German car manufacturer Volkswagen have released a site called “Volkswagen 2028″ that sketches a scenario of future automotive mobility, 20 years from now. The site kicks off with a short introductory movie set in the future, where a father takes a walk with his son talking about the old times where you had to search for a parking-lot. Future times according to VW are about smart, on-demand car delivery services, skinnable car exteriors and the death of traffic jams as we know them.

A series of interviews with VW researchers and designers unveil their visions of electric-driven Single Occupant Vehicles, holographic projections, gesture controlled dashboards, and emission free automobiles.

While the entire site is in German, it’s still worth having a look at their future scenarios.

Volkswagen 2028

BoingBoing recently found itself in a public tiff with one of their former writers, Violet Blue, after the website’s editors decided to delete every one of her posts with no identifiable reason. BoingBoing insisted that they hadn’t censored their ex-blogger, but rather just ‘unpublished’ all of her work.

In response, Gawker has posted a funny if characteristically snarky post clarifying some of that obfuscating language (such as ‘unpublished’) being thrown around by all of us in the blogosphere when we’re trying to cover up what’s really going on (or what we really mean). Some highlights:

- Brand advertising = Bad clickthroughs. “We have a clickthrough rate of one in ten thousand, but we’re more of a brand destination.”

- Update: Fix. On a blog or in a program, an update means something was broken.

- Experimental: Failed. Everyone secretly hopes their projects take off, so they can say “Oh, it was just a fun little project!” More often, the project gets just the attention it deserved: none.

- Platform: Vague idea. Instead of a useful tool, a tool for other people to make useful tools. Possibly a cash cow, but boring. (For a geekier set, a platform is for those too lazy to code; an API is for those too lazy to write a platform.)

- Beta: Broken. For some web services, “beta” is as regular as PMS until Google buys the company.

- Viral: Cheap. Of course, sometimes that’s the kind of ad a brand deserves. Note which brand was faster to jump on viral videos: Not Coke, but Mentos.

- Contextual advertising: Bottom-of-the-barrel ads. What’s left over after “brand advertising” and served with “user-generated” content.

Gawker: The 15 Most Useless Internet Euphemisms

Ricoh is building an nature powered billboard, scheduled to go up in Times Square this December. A first for New York, this solar and wind powered giant ad is only the third in the world. The other two are Pacific Gas & Electric’s in San Francisco and Ricoh’s original eco billboard in Tokyo. The ad’s lighting will be powered by 45 solar panels and 4 wind turbines. Strangely the system lacks any kind of back up power source. If there’s a cloudy day with no wind, the ad will not be illuminated.

[via Live Science]

Opening tomorrow (July 4th) on Montague Place behind the British Museum in London is a new temporary cultural space designed by Carmody Groarke Architects. Called the Sky Walk, the installation is the centerpiece of the Bloomsbury Hub of the London Festival of Architecture. Sky Walk is a series of elevated ramps that take visitors on a meandering journey exposing them to new views of the architectural details on the surrounding historic buildings. Over the next three days, Sky Walk will serve as a backdrop for performances, and exhibition, and a continuous picnic of locally produced food.

Sky Walk was constructed over the past three days out of reusable staging components. It’s covered in a translucent black mesh. The ramp reaches a height of over 13 feet at it’s tallest point.

The event is the first step in the total transformation of the street into a usable public space and a destination in its own right. The design firm of Burns+Nice have already developed proposals to redo the street and surrounding areas.

[via WAN]

We’re looking forward to having Mark Lewis, strategy director at DDB, join us at PSFK Conference San Francisco. On our “Using It” panel along with Adrian Ho (Zeus Jones), George Parker (AdScam), Lynn Casey (Team Noesis) and Rohit Bhargava (Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence), Mark will be discussing how companies can use social media to enhance consumer dialogue, evolve product offerings, and improve sales.

First, who are you and what do you do?

I’m a strategy director at DDB in San Francisco working on brands ranging from SunPower (one of the largest solar panel manufacturers) to Brita to STP. I’d define my job as introducing interesting things or ways of thinking to people in the hope of inspiring them to do things a little differently.

You’ll be speaking on our “Using It” social media panel. Can you sum up your views on how you are seeing companies and organizations leverage social media to enhance consumer dialogue, evolve product offerings, and/or improve sales? In what direction do you see Social Media taking brands in the future?

