SPINNING AROUND: SEVENTY SEVEN THINKING OUT LOUD

THE BEST THING THIS WEEK ...

This is the best thing that I am going to find this week. Without question. And it's only 9.15 am.

Seriously, I am thinking that it might be sensible to bugger off home right now and put my feet up, happy that I have accumulated sufficient knowledge of new stuff to last a full seven days.

My M&Ms is amazing. Brilliant.

You can actually print your own M&Ms. You can have your own messages on them, print your face on them (you can upload a photo and they sort it for you), you can put your logo onto them. Bloody magic. Oh, and you can choose which colours of M&Ms you want in your pack of personalised confectionery.

Love this very dearly.

And what is more, it's a brilliant business-building idea. Now, M&Ms are something different - a medium no less - for self-expression. Mars has found a new way in which to open up a whole revenue stream, engage people, make them ambassadors for their product and brand.

And if a small, round sugar-coated chocolate globule can go web2.0, you have to ask the question: why can't other brands come up with ideas like this to change the way that they engage with people across the web and the world?

This came via the excellent ...

A MATTER OF MATTER

What an interesting idea ... a box of DM type stuff that people would actually WANT.

Altogether nice fellow, Tim Milne has created an experiment that, by all accounts, is working. Matter is a box that you sign up for online. Some time later (the next one is due in summer 2008), a box arrives full of interesting branded things.

The sample box contained stuff from Jordan's, Virgin, Wii, Evo ... all manner of lovely stuff.

The boxes are aimed at specific audiences (so the sample was men aged 25-34-ish). Tim has hauled himself around the ad agencies of London and has got some great brands involved.

What a lovely, lovely idea.

As Tim says ... "In an increasingly virtual world, we're beginning to appreciate the value of real things. Matter is a box full of interesting stuff–a way for companies to talk to people by giving them things."

Makes a heap of sense, when you think about it. Find out more HERE.

LYNX IS AT IT AGAIN

Lynx (Axe as it is known outside the UK and as they refer to it on other blogs) is at it again - its latest marketing campaign launched yesterday through BBH.

This time around, the brand has gone all YouTube and "lo-fi" with clips that explain how to pull birds. As has been observed, an interesting departure for the brand's creative in that the women in the videos are marginally less objectified and there aren't many heaving/bouncing breasts on display. For those who are interested, a couple of the clips are below.

However, what we think is more interesting is the LynxEffect.com website that Lynx has set up to support the campaign.

The site, split into three sub-categories (Get Inspired, Get Tooled Up and Get In There) takes the brand into the arena of media ownership - take a look at the site, it looks, feels and reads like an edition of FHM.

Just some of the content includes: recipes (because women love a man who can cook), links to gifts to send the object of your affection, pulling advice, fashion advice (with links to retailers and product information) and a section called "girl talk" which suggests the topics that women might find interesting (Kylie's new album, what to think of UGG Boots and whether Robbie has lost it).

Interesting piece of digital media use to take the brand on from being about the image to being about the content. If the site starts to offer some genuinely interesting editorial, who knows, maybe we're looking at the latest online men's mag in the making.

Perhaps Lynx is forging a path that others will follow - recognising that as a brand, they also have the licence to engage their consumers with interesting content, news, exclusive information. That at least some of their audience might look to them as something more than a spray and more like a brand that becomes a trusted resource for semi-aspirational blokey information that happens to sell a deodorant by the same name.

Interesting times indeed.

Meantime, those clips ...

via PunkPlanning, Mad and PSFK

BIG BRANDS SPA-ING ON THE HIGH STREET

Extraordinary times when Dove and Simple have become such phenomenally strong brands that their owners can go as far as to open high street spas under their respective banners.

But do so they have. And so it is that Unilever has moved from home care and food to owning a chain of high-street spas bearing the name of their leading beauty brand with the Dove Spa chain. At the same time, sensitive skin brand Simple has launched a Simple Spa in Covent Garden.

It struck us that this is a fabulous demonstration of the real power of brands on consumers - that a brand can carry a business and a set of consumer relationships across from shampoos and body washes to spas in town highstreets is testament to the power that these names have and the trust that they have built up over the years.

HATS OFF ... WHAT A WEEKEND FOR WOOLIES

A reserved "hats off" to the good folks at Woolworths for some fab (ish - our reservations are below) coverage over the weekend: their new value range got across-the-board coverage as they announced a £5 bottle of champagne.

The retailer is to sell a "limited number" of the bottles in the out-of-town superstores where they have secured a licence to sell alcohol. The whole thing felt like a stunt - but a fab one at that.

Cue a mass of media debate about whether it is the cheapest, whether Woolworths can do it profitably - and whether it goes better with a strawberry fizz or a banana twist from their Pick n Mix range (the brand launched the bottles to journos with a bag of "paired" sweets they would recommend enjoying alongside it).

The reason for the reseravtions are the reactions of some of the wine writers who sampled the products as part of the news coverage. The pieces included The Times, Daily Telegraph, The Sun, Daily Mail and a whole range of others. The biggest piece of coverage was in The Guardian - a full page across page three of the paper.

However, The Guardian described it as "flat with a morning-after taste," which did rather undermine the messaging. So our question is whether the flat (ho, ho) coverage of the product undermines the brand message - reinforcing the perception that Woolies is a bit cheap bu shoddy.

Interested in views ...

IKEA HOMES

... Literally, IKEA homes.

Ikea, through a partnership with engineers, Skanska, has gone into homes. Through BokLok, you can get your hands on a complete IKEA house!

Thankfully, you don't have to build these chaps yourself - the brand hasn't taken its flatpack mentality to that extent.

