Here’s a recipe for a delicious Butternut & Feta Tart I make for the 20:20 agency team. Serves 8 500g Plain flour 125g diced lard 125g diced butter or 250g butter only a little water 250g feta cheese – diced 2 med butternut squash – peel, de-seed and dice 6 eggs 500ml double cream…
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Social media is exciting and is an instant way for people (and brands) to connect and share new content. Also, news travels fast in the world of social media and acts as a fantastic catalyst for getting the talk out there.
This story about Sainsbury’s renaming their Tiger Bread to Giraffe Bread after receiving a letter from a inquisitive child is a great example of a brand interacting properly with people through Social Media and recognising when something has ignited the imaginations (and hearts) in this case of the public.
Back in May 2011, three-and-a-half-year-old Lily Robinson wrote to Sainsbury’s, asking why its Tiger Bread was called that when it actually looks much more like a giraffe.
Chris King who worked in the Sainsbury’s customer service team at the time wrote this great response which went viral and trended all over social networking sites after Lily’s mum posted the letters on her blog
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In another example of how social media is becoming a key tool for politicians the American President took to Google+ hangouts yesterday in order to tackle over 133,000 questions sent in from the public to answer.
Subjects such as the economy, foreign aid and drone strikes were all up for debate and five individuals were chosen to direct their questions live to Obama in the forum arranged by Google+.
The medium proved itself as not being a place to hide if you are answering tough questions. The economy was a hot topic as one woman complained about her husband being unemployed for three years despite being a skilled engineer. Obama expressed surprise at this and by coming involved with the woman personally showed that this sort of arena is not one where you can shrug away criticism or appear nonchalant.
When it comes to brands perhaps there is a lesson to be learnt that live interaction with your detractors will certainly court the medias attention but you better make sure you have all the answers ready for any tricky situations that could arise.
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Was I the only ten year old terrified of the demonic ‘One too many and you might turn Bertie’ adverts that graced our screens in the late eighties / early nineties courtesy of Liquorice Allsorts?
I wasn’t the biggest fan of liquorice as a child anyway but my Great Grandmother Muriel a type 1 diabetic always hid a packet underneath her blanket and would sneak them out when she thought nobody was watching.
Now Muriel should have been more worried about ‘One too many and you might fall into a diabetic coma’ but she used to love bribing her Great Grandchildren not to tell by offering us one of our favourite allsorts in exchange for sealed lips. It was also a great excuse whenever she got caught to announce innocently ‘but I bought them for the boys’ at which point we would all nod in agreement our teeth stuck together with sinful sweeties.
As an adult I now realise that the Bertie Bassett adverts were homage to the sci-fi film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But at the time because of the link to doing something so sneaky behind my parents back with Great Granny Muriel I was genuinely paranoid that some sort of liquorice based transmutation would happen to me as punishment.
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In the grand scheme of things, people don’t care about brands that much. If we want people to pay attention, ‘like’, tag, ‘participate’, share and everything else it’s worth bearing in mind that we face the most terrifying of all human emotions. It’s not contempt, infatuation, love, hate or anything else. It’s indifference. Most people have something better to do.
So little no wonder that when the IPA mined their Databank of Effectiveness Papers-20 years of rigorous case studies- they found one kind of communications strategy outperformed all others. Fame.
Much, much more successful than rational ‘persuasion’ or ‘information’. What’s more, they’re incredibly good at raising quality perceptions, without delivering ‘facts’ about the product. What’s even more startling is that there’s quite a lot of evidence in the case studies that delivering ‘facts’ about product and service benefits can drastically REDUCE the effectiveness of a campaign.
When we say ‘Fame’ campaigns, by the way, we don’t mean ‘using celebrities’ (of course making use of celebrities is perfectly fine!), we mean getting the brand talked about. Actually, above all else, looking to make it famous for something. This goes way beyond ‘brand awareness’ and is all about being seen to be making waves in the category. This gives the brand a sense of authority and leadership.
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Facebook has come under some criticism today for giving users seven days to adapt to their new look timeline before it is made mandatory across the board.
