.oO Tailwind

United Colors of Smarties

Originally uploaded by fiorinolatino

I’ve just seen the most bizarre television ad for Smarties.

(As in the confectionary made by Nestle)

The message is basically that “Blue is back” citing the return of the blue coloured Smartie after 3 whole years!

Has it been that long?

Not strange so far I guess, but it’s the plot and underlying message of the ad that I found odd. Warning, this gets weird from the off.

So cut to a scene of people dressed in brightly coloured lycra enjoying an idyllic country life.

Then a guy dressed in blue runs across the brow of the hill and shout ‘Woo Hoo, I’m back!’ at which all the pink, red, yellow, orange, brown, violet and green ones run away and hide inside a giant smartie pack.

Cue Mr. Yellow Smartie who gets thrown outside of said giant Smartie pack to deal with incoming Mr. Blue Smartie and get rid of the unwanted guest.

Mr. Yellow Smartie is clearly struggling within himself, coming to terms with himself as to how he should get rid of Blue (acting without saying anything is so incredibly hard, so credit to Yellow here).

Cue Blue showing a piece of paper that qualifies him as being 100% free of artificial flavourings and colours.

Woooooooo Hooooooo!

Hang on…

What?

Why is this a good campaign?

I know that there was a rumor that blue Smarties unlocked your inner ADHD within, but this is an odd way to run.

“Hey everyone, that blue Smartie we introduced three years ago that sent your young ones a little nuts is back. But this time without the mad stuff inside. Yeah!”

The press pack that’s available cites 2007 being “graced with comebacks. Take That, Spice Gils, Prince, Boy Zone and even Led Zepplin. Leading the trend for 2008 is the BLUE SMARTIE!”

It goes further to explain:

“Nearly two decades after Blue was first launched, a genuine fan base still exists with over 20 Facebook groups and nearly 2,000 members asking what happened to Blue and demanding its return.”

What was strange about the press statement was the solution as to how you provide the variety of blue in a natural way:

“So after years of scouring the globe for a solution, Nestle has found a way to create the much-loved variety with no artificial colours and flavours. This has been done by using a blue concentrate from an edible algae called Spirulina.”

Spirulina?

Errrrr. No thanks. Sounds mingin’

I’ve never ever been to a confectionary website. Not least the Smarties one.

i have now, so I guess it works.

By Warren Hutchinson

The Greenpeace Orang-Utan’s struck Unilever on Monday and within an hour the blogosphere was rampant with rampaging Orang-Utans, videos, images, stories.

As ever ‘Transparency Tyranny‘ is rife and digital is the driving nemesis of corporation x.

What are Unilever doing in response? And how are they going to engage in this digital onslaught, this citizen journalist propagation and ironic spin of ‘real beauty’?

I’m really interested in the strategy behind all of this and how it unfolds. In the inception of the ‘campaign for real beauty’ I wonder if they thought about defensive strategies should stories (which they MUST have suspected) such as this emerge.

On the Unilever site there is a front page news item titled ‘Sustainable Palm Oil’. Click through and you see a video from their SVP of Communications and Sustainability starting with a statement that:

“We have great sympathy with what Greenpeace are trying to achieve, they are drawing attention to a really important issue” - Gavin Neath, SVP Communications and Sustainability

I find the role of SVP ‘Communications’ (Spin) and ‘Sustainability’ incongruous, but that’s another issue.

Unilever are part of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, or RSPO for short, and unsurprisingly they are playing up to this. Unilever claim to be instrumental in setting up the roundtable for sustainable palm and carrying it forward.

The transcript can be found here.

The response is a step, I’d rather see something directly relating and acknowledging the Greenpeace efforts, an alignment of sorts. They are playing it down, but not explicitly responding.

The ‘Dove in the News’ site is even wetter. Dove is all over the news, but it is not showing here.

Cue fingers in the ears - “la la la”:

The problem is, in order to hear Unilever’s point of view you have to mobilise yourself to go and see their site, navigate and watch a polished corporate video.

I can’t, yet, find any level of engagement by Unilever with the user-generated, mobilised, chatteriffic sphere of blogs, video sites and social networks. Searches for ‘Greenpeace, Unilever, Palm Oil’ only result in links to sites siding with the Greenpeace effort and not Unilever.

