Archive for the ‘Video’ Category

This week we’re loving #blogadesh and Reynholm Industries

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Here’s our regular roundup of stories that have caught our eye this week – as ever, thanks to the Shiny team for some great suggestions.

Facebook Places

Lots of news coming out of Facebook this week about forthcoming features and changes to the service. Most notably, Facebook Places has launched in the US and just as they were influenced by Twitter to create the “what’s on your mind” feature, Mark Zuckerberg and his team have responded to the interest in location-based networks like Foursquare and Gowalla, both of whom they’ve partnered with for this launch.

As with Foursquare, Facebook Places allows you to check in to places like bars or shops, and if you wish, tell your friends where you are via your profile. You can also tag friends who are with you, and see who else has checked in there, with each destination having its own Facebook page. Users will get rewards and incentives for checking in, something that to date has been missing in the UK from location-based networks.

It’s a savvy move that will be coming to a smartphone near you soon, and yet again shows Zuck’s determination to make Facebook the only social network most people need – which in turn increases interest from brands, and advertising revenues…

Facebook will also be rolling out some changes to how profiles are displayed from Monday so if you start to spot some changes on familiar pages, don’t be alarmed!

Mummy Bloggers help Save The Children

Twitter’s been full of positive buzz around a great initiative from Save The Children to invite three mummy bloggers to Bangladesh to highlight the issue of child deaths from diseases including malaria. This has huge support from the blogging community, with over 40 supportive blog posts appearing in a matter of days, and a huge number of tweets using the hashtag #blogladesh.

The link-up is explained by one of the chosen bloggers, Sian To (who also organised Cybermummy), and you might have spotted Shiny Red alumni Jaz Cummins, now at Amnesty, giving the campaign her thumbs-up in PR Week.

Chatroulette bites back…

Our video of the week has to be this one from Lionsgate films which is a brilliant use of Chatroulette to promote The Last Exorcism. Teen boys watch expectantly as a girl flirts with them, only to freak out when all is not what it seems…(warning kids – contains strong language…) Subverting Chatroulette like this sees the campaign deliver genuine shock factor to exactly target the right audience who love a scary movie, and the video is a brilliant way of taking that to the wider world.

…and Reynholm Industries online

You might have spotted Aleksandr Orlov’s latest online venture, Compare the Muskrat, but our favourite spoof site of the moment is for Reynholm Industries, workplace of The IT Crowd. If you’re suffering from withdrawal since the show went off air a couple of weeks ago, never fear – Reynholm’s Facebook profile takes you through to Reynholm’s own site where Moss, Roy and Jen are dispensing their usual helpful advice …

Tags: mummy blogging
Posted in Digital download, Facebook, Foursquare, PR and Marcomms, Video, social media | No Comments »

The Perfect Pint… At Home – new Shiny Red video

Tuesday, June 15th, 2010

Our client Molson Coors has recently launched Home Draught, the biggest innovation in home drinking for years, and we’ve been helping them spread the word. If you haven’t heard about Home Draught yet, it’s a draught beer system filled with ten pints of beer that fits easily into the fridge for the perfect cold pint at home.

We’ve set up a dedicated page at www.facebook.com/homedraught where 5,000 lucky beer fans have already won free Home Draught units to try for themselves, and we have lots more activity planned for the rest of the year. One of our key objectives has been to get across how easy Home Draught is to operate – and one of the ways we’re doing that is through video, such as the clip below:

Of course, as part of the creative process, we’ve had to drink a fair bit of beer to get acquainted with the product. Life can be tough sometimes…

Tags: beer, Carling, coors light, grolsch, home draught, lager, Molson Coors, shiny red, social media, Video
Posted in Client News, Facebook, PR and Marcomms, Video, brands, social media | No Comments »

Shiny Red’s take on the iPad – is it worth the hype?

Monday, May 17th, 2010

As iPad frenzy builds ahead of its UK launch on May 28 the Shiny Red team have been getting a sneak peek and playing with a rare US import. It’s fair to say we’re pretty divided here, with a few of us completely won over and planning to buy our own as soon as they hit the shops, but others less blown away.

