Articles about Justine Koenders

June 17th was the day Mozilla released it’s latest version of the Firefox browser, Firefox 3.0. This was not only Firefox 3 launch day though. With the release of Firefox 3 this also kicked into action Download Day. Download Day was a campaign Mozilla was pushing to set a new Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in a 24 hour period, coinciding with the launch of Firefox 3.

According to the Download Day headquarters, they got more than 8 million Firefox 3 downloads in 24 hours. That’s more Firefox downloads than they’ve ever had in a single day and it created a new Guinness World Record.

The Download Day microsite exists within Mozilla’s official community marketing site, Spread Firefox. At Download Day headquarters you were able to make a pledge that you were going to download Firefox 3 prior to launch day, with the pledge results being displayed via an interactive world map. This map was a good touch as not only could you see the total amount of pledges worldwide, but going off some of the comments in the various Mozilla groups and forums, it probably helped engage a bit of competitiveness between some countries, thus encouraging more pledges.

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It has been six months since Mintshot literally erupted onto the scene. At the time of the site launch, I thought I would hold off writing about Mintshot, sit back and see how it all went. I’m glad I did, because unfortunately since the launch Mintshot has been plagued by a plethora of issues including loads of site usability and security issues, not to mention their guerilla marketing launch activity. I won’t even attempt to list any of the site or security issues because from the bit of research I’ve done there appear to be so many. For excellent in depth coverage on all of the issues, check out the NZ Reality TV blog. The blogs posts and comments about Mintshot makes for very, very interesting reading. You really do get a good picture of whats been going on. A heck of a lot has been happening and many users of the site have been less than happy. So much so that a spoof video has popped up mocking the fact that the site was outsourced.

The Mintshot concept, as is stated in the sites ‘About us’ section: “A fully integrated community marketing site where consumers could earn virtual dollars which they could in turn grow and use to purchase a range of products from New Zealand’s best brands without it ever costing them a cent”. How you earn the virtual dollar is by watching branded advertising online. Once you have earned the virtual dollars, you then need to grow the dollars and in turn spend the virtual dollars before the end of each month. At the end of each month your Mintshot dollar balance goes back to zero.

Minshot was founded by Nick Dalton, Ben Hickey and the ever high profile Marc Ellis. In a press release Marc Ellis said “The site has been designed to be engaging and top fun for the consumer, and an important marketing tool for advertisers”. “A key objective is to have over 100,000 people register with mintshot.co.nz within the first 48 hours. We think we will get there with our launch activity which is sure to put the words mintshot.co.nz on everyone’s lips!”.

And, it is that Minshot launch activity that I want to talk about. On the 13th November 07, a guerilla marketing tactic was used to help launch the Mintshot site. This consisted of Marc Ellis and team setting up a fake volcanic eruption on Rangitoto Island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf. They did this by igniting a fair amount of smoke flares. This kind of stunt is just what you’d expect from the likeable joker Marc Ellis isn’t it, he’s always up to some kind of laddish behaviour. The stunt was well planned with legal advice being taken around the stunt. Initially this hoax eruption seemed to be pulled off without a hitch, well that’s what you think after seeing the footage of them celebrating after the stunt had taken place.

Then people started to complain including The Department of Conservation (DOC). According to the NZ Herald, the stunt was undertaken without a permit from the Department of Conservation. In the end Marc Ellis had to apologise for the Mintshot stunt.

So, the question is did the stunt backfire on them? Well, I think no in one sense, but yes in another. No, because they pulled off the hoax pretty easily which got them the initial publicity for their launch. Then the publicity continued with the aftermath/backlash caused from the launch activity giving them more free publicity. On the other hand, yes I think the stunt did backfire on them also. Back fired in the sense that they ended up having to apologise for their actions. So, it did make them look a bit silly really. Maybe Marc Ellis went one step too far this time.

