Hilarious dance moves for this Summer’s Britvic Drench campaign, produced by Clemmow Hornby Inge.

I’m disgusted to find out that Ofcom is about to allow more advertising on commercial television channels in the UK. Somehow, in response to people using more personal video recorders like Sky Plus, Ofcom’s been fooled in believing that the answer is to slap on some more ad minutes into every show.

The geekier masses have migrated towards online sources for entertainment, and I’ve got a feeling that if UK television is heading the same way as American shows, crammed with obnoxious and imposing ads, more Brits will start relying on Joost, Bittorrent, iTunes podcasts and other services.

The advertising industry is so sick, all the way to the core, I don’t think it’ll ever recover. If you agree that this new suggested ruling, allowing more ad breaks, should be stopped, please let your comments be heard by Ofcom, do it now, and pass it on to others around you!

In the past few days, I’ve read some genuinely interesting articles which I’ve been meaning to blog, but to avoid stale blog entries in my drafts, I’ll just share the links and let you read on.

Want more? Why not subscribe to my Shared Items in Google Reader?

[Crossposted from the Taptu blog]

Sitting in my parents’ living room in Canada, I’ve seen just how much unrequested mail they receive, flyers from supermarkets and furniture shops to clothing and hardware stores. Each one is filled with “50% off” claims and coupons. It’s a quaint tradition that is now being shoehorned into new technologies like mobile.

Mike writes about it saying that marketers tend to think of the mobile as a fantastic advertising medium, “always on, highly person, uniquely identifiable users”. That much is true, isn’t it?

While maybe I’m more of a sucker for Starbucks than Mike may be, in theory, I can quite comfortably see a Bluetoothed voucher for 25p off a latte cause me to detour towards the overpriced coffee store on the way to my destination. However, it’s an extremely slippery slope, and encouraging Bluetooth marketing exercises would probably result in a heavy influx of untargetted marketing messages to my phone, which I definitely would not welcome.

Coming from an email marketing background, I know quite how poorly some “marketers” can choose to understand data protection and user privacy, giving themselves artistic license over what “opt-in” means. Carlo also echo’ed my suspicion that too often, bluespamming is so untargetted that it gets a very poor conversion. So let’s scrap Bluetooth marketing!

An unprompted SMS is even more invasive than Bluetooth marketing, since it can disturb me during a much needed holiday nap, so that’s out too.

This leaves us with user-initiated promotion. This is like the mobile equivalent of double opt-in in email marketing - Far tougher to achieve user participation but cream of the crop conversion rates as a result, since you’re only reaching those who are actively showing interest. The best example I can think of for this is Orange Wednesdays, a promotion that’s been running successfully for over 3 years, launched by Orange and Flytxt in the UK. Orange customers get a 2 for 1 discount on movie tickets on Wednesday nights, feeling they’re getting a great deal at 50% the usual ticket price, while cinemas get a fresh influx of visitors in an age where the big screen is suffering from lower footfall every year. Brilliant deal!

Using a word which needs to be texted to a shortcode is a reasonably low-effort option for the mass market, while QR codes scanning is only a suitable solution if uber-nerds are the target market. Ask anyone else what that stamp-sized black and white garble means and you’ll get an uninterested shrug.

The bottom line is that it’s got to be simple and non-intrusive, something that not all marketers can achieve successfully!

What are some of the best mobile marketing campaigns you’ve seen? What’s the wildest ideas you’d like to see using mobiles? At what point is a discount, a promotion or an incentive good enough that it should be allowed to interrupt our life?

Over the past few years, I’ve written quite a few posts about my amazement at many people’s fear of cooking unknown foods, resulting in Britain households cooking on average 4 meals each.

But while watching Hell’s Kitchen (the Marco Pierre White version, not the Gordon Ramsay one), which is a worthless show by the way, I saw an interesting advert by Asda which got me thinking.

Fish is a type of food many people have issues with. It’s wet. It’s slimey. It looks at you funny with its beady eyes. It can smell funny sometimes. So Asda found a low-cost solution for that problem.

They simply put the fish in a sealed bag which can be put straight into the oven, but also add a few bits of herbs and some lemon. This means a non-foodie can easily get a lovely steamed-in-the-bag meal without the hassle of touching fish.

Asda didn’t need to reinvent cooking or teach anyone to cook. Simply remarkable.

Since Ask.com’s good old Jeeves was fired a few months ago, it’s been clear that something was brewing behind closed doors and that a great relaunch was bound to happen soon.

It’s now happened. A viral, out-of-the-box, really groundbreaking campaign about an information revolution. At least, that’s how it sounded back in the boardroom where the ideas took shape.

In reality, it’s one of the most blatant cases of astroturfing I’ve seen in the past few years. It presents itself as some sort of underground social movement, shrouded in mystery. [Disclaimer: Keeping in mind that I don't live in London and my exposure to the campaign is limited to the banners on blogs I read, and these pictures snapped on the street and on the tube by some Londoners.]

The Wall Street Journal weighs in:

Support for the campaign has been scarce so far. The campaign has been called a “load of drivel” and the agency producing it “cynical, manipulative hacks”. Some go as far as saying that Ask.com expected things to turn sour, figuring that bad publicity is better than no publicity at all.

Not so sure about that. If all it leads to is a couple of attempts at using Ask.com, when the user is already in a mindframe where they feel betrayed and bullsh***ed by the company in question, the likelihood of this user leaving with a positive, “yes, I think I’ll use them again” attitude is somewhere between unlikely and simply laughable.

Time will tell whether this campaign yields any positive visibility for Ask.com, but at the moment, it’s a bit on the ugly side… A bit of a shame, but really, if Ask.com felt that the right way to spark new interest in its search engine was to be deceitful and lie to its users, then it’s getting what it deserves!

[Cross posted from Focus on Them]