A Clever Way To Market Calm. BOH Camomile Tea Bags And Widget Designs.

To promote Boh brand camomile tea bags, M+C Saatchi, Malaysia created tea bags, packaging and a widget that, like camomile, bring calm to your world. The clever concept has won many awards worldwide including the Clios (Silver), Cannes Lions (Shortlist x 2), One Show (Merit), Communication Arts (2012 Design Annual), AdFest (Finalist x 4), AdStars (Finalist), Malaysian Kancils (Gold x 2, Silver, Bronze, Merit) and the 2012 Communication Arts Design Annual.



Each Boh Camomile Tea bag features a design, printed using edible tea ink, depicting the stressed person’s state of mind. Once the tea bag was immersed in a cup of boiling water, the edible tea ink dissolved, revealing a much calmer design. The Before/After effect served as a timely and memorable reminder of the calming properties found in every cup of BOH Camomile Tea.




The before and after teabags:




The Accompanying Widget:


This widget simulates the calm brought about by Boh Camomile Tea on the desktop of a harried person. Once the widget is downloaded, the user connects using Facebook. By doing this, the widget can access data and information from the user's profile, generating a compilation of their interests. When the frenetic pounding on the user's keyboard exceeds a set sound level for a certain time, the widget senses that the user is stressed, it automatically pops open on the desktop and shows the user a stressed photograph of him/her (via the user's webcam) and suggests he/she relax. It then helps calm the user by pulling entertaining content based on the user's interests from YouTube, Flickr,Twitter and other websites. Users can share the widget's calming influence with friends, thus spreading the calm.




A video that explains how the widget works:


Credits:
Title: CALM TEA BAGS
Client: BOH PLANTATION SDN BHD
Product/Service: BOH CAMOMILE TEA
Creative Directors: FARROKH MADON, HENRY YAP, MARZUKI MAANI, NEIL LESLIE
Art Directors: CHOO CHEE WEE, PAULINE ANG
Copywriters: FARROKH MADON, AHMAD FARIZ
Client Services: FARRAH HARITH, SHERINA BINTI MOHAMED ZULKIFLI
Designer: ELLIE SEE
Typographers: PAULINE ANG, ELLIE SEE
Print Producer: SEBASTIAN NG
Photographer: JESSE CHOO
Photography Studio: UNTOLD IMAGES
Print Producer: SEBASTIAN NG
Color Separation: IGNITION GRAPHIC PRODUCTION SDN BHD
Agency Producer: SEBASTIAN NG

images, descriptions and video courtesy of M+C Saatchi Malaysia Creative Director Neil Leslie

Another Engaging Marketing Tactic For UNIQLO. A Pinterest Takeover For Their Dry Mesh Project.

More opportunities for branding continue to spring up on the web as popular user-generated and social network-related websites grow.



Pinterest, one of the fastest growing sites out there, with over a reported 13 million registered users, was recently hijacked by UNIQLO to increase awareness of their Dry Mesh Tshirts. Part of the new UNIQLO Innovation Project (UIP), the idea was conceived of and executed for the Japanese brand by New York digital agency Firstborn.



Firstborn had to do something big for the Japanese brand to stand out from the chaos of online fashion and social media. To promote "the ultimate functional wear" that keeps you cool and dry while exercising, Firstborn created the first-ever branded mosaics on Pinterest.





As users scrolled through Pinterest public feeds, giant blocks of images appeared. Together, the image blocks worked to create an impossible to miss, branded mosaic. As users continued to scroll down, the branded images seemingly animated.









How did they do it?
To reach active consumers, the guerilla campaign targeted five categories: Men's Apparel, Women's Apparel, Geek, Fitness and Sports. Extensive R&D ensured the images would appear in one group. To evade Pinterest's detection algorithms, Firstborn set up over 100 shell accounts ahead of the launch. A group of Firstborn employees simultaneously pinned pre-selected images to successfully free users from the monotony of Pinterest scrolling. With a strong team effort, the UNIQLO Dry Mesh Project on Pinterest brought attention to the new product with an experience as unique as the actual shirts.



UNIQLO has been one of the most innovative brands in terms of their marketing and advertising on the web. This is merely the latest in their engaging tactics.

The Year in Digital And The Brands Using It Most Wisely According to the L2 Think Tank.