While it is great to see companies beginning to use social media and engage in the web in a new way, the number of companies that have truly grasped the true model shift created by the social web is relatively small. Brands have to figure out how to engage consumers in a dialogue where they have something to give beyond entertainment (because very few brands can do that well over the long term) – where their marketing becomes an extension of what they do.

Four sites that provide you with inspiration:

PostSecret
Pandora
Google Labs
GigaOM

Thanks, Mark!

DDB

Have you bought your tickets for PSFK Conference San Francisco yet?

Skype has launched a new advertising campaign based on one of the most basic human emotions. Dubbed the “Skype Laughter Chain” it is the latest in the growing pool of viral marketing. The concept is simple, you record yourself laughing and if it is deemed contagious enough you will be added to the chain. The first video is just a sample of what’s to come and it seems straightforward enough, if not a tad lengthy. The preview video features a lovable baby, a woman trying to hide her unique chuckle and arguably the internet’s only laughter celebrity.

According to their website:

Laughter is a universal language

It’s no accident that LOL (Laugh Out Loud) is one of the most popular acronyms on the web – we all love to communicate, to share and feel part of a community. Laughter brings us closer together – it’s a language we all understand and everyone loves a good laugh.

WeJetSet sponsors Josh Spear’s RSS. Nice to see someone taken the simple initiative of associating themselves in the medium many people now read blogs - i.e. through an RSS reader like iGoogle or NetNewsWire

I was at a research conference today and despite the ad being a year old the Cadbury’s Gorilla ad still hangs over every single example and presentation. It’s one of those genuinely great ads, not because people love it, but because people even now just don’t get it.

Influx Insights have put together their five lessons from the Gorilla:

1.Sales Performance: It worked- Dairy Milk got a 9% bump in sales

2. Some Creatives Get the New World: Creatives liked it and it won big at awards shows including Cannes

3. Some Creatives Don’t Get the New World: Creatives didn’t like it- it caused some significant debate at awards shows including Cannes

4. There’s No Such thing As A Formula: It’s hard to repeat success- the second spot, despite it’s craziness could not capture in the way Phil and the gorilla did

5. The Planners Worked Hard: Despite the feeling that planners weren’t involved in this- they did a ton of work setting the stage for the client to accept a new form of advertising. Things like:

- Why being matters more than saying
- Being true to yourself, rather than pretending to be something you are not
- Being authentic vs. contrived
- The idea of brands taking on the role of entertainers.

6. Research Can’t Explain Everything: This thing was tested to death- it blew the lid off Millward Brown’s ad testing scores, but the company couldn’t explain why.

Following yesterday’s post on ideas vs response I thought I’d dig out a piece of thinking I’ve had in my drafts for a while:

Assumptions:
By brand I mean something that exists in people’s heads and has emotional qualities. I don’t mean a logo like ‘ elephant.com’. A brand has to be something that enables the company to charge a premium vs the sector, for example Innocent are more expensive than PJ Smoothies despite being identical products [Update: the AA and RAC are probably a better example].

By direct response I mean a communication whose main objective is to elicit a physical response in the Lester Wunderman sense i.e. making a phone call, visiting a website, returning a coupon.

So a TV ad with a URL or a phone number tacked on the end probably doesn’t count.

Can direct response build brands?
For the most part, the best you can expect from direct response is that it won’t damage the brand – it reads well, has a charming tone of voice, but it works the left brain and to give it a strong call to action bribes people into responding using an incentive. Because direct response tends to be a numbers game this is as far as appetites for the ‘B word’ go.

In order to function at its best, direct response relies on an incentive or bribe to elicit a response from the person receiving the proposition. How many times have we seen ‘10% off your next purchase’ or ‘£50 cashback’, or even ‘receive a free mug/soft toy when you call us’? It’s here that direct response becomes a dangerous tool as the minute you need to bribe someone to use your product you’ve effectively eroded the value of it as a brand in their mind.

Direct response marketeers will point to the fact that the are converting people who were near the tipping point to try the product, but there’s little proof to show that these people didn’t already use it or would have purchased without the bribe. In fact econometrics constantly suggests that DM is less efficient than we think and PR much more so.

