Get Inspired Here

Renegade marketing

Philippe D. — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:45:00 GMT

Today I will duplicate a post I made for my personal blog since I believe it's an interesting point of vue (very non-marketing actually)

Who’s that girl? The new Betty Page? A recent recruit for the pussycat dolls? Catwoman in the next Batman sequel?

Actually, she’s one of the most famous and innovative Belgian entrepreneurs. Her name is Murielle Scherre and she’s a myspace and facebook star under the nickname of “La fille d’O”. She’s sure isn’t the typical executive woman. I doubt she produces elaborate business cases. She has no background in corporations but she’s successful and already appeared on a bunch of business magazines covers. Besides her entrepreneurship, Murielle also wrote a book, is a stage artist and used to have her own TV show.

Her brand “La fille d’O” is initially a lingerie brand but Murielle is so interleaved with her brand that it’s difficult to distinguish her person from her brand. She recently launched an acclaimed shoe collection.

Murielle is also a very gentle person who kindly accepted to answer my questions. No marketing buzzwords included…

“ I am no marketer. I am a human being and a customer all the same and I try to create a brand like I would want to buy/discover in stores myself. I don’t think about money. I think about satisfaction: For me as a creator and as a person and a customer. The other people wearing my stuff feel the same. They are fed up with the mainstream. More and more people tend to think before they invest their money in a brand. You need to deserve it. That is why I took the risk of linking my person to my brand like this. I knew it would put some people off because of who I am but it would charm the others even more.”

About social media:

I got picked up by the media from the very first day so I can easily say it was verrrry important. Word of mouth is another part that can take some credits. I have very happy customers because I see them coming back and all of them bring friends and family.

Instruments such as myspace and my website only make all this ‘teambuilding’ stronger because I show my true face on it and I guess it gives people confidence. I have seen a lot of big companies trying to start up a blog or a myspace but “virtuassionals” know to distinguish the sincere from the marketer.

About advertising:

I have never spent any money on advertisement. I think the people I design for have grown immune to it so I don’t see why I would spend money on useless efforts. I prefer to get exposure where it ‘hurts’. When going out, on stage, playing music, making a decent TV show…

I don’t want to make commercially interesting decisions by being less radical. I want to make stuff I shall fully take responsibility for.

About the link between being a beautiful woman and breakthrough in social media:

Auch! That is both a difficult question and a compliment! Great! I have the slight suspicion things would have been different when trying to make a living selling orthopedic shoes. They say beauty is on the inside but I have never met anyone who could lay eyes upon someone’s inside at first glance so I guess that is just a lame excuse. But I do think my standards of beauty aren’t what the current beauty trends are. I am totally turned off by uniformity, perfection, purity, glamour, all those things have become so commercially vampirized it scares me!

About sharing:

I think everyone who’s eager to learn is stimulated to share experiences since it shortens your own learning process. Collaboration is the new black

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www.lafilledo.com

The same interview with another video can be found here

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Rich Media, Arte povera

Philippe D. — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:10:00 GMT

I am currently working of a presentation called Rich Media, Arte povera. The idea is to show that you don't need big budgets to create big impact.

It's even the case for video advertising. Here are 2 examples I really enjoyed.

The fist one is a Lynx video using only one picture (explicit content warning :)) + a packshot

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The second one wasn't a commercial in the first place but after the big hit of the first epîsode, Coca cola sponsored the second and the third episodes of the trilogy. Here's episode 2

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If you know other examples like those, I would love to see them.

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Can brands have a social live?

Geert — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:28:00 GMT

Below you can see an interesting presentation that was given by Lucy McCabe, Lead Consultant, OgilvyOne Worldwide in Singapore during the Verge conference. They have also posted other presentations from that seminar on their blog: The open room. It covers the Lily Allen story, the opportunities for brands in Asia Pacific (with some phenomenal figures: 417 million people participating in social media here), and five lessons for brands to engage with them:

Trust your fans
Give people something to be passionate about
Content is key
Let go of your brand
Get involved actively

If you want to know more, check out the presentation.

[media type="slide" height="355" width="425"]http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=lucy-mccabe-1213586741873089-8[/media]

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All you wanted to know about viral video

Philippe D. — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:18:00 GMT

Ben Stiller got it all!

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Silverlight Demo in the creativology Lounge in Cannes

Geert — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 11:02:00 GMT

Nice demo of Silverlight by David Pugh-Jones Creative Strategist EMEA, Microsoft Advertising, in the Cannes Lions 08 Creativology Lounge. He shows us the following examples that you can give a try yourself here:

Photosynth with the Endeavour on the launch pad including amazing detail shots taken from a helicopter.
Deepzoom for Hard Rock Cafe.
Deepzoom and Silverlight for the Renault Laguna

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Inspiration from Perfect Fools

Geert — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:53:00 GMT

Tony Högkvist from Perfect Fools discussing innovation during Cannes Lions 2008. A few quotes:

Best campaigns are the ones that go beyond the banner.
The big picture will be more social tools and social activation.