Looking up the meaning of guerilla marketing on Wikipedia it mentions that according to Levinson (the guy who coined Guerilla marketing in his 1984 book), the Guerrilla Marketer must “deliver the goods”. In The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook, he states: “In order to sell a product or a service, a company must establish a relationship with the customer. It must build trust and support. It must understand the customer’s needs, and it must provide a product that delivers the promised benefits.” So, it seems so far, even though they launched with a bang, the Mintshot site does not to appear to have “delivered the goods” to the punters.

I was passing through our living room on my way to enjoy some afternoon summer sun outside on the deck, when I happened to glance at the telly on my way out. The sound on the TV was muted, but I did catch a quick glimpse of an advert for a web site called vouchermate.co.nz. on C4 and thought I’d better check them out.

Vouchermate is a web site where companies display downloadable vouchers for discounts on their goods and services. You can either print them off for free, or send a textcode and have a voucher sent to your phone at a cost of 50c per voucher.

So, it’s a pretty simple idea. You can’t go wrong if you want to get some discounts. My initial thoughts on this web site concept is…. are people really going to bother to go to the effort of doing this just to save a few pingers? For me personally, I probably would go to the effort if I thought I was getting a pretty good discount. So, for the sake of my curiousity and research, my search begins.

Within in my local area, I find six vouchers available. Four vouchers for Beaurepaires, two for the National Combat Simulation Centre and one 10% discount for Gr8 SHUZ Footwear. I ‘m not really interested in any of their promoted discounts. I search other areas around where I live as well, but still don’t find that much that I would be interested in. The only two vouchers that I may be currently interested in is a 10% discount on flowers from All Season Flowers and the ‘Bring a friend free of charge when you buy a Friends of the Zoo membership’. So, doing the math…. if I bought a $25 bunch of flowers (and lets be honest you can’t really get much in the way of flowers for under $25) with a 10% voucher discount, that would be a $2.50 discount on the flowers. Well, I really don’t think I would go to the effort to use that voucher, purely because I don’t think the $2.50 (minus the 50 cents if you use the text option) is that it’s that much of an amazing discount. Honestly would you really bother. I think I would go to the effort if I found a voucher for something I wanted that had a discount of 20% or more. These kind of 20% or more discounts are available from some companies on vouchermate.

Even so, I don’t know if I’m convinced that I would go out of my way to use Vouchermate. Maybe I would, if I happen to remember to check the site before I got out shopping next time, but then again maybe I won’t remember. My thoughts at the moment is that Vouchermate is a bit, well, boring. It needs more than just come check out the vouchers available. Looking at their blog, the March 12 post talks about their biggest ever surge in site traffic since their TV advertisements started on TV3 and C4. Getting people to the site is one thing, but getting people to do a repeat visit is even harder. How about some bigger incentives to revisit the site, like maybe some competitions where you can win some fancy prizes or something?

The Energy Drink V has a profile on the social networking site Bebo called the People’s Republic of V.  V held a competition where people had to come up with an idea on how V was to spend $100k and a pallet of V. People were encouraged to submit their ideas according to the idea criteria and free prizes were up for grabs too.

When it came to deciding which idea was the winning idea, V decided to get the people to vote online using the poll section. I returned to the site at a later date to see whether they had announced the final winning idea from the poll, but you got the idea that there had been some cheating going on and the poll had been scraped.

V proceeded to hold a second poll to let people help decide on how they were going to determine a winner. So once again I waited for the results of the second poll and subsequently returned back to the site.  V stated… ‘the polls says let the judges decide’ which idea is the winner. So, then we had to wait for the judges to make their final decision and this seems to take forever.

By this stage I had lost interest and many weeks later returned to the site to see if the judges had made a final decision as to which idea won the competition. The results were not immediately apparent. I checked the blog section but didn’t find a post regarding the final winning idea. Looking through the photo section I saw photos of the judges actually judging the $100k competition, one of the judges doodles and 14 photos with captions on a few $100k competition entries.