It’s a numbers game – the more you send out the more you get back.
Bombardment – 35-44 year olds get on average 8 pieces of DM every week (Source: DMIS).

The received wisdom on direct response is that you first need the right audience. You then need to hit them with the right proposition at the right time. Finally a bit of nice creative can make a small uplift in response. The best way of hitting enough people at the right time and with the right message is to bombard a chunk of similar looking people and hope that at least 0.5% of them respond to a DM pack or just 0.004% to a DRTV ad.

It’s all about an obvious benefit to them at the right time - but if you’re selling car insurance it could be at pretty much any one of 11 months of the year.

A lot of direct response accepts and even welcomes pissing off the audience. This just seems crazy in the twenty first century, but a good bit of irritation can mean salience and therefore high consideration.

But this all sounds a bit mad when you consider that 99 out of 100 people are ignoring your communication and that is considered a success. And it’s something that the smarter companies have spotted. HSBC have now offered people the opportunity to opt out of their mailings - pretty radical in financial services and the data on direct mail supports this. Ten years ago 83% of all direct mail was opened and 63% was read. It’s now closer to 67% and 45% (Source: DMIS)

The tyranny of the Drayton Bird model
Direct response tends to focus on certain techniques for attaining a response. A strong call to action, an incentive, impenetrable long copy and rational benefits feature in the vast majority of work. Once you step outside of this formulaic comfort zone it starts to get a bit tougher.

Those that are prepared to change things and create distinctive, charming and brand enhancing pieces have to be prepared to take a risk. The chances of the work driving a comparable response rate are slim. However, the rewards are potentially great.

However, it doesn’t work all the time. Brand building and responsive work isn’t formulaic and therefore can’t be produced as consistently.

In other words, it’s much easier to get wrong and so people just don’t do it. Clients and agencies alike.

Where direct response does build brand
There are, however, a couple of exceptions that prove the rule:

Some categories demand that direct response helps to build the brand. For example charity work. Everything Bernardos do has to elicit an emotional reaction but also prove its worth in the number of responses it generates. And it does this without, for the most part, resorting to incentives and other dirty response tricks.

It’s probably the sector where the emotional reaction and the rational response are most closely linked: “that’s terrible – if only I could do something about it – oh I can”.

Automotive also has a link between brand and response but only in direct mail where the most responsive packs are those that provide an emotional reason to purchase. I have to feel that the car reflects me before I purchase, and due to the nature of most manufacturer’s dealer infrastructure, provide me with a straightforward call to action. If a mailing can achieve this then the chances are that I’ll call up and book a test drive off the back of it.

Two of the strongest pieces of direct response work that I know of have both worked on a predominantly brand level. The first of these is ‘Error Letter’ a mailing from Telewest (now Virgin Media) to customers who were still using dial up. The simple but effective use of space and missing words to convey the experience of using a dial up connection was a superb summation of the argument. And lifted response by 55%.

The second piece of work was a letter sent to Mercedes Benz vans prospects with the proposition that a Mercedes Vito van was ‘better built than other vans’. To bring the proposition to life the letter was printed on a thick card stock and so provided a literal demonstration of the product benefit. Research showed that 48% of those who received it would now consider a Mercedes Vito as a result of the mailing.

Both pieces of work are the best performing pieces either client had ever had. Whether they can be replicated, and in particular the Telewest mailing, is another matter.

What about online?
The web is geared towards DR but in it’s purest form this consists of Google Adwords. Whilst incredibly informative, and useful they on their own don’t build the brand. They provide a means of getting to a website which will provide a brand experience and a possible sale. You could also argue that traditional online display when primarily used to drive response struggles to build the brand.

Conclusion
The number of clients who continue to invest heavily in direct response suggests that is an incredibly useful tool. And a review of most agencies DR work shows that they won’t sacrifice brand for the sake of response. However, whether DR alone can build a brand on its own seems highly unlikely. For the most part though the most you can hope from direct response is that it doesn’t erode your brand. And recent events in the banking sector illustrate this.

As illustrated earlier, HSBC have offered customers the chance to opt out of mailings. Banks like Lloyds TSB are looking to move away from the huge volumes and work a little bit more smartly to try and offer customers things when they want not when the business needs.

Makes sense to me. What do you reckon?