Toblerone moments this Easter! That’s what I get for staying off chocolate I guess. (PS my personal preference was cadburys egg with a pint of milk!)….If easily offended don’t watch this to the end!

Hope you had a nice long weekend.

When Curad took on Band-Aid

I love the story of how Curad, the smaller player in the bandage market took on Band-Aid, the market leader. The bandage maker has been smart in how it took on Band-Aid, I mean lets face it a plaster is a plaster. But when a kid has an ‘ouch’ moment sometimes getting a plaster on them can be a challenge….also you want that plaster to be the ‘make everything better’ moment.With J&J behind them you would think there would be no way that they could take them on and win. But when it came to children’s bandages, that is exactly what they did.

In 1990  Curad partnered with McDonalds, in what was a moment of marketing genius. With 85 percent of kids under the age of six visiting McDonald’s about once per week, kids were more than happy to see their favourite McCharachters on the plaster that would make them feel better. (Also a 25cent off voucher drove traffic to McD’s!)

Curad continued to cater to the ever-growing children’s market and in 1991, began to produce specially shaped bandages for fingers, elbows, knuckles, and knees.

Then they really went after Band-Aid and in conjunction with several blockbuster movies and television programs, Curad had its bandage strips printed with such characters as Casper the Ghost, Jurassic Park dinosaurs, and Cartoon Network characters.

Then in 1997 they launched a Design Your Own Bandage contest, in conjunction with Nickolodeon. The contest was so successful that it became an annual event.Not wanting to leave tweens and teens out, they launched Tattoo-U designs.

In another clever move, in 1998, Curad teamed up with the American Youth Soccer Organization and became a sponsor of the AYSO, which in turn offered Curad bandages as the official team bandage.

Of course kids dont actually buy the bandages so the marketing strategy was targeting the consumers who actually did the purchasing, married people between the ages of 35-54. Most of the mass marketing occurred where the kids usually shopped with their parents, not pharmacies, but supermarkets.

Johnson & Johnson’s Band-Aid, Curad’s major competitor, didnt sit still of course. They fought back trying to go one better than Curad launching a range of plasters with Disney characters, endangered species (which was a tie-in with the World Wildlife Fund), and NASCAR racing designs.

The Results

• By the late 1980s, Curad had approximately 25 to 30 percent of the total market, while Johnson & Johnson had about 60 to 65 percent.
• In 1990, Curad’s sales increased about 20 percent, and Band-Aid’s sales dropped about 10 percent.
• By 1993, Curad held 36.1 percent of the entire children’s bandage market, while Johnson & Johnson held 26.6 percent of the children’s bandage market.
• By the end of the 1990s, though Johnson & Johnson still had greater overall bandage sales, Curad continued to lead the children’s bandage market.

Antwerp Zoo – How to welcome a Baby Elephant

Don’t just say there is a new Elephant, allow people be a part of it, have that feeling of a new arrival. Very well executed idea.

Is Facebook working?

I presented at the Fundraising Ireland conference recently about research I carried out with the DSPCA around Facebook and levels of engagement offline as a result of online activity. We found that people were more aware of animal rights issues and more likely to take offline action as a result of the organisations Facebook activity. You can look at my presentation here.

Last week Beth Kanter had a guest post by Kyle Andrei of Idealware on her (brilliant) blog who have done research on who is seeing success with Facebook pages. They looked at how successful people were in attracting new constituents. They:

asked survey respondents whether or not they felt they had attracted new constituents (donors, members, volunteers, clients, or event attendees) through their Facebook page. And people did indeed see successful results.

The percentage of respondents who said they they’d seen “a few” or “substantial” new constituents of that type, who also said that attracting that type of constituent was important to them.

They also found that:

People didn’t see as much success with new donors and volunteers, though….

Further to that, they have found that:

Respondents reported the most success with using Facebook to direct new people to their websites, with more than 75% saying they’ve seen an increase in web traffic. With free web analytics tools like Google Analytics, tracking who followed your link from your Facebook page is one of the most measurable goals included in this survey.

And more than 65% said that they’d had some success with moving people to take some form of action for a cause, like signing petitions or other advocacy actions. Online petitions and other political or advocacy actions are easy to do, demand little time, and are easily spread through Facebook and other social media.

Following in suit from the constituent impact, donations saw little success; less than 30% saw success. Surprisingly, respondents didn’t have a huge amount of success with increasing their email lists via Facebook either only 42% saw results. Maybe people aren’t including links or widgets to allow their fans to sign up, or like one person mentioned, fans may prefer to be contacted through Facebook messages and updates, instead of through email.

 

The percentage of respondents who said they they’d seen “some” or “substantial” effect that they would attribute to Facebook. The percentage of “Moved People to Take Action” and “Increased Donations” are out of those organization who said those actions were important to them, while “Increased Website Traffic” and “Increased Donation” are based on all respondents.