A look at The Year In Digital (social media, online commerce, mobile, content sharing) as well as the 2011 luxury brand digital "geniuses" from a year's worth of L2's Digital IQ Index® research.

L2, a think tank for Digital Innovation, has selected what they are referring to as the Eight Most Innovative Digital Programs in Prestige/Luxury and 2011′s Geniuses. Brands that understand how Americans interact and engage with social media, spending more time on social sites than they do on portal sites (with 95% of that social networking time spent now spent on Facebook)



These brands have figured out how to make meaning in the fire hose of daily tweets and video uploads. They understand the implications of a world where e-commerce volume will reach $197 billion by year end (Amazon is 1/3 of that number), 85 percent of the population is blanketed with a commercial wireless signal, and Facebook hosts tens times more photos than the Library of Congress.

L2 states that "The taste for luxury goods will always endure, but the digital world moves quickly. Today’s giants have created tremendous opportunity for themselves in the marketplace, but on the web there’s always room for the rise of the unexpected, the meme, and the new, next, next thing."

And here are their picks for the The Eight Most Innovative Digital Programs in Prestige:

#1 Burberry

#2 Lancome

#3 Oscar de la Renta

#4 Estee Lauder

#5 Dior

#6 Sephora

#7 Benefit Cosmetics

#8 Kate Spade


Consumers are hungry and today digital represents the greatest opportunity for brands to punch above their weight class. As their benchmarking tracks into 2012 it looks like there are quite a few brands bulking up and throwing punches.

Here are their picks for the 2011 Digital Geniuses

Fashion: Burberry, Kate Spade, Coach, Gucci

Watches & Jewelry: Tiffany & Co.

Beauty: MAC, Clinique

China: Audi, BMW, Burberry

Specialty Retail: Victoria’s Secret, Nordstrom, Macy’s

Magazines: Time

Facebook: BMW, Audi, Belvedere Vodka, Bare Escentuals, Infiniti, Clinique, Ferrari, Bobbi Brown, Lexus, Tory Burch, Lancome, Johnny Walker

Travel: Airlines – Southwest, Delta, Continental Airlines, American Airlines; Hotels – Westin, W Hotels, Hilton

L2 looks at the state of digital (social media, online commerce, mobile, content sharing) as well as luxury and prestige brand digital "geniuses" from a year's worth of our Digital IQ Index® research.

Be sure to check out their informative library of individual videos of the ways brands are using digital here on Vimeo.

Follow them on twitter

Visit them at L2 Think Tank

Send E-mails In Your Own Handwriting With Pilot's Online Personal Fontmaker.

Pilot pens has brought the personal touch to impersonal e-mail communication by creating an online site that allows you to personalize a font based on your own handwriting and then use that font to compose and send an e-mail.



You simply go to their website where you register and then print out a blank template. Write your own letters in the spaces in the template and upload it to the site via a scanner, digital camera or webcam. Once the site processes your individual letters of the alphabet, you can finesse each letter by either erasing parts of it or adding to the letter.

Print out the template:

Use a pen [preferably a Pilot pen. After all, this is the way they are marketing their product] to write the characters in your own hand:

Complete the template:


Capture the template by using a web scanner, a digital camera or a webcam and upload it to their site where they will process it. The computer then digitizes your font:

And you can finesse each character if you wish:


Save and then name the font, and voila! You're now ready to send an e-mail [from their site, of course] to anyone with an e-mail address in your own personalized handwritten font.



A video of the process:


Do it here.

Looking for your own font from your handwriting for more than e-mails? Check out fontifier.com, where for $10 you can create your own and download it immediately.

Amazing Tansu Shoe For Onitsuka Tiger Wins Gold At Cannes

International creative agency, Amsterdam Worldwide has won a Gold Design Lion at the 2010 Cannes Lions Festival for their hand-crafted tansu shoe created for yet another one of their fabulous campaigns and collateral work for Onitsuka Tiger.



Honoured for its innovation and creativity, the Tansu shoe is the centerpiece of the 2010 brand campaign for Onitsuka Tiger.

The one and a half meter long Tansu-inspired wooden sneaker is a totem to classic Japanese design, and was hand-carved in a traditional 9th generation Tansu workshop.





