The idea was straightforward – talk about why people might consider paying more for energy. We would start the conversation, then watch it grow. People would reach their own conclusions on just how important clean renewable energy is to all of us once they knew how it worked. Who better to explain it than those who had already made the decision to support the environment?

While the concept was simple, the execution would be less so. By placing this in the care of a partner with years of experience, both creative agency and client could focus their attention where it would be best served – the consumer.

Oddly would take care of the production of the campaign both in Facebook and through rich media ads. The showpiece would be a video wall, filled with user-submitted content created by fans of the brand who wanted to tell the world why it is important to support clean renewable energy. This presented a few challenges, as it would mean stepping outside of the usual functionality of Facebook. Used to unique challenges, the developers at Oddly got busy coming up with solutions.

Along with the video wall, Oddly would handle much of the design production, working with suggestions from the creative director to flesh out the concept, including a lawnsign application, custom video uploader, and several other products like video ads that would run parallel to television and radio campaigns.

On the technical end of things, the major challenges involved working with Facebook video, a feature still under development at Facebook. We briefly considered creating our own custom solution, but we wanted all of the social media features such as sharing, liking, and commenting. We went with a solution that provided the best of both worlds, using the established facebook video player, but replacing the video uploader with one of our own that would allow us to put a database in place and various other extra features.

The end result was a beautiful video wall full of enthusiastic Bullfrog fans, that also allowed for moderation by administrators. They could pin favorite videos to the top of the wall, and give them custom thumbnails if they wished as well. And they could put up their own videos to show people how Bullfrog power works.

During the major campaign period between Earth Hour (March 27) and Earth Day (April 22), the client tripled the number of active fans they had on Facebook. Entire threads sprung up with new fans adding to the conversation around renewable power. The green logo began showing up in profile pictures, proudly declaring “I pay more”.

The campaign caught attention for it’s candor and unique position. In an interview with the Globe and Mail, John St.’s creative director Angus Tucker acknowledged the difference, saying “..you turn the TV on, and 70 percent of the ads are saying ‘it does what their does, for a lot less’ “
He continued “we thought that the organic parallel held, fairtrade coffee, and even things like sweatshop-free clothing…these are decisions that millions of Canadians are making every day and we thought the time was right to take this way of thinking into energy”

We at Oddly are proud to have been a part of Bullfrog’s first foray into sending their message out via multi-media channels, providing conversation tools that are active right to this day.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/industry-news/marketing/going-beyond-the-dark-green-with-no-nonsense-pitch/article1504950/

Salvatore Leonetti salon is one of the premium salons in the trendy Yorkville area of Toronto. Renowned for their personal attention and expertise, everything about Salvatore Leonetti Salon reflects care and detail, from the fresh flowers placed throughout to the beautifully designed interior.

Salvatore Leonetti is big on the health and well-being of his clients, who demand nothing less than top quality treatment. With well-known experts on staff, such as Douglas Timleck (a 30 year veteran colorist), the salon more than delivers.

For the creation of their web presence, styling salon Salvatore Leonetti came to Oddly Studios for expertise in design and production. The end result is tasteful and elegant.

Still making personas? Why?

The advertising kingdom has a long history with analytical information, and constructing a bird’s eye view of the consumers they are trying to reach. This practice began before the creation of interactive media, but like many things, has hung around into our modern age, occasionally morphing into other forms but maintaining the same basic intent, namely to fabricate a picture of the target audience to understand them better.

In the period leading up to the eighties, demographics were the keys to the kingdom. Analytical information was gathered by poll, study and survey to construct a description of segments of the population based on age, race, sex, geography, religion, income level and so forth.
With the arrival of more electronic channels in the nineties, our demographics became more sophisticated, morphing into ‘psychographics’. The advertising industry sought to understand the target market by examining not just statistical information, but emotional motivation as well. They looked at the personality, values, gender and generational bias, interests and lifestyle choices of their target. Cultural anthropologists were brought in to contribute, along with other experts.