Elements that have gone down particularly well with the admirers in the office include:

The overall design – the iPhone owners in the office all love the look and feel of the iPad, perhaps unsurprisingly, as it’s more or less a supersized version
The apps – from what we’ve seen the choice of apps is already very promising, with a great selection on offer for both fun and practical purposes, to keep gamers and less frivolous users happy

Having said that though, there’s some obvious potential problems that, in our view, may deter some potential purchasers from investing in a first-gen iPad. For example:

No Flash – thanks to the ongoing squabbles between Apple and Adobe, you won’t be able to access any content that requires Flash on your iPad, which means many websites end up full of holes when viewed, and perhaps more importantly: no iPlayer
No camera – the size and portability of the iPad mean it feels naturally suited for using with Skype video chat, but the lack of camera renders this impossible. A good reason to wait for later incarnations of the iPad for sure…

UK prices have just been announced and feedback has been less than enthusiastic, as we’ll be paying a fair bit more than iPad purchasers State-side. Even despite the cost difference, it’s worth comparing the cheapest iPad (£429) with a similarly priced netbook, as you quickly realise the netbook can actually do more.

So to help you decide whether to buy or not to buy here’s our guide to the iPad in action:

Tags: Apple, digital pr agency, iPad UK launch, iPad UK price, iPad video demo, shiny red, social media agency, social media marketing
Posted in Blogging, General, Mobile, New Media, Traditional Media, Video, iPad, social media | No Comments »

2009: how it was for us

Friday, December 18th, 2009

The office has been full to bursting this week with mince pies (thanks Lewis), birthday cakes (courtesy of Tara and Gill) and home made Christmas cake (from my Geordie gran). Amidst the crumbs and tinsel, we’ve been reflecting on what’s been a busy and incredibly productive year, so I thought I’d share my take on Shiny Red in 2009.

Without doubt there’s been a real growth in demand for digital innovation, driven by consumer brands and public sector clients who now expect to choose from a portfolio of online comms services. We’ve constantly evolved our offer to meet this demand, and looking back, it seems as if the year unfolded as distinct social media seasons.

So spring saw us creating social sites for two quite different clients. Yell.com wanted to encourage people to and around the site so we developed Sort Your Life where each month an expert guest blogger would write on a theme like fitness or fashion. For Reckitt Benckiser, the brief was to inspire graduates about available career opportunities, so our approach was to develop a site where new joiners from around the world could talk about their front-line experiences.

By the summer, web video had really come into focus, and we worked with fashion stylist Louise Roe on a series of films to help launch social shopping site very.co.uk. We also got to meet Peter Crouch at an East London soccer skills academy and filmed him in action for the National Lottery Promotions Unit (an edited version is on our homepage video). Video was also a powerful way for us to showcase a new interactive Piccadilly Circus sign for McDonald’s to bloggers and photography communities (thanks, Leo Burnett!).

Autumn was the season of microblogging: we helped Habitat relaunch the brand’s Twitter feed, which now provides offers, updates, and store news. We also issued a major report into online buying behaviour for eBay Advertising, and asked the great British public for messages to put on advertising billboards around the UK for Cadbury Wispa Gold.

Everyone needs warming up in the winter, so our Twindaloo app for Cobra that analyses your Twitter profile to find out what type of curry you are provided a welcome touch of spice to our lives, as did managing the brand’s 60,000-strong Welovecurry Facebook group. We went live with Pfizer’s Man MoT to give men health advice from doctors via an online surgery, and partnered with MySpace for the NHS Teen LifeCheck campaign that asked teens to take a quiz and find out how healthy they are in return for the chance to win a gig by R+B artist Chipmunk at their school.

Of course talking to bloggers and web communities was – and is – still very much on the agenda for clients including Molson Coors’ Bittersweet Partnership which looks at women’s attitudes towards beer, and Odeon which saw us we targeting film bloggers and heavy metal fans to promote Iron Maiden’s Flight 666. And in one of PR Week’s digital campaigns of the year, we unveiled the wedding of Bertie and Betty Bassett for Red Allsorts via Facebook and YouTube.

I could go on because there’s so much more great work that the team has done this year, but the end of the year is time to look forward as well as back. Ash has been gazing into his crystal ball and will share his some thoughts about what 2010 will hold next week.