The new look timeline pages shows a users entire history on the site and not everyone is a fan of the design finding it clunkier and less user friendly than the Facebook they have become accustomed to using.
By the end of the week users will be updated through an announcement at the top of their home page which they will need to click to activate the timeline before going back onto the site.
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I went to see The Artist last week and I am not ashamed to say that it made me a little teary. It wasn’t because the ending was tragic or that the characters ended up destitute and alone – in fact the story unfolds to become quite the opposite.
What upset me was the main characters utter belief in his on screen persona and the devastation it causes him when this is taken away. Would you really (spoiler alert) burn your house down and attempt suicide if fame was taken away from you? What kind of psyche is at work that would make someone react in such an extreme manner?
It led me to thinking about people in the public eye in general. When do famous people stop playing a part or reading the lines in a role and actually believe they are a brand? Is there some sort of seismic shift in their brain that takes them from actor and actress, singer or comedian to global brand, hero worshipped and iconised by all sundry as something much more than the mere mortal?
I sometimes feel flicking through Heat Magazine whilst waiting for a train (I would never buy a copy) or noticing that Katie Price is on the cover of OK for a record eighteen months running that fame appears to be the one mental illness which they can’t section you for. Surely it can’t be healthy for a person to become totally self-obsessed and regard everything they do or say to be part of their brand as if it’s a physical tangible omnipresence?
I then ended up thinking about how every one of us presents ourselves as a certain type of person each and every day of our lives. In many ways we all have our own ‘brand’ which we feel defines our individuality and keeps us special. In the quest for staying uniquely human we like to believe we are all ‘one offs’ and the clothes we wear, food we eat and hairstyles we adopt tell the world a certain something about us.
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Recent high profile gaffes by politicians Ed Milaband and Diane Abbott are proof positive that Social Networking particularly when you are in the public eye needs to be treated with extra respect. Sometimes the points you think you are making privately can get picked up and misrepresented in the blink of an eye.
Experts are predicting however that the next generation of Social Media users will become much more savvy in the way they self-publicise and use tools to promote their own opinions.
Labour MP Diane Abbott had to apologise earlier this month after a comment on Twitter about white people led to accusations of racism. Ed Miliband, the Labour party leader then mistakenly entered “Blackbusters” in a tweet expressing sadness at the death of former Blockbusters host Bob Holness.
But as a younger generation of people emerge who are tapped into social networking from an early age people working within the social media industry believe that this level of ignorance will decrease as society realises what sort of impact an unguarded comment can have on a career or reputation.
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Wimpy, Yorkshire Tea, Skittles, Tropicana – these are just a few brands that through random acts of kindness not only seem more human, but make us feel more human too. If you’re anything like me, you’ll love doing kind things. Picking a card for a friend’s birthday can take a good half an hour and writing it… well I see it as an opportunity to say something nice, so I do, in a short handwritten message.
When brands embark on missions to share ‘love’, ‘happiness’, ‘sunshine’ and ‘goodwill’ it gives me a fuzzy feeling inside. Even though a part of me knows that it will most likely be the strategic brainchild of a creative guy sat in an office tasked to boost the corporations profile, these seemingly random acts still give me a warm feeling…
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Another blast from my televisual past is the holy grail of advert addiction ‘Shake n Vac’. My Nans house used to smell of three things when I was a kid, Nina Ricci L’air du Temps perfume, home-made toffee and the citrusy top notes of Glade Shake n Vac.
My Grandmother was a Shake n Vac aficionado and used it on a daily basis to combat any perceived odours from her immaculately groomed blue blond Skye terrier Pepe who I never once saw roll in anything unsightly or jump in a river.
You see Nanny Eileen is the type of woman who paints the kitchen ceiling in a silk shirt whilst making Sunday dinner for six. Now in her early seventies and still extremely sprightly twenty years ago she was a very young active Nan who would take us crabbing on holiday in Cornwall and bowling on the beach.
Anyway back to Shake n Vac and why I love it as a brand. My Nan to this very day (so this has lasted 26 years) still likes to break out the Shake n Vac and do a little dance around the house whilst vacuuming – now that’s an advert that’s tapped into a very strange side of the human psyche!
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