 

This is really interesting work and thanks to Beth Kanter for sharing it on her blog. (Original Source: Beths Blog, guest post by Kyle Andrei)

The Lottery of Life

I don’t know about you but I sometimes think about the Lottery of Life, how my life could have been different based on where I was born.  Save the Children commissioned Swedish advertising agencies Lowe Brindfors and B-Reel to build “The Lottery of Life” in order to give users the opportunity to see where they might have otherwise been born.

When you log on to the site the intro tells you about the lottery of life and then you can connect with facebook (or just add your name) and then spin the wheel. Using population stats you will find out where you could have been born and are then exposed to stats about that country, like illiteracy rates, child mortality, poverty.

You can share your life ticket on Facebook, twitter and people can help you by donating or collecting more support through their own networks.

Here is a short video about the campaign. You can check out the site here, worth taking the time.

 

Here is a link to my Life ticket http://thelotteryoflife.co.uk/shared/runtime.swf

How will we watch TV in the future

Eoin O’Brien tweeted this earlier in the week.

GOAB is a TV experience concept. They have identified the following challenges relating to how we will watch TV in the future. And then suggest a way this will all work out

• Complexity – The available media offers have exploded. Alone on YouTube, 20 hours of video are uploaded every minute. The available number of television channels is, on average, in the hundreds. Information in a barely manageable volume is sent to sources at lightning-fast speeds.
• Context – With the flood of news on various channels, the user is left to evaluate and rank the context. Without the right context, there is the danger of misunderstanding information.
• Interactivity – At the moment, when people talk about TV interaction, they refer to the most basic interaction one has with one’s television set. To interact with a television program, one must still “call-in”, or the more “modern” equivalent: of “e-mail-in”. This has quite an oldfashioned taste in our days. The classic channel communication model is no longer valid in the online world. Interactivity is the key to modern television.

To complete our approach we have formulated the following underlying principles:

• Independence – GOAB should function independently from in and output devices. For these reasons, GOAB is intended to be completely cloud based. Regardless if accessing via laptop, tablet or smart phone, the personal preferences and network are always available. To watch television, the device triggers a display if available or directly plays back the content.
• Always an Optimal Experience – Through this independent behavior, the system is always delivering optimal transmission to the device of choice. Regardless if to a smart phone, living room beamer or a hotel room in another city.
• Integration of social media – The integration of social features is naturally a must. The potential in regards to user relevance is yet to be determined.

GOAB. A TV Experience Concept from Syzygy on Vimeo.

Capture it cheaply!

I was sent this by my friend Karen Profita. This bar owner set up a camera and it continuously took pictures until it died. As Karen pointed out to me, this would be a great way to capture an event (and cheap as chips too!)

$40 the Hard Way from Frank McMains on Vimeo.

How is Facebook advertising performing against search?

Here is some interesting research by Jonathan Beeston, he posted this on Econsultancy last week. He is Client Services Director at Efficient Frontier.

He tested  the performance of Facebook advertising on their Facebook optimisation platform, to see how it performed against search for a test sample of brand clients.

We did this by running two simultaneous campaigns across search and Facebook for each client (both campaigns are designed to work together, with a similar message and content). We’ve measured the impact of each on conversions (predominantly sales and registrations) on each brand’s website.

The first step was to build and optimise the brands’ search campaigns across Google, Bing and Yahoo!. Then, we built and optimised Facebook campaigns designed to achieve the same goals. This lets us look at how Facebook and search campaigns perform together, and against each other, and what the different benefits are of each.

Our goal for these test clients was to distribute spend across each channel in the most efficient way possible, to effect the most conversions at the lowest possible cost-per-conversion.

In the article, which you can read in full here, he goes through the methodology, which is worth checking out so you get some context to the results. But here are the results:

The test results so far have been interesting:

• For brand advertisers spending around the £1,000 mark, the CPA for Facebook campaigns is marginally lower than it is for search.
• For higher-spending brands (those spending more than around £2,000), Facebook starts to give a lower CPA rate, and so becomes the more effective channel to meet the CPA goals.
• At this level, the optimum spend ratio between the two channels is between 60 and 75% Facebook, and 40-25% on search.

He does note that:

These are initial tests, and we need to do more to establish whether they will be reflected across all brands, but they do show that Facebook is, for the first time, starting to perform as an acquisition or sales channel, and is a real challenger in performance marketing.

(Source: Econsultancy)

Flair Fashiontag

When it comes to fashion I’m incredibly clued in! (please read heaped with sarcasm). I saw this on the Goodbuzz Facebook page and thought it was a clever use of a Facebook app, brought online and offline together nicely. I think I had heard of something similar previously, but cant remember for what brands. I wonder how other brands, outside of fashion, could use this? Would love to hear your thoughts on it

 

Cause Marketing may decrease charitable giving

This is really really interesting research by Aradhna Krishna. So many organisations (corporate and charities) want to engage in Cause Marketing. We are all told how it boosts sales, 76% of consumers are more likely to buy if the brand is associated to a cause etc..etc..

But perhaps its the wrong model? Are companies making real donations, or in kind, and what is the knock on effect of this new research? I don’t have the answer, but this is certainly food for thought for people in all sectors. I expect we will hear a lot more about this.