Meanwhile (and apologies for a slight touch of the Oscars …) huge thank yous go out to all the lovely Shiny Redders for making 2009 a vintage year, to our colleagues at Red for all their amazing support over the last 12 months, and to you the reader for being part of it with us.

Merry Christmas, and have a happy, healthy and social New Year!

Posted in Blogging, Client News, Facebook, PR and Marcomms, Video | No Comments »

Everyday Adventures – New videos for UK parents

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Over the last 6 months, we’ve been working on a video project which aims to tell parents from a range of backgrounds about some of the real life stories and circumstances that people in their positions find themselves in.

“Everyday Adventures” tells the stories of ordinary families from around the UK as they face these and other challenges. There’s a mix of real life and animation films, packed with useful information on: registering your child’s birth; parental rights; benefits you may be eligible for; and the availability of extended services in schools. Also included are links to organisations that can provide further help and support to mums and dads in all areas of family life.

To reflect the multicultural nature of UK families, the videos are available in English, Polish, Somali, Bengali and Guajurati. We’ve created MySpace and YouTube pages for the videos so you can check them out and let us know what you think. Our favourite is Wayne’s story

Tags: everyday adventures, myspace, parenting, Video, youtube
Posted in Client News, Video | No Comments »

The web on your tellybox – an update.

Monday, April 20th, 2009

Adapted by the author from an original post at social Probiotic

A few months ago I wrote a piece on my own blog about internet content making its way to the TV screen. Not in a Media Center box kind of way, but a way that is done from the point of view of the television industry. It’s now time for the other big event of the braodcasting calendar, NAB in Las Vegas, which unfortunately, I’ll not be attending. There was however, a chance to see some of the things that will be on display there at the IPTV World Forum in London last month. Once again, for a show that is about using internet technology, there was disappointingly little about internet content to see. But here’s a run down of what some of the TV tech companies are doing with social media.

Accedo: This is more of an update from what they showed me at IBC, essentially, they’ve taken on the ‘app’ model for Facebook and Twitter so that you can view a cutdown version of these applications as a sidebar during your normal TV watching. In the same way that online applications such as thwirl and digsby recognise that some things need to be kept in the background while you’re focusing on your main task, Accedo will sit completely unassumingly until you want to share what you’re doing with your network. It also integrates with your EPG, so that just using the coloured remote buttons, you can update what you’re watching. Neat, look:

SeaChange: as a company I’ve done some work with before, I was curious to know what this middleware provider was up to in the world of web content. They’re showing off Affinity, a social networking engine for video-on-demand, essentially a tool that allows you to make and take recommendations for stuff in a VOD library, the idea being that people will discover pay-per-view content that they might not normally find (= extra revenue for operator). The problem I have with this is that it seems that the recommendations are done via collaborative filtering (i.e. you share what you like with your friends and vice versa), which means that the solution is only good when your friends like the same stuff as you AND they happen to have an Affinity enabled TV service. If it was linked to a social network’s API, there would be a lot more value from this and it wouldn’t necessitate the latter point.

Ericcson: Yes they do TV, in fact, they were showing last.fm on TV – not the actual videos, but essentially, it’s an ‘app’ built for playing music through your TV when you get very bored of adverts for ringtones on VH1. I’m not entirely sure where it sits in the network because they don’t seem to be talking about it in any of their literature or website, which is a shame. I liked the demo though, it looks pretty slick and my TV has better sound quality than my PC, so I’m all for taking this particular service to the living room in another way (I currently use the last.fm app on my iPod quite frequently for that type of thing. Pic below:

CompleteTV: Now I have to say I’m more than a little disappointed with these guys. Despite having a fairly nice booth at IPTVWF, and splashing the YouTube Logo across it a couple of times, looking at their site, I fail to see how that was any more than lip service to online media making its way to the TV in any genuine form. Fear of content producers… perhaps. Now, that might sound harsh, but here’s the thing… CompleteTV makes boxes – not a great start… boxes for the consumer (even worse, since most of this stuff will migrate to the network in 3-4 years), which, with the whole wealth of social media goodness out there can do all this: “browse the internet and act as an email/instant messaging client”. Wow. I’m hugely underwhelmed.