Designing a strategy for organic search traffic is required or else people will simply miss Unilever’s point.

I had a quick scan through the Facebook groups and found lots of Unilever corporate groups for ‘Graduates’ and ‘Management Schemes’ but UNSURPRISINGLY I found the Facebook group ‘Dove: Not so clean’.

Okay - it has 12 members so far.

Corporations are really uncomfortable with this stuff and they continue to ignore dealing with it.

And in closing, the final statement by the interviewer:

“Gavin Neath - thank you very much indeed”

smells horribly corporate and reeks of Aunty (The BBC for non-UK readers).

By Warren Hutchinson

Only last week I was having a conversation with one of the brains behind the new LBi Quarterly called LBiQ about the Dove campaign that gave Unilever permission to engage with audiences as an authority of ‘real beauty’.

We debated the merits of Dove’s ‘campaign for real beauty’ and how a good old fashioned campaign can bring new light to an otherwise dying entity even in today’s ultra transparent web 2-oh world.

Recruiting ‘real women’ from London streets, using portrait photographer Rankin to shoot the images and celebrating 95% of the female population as having a normal figure, it was a good idea well executed.

Well, today as I was crossing Blackfriars Bridge in London on my way to work in Clerkenwell I saw that Unilever’s London HQ had become besieged by Orang-Utans in protest about the beauty line’s impact on wildlife via the extraction of palm oil in rain forests.

In the words of the Temptations;’…beauty’s is only skin deep yeah yeah yeah‘.

The protest coincides with a released Greenpeace report called Burning Up Borneo which reports on a link between Unilever’s relationship with palm oil extraction companies and the destruction of Orang-Utan habitats. Apparetly 80% of Orang-Utan habitat has been destroyed in 20 years.

More here from Orang-Utan Outreach if you are interested in the plight of ginger monkeys (I know, I know).

Also, good video here from the BBC.

Do you know which of your household products use palm oil? Or where it comes from?

Personally, I haven’t a clue.

It’s used in cleaning products, fabric conditioner, margarine, soap and a whole host of cosmetics. It’s also used as a crop for bio-fuels, so demand for it is going up.

However, it’s further proof that in beauty terms it’s what is on the inside that counts.

Anyway, here are some pics I snapped on my mobile:

Apparently, the protest was staged simultaneously at various Unilever sites in London and Merseyside with some protesters gaining access to the factory on the Wirral.

After good work from Ogilvy & Mather on the concept in 2004, this kind of communication/brand strategy is always open to subversion in this way. I’m expecting Howard Sheldon from the Halifax ads to have some dark financial past secret exposed at sometime bringing his personal equity and thus Halifax brand integrity down like a house of cards.

I find it ironic that the concept of ‘real beauty’ is being subverted by something that is entirely un-beautiful. Okay, the sorrowful near-human gaze of an Orang-Utan’s face aid in the sympathy somewhat, but ultimately my take away was ‘Dove products are responsible for dying Orang-Utans’.

Yes, my takeaway.

Interestingly, most of the coverage of this protest that I have seen centres on Unilever and not the Dove brand so the Dove ‘campaign for real beauty’ might get away with it unscathed.

Nearly 2 years ago here at LBi, we started working with Multimap to redesign their public .com web property.

It was time for their loved, but ageing raster-map offering to be dragged inline with, then new and innovative, Google’s ’slippy’ Maps.

With a raft of new features including drag, zoom, pan, hybrid view,all stuff we take for granted now, we set about defining a sharpened mapping proposition that worked for both Multimap users and advertisers.

It was a brilliant project, great fun, hard work and really quite challenging. The guys at Multimap (which sold to Microsoft in December last year) were all smart cookies and pleasure to work with. Personally I see it as one of the triumphs of the team I work in here at LBi. Not only was it great solution, it was a great learning experience and those two things make for great projects. Certainly satisfactory ones.