There was a video posted in the video section that says ‘$100k idea - Brazilian street party‘. A Brazilian street party would be cool, but there were also other great ideas. For example one ‘idea of the day‘ was to throw a pallet of V from the back of a Hercules plane and let the people know that it’s raining V.

Back to the matter in hand, I was still at a loss as to the winning idea.

Eventually, I received an email from the People’s Republic of V saying: “A couple of months ago we asked you, the People’s Republic of V what we should do with $100k and a pallet of V. Gary’s idea was that we should throw away the $100K! And he won. So we’re going to do it soon…very soon…” Aha, at last, confirmation of the winning idea - phew! So, the $100,000 is to be divided into three and thrown in to the wind in Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin.

The competitions in the Republic of V are relentless for their worshipers. I say worshipers rather than followers because looking at some of the comments they really do appear to worship the V product and appear to be true brand advocates. They recently had a few more competitions including: Be in to win a pimped out V ride, and a Big Day Out double pass competition. Another prize you could win was a case of V.

V wanted to hear from people as to what they thought about V by answering three questions. 1) When I drink V it makes me feel? 2) If I were to describe V as a person I would say they were? 3) If I were in charge of V, my brand slogan for V would be? The winners got a case of V on their door step.

V work hard to engage their target market with all these competitions and freebies. They aren’t afraid to ask their V members what they really want and the people who frequent the People’s Republic of V are more than happy to oblige. They are very happy to express themselves through comments, forums, polls, photos and more.

V in return gain insight into their customers’ perception of their brand and are able to carry out low cost market research.  Unfortunately, their marketing team appeared to be slow on the uptake of managing the “How to spend $100K and a pallet of V” competition, which could have resulted in their brand advocates being frustrated or disappointed.    It’s important that when marketers carry out such competitions and campaigns online that they have the technical expertise to ensure a smooth running campaign and its delivered in a timely manner.

The Speight’s Great Beer Delivery was conceived after Tim Ellingham, a kiwi fella living in London wrote an email to the Speight’s Beer company saying he was missing the cold Speight’s beer. Sending this guy a few dozen Speight’s beer wasn’t going to be enough. So the people at Speight’s came up with the most brilliant idea that’s come out of Godzone in a while, and that was to put a pub on a boat with volunteer crew members and sail them around the world to deliver some cold Speight’s beer in London. If you wanted to be part of this adventure and were interested in becoming a crew member, all you had to do was register your application on the Speight’s web site and convince them of your southern ways and values.

At the time The Speight’s Great Beer Delivery was announced, I thought WOW, that’s totally awesome! Now that’s one hell of a brilliant marketing idea that’s for sure. Good on ya Speight’s, I truly applaud you. You guys are geniuses. I would of totally been up for applying to be a crew member for this voyage of a lifetime, but unfortunately the timing was all wrong after recently becoming a mum. The reality is though, that I wouldn’t of been a good candidate since I don’t represent their southern ways.

The crew were chosen and all of the people chosen for the trip were guys. Now, I know that women applied, so come on Speight’s there is no excuse, you could of at least chosen a couple of girls for the crew? Anyway, on July 25^th 2007, the replica Speight’s Alehouse pub left Dunedin on its journey to London. The trip would take them to Samoa, the Panama Canal, the Bahamas, New York and London. Through the Great Beer Delivery web site you could watch the crews latest video diaries, read their blogs, send messages of support and even ask them questions. What I found a bit annoying about these video diaries on the web site is that you could only view the video at the one size and you were not given the option of being able to view the video in a larger format. You could also watch a weekly TV episode called ‘Crowd Goes Wild’ to keep up to date on where the boat was and what the crew had been up to.

