Desperate Housewives aired in the UK tonight with an outrageous / exceptional (you decide) product placement for Lotus Evora. Effectively a 4 minute sales pitch for Lotus was included in the plot of tonight's Desperate Housewives episode. The Lotus Evora section of the show has created significant discussion online (particularly on Lotus forums) and has naturally been posted to YouTube too:
Is the Lotus Evora Desperate Housewives integration an example of what the future holds as more and more product placement restrictions get relaxed and more and more brands try to feature in the 'editorial' rather than the ad break?
NFC is technology that allows mobile users to touch their phone to an NFC chip (which can be incorporated in a sticker or a reader) in order to get information or register an action. For those in London it's the same sort of principle as an Oyster card and phones running the Android Gingerbread 2.3.3 OS have this NFC / Near Field Communication ability now built in as standard.
NFC is useful for a wide range of things and from a social network perspective it is particularly useful for location based 'check-in's.' Japanese social network site Mixi was the first to offer this sort of NFC functionality (Japanese press release is here) with users able to simply wave their phone in order to check-in to a location.
The Taglet application has been one of the most popular NFC apps to date and the following video offers a demonstration and an explanation of NFC technology:
We now see Foursquare experimenting with this sort of NFC check-in approach at the Google I/O developer conference in California. Google and FourSquare have placed NFC check-in points all over the conference center and users tapping their phone against an NFC point will allow them to check-in and collect the Google I/O FourSquare badge:
Furthermore, NFC can be used for payment:
as well as point of sale couponing, with Enable Table's NFC restaurant couponing a nice example of this:
More and more phones are going to be operating with this sort of NFC capability and embracement by FourSquare may help the technology to permeate. NFC should also increase mobile web usage as it makes getting online even easier. At the beginning mobile web users had to type a web address into a browser, then QR codes / Google Goggles made things simpler by allowing barcodes to be scanned in order for the handset to be automatically directed to a website, but NFC seamlessly fuses real world and the digital world, further reducing the hurdles - simply touch the phone and go!
With NFC rumoured to be a feature of the iPhone 5 too, how long before this is everywhere?
The latest digital initiative from Lynx is the Lynx Stream mobile app - effectively a social content aggregator.
Billed as an app 'to capture and record unforgettable nights out', if an event is set up through the app, it will then 'collect every video, picture, text, tweet, check-in and status update a group of friends makes to produce an automatic Stream of the night and highlight video, which can then be watched and shared online.'
Another example of a brand aiming to be helpful and provide something of use rather than simply a branded content experience.
Last year Advertising Age published a piece about marketing in the age of Twitter and Facebook. The thrust of the article was that 'when it comes to Facebook, relevance may be redefined.' The story highlighted the fact that Blackberry tweeting 'May the 4th be with you' ended up being one of their most successful tweets of 2010.
This year it's the turn of VW to capitalise on (the unofficial) Star Wars Day. They are using May the 4th to promote further interest in their YouTube video 'The Force', using a Facebook video ad to both align with today's Star Wars date and drive further views for their film
KLM have launched a Facebook promotion that could see your design then painted onto a plane!
The KLM promotion is based around Delft blue tiles, with Facebook users encouraged to turn photos and profile pictures into Delft type images and then add a caption too. Selected photos will then be added to a specially painted KLM plane which will then fly around the world.
and a YouTube video explaining everything can be watched here:
This is an elegant way of using both virtual and real world Owned Media to stimulate Earned attention - though I think 'Delft Yourself' would have been an even better name!
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