Chiquita Pulls off a Crowdsourced Design-as-Marketing Campaign

Crowdsourcing is a hit-or-miss proposition, and when it comes to crowdsourcing logo or design work, it can often result in some nasty blowback. So it’s interesting to see a successful example of a major brand crowdsourcing the design of an iconic logo, as a de facto social media marketing campaign to generate buzz.

In this case it’s Chiquita, and the iconic logo is the little blue and yellow sticker that anyone who has ever had a banana probably recognizes. It seems Chiquita went out and crowdsourced the redesign of the sticker, got over 100,000 votes for the 50 finalists, and generated some nice buzz around a product that normally is hardly considered cutting edge.

Cliff Huang over on fastcodesign.com makes a great point about why this worked for Chiquita, relative to the challenges of crowdsourcing your primary logo or major campaign creative:

The stickers are a perfect outlet for the crowdsourcing. It’s not like crowdsourcing your logo or an entire ad campaign — which gets you mediocrity in exchange for a bit of passing buzz. Rather, the sticker itself is such an obvious passing fancy that even if it’s not great, it doesn’t matter. (And even if it’s not great, the real estate is so tiny that the most important thing — the brand’s colors — remain. To preserve the core mark, the contest made sure to mention that the Chiquita girl could not be shown in any of the entries.) So you get the buzz, but it doesn’t take over your branding because the icon itself remains intact.

I don’t necessarily agree with Cliff’s side point about how crowdsourcing larger project necessarily produces mediocrity, but that’s for a later post. For now, hats off to Chiquita for a smart big of marketing and a brand team willing to take some risks.

Found via @TDefren

The Lesson of Old Spice: TV is Simply a Starting Point

If you were anywhere near almost any social media tool earlier today, you probably heard about the remarkable personalized response videos from “the Old Spice guy” (“I’m on a horse, backwards”). It started in what seemed like a one-off, then quickly picked up steam as short, quickly produced personalized videos started popping up with Mr. Old Spice, clad only in a towel, replying to tweets, blog posts, Facebook comments, and YouTube replies from all over the Web.

In some cases, such as with the actress Alyssa Milano, she tweeted and got her own response video (several actually) with an hour or so (and the wide-eyed optimist in me is hoping that part wasn’t staged in advance). All in all it gave the impression that a small creative team from Weiden+Kennedy were camped out in a small stage (or hell, a large bathroom) with the actor and some live social monitoring tools, creating what will go down as one of the best examples of integration between advertising and social media yet seen.

There are a lot of lessons to be had – the value of engaging with the community and how you shouldn’t just aim for the celebrities but engage with fans across the board; the power of realtime social media monitoring tools; the impact of smart humor; the potential payoff from brands that are willing to take risks; etc.

What resonated with me however is the idea that this stunt, more than any other I can recall, cements the fact that the once-glorified 30 second TV spot is no longer the epitome of advertising – it’s merely a starting point. TV is now more than ever simply one channel, among many, to seed your content out into the marketplace, so it can be built on and blown out through creative use of new social channels like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and more.

This isn’t a new idea, of course, but sometimes it takes a truly creative campaign to shock your eyes open to both the reality and the possibilities of all the new toys we’ve perhaps grown too used to. Hats off to the team at WK and Old Spice, today was definitely a pleasant and exciting jolt and a hint of what’s to come.

Why no single type of agency will own social media

There’s been a debate raging among agency-types and industry watchers for some time now: Who will “own” social media? The ad agencies? The PR agencies? The marketing firms? Digital shops? Or maybe specialty agencies who do nothing but social?

One argument holds that agencies are converging as they chase the significant movement in attention and budgets towards digital and social, and it’s an epic battle for which flavor of agency will “own” social media in the future (Jason Keath’s post is a great example in favor of PR; to which Valeria Maltoni has a well argued counterpoint. The debate goes on). But here’s the thing.

They are all wrong

Why? Because all those arguments are based on a single false premise: there is no one “right way” to do social media to the exclusion of others. Social media is not solely about reputation, conversation, or crisis management. It’s not only useful for engagement, word-of-mouth, viral, or branding.

Rather, social media is a hydra, a multi-headed way of thinking, connected by a common set of tools, platforms, and concepts, that impacts an organization in so many ways that no single type of agency can claim exclusive domain over it all.

How many heads does this thing have?

• Social media is an excellent tool for long-term reputation building, for story telling, and for crisis communications – the natural purview of public relations agencies.
• Social media is incredibly useful at branding, creating emotional attachments and personal connections with brands of all varieties – the domain of branding and ad agencies.
• Social media, tracked and expressed via engagement tactics and metrics, can be the cornerstone of a powerful relationship marketing program – the haunt of marketing agencies.
• Social media can be very effective as a medium for promotional and demand generation campaigns of incredible variety – making it a valid tool for ad, marketing, and digital agencies.

The mishmash occurring right now, as outlined in Forrester’s “Great Race” concept, is happening in part because of client demand and shifting budgets. There’s undeniably a shift going on in where the client dollars are flowing, and no agency wants to be caught on the wrong side of it. In the rush there’s a confusion as the boundaries blur and client marketers learn. But the seeming convergence of agency practices in social media is also happening because those agencies all – rightly – see the practical value of social media in achieving results in their own respective domains.

The PR guys need social media capabilities as it’s good for PR, while the marketing people need it because it’s a useful engagement strategy.

Is there overlap? Of course, and there will likely be indefinitely. The entire concept of social media is so new and evolving so rapidly that it’s hard to tell where social media for PR stops and social media for advertising or marketing begins. Within most client organizations the same confusion reigns, and that’s simply reflected outwards in how they currently select agencies to work with in the space.

But my underlying point remains: In the long term no single type of agency will ever “win” social media all up because social media itself is a useful tool for every agency, and most every discipline. Rather, smart agencies of all stripes will develop expertise in social as it relates to their own practices and as client organizations of all variety come to recognize the value it offers.