Results from a pilot field study and two laboratory studies show that consumers’ direct charitable giving to a charity is lower if they purchase on CM (cause marketing) even if the cause marketing purchase is costless to the consumer (unlike other forms of charitable giving).

This suggests that even if CM purchases are costless, consumers think of their purchase as a charitable act and decrease subsequent charitable acts. This is corroborated by the fact that in both laboratory studies, the higher the cause marketing expenditure, the lower the individual charitable giving, indicating that people may mentally assign their CM expenditure as their charitable giving. Consumers may even think of the firm’s donation as theirs since it is facilitated by their act — in fact, this type of thinking is “rational” since it allows consumers to spend less to meet their donation goals.

The premise that cause marketing will always increases total money raised for the cause is shown not to hold in our studies. We find that instead of increasing total contribution to the cause, the presence of CM can decrease it. It needs to be noted, that whether total donation increases or decreases with CM depends on firm contribution. We have merely challenged the belief that total donation always benefits with CM, with the objective of making consumers and public policy officials think a little before embracing CM at every opportunity.

This is especially important given the number of highly opaque CM campaigns that are run – for instance, many do not report what portion of proceeds are given to the cause, some have limits on their donation and keep the excess monies raised (e.g., the notorious Yoplait campaign – see Boston Globe, October 4, 2009), some report the donation as a part of unreported profits.

CM purchasing substituting for charitable giving is also consistent with people choosing the less costly altruistic option. However, the laboratory studies show that the less 18 empathetic altruism option of CM purchase chosen by consumers leads to lower contentment.

It is as if people know intrinsically when they have done selfless charitable acts. The egoistic nature of cause marketing purchases is evidenced in open-ended responses focused on selfutility, or selfish reasons. It is also seen as being more selfish and less empathetic in thirdparty ratings of “purchasing and donating behavior” as being more caring, helpful and sacrificing. Our results are in line with work showing happiness to be a function of donation amount. However, our research adds another dimension to research linking charitable giving and happiness — selfish versus selfless altruism can have different effects on happiness.

 

The paper goes to point out that there are many limitations to the research. And suggestions for future research. But still this is a challenging piece. You can read the full paper here

Mashable Follow

Im not sure I need badges…but this looks good

Special Olympics Ireland – Send Team Wishes

Special Olympics Ireland are doing great work. I really admire the organisation since I did a small bit of work with them around the World Games in 2003, and since then have always kept an eye on what they do. I really like what they are starting to do online and on Social Networks.

They recently launched this nice Send Team Wishes on their Facebook page. They also have a national collection day on April 15th (I heard that they raised 1 million last year from it, not sure how true that is). What I like about it is that its easy for me to sign up to volunteer my time. Check out the link here.

 

I met my first……

…….Director of Appreciation last week! And I was thrilled. For two years I have been wondering if any organisation would appoint one…and I have finally found one that has.

Granted they are fairly large, but still, what a great move by the Children’s Medical Research Foundation and congratulations to Catriona McGloin (her title is actually Head of Donor Care) . Maybe you could do a guest blog post in the next few months and tell us how its all going?

World Autism Awareness Day

Lisa Domican posted this on her blog last week. Its World Autism Awareness Day tomorrow and to mark it you can download the fantastic Grace App for Free. Read this to understand a bit more about this wonderful app. Please feel free to re-post this and share the news.

Many kids with autism or speech delay use pictures attached to a board to ask for what they need or say how they feel. These boards are stored in a book which they have to carry around with them. Even if and when they begin to say a few words, they may be difficult to understand and so they rely on a growing picture vocabulary which can become very unwieldy. As the mother of a severely autistic little girl with a few words but many pictures, I wanted to keep supporting her speech development by prompting her to use her own voice – with the support of her pictures anywhere.

And that is where the Grace App for Autism came in.

Grace App replicates the picture exchange system by storing a basic picture vocabulary of Foods, and things the user might need or want with a function for making a sentence.

It can be used on iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. On the smaller devices you tilt and the cards are enlarged for you to point and read together. iPad works on Landscape or Portrait view with the pictures big enough to be read easily without enlargement.

There is also a facility for finding, taking and sharing photographs of all the other things that you may need or want. You can sort the pictures into categories, delete those you don’t need and teach the child or user to add their own independently-:

Giving them power over their communication choices.

It is a simple and portable means of prompting communication and mutual understanding –

which leads to trust.

Grace App was created with the support of O2 Telefonica and developed by Steven Troughton-Smith.

Thanks to the support and feedback of the wider Autism community, Grace App has been improved and we are delighted to be launching a major update.

And to celebrate World Autism Awareness Day on 2nd April, we’re setting the App to free.Anyone who uploads Grace App on the day will own it forever and will get all updates free AND It can be shared with up to 30 devices per iTunes account to support Autism Classes and Schools.

For more information and to download the Grace App System Manual, please see our website www.graceapp.com

You can also support the drive for collecting old 3G iPhones and iPods/iPads at The Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism -including our own MyCharity Link

Everybody deserves the right to say what they want. Listen and you will also get to know what they like and need, and maybe get to know them a bit better.