Finally I wanted to quote a great article from the March/April issue of Future Media, in which Jonathan Webdale has interviewed Anthony Rose, one of the big cheeses behind the iPlayer, who said that “2007 was the year the BBC chose what you watched, 2008 was the year viewers chose what they watched and 2009 would be the year your friends choose what you watch.” As long as it’s not the rest of the Shiny Red team choosing, I’m keen to see how it goes.

Tags: future media, nab, social media, tv
Posted in Social Networking, Video, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

How the Guardian’s Ian Tomlinson G20 video changes the media landscape

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

An astonishing piece of amateur video obtained by the Guardian shows just how much the world has changed for big media players. The footage shows Ian Tomlinson, the man who died at last week’s G20 protests in London, being struck by a police officer and falling to the ground minutes before suffering a fatal heart attack.

You can view the film and make up your own mind about the incident, now the subject of an investigation by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. My focus here is to discuss how the footage and surrounding story has played out across old and new media in an exceptionally powerful and converged way.

The Guardian has scored a major coup, not just in getting hold of what is an extraordinary news exclusive, but for how it has successfully delivered the story via its traditional print product, its own web site, and across social media too. (I have to declare an interest as my husband David Taylor works on the Guardian’s home news desk and has been pivotal in developing this story over the last few days.)

Consider this: The Guardian had an exclusive, yet it chose to share its content before it appeared in print, running the video and a first break on the story on its web site yesterday evening. In the ‘old’ days of print journalism this would have been inconceivable, to the point that the red top tabloids would regularly run weak front page stories in their early editions, revealing their big exclusives only in final 3am print run.

As soon as the video appeared other newspapers’ sites were linking to it and capturing the footage or still images to use themselves, and crediting the Guardian. Meanwhile broadcasters including the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 featured it extensively on their news bulletins, again promoting the Guardian name.

At the same time, social media was fuelling the story, with Guardian journalists using Twitter to share the video URL. Mass retweets followed and within hours, “Ian Tomlinson” was trending on Twitter as one of the 10 most written about topics.

Today the Guardian’s print edition has extensive and detailed analysis of the film by reporter Paul Lewis to augment his online story, while the web site is offering bloggers the footage to embed. And rival media from the agenda-setting Today programme to competitor broadsheets are still crediting the Guardian as the source.

So what does this tell us? Firstly that high-quality content is crucial - without an exceptional story none of this would have happened. Second, strategic use of the right media channels – print, social media, web site – can have a multiplying audience effect not a minimising one. Third, that media businesses now are not “papers” or “web sites” but brands, regardless of how we consume their content. The Guardian’s liberal stance helped it secure the story, and its brand has been strengthened by the extensive cross-promotion it has since received.

Tags: David Taylor, death, G20, Guardian, Ian Tomlinson, Paul Lewis, Video
Posted in New Media, PR and Marcomms, Social Networking, User Generated Content, Video, Web 2.0 | 11 Comments »

Are you prepared to save Tango?

Friday, December 5th, 2008

Brtivic have made a great effort in fighting their declining sales with an upbeat integrated marketing campaign which portrays Tango as a British institution and asks the public to get behind the brand.

For the campaign they have rolled out some amusing but captivating videos ““ here’s my favourite:

Their website, Save Tango is a great resources for the fans of this campaign. It holds content for you to do your own offline PR ““ you can download and print off stickers, stencils and letters to lobby shops to bring back Tango. The website also includes games, chances to sign a petition and watch vintage adverts.

No doubt inspired by the award winning ‘Bring back the Wispa!’ campaign, this strategy of saving or reviving a traditional brand through new media has a precedent of success. The fan page already has 343 members and has been running for two weeks.

Posted in New Media, Video | 1 Comment »

Tell us about the last good party you went to…?

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

As part of activity to celebrate all the ways you can organise a party on Yell.com, I had a good day asking members of the public about the last party they went to. Below is the result, unsurprisingly a few juicy anecdotes were shared and it was obvious that we do like to party!

The video was also posted on one of our favourite blogs, Londonist, who were celebrating their 4th brithday that week, and we were really pleased to see posts go up on YPulse and Female First for the wider Party Pieces report into the British partyscape.