Marketing Strategies 61 | Ramble by Sunil Bahl @SunMatrix

Social Media Happiness

In a first of it’s kind undertaking, we are seeing Coca Cola using social media marketing and a travel campaign to tap into regular people to be their “Happiness Ambassadors” and travel the world for the whole of 2010 and document their entire quest via blog posts, tweets, YouTube videos, TwitPics, and other social media mentions.

Currently their is a contest in progress to shortlist the brand ambassadors whose mission will be to find happiness in the 206 different countries that sell Coca-Cola products across the world.

The winning three-person team will begin their journey on January 1, 2010 and attempt to travel more than 150,000 miles in 365 days, visiting each of the 206 countries where Coca-Cola is sold. Their duty will be to engage with local denizens and uncover what makes them happy. After which they are to share their experiences online, and complete tasks in each country as determined by online voters.

Breakfast cereal box is a 3D game console!

No longer the stuff of science fiction, augmented reality (AR) is fast catching on with forward-thinking brands.

This growing trend has led brands to conjure up useful ways to integrate AR within their campaigns, with mobile playing a very big part.

Augmented reality apps are proving popular with brands
Augmented reality (AR) is the process of superimposing digital information or objects onto real-time video streams in order to create the illusion that they are part of the physical scene.

The latest AR application being Nestle’s Chocopic cereal box being turned into a 3D game console for the film ‘Arthur and the Revenge of Maltazard’. The film and the cereal box will roll out across Europe, starting in France next month.

The game itself is fairly simple – a variation of the hand-held maze games requiring the player to manoeuver ballbearings in to a hole. Achieving that has a rather spectacular effect in the AR version, as shown off in this video released below.

Still for many, AR remains little more than a gimmick, but the campaigns shared in the below links show it can be much more. Here is a top 10 list from Revolution Magazine:

Virals are now known as Epipheos

Internet has changed advertising for ever…it’s now all about having shared experiences! Therefore everyone is using this new technology to share things that enlighten and educate one and another.

This epiphany (i.e. an illuminating discovery) is interactive, collective and viral…and hence now we see a new word being coined for the same i.e. epipheo.

Epipheo is a video that creates a sharable epiphany 🙂

It’s pretty neat to see how these guys have coined the word…