Personas were Born

At the end of this shaky road came the creation of the persona, which is popular now and at times has been treated as the ultimate insight into the factors influencing the spending habits of a given market. Persona creation is sophisticated.
Usually it is not possible to sum up an entire market segment in a single persona, so several may be created. Personas have come to be extremely detailed, listing off many aspects of the composite’s life, their habits, their behaviors. To remove the reminder that this persona is a composite, they are even given names and decorated with the photos that are said to resemble them (usually a snapshot of someone at the creative agency). Some companies go all out with personas, going so far as to bring in decorators to design a room according to the persona’s tastes, or fill their handbag with items the persona uses.
The persona has merit to some degree – it’s use can provide a common language and vision for the team working on the marketing.

But there are quite a few problems with personas as well, to the point that they can wind up being no more than a tool for the creative agency, with very little gain to the client. There are a number of reasons why personas can go terribly wrong.

1. The Strategy Team Gulped the KoolAid
Having been involved in several persona builds for high level accounts, I can personally say that I have NEVER seen a persona made of a total jerk. On the contrary, the personas inevitably are of attractive people, who if they have a flaw have the perfect flaw that completes them as an interesting and story-worthy individual. But most often they don’t need a flaw, they are a composite of the most interesting features common to the demographic. Is this realistic?
2. Two Weeks of Research – We Must Know Everything
I have witnessed personas made up based on no more than a couple of days of brainstorming and a quick visit on location. And those personas were convincing, detailed, beautifully presented. In every sense they were real and compelling. The problem is that while the persona does a good job of selling through a concept with a client, the illusion of customer insight is just that – unreal. Many times it does a fantastic job of convincing the client that they do not really know who their customer is, that the customer is in fact someone far more interesting and sophisticated than they had thought they were.
3. Nobody is Perfect
No matter how you slice it, a persona is a composite of many people. While it would be nice to mix and match our finest qualities with the best of others and cook up a super-person, the real world does not work that way. And thankfully so, for as it turns out the world needs all those flaws and quirks just the way they are, and good advertising can talk to those flaws very effectively. As a composite, the persona is a throwback to a time of mass marketing, when the interest of the individual took a back seat to attempts to reach out to people en masse. That worked during mankind’s brief flirt with non-interactive entertainment, but that time is drawing to a close.

Why is so much time, attention, imagination and effort going into the creation of composite personas when the real thing is so readily available? I’m talking about real, living breathing people with whom advertisers can open a dialog. No imaginary persona can ever match up to referencing an actual human being with all their many levels of complexity.

The channels are there, they exist right now in a form never before available to us.
There is a lot to be said for tossing aside the composite, and marketing directly to a single real individual. This is more challenging than selling to an imaginary person, but it is more valuable. A real person will tell you no, they will react irrationally, they will get emotionally involved. But often, setting out to please a single customer yields lessons that can apply widely, because at the heart of it, we all share a few major motivators in common as human beings.

There are some cases of large companies employing this method of marketing to a single real customer with great results. Anecdotal reports in “The Whuffie Factor” by Tara Hunt, and Marcus Buckingham “The One Thing You Need to Know” mention Walmart using this technique.
For the most part though, this idea of marketing to actual individuals seems to be the domain of smaller startup companies, the kind that explode with vibrant growth not expected in large corporations. That makes sense, because these groups seem to have figured out the right way to use interactive media and are doing so with far more frequency than the large established brands. Perhaps it is because the large brands are so very used to traditional marketing. At one point the persona was far more intimate knowledge of the target person than say, just launching catchy jingles.

But in today’s electronic medium, the persona lacks sorely compared to actually jumping on and having a genuine conversation with a person.

Click here for the animated version

I have to share this wonderful example of creativity, done by Oddly Art Director Zad. This is a great example of adding joy to a navigation system. Try it, you’ll see what I mean quite quickly. Why is it so fun to just roll up and down with the mouse on it?

This piece is a very nice example of metaphor that results in a high level of affordance. It seems very natural to extend the idea of houses as places we organize our things, our lives, ourselves! Could we pull the layers out, one by one, and examine them?

Enjoy!