In March, I have only 8 links to share, but each of them relates to a particularly interesting topic. Starting with Unilever’s crowdsourcing ambitions (via The Foundry), to a very funny pre-roll ad by Geico, all the way to some public relations-related articles and a drone video. The latter takes you through the world’s largest cave in Vietnam (click on the image left to see more), and the images are breathtaking.
One example of a major company’s crowdsourcing effort is the launch of The Unilever Foundry, in May 2014. “The Unilever Foundry builds on a lot of work that we’ve already done – and will continue to do – to engage with startups,” Marc Mathieu, Global SVP of Marketing, explained in an interview with Rafe Ring for Campaign Asia. The Unilever Foundry now acts as a central hub to house all crowdsourcing briefs of the company, with the objective of better organizing outsourced activity as a commitment to more effective marketing. This month, I tweeted this article in which Unilever announced that it seeks to increase the use of crowdsourced innovations tenfold globally by 2020.
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This YouTube preroll spot from Geico and The Martin Agency takes full advantage of the 5 seconds that you have to skip the ad, and makes sure there is some serious payoff for anyone who sticks around and doesn’t hit skip. “Probably the biggest, furriest, most adorable preroll we’ve ever seen,” said Fast Company, and I agree, I laughed my a** off.
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This is an interesting interview of Trevor Wolfe, Managing Director of the South African crowdsourcing platform Springleap. He tellsthe How We Made It in Africa website more about the company’s operations, plans for Africa and how it is using crowdsourcing to conduct market research. “It’s actually fascinating; it feels like a bit of chess game is going on,” he says. “We see some brands that are trying to skip over the markets [where there are already a lot of brands or competition], and moving into the likes of Burkina Faso and South Sudan.” Read more for rare insights in global crowdsourcing adoption.
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Last year, Apple was the first company to be valued at $700bn. As it makes a bid to enter the luxury market with the 18ct gold Apple Watch, the brand’s British design visionary, Jony Ive, gave a rare interview to Nick Foulkes from How To Spend It, which I enjoyed reading very much. It doesn’t tell us much more about the man or the company than we already know, but it reminds us how tedious and engaged Ive is when it comes to design and user experience.
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Part of my job at eYeka is to lead the company PR efforts, along with our great partner Babel PR and the people here internally. I also benefit a lot from the experience of Joël Céré. But beyond that, it is always useful to learn about other companies’ experiences with PR – which is exactly what the people from Wistia did in this post. The author says: “I wish we had had more internal clarity around who owned what aspects of PR, that we’d been prepared to communicate more quickly and clearly with the firm, and that we’d prepared more content ahead of the campaign.” A very valid point. PR is quite expensive in an ROI-driven digital world, but it’s worth the investment. Find out more on eYeka’s press center.
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A propos PR, here’s a cool tool for those who are looking for journalists and bloggers to cover certain topics. Hey Press is a search engine for startup journalists, in which you search for a keyword (e.g. ‘Oculus Rift’) then the tool scouts the net to find the most relevant journalists for you. The database is still restricted to a couple of mainstream publications (Mashable, Techcrunch, CNet etc.) but – with a bigger database – it can be of tremendous value for anyone looking to find the best journalists for your start-up!
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I already shared a a link about Magic Leap, the “mysterious virtual reality company funded by Google,” as The Next Web (TNW) puts it. In this post, TNW shares a google video that supposedly shows how Magic Leap works (a game where the user can interact with real-world and virtual objects and impressive graphics). It’s a cool look at what could be our augmented reality future, when you will be running run around your office like an insane person. But seriously – imagine the awesome possibilities behind this!?
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Five years ago, explorers discovered a way to access the Son Doong Cave in Vietnam — the largest known cave in the world. Now, thanks to photographer Ryan Deboodt, take a tour by drone. “Hang Son Doong is an incredible, otherworldly experience,” Deboodt says. “You lose sense of time and location. Am I going to see a dinosaur around the corner? Am I on another planet? It is just incredible. The sheer size of the cave makes you feel tiny, and you realize how small and insignificant you are on the grand scheme of things.“