It is often said that all good things must come to an end.  Following ten years of incredible work, the Swedish agency Farfar shut its doors…and ironically enough, they closed up shop on the very day that they won yet another award.

I just  learned of the sad loss of Farfar, and in order to properly honor this groundbreaking agency I’ve prepared a tribute showcasing 3 of their best and most indelible campaigns:

"Heidies 15 MB of Fame" (2007)

Let’s begin by turning up the temperature a little bit with this provocative and astounding campaign that Farfar put together for Diesel. The recipe is actually quite simple: Put two hot girls in a hotel room with an equally hot (and mostly naked!) guy. Then stand back and let them do all kinds of crazy stuff. And then show everything online. And to make it even more tantilizing, give the trio control of Diesel’s official website, and allow them to transform the site into a personal blog and live-chat. Not innovative enough? Well, this went down way back in the day in 2007. In Internet years, this is like “the Dark Ages.”

Here is the video case-study:

Bjorn Borg (2007)

Let’s keep the heat turned up, shall we? Here is another Farfar campaign from 2007 that uses sexy people to maximum effect, except this time they mix in a some humor. To boost the Swedish lingerie brand Bjorn Borg, the agency chose to make fun of the universal blond-Swedish stereotype. The result is an amusing story involving fake company employees sharing their crazy ideas of how to change the world using the “power of underwear”. Unfortunately, I found very little online about this great campaign, so below are two videos, one presenting the general concept of the campaign and the other bringing to life one of the um, “creative” (shall we say) concepts.

This is the concept video for the campaign, which presents the office, the characters and the general story:

Here is the video of the first “mission” promoted by the “power of underwear”: Peace on Earth:

The World's Biggest Signpost (2010)

Finally, let’s jump ahead to 2010. Farfar was able to count Nokia as a regular client for many years and several great campaign came out of their relationship. However one stands apart from the rest: “The World’s Biggest Signpost”. Designed to generate interest in Nokia’s navigation products, it featured a 50m high SMS-controlled signpost displaying people’s favorite places around the world. This brilliant idea received tons of awards, including the one mentioned in the beginning of this post.

Here is the video case-study:

Cover of Cry Baby (Director's Cut)

Come on, this is perfectly ok:

The technology was of interest to a number of acquirers, including Zappos.com which tried to buy it, and Kumar rounded up a group of angels for its first funding–a $500,000 angel round in August/September 2009.

The only problem—another start-up, Like.com, was doing something similar. Modista’s technology was better, according to Kumar..... But Like.com had a patent on product applications of computer vision. Like.com, which was well-funded with $47 million in venture backing, filed a lawsuit against Modista the day before its funding was going to close. (Like.com was later acquired by Google in August 2010, showing the value of the idea.)...The lawsuit caused investors including Kumar to drop out, for fear of dealing with an expensive lawsuit that could cost more than they had even planned to invest. Because Modista had no money to defend the suit in court, the company later shut down.

So where is the news here? Companies are built to win, not to be nice.

Related articles

• The investment that didn't happen (k9ventures.com)
• The Story Of The Greatest Shopping Technology That Never Was (businessinsider.com)

eMediaVitals, website geared toward publishers going digital, and FIPP digital content partner,  invited me to write a column about digital media, platforms and business models.
The first article describes  why Jobs is not the knight in a shining armor for publishers, and why technology is not the answer to the challenges the industry is facing.
Would love to hear your thoughts.

You can find it here.

Take a look at this diagram:

North American marketers see major improvements when integrating email marketing and social media efforts. This is another proof that the power of digital marketing lies in channel integration, and not in short term campaigns. As social web marketing requires an ongoing nurturing of branded online assets (brand's Facebook page, Twitter account, on so on), the biggest advantages are for those who combine different channels to utilize these assets.
This information also sheds light on the expected announcement of Facebook Mail today. My friend Yaniv Golan have some interesting thoughts about this move.

In a world were marketing ROI becomes critical for brands success, the combination of strong branding tools with direct marketing tools provide major advantages to the ones who use them well.

Related articles

• 360 Degree Marketing Redux: How the Social Web is Changing the Marketing Communications Ecosystem (gauravonomics.com)
• Three Strategies for Ethical Email Marketing (teachstreet.com)
• 35 New Social Media Resources You May Have Missed (mashable.com)
• Why Email Marketing Still Trumps Social (webpronews.com)

In a world of likes, what is the value of engagement?
Facebook made "like" easy. Just a click. No comments, no attachment, no real interaction. Just a click.
So why do we constantly value our campaigns and social activities by this low effort measurement?
It might be that we don't have enough tools to really understand the value and quality of our social web marketing activities.
But it might be because it is easier to count likes and fans than get to the bottom of these new tools and platforms.
And maybe it's because we are working too hard to be cool and "social" and "new" that we forget that social marketing is at the end of the day a part of digital marketing - which in turn suppose to provide clear business value.
Engagement doesn't matter if it doesn't grow the business. Likes are useless if they don't help the company to grow by either lowering costs, increasing revenues, or increasing customer satisfaction.
Digital marketers have a huge responsibility - we are ahead of the curve for most of our clients. We should always remember that at the end of the day we need to justify our retainer and project fees, with proper increase in revenues - or achievement of a clear business goal.