Taking cues from ‘puzzle box’ cabinets created for the Samurai, it took a team of expert Japanese craftsmen over four months to craft the model using traditional methods.



The Tansu shoe comprises many authentic features, including a number of secret compartments which intrigued and engaged consumers in retail environments worldwide. Below are screen grabs of the shoe's interactivity as it appears on the Onitsuka Tiger website:



Richard Gorodecky, Amsterdam Worldwide’s executive creative director said: “In a world increasingly dominated by the virtual, it’s great to see that something hand crafted and ‘real’ has won such a prestigious award.

This is the fourth in the award winning series of larger than life sculptures created from the agencies 'Made of Japan' strategy. Their campaign for Onitsuka Tiger won a Cannes Cyber Lion in 2007 and in 2008 the Electric Tiger Land campaign was a Cannes Titanium finalist.

Do All Those Posts and Comments On Sites Really Affect Sales?

Below is part of an article from Trendwatching.com on what they've coined as Transparency Tyranny-the effect of online consumer reviews, habits and posts in regards to marketing and sales.

Really interesting. Read on....

Remember the promises of flawless matching of supply and demand, and limitless consumer power, when the web burst onto the scene a dozen years ago? While the last few years didn’t disappoint (consumers are already enjoying near-full transparency of prices and, in categories like travel and music, near-full transparency of opinions as well), 2007 could be the year in which TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY really starts scaring the shit out of non-performing brands.

Why? For one, 1+ billion consumers are now online, and the majority of them have been online for years. They're skilled bargain seekers and ‘best of the best’ hunters, they're avid online networkers and they're opinionated reviewers and advisors (tripadvisor.com now boasts 5,000,000+ travel reviews).

1+ billion consumers are now online and the majority of them have been online for years. They're skilled bargain seekers and ‘best of the best’ hunters, they're avid online networkers and they're opinionated reviewers and advisors. And there will no shortage of future contributors and viewers, especially with younger generations weighing in heavily; those that are born to the web, to whom contributing online is a given. Simply put: there will be many more consumers posting reviews, and they will increasingly consider them an integral part of their relationships with brands and businesses.

The non-competitive and the downright incompetent have very few stones left to hide under: never before have consumers’ purchase decisions been so strongly influenced by all kinds of transparency. In fact, TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY now rules:

"Old economy fog is clearing: no longer can incompetence, below-par performance, ignored global standards, anti-social & anti-eco behavior, or opaque pricing be obscured. In its place has come a transparent, fully informed marketplace, where producers have no excuse left to underperform. TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY for some, TRANSPARENCY TRIUMPH for others."

TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY | Facts and figures

Some numbers to convince those execs in your organization who still don’t see the TRANSPARENCY TYRANNY deluge coming…

• 80% of online shopping time is spent researching products rather than buying them. (TechCrunch)
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• 71% of online shoppers read reviews, making it the most widely read consumer-generated content. (Forrester)
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• In a test of product conversion with and without product ratings by customers. Conversion nearly doubled, going from .44% to 1.04% after the same product displayed its five-star rating. (Marketing Experiments Journal)
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• 60 percent of online shoppers provide feedback about a shopping experience, and are more likely to give feedback about a positive experience than a negative one. (JupiterResearch)
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• User-generated ratings and reviews are the second most important site feature behind search. Retailers who adopt ratings and reviews as a differentiator and retention strategy will gain market share. (JupiterResearch)
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• In a study of 2,000 shoppers – 92% deemed customer reviews as “extremely” or “very” helpful and ~ 71% used keyword searches to find products. (eTailing Group)
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• 59% of their users considered customer reviews to be more valuable than expert reviews. (Bizrate)
  
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  Only 26% of the 137 top retailers surveyed offered customer ratings and reviews, but 96% of them ranked customer ratings and reviews as an effective or very effective tactic at driving conversion. (Forrester)
  
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  63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. (CompUSA & iPerceptions study)
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• Conversion rates are higher on products with less than perfect reviews (less than 5 stars) than those without reviews at all, indicating that the customer feels that the product has been properly reviewed by other customers. (Burpee)
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• 39 percent of those who bought from sites with reviews cite the reviews as the primary factor influencing the purchase decision. (Foresee Results Study, 2006)