Stephen Barber was, and still is, ace on this project. Will Bloor was his usual unremitting creative self, Peter Jupp smashed the design and Mike McIntyre and Gavin Edwards aced some complex interaction and James Norton provided some wonderful interface development. It was also a pleasure to see Lorenzo in action, which doesn’t happen nearly enough for some of us here at LBi.

Well, enough spouting from me. Multimap.com has just been named as an Honoree in the Service category at this years Webby awards.

This is no mean feat as only the best 15% of submissions attain the accolade and this from a pot of nearly 10,000 entries received from all 50 US states and over 60 countries.

Multimap is now owned by Microsoft, so expect to start using it a lot more as it integrates into all their properties. Exciting stuff indeed.

The guys I worked with on this project were:

• Stephen Barber
• Will Bloor
• Peter Jupp
• Mike Mcintyre
• Dave Dunlop
• Lorenzo Wood
• Darren Gerry
• Gavin Edwards
• Phil WHitehouse
• James Norton
• Marcus Alexander
• Suzanne Chapman
• Claire Freund

This was doing the rounds at my place of employ last week:

Dell using Twitter to communicate offers.

In a nutshell, DellOutlet has a Twitter stream communicating offers and coupons.

Okay, so you only follow if you want to which I guess is fine, but I’m just not a fan of brands entering into this kind of ‘conversation’. It cheapens it and erodes the idea and starts to make me want to get out. To [mis]quote Seth Godin, where is the ‘permission asset’ for Dell?

Regarding the Dell feed I doubt anyone loves Dell so much that they permanently follow DellOutlet on Twitter so I’m curious as to how people discover and then track the offers. How is it making itself known? Word of mouth? Surely people savvy enough to pick up on this aren’t in the market for a Dell machine, I don’t know.

Why is Twitter a valid channel for this over and above a standard RSS offers feed? Maybe it’s due to the fact that Twitter is a web 2.0 darling, albeit from last year’s SXSW and an RSS feed just isn’t out there enough.

Incidentally, a quick hike to the Dell Outlet site shows that the left and the right hands aren’t talking as there is no allusion to the Twitter stream, no list of followers, nothing.

Interestingly (or not), the tone of the Dell Outlet site isn’t chatty like the Twitter feed either.

Either way, I don’t fancy a smidgin’ of ‘ambient intimacy’ with Dell thank you very much.

I shall not be following.

Besides, I’m a Mac fanboy.

Yay! I remembered to share some more links with you this week. This could become a Friday habit (okay, technically it’s Thursday evening here) but I’m promising nothing. You hear me? Nothing!

Award winning Honda TV advert ripped off and applied to a website. I think I actually HATE this.

Playing football with binoculars on. Funny. Want to play.

Ever wondered how much space in our transport network is lost through choice of vehicle..? No..? Are you kidding me? Well check this image showing the amount of space required to transport the same amount of people by bus, bike or car.

Some haunting images from the day before. This is why I love photography and why I hate post production photo-engineering. I’ll argue with anyone that photography is about capture (though ‘capture’ may be interpreted).

This is what I hate about manipulated photography. It should be on the bedroom wall of a stoner student.

More photography, but this one feels personal, old and from a bygone era.

Need some new business cards, don’t be lame and print on card, try some of these. I wish we had, ours are rubbish. The divorce one is quite sweet and I like the one with a seed embedded within it.

I’m sure you’ve seen this transparent screen trick, I still like it. the effort people go to is amazing.

Move your mouse about and feel sick and disorientated. Wicked.

What’s your favourite keyboard shortcut? I wish I could ‘Apple-Z’ sometimes in life.

Apple - iPhone - TV Ad - Large

Oh it’s gratuitous. It’s obvious and everyone else has blogged it. But MY GOD this UI is lickity slick. I love the way you get a full tour of the phone features in the context of a story. less than 30secs and I’m sitting there thinking.. ooh, ahh, yes, yes, yes!

But then, I’m a self-confessed Apple fanboy who can see no evil.

I still defend my 3Gen iPod and it’s naff 35 minute battery life and easy-to-scratch screen. One of the iPod design flaws was that a computer peripheral was designed and not a portable product. Let’s home the iPhone is a portable product and that the battery doesn’t fade. That would be a real shame.