So, what's the business value of Like?

A Friend

A lot of exciting things happened recently, and can't wait to tell you all about it. However they affected our blog updates, and we are now getting back to speed with that too...
The incentives of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an important tool in online marketer toolbox. Companies big and small use this method to reach new audiences effectively. The principle is simple - Company A provides incentives to everyone online to promote their product. Usually a cut of the deal is paid to the affiliate. Companies such as Amazon provide dedicated links and widgets for these partners who in turn distribute them to their audience.
Besides Amazon and other well known brands, many found affiliate marketing a profitable business in other business line such as diet and nutrition and investment tools . In many cases a small operation of two to three smart people, with strong knowledge in SEO and PPC can make a lot of money in these activities.
Affiliate marketing is in many cases more a science than art. Where everything can be measured, smart affiliate marketers optimize their efforts again and again to reach the best conversion rate possible. The ability to instantly measure every activity as well as reassign resources makes it a very dynamic business.
Some in this business are using tactics that are ethically questionable such as fake blogs and spam.
Brands are interested in creating meaningful relationships with their audience, in order to make their brand affect buying decisions.
In short, while affiliate marketing is all about one night stands with customers, branding is more like a long term relationship.
Efficiency of Social Media
Social channels are all about creating meaningful connection with current and potential customers. Unlike other channels, here the brand is acting within the personal space of the customer. That's because people go to Facebook and Twitter to talk with friends and family, and not necessarily in order to consume content. The content they do consume is usually recommended by friends, or sent to them based on their permission (such as joining a Facebook page of a product or a brand). In social channels it is all about trust - brands can increase the trust of their target audience while engaging with them and giving them value. These channels offer many for affiliate marketers as well. Do a little test: twit several times about forex and diet and see how hoards of great looking, well endowed women follow you and offer you to get rich and fit in less than 10 days. Many find it rude.
This is the risk for brands. Let's say that Joann, 19 yo, beautiful brunette just offered me a unique diet that will make me the hottest guy around, and when I click the link I am getting to a reputable brand's page - how would it make me feel re this brand? Would I continue to trust it? And let say that I am looking for info about a company and see that the only mentions on twitter are by Joann and her friends - would I trust that company? And if all the raving reviews about this company are from blogs that look like fake ones - how would that affect my perception of the brand?
Brands, Short Term Relationships and Incentives
Everyone wants to make money. This is not a shocker. But there are different ways to make money. Some companies are focusing on short term gain, and some are focusing on building and maintaining a brand. The brand strategy takes time and effort. Not only that but association with spam and other ethically questionable tactics can harm brands more than the value of increased exposure gained by using these tools.
While affiliate marketers aim is to increase conversion, brands are interested in creating brand equity - meaning, making their brand count. This is a basic difference in incentives.
So while our imaginary Joann could provide great conversion rate for the affiliate marketer, the brand she is referring to might suffer from that activity even if in the short run they will sell more of their products. And while it was always true, the trust based system of social media increases the potential damage for brands.
So What Can You Do?
It all boils down to strategy. If your company doesn't care about branding - affiliate is the way to go. If branding is crucial, but so is affiliate marketing, consider separating brands, or find ways to impose at least some guidelines on your affiliates. It's tricky but feasible. As long as you know what you lose and what you gain in each strategy, you will be able to find the best way to grow your business.

Last week I was invited to speak at Digital Innovation Summit in Berlin, organized by VDZ, the German Magazine Publishing association. In this series of posts I'll cover some of the topics discussed.

Susanne Kunz, media and communications director, Procter & Gamble, Germany, spoke at Digital innovators summit in Berlin last week, and had some very direct words to say to publishers. She stressed the fact that magazines are facing competition for ad money - and they aren't necessarily delivering premium value.
First she explained that magazine publishers in Germany are missing the most important value they could provide - customer insight. Publishers are not investing enough in knowing their customers and provide valuable information to advertiser.
Second, she believed that companies and brands should be present on all platforms, cause their customers are on every platform too.
Third, she stressed the fact that with content becoming more and more open and free, magazines should focus on bringing truly unique content to customers.
And last but not least, she mentioned mobile as more than a content distribution platform - but also could be used for virtual goods and product delivery.

The session was meant to be a wake up call to publishers - it seems that at least in some cases it worked...

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• 60% of bigger magazine websites profitable, survey shows (guardian.co.uk)

Facebook is slowly removing many of the elements that made it a marketer's wet dream.