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Marc Bresseel, General Manager Microsoft Advertising EMEA on what we did in Cannes

Geert — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:42:00 GMT

General Manager Sales EMEA, Microsoft Advertising on Pioneering Creativology In Cannes. Marc gives us a summary on everything that went on in Cannes.

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Interview in Cannes with Fernando Romano, Creative Director at JWT

Geert — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:32:00 GMT

David Pugh-Jones, Creative Strategist for Microsoft advertising asked Fernanda Romano, JWT London Creative Director, to highlight the key messages she delivered on channels, content and innovation during Cannes Lions 2008.

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Microsoft Surface at the Rio in Las Vegas

Geert — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:26:00 GMT

Harrah’s Entertainment and Microsoft are unveiling a new interactive entertainment experience with the deployment of six Microsoft Surface units at the iBar in Las Vegas’ Rio Hotel and Casino.

Guests in the iBar will be able to play games, order customized drinks for themselves (or that special someone across the room) and send photos and messages to each other via strategically placed video cameras that can be controlled by the Surface units.

The iBar Microsoft Surface units will feature severall brand new interactive applications. Personally, I was impressed to see the Flirt application. Have a look at the video. If I was in advertising for drinks I would definitely want to be in there, won't you?

Thanks to on10

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Michael Eisner on storytelling at Advance

Geert — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 23:09:00 GMT

Michael Eisner was the opening speaker at Microsoft's advance08 digital advertising conference in Redmond a few weeks ago. His remarks focused on the content that the advertisers are looking to associate their brands with, and he offered his take on where things are going. One of the quotes in this video I found remarkable was this:

"The salacious and the stupid have been traditionally the avant garde and the advance guard of the more high-minded and definitely more profitable fare. The Internet will be no different. YouTube is celebrated as a completely revolutionary concept -- and it is. The ability for anyone, anywhere to create and distribute short-form entertainment that can be seen by anyone else, anywhere else is an extraordinary development. But in many ways, YouTube is very old news. It is to the Internet what the nickelodeon was to the movies -- a very preliminary installment of what is to come. What is to come is great, creative storytelling, tailored for an era in which many think the audience has a 10-second, thumbnail mentality for free content that they feel entitled to."

Another was this: “Internet users…will stay with a story for as long as it’s good. It’s not just 90 seconds or two minutes. They’ll stay with a story if it’s 10 minutes, 20 minutes, even 30 minutes.”

And this: “One of them, whether it’s Yahoo, MSN or MySpace, has got to say, story-driven content is going to be the next big app, and we better be there.”

Personally I loved his take on micromanagement of brands. You can hear it on the 22 minutes mark in the video.

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I found this video inspirational and I hope you feel the same way!

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From conversation to particiption

Geert — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 00:14:00 GMT

The movie:"Inspiration, anyone?" is online. This time it’s not only about the movie! The movie is a trigger to get people to this site: http://getinspiredhere.net where we want to try and create an online marketing community and bring as much inspiration as possible to marketers and everybody in the marketing, advertising and publishing business, whether they are marketers, designers or developers.

There are a few examples on the site but we will really start at the Cannes Advertising festival where we will try and capture as much inspirational content as possible and share it on this new platform. So put this site in your RSS reader and we hope to inspire you in the coming weeks. For all the feeds use this main feed, if you only want the marketing stuff, use this marketing feed, for the designer posts use the designer feed and for the developers, use the developer feed.

The first movie was about conversation, now we need to build in participation. We hope we will achieve this with this platform.

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Inspiration, anyone? The movie

Geert — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:02:00 GMT

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Inspiration, anyone?

Geert — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:49:00 GMT

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Interview with Marc Bresseel at Interact in 2007

Geert — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 22:39:00 GMT

Interview with Marc Bresseel, General Manager EMEA, at Interact in Brussels in 2007. His gives us his views on the future of online marketing.

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Bill Gates TechEd Keynote

Geert — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 11:19:00 GMT

Bill Gates opened the TechEd Keynote, if you missed it you can watch it her

From Channel 9

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Digital Trailblazers

Geert — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 10:49:00 GMT

Aaron Coldiron from Microsoft Vista and Clive Peoples of Expedia.co.uk on being part of the digital trailblazers. Interview taken during Verge conference in London.

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Digital advertising Trends

admin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 09:53:00 GMT

An excellent presentation from Chris Schaumann, Global Advertising & Digital Lead - APAC/Greater China Region, on Digital advertising trends with a focus on Asia.

[media type="slide" height="355" width="425"]http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=mscmgremixdigitaladvertisingtrends290508-1212141191965616-8[/media]

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Trailer

admin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 06:13:00 GMT

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Can brands have a social life?

admin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:49:00 GMT

Despite an estimated 417M users in Asia Pacific consuming social media, very few brands are actively leveraging the channel in a way that creates true value. Ogilvy's digital folks interviewed some experts in the region and here's what they had to say.

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Future shape of advertising

admin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:45:00 GMT

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See the Silverlight 2008 Win video featured at MIX08

admin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:25:00 GMT

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Exporting XAML from Expression Design to Expression Blend

admin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:22:00 GMT

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Behind the scenes of the sequel

admin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:14:00 GMT

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Bring the love back

admin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:01:00 GMT

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