According to the site, the BokLok concept is all about not just cute houses, it is actually about "smart living" - creating living environments that deliver what people really want.

An example of an amazing business and brand-building idea - it takes IKEA into a whole new realm. Where it sits curiously happily.

BRAINFOOD FROM HOWIES

A really smart campaign on this bit of the Howies website: a sort of online lending library.

You can browse the books in the collection (living & environment, design & photography and social commentary). Then you email the nice folks at the clothing brand (library@howies.co.uk) and they send you the book. It's up to you to return it and is all done on trust.

What a fabulous idea.

BIG LOVE FOR GREAT LOVES

Actually, credit for this one must go to my colleague and wife, Anita. She came across these fabulous new covers for Penguin's Great Loves series - new covers for 20 titles that all revolve around the subject of love.

Set me to thinking about how Penguin has managed to rejunvenate interest in its massive back-catalogue. As the words between the covers become commodity (as copyrights cease and anyone can publish the books), so Penguin has reinvented itself.

Yes, it is still a publisher, but more than that, it is a design house, producing desirable objects that, in a much the same way that we desire a Starck chair or an Eileen Grey table or a Smeg fridge in our homes, we buy Penguins to show off on the bookshelves.

KATE MODERN: WE'RE ALL MEDIA OWNERS NOW

The world that is KateModern has launched upon us as Bebo has got into commissioning and broadcasting (sort of).

The questions that it poses for the industry - and the opportunities that are being realised - are manifold ... who is the media owner now? is Bebo a social network or a broadcaster - and does it matter? is this a potential future for online advertising? or for that matter online programming? or is it all a bit of a fad?

For those who are not aware of the KateModern story, she is from the team that brought us LonelyGirl15, a fictional blogger and video diarist, whose adventures were tracked by millions. Once outed as a fake, she retained a substantial following, those eager to find out what became of her. The story still continues.

Now Bebo has picked up rights to the KateModern story. A Bebo user claiming to be called Sophie has set up a KateModern page on which "she" is posting video clips from Kate. Strangely, this happens before "kate" manages to post them herself - because of the deal that Bebo has cut, viewers get the news first through them.

So far, so post-modern.

What makes it interesting is that "screening" KateModern's adventures means that Bebo has become host to "broadcast" content - a soap plot being updated in installments. Which makes them no different to any other commercial broadcaster - and a simple social network no longer.

The KateModern Bebo pages have now been viewed 106,638 times and the publicity machine has only just started. So while the whole thing is a long way off matching a mainstream commercial broadcaster, these are early days and our prediction would be that this story will only grow.

At the same time, Bebo is starting to talk about plans to include product placement in the films, with the likes of P&G, orange, Microsoft all keen signed-up to get involved. So for Bebo, the world of banners and buttons could well be left behind as they tap into a brave new world of branded entertainment.

The whole thing is kind of a neat inversion of the Skins/MySpace campaign, in which characters in a C4 soap assumed personalities in a digital social network. In this case, the characters, personalities and the network are all run by one business.

For this writer, campaigns such as this, which are gaining traction amongst a younger audience, are the biggest threat to broadcasters.

It is not that the volume of broadcast media watching will fall (see Les Binet's recent IPA presentation to show that is not the case) it is that for the commercial broadcasters the competition from the likes of Bebo, MySpace and the other big media players means that eyeballs will go elsewhere - to media owners that offer greater interactivity, are fleeter of foot and carry lower costs than a large, encumbered national broadcaster.

If KateModern is a potential future, we say: "bring on the future, it's great".

UPDATE: Interesting interview with Joanna Shields, the woman behind the KateModern campaign in today's Media Guardian - with news that there will be more to follow along similar lines.

MORE VAUXHALL WORK... THE C'MONS

There must be something in the air as this is the second Vauxhall post this week.

Just watched the Corsa "C'mon" ad and wondered whether the brand was supporting the oh-so-cute plush characters that feature in it.

Regular readers of this weblog will know that we are interested in ideas that build new business lines and this is a great example ...

No sooner had the ad gone off air, but the office has found itself the proud owner of a "Moo" doll from the C'mons Shop. Thanks to this piece of marketing, we have just purchased a branded soft toy from Vauxhall, of all people... and we are going to love it dearly. A great business-building idea.

BRILLIANT BUSINESS-BUILDING BRAND IDEAS

The Anya Hindmarch "I am not a plastic bag". Part design brilliance, part simple rules of supply (limited) and demand (healthily stoked by celebrities and great PR), it is a cracking example of a brand-marketing idea that has built a great business proposition. Read more in the Guardian's analysis.

The impressive thing about the whole thing is that a successful piece of marketing has created a whole market for both partners - Hindmarch and Sainsbury's - as well as creating huge word-of-mouth. What are the bets that this whole thing came close to being self-liquidating? Or might have broken into profit? A great business-building idea.

PURE GENIUS: BUSINESS-BUILDING IDEAS

One of those rare times that you think that marketing might actually build a business, rather than just build a brand. The collaboration between Marmite and Guinness is not just a cracking idea that has got people talking - not to mention cool-hunters beating a path to the nearest Harvey Nicks to get hold of a jar and eBayers trading the stuff in a frenzy - but has likely created a whole new market.

It's pretty rare that a marketing agency comes up with something that really changes a client's business and turns cost into profit-centre - Tango men is the last one that we could remember.

Now, the IPA is rewarding the businesses that have pulled off this most marvellous of feats. See the nascent IPA Strategy Blog for details. Be interesting to see what the ideas are that this competition pulls to the fore.