Facebook announced several major changes that affect marketers using the platform to promote their services:
1. Splitting feeds to news feed and live feed - users see, as defualt, a feed with only content and comments from their friends. Information about groups etc was moved to a separate feed.
2. Removal of app notification - Facebook apps will not be able to send notifications to users.
These changes reduce the virality of the platform in a major way.
For example, if in the past one could invite friends to become fans of a page, and his friends would have seen that he joined, now they wouldn't see it unless they look for it. This effect was crucial for virality of fan pages and applications. The same goes for notifications.
While many users rejoice, as they see more relevant and focused information on their feed and notification tab, marketers should rethink the way they interact in Facebook.

The two most important consequences for marketers are:

1.  Advertising becomes more important in creating traffic to Facebook applications and fan pages - without virality, paid advertisement within the platform, or in other channels, is an important part of any Facebook marketing activity

2. Fan pages and apps should provide more value to users, as it will be more difficult to attract repeat visitors.

In the next part we will discuss additional changes in the platform and what are the opportunities for marketers in this area.

Twitter revolutionized the way people interact online.

It's phenomenal growth shows that a limited, real time network answers a market need, which in turn becomes an opportunity for brands and service providers.

We also see a phenomenal click through rate on links in Twitter messages, probably due to the fact that  Twitter users are there in order to interact and consume content. This interaction makes Twitter a powerful distribution platform.

Twitter started the real time microblogging revolution.

But, risking actually having to eat my hat for this post in the future, I believe that in the long run it won't sustain as an independent network.

Twitter suffers from several core issues:

1. Lack of context - there is almost no way to track conversation and actually understand how conversations develop in the network

2. Limited extensibility - the 140 characters limit makes it extremely complex to create services based on this protocol (tip hat to Gil Dibner for this one)

3. Lack of groups and filtering - users cannot group contacts based on interest or other parameters and broadcast a message only to them. For example, if I am on a diet, and would like to share it with a community in real time, it might be the case that I wouldn't be interested that my business partners will be aware of that. Today, the only way to do it is to create separate Twitter accounts for each group, and convince relevant people to follow it.

4. Non intuitive interaction and interface - how many times did you try to define what's Twitter to your mom? And how easy it is with Facebook? And how complex it is for new users to "get" what is it all about? I believe that this is one of the main reasons of the 60% service churn reported recently.

I strongly believe that real time Microblogging will prevail - as it has a lot to offer. But taking these issues into consideration, we will see that Twitter as a service, will have limited long term growth.

So what will be the future of Microblogging?

1. We will see more and more communities integrate Twitter-like functionality in their sites - for example, no reason why a diet site won't allow users to interact in a closed, real time, microblogging environment. These niche real time communities will fragment Twitter potential user base and diminish the value of a general purpose network.

2. Major portals will add their own version of microblogging as well - Yahoo! is already doing it, and Facebook/Friendfeed deal might show the direction they are taking. This will be another nail in the coffin of Twitter as general purpose network.

3. Twitter as an independent network will either collapse due to spam, lack of groups and other issues, or will be bought by one of the major online players - for their users base. It will always have a hardcore fan base, but it won't be enough, in my opinion, to sustain it financially.

Twitter might be the forerunner in bringing the real time microblogging revolution to the masses. But it might well be,  that just like Che Guevara,  it won't enjoy the fruits of the revolution it created.

How can you create an engaging, interactive, virtual conference, that will keep people interested, even though they are hundreds of miles away? This is the challenge that we at IMTC is facing this year, while planning its annual event.

IMTC's Annual event is a meeting point of industry experts in the fields of video communication and interoperability. This year we decided to do a full day conference virtually, using available technologies. We are doing it because of three reasons:

1. This is the conference of the future: Though nothing can replace a handshake, virtual conferences are appealing from economic and efficiency perspective

2. This is what we do: IMTC is all about collaboration, unified communication, and content delivery. Virtual conference is best way to practice what we preach. We also would like to support our members by letting them showcase their technology in real life scenarios, and not only in booths and exhibitions.

3. This is the right thing in the current economic climate: With companies cutting their travel budgets, we should, as an industry organization, enable as many people possible to be a part of the experience. Virtual conference is a great solution for those who can't travel, but still interested in the content or participants of the event. Also, in times when companies invest a lot in order to reduce their carbon footprint, virtual events are the way to go to help our planet a bit.

So what is the biggest challenge?

For me, the biggest challenge is not technical, but the experience :How can we prevent the conference from turning into a string of webinars or a list of audio presentations?How can we encourage people in the "audience" to interact with speakers and with each other?What should be the role of social platforms in the event?And how to make an extraordinary event, that pushes the boundaries of virtual conferences, with a shoe string budget?

Luckily, I am a part of a great team that is trying to make this project a reality, including Anatoli Levine from Radvision, Andrea Basso from AT&T, Shantanu Sarkar from Cisco, and many other volunteers.

Want to be a part of the effort to create the conference of the future? have a relevant technology? Consider this as an open call for the industry and drop me an email at kfir AT Pravdam DOT com

Published originally at IMTC's Blog