There is a Speight’s Great Beer Delivery profile on MySpace which had 7462 views when I last looked. Unfortunately it looks like the MySpace presence for The Great Beer Delivery was a bit half hearted though. The reason I say this is because the blog entries here have not been kept up-to-date and there are only two videos appearing when you click on the profile video link. Also when you do a search for the Speight’s Great Beer Delivery within the MySpace videos category you get only one video available. I am not sure if this MySpace presence is an official Speight’s one or not. To be honest, it really just looks like some random person has taken it upon themselves to add the Speight’s profile and then they didn’t continue to update it. With only two Speight’s Great Beer Delivery videos having been posted on YouTube as well, maybe Speight’s could of used MySpace and YouTube as more of an online marketing tool.

I think that Speight’s could of really taken more advantage of their amazing idea of The Great Beer Delivery. They could of taken advantage of the fact that (1) it’s such a brilliant idea, (2) when it’s such a brilliant idea, people will talk about it. People will create a buzz in the social networking and social media sites. They could of harnessed this potential in their online marketing campaign. For example, all those video diary entries on the web site could of been posted on the the likes of YouTube and MySpace as well. This might of helped push the Speight’s brand even further and get more exposure for The Great Beer Delivery campaign.

Upon arrival in London and once they got the Alehouse on to dry land, there were seven nights of celebrations in the pub itself with free beer to be had, yes that’s right FREE BEER. All that the ex-pat New Zealanders living in London needed to do was register their details via the web site to become a UK Speight’s Mate. There were 700 tickets available for the lucky punters. The permanent location of the Speight’s Alehouse in London is above the Temple Tube station. You can check it out via Google maps.

The Gingerbread Haka animated video for The New Zealand Bakery of the Year competition managed to cross the advertising channels of web and television successfully despite it proving to be controversial.

Who needs the All Blacks to perform the Haka when you have these ‘hard as’ (as we say in NZ) gingerbread men strutting their stuff, doing the Haka in an oven to get people to rise to the challenge and vote for their favourite bakery in the New Zealand Bakery of the Year 2007 competition. These gingerbread guys have been literally baked so hard that their performing amongst their own crumbs bouncing around in the oven.

The first challenge was to get the bakeries to register online to receive an entry package for the competition. When registered each bakery was assigned a unique number to identify them for judging and voting purposes. Voting could take place by either public texting, online voting or voting in store at the bakeries. A special ‘Peoples Choice Bakery of the Year’ award would be determined by online and text voting only. The next challenge was to get people to vote for their favourite bakery. What better way to try and get people to vote than by doing some TV advertising showing the Gingerbread Haka animated video. At the end of this video people are enticed (by being able to win a $500 travel voucher) to vote for their favourite bakery by going to www.bakeryoftheyear.co.nz. Here people were encouraged to spread the bakery challenge by filling in the online form and sending the Gingerbread Haka video to their friends. This word-of-mouth, viral marketing part proved to be so vital for this campaign.

With this video having around 100 people upload it to YouTube and MySpace respectively and it reaching in excess of 300,000 views on YouTube (at the time of writing) the campaigns viral marketing aspect was successful in getting people talking about what they thought of the Gingerbread Haka animation. Looking at some of the 300 comments posted on YouTube and various mentions in blogs, some people found the advert cute, cool, or hard case funny. Other people thought the animated video was culturally insensitive and politically incorrect for various reasons. This in turn added controversy around the advert and gave more attention to the campaign itself. The advert even got a mention on TV3 News. Now, when your ad gets talked about on prime time TV News, you get alot of exposure and it doesn’t seem to matter if it is positive or negative exposure. One can’t help to think that people might have walked right into the advertisers hands on this one.

The funny thing is that, even though there are about 300 sites linking to the animation on YouTube, there does not appear to be much talk about it on any of the larger social bookmarking sites. At the time of writing there are 2 posts on del.icio.us, 5 diggs on digg, a couple of mentions in Reddit, 21 scoops on Scoopit and no mentions on the New Zealand based social bookmarking sites sharemyNZ or Sniff It. But then again, I’m not sure if sharemyNZ or Sniff It even existed when the The New Zealand Bakery of the Year campaign was released.