Category / EN : Brands & Companies

by YannigRoth

Interview of @ChrisKuech (Frito-Lay) About Crash The Super Bowl VIII

Chris Kuechenmeister, one of "40 under 40 to watch" in 2011, according to PRweekUS.com

In 2011, PRweekUS.com cited Chris Kuechenmeister as one of “40 under 40” to watch in public relations

A week ago, PepsiCo launched the 8th edition of the Crash The Super Bowl contest, probably the world’s most famous, open-to-all video advertising competition. For the eight year, PepsiCo invites individuals to compete to have their own Doritos ads air in front of millions during Super Bowl XLVIII, the pinnacle of television advertising. What’s new this year? Doritos is opening Crash The Super Bowl (CTSB) up to the whole world, or at least to any of the 46 countries where Doritos are sold.

To talk about this latest evolution, but also about the general strategy of relying on consumers for the production of advertising content, I had the great pleasure to talk to Chris Kuechenmeister, Senior Director of Public Relations at Frito-Lay North America (which is part of PepsiCo). He kindly replied to my tweet and we had a very interesting chat on Monday. Here’s his insider perspective on this pioneering crowdsourcing initiative. One question a day. Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

OnlineVideoContests.com Features Crowdsourcing Platforms in Short Videos

OVC banner

The video contest directory OnlineVideoContests.com (OVC), which gathers all video contests on one great site (“#1 most updated video contest site on the web!“) and newsletter, has started the “OVC Spotlight” series. It’s an ongoing series of two-and-a-half-minute YouTube videos that describe different video crowdsourcing platforms (eYeka, Mofilm, Poptent ProjectED, Tongal, Zooppa…) is a clear, short and crisp manner. Marissa from OVC told me that:

We decided to create these Spotlight videos as a service to our community, so our creators could better understand all the video crowdsourcing platforms in the space Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

Interactive Ad or Crowdsourcing? Audi Australia’s “Land of Quattro” Campaign

Australia Audi Land Of Quattro

Audi’s latest global brand platform, “Land of Quattro” and has been rolled out in several countries like India, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia. For the latter, Audi Australia has imagined a participative campaigned designed to involve consumers with the brand. “In Australia, Audi has worked with its newly-appointed agency Holler to produce […] an innovative digital execution that allows the public to ‘remix’ the TVC to direct their own commercial,” Marketingmag.com.au explains. A typical example of a crowdsourced advertising campaign, right?

CSW’s tweet got me thinking. It links to this article, where Anna Burgdorf, general manager of Audi corporate communications, says “we don’t see it as crowdsourcing, we see it as another way to watch a commercial and be involved in a brand campaign.” Looking at the campaign created by Holler, I see a creative brief, a deadline, a reward… so it’s crowdsourcing, right? Let’s look at it in more detail! Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

My Review of “How Emerging Market Brands Will Go Global”

brand-breakout-bookIn October 2009, I covered the publication of the Best Global Brands ranking, underlining that none of the 100 brands came from emerging market countries in 2009. In one part of the report, called “Tomorrow’s Brand Leaders, Up-and-Coming Global Brands,” Interbrand China’s Jonathan Chajet nevertheless listed a couple of brands that could become global in a near future, like companies from China (Lenovo, Haier, Tsingtao), India (Tata, Reliance, ArcelorMittal), Russia (Kaspersky Lab, Aeroflot, Gazprom), South Africa (MTN, Anglo-American, SABMiller) and Brazil (Itaù, Vale, Natura). You can see some of them in my post (even if it’s written in German).

Some of these brands, like Lenovo, Haier, or Natura, are presented in a fascinating book called Brand Breakout: How Emerging Market Brands Will Go Global, by N. Kumar (London Business School) and J-B. Steenkamp (University of North Carolina), which I just finished reading. Based on extensive field and desk research, the authors present 8 strategies that brands are taking to go global (the Brand Aquisition Route for Lenovo, the Asian Tortoise Route for Haier or the Natural Resources Route for Natura, for example).

Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

Co-Creation in the Banking Industry: Crédit Agricole’s Alpha Project

tugdual-de-latour-alpha-agence-credit-agricole

On December 13th 2010, the Parisian branch of Crédit Agricole, one of France’s leading banks (whose co-creation efforts I already covered here in French) announced the launch of the Alpha Project. By creating a physical space in the center on Paris, the co-creation project is meant to invite consumers in a physical store, to let them suggest and test new ideas and to eventually co-create the bank-client relationship. This is an interview of Tugdual de Latour, the manager who handles the Alpha project since the early days.

I met Tugdual in the Alpha Agency, and asked him what results the experiment has provided so far. His 2-and-a-half years experience as a co-creation manager prove to be invaluable for all those who are curious about customer involvement. Here are his answers about running a co-creation experiment in the banking industry, about the good and bad sides of customer involvement, and the future of the Alpha Project. Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

Genius Crowds, Another Company That Failed to Turn Co-Creation Into a Profit

Genius Crowds is Out of Business

In May 2011, I covered the French platform Crowdspirit, and tried to discuss the reasons of its failure. In August of the same year, I wrote a blog post about the costs of co-creation, underlining that there are substantial costs to orchestrate crowdsourcing and/or organize co-creation, and that profitable platforms are actually rare. Well, very recently, crowdsourcing.org announced that a US-based crowdsourcing company, Genius Crowds, had to close its doors. Why? Because Genius Crowds was not able to turn their co-creative model into a profit.

“As a small startup, we frankly didn’t have enough resources to do the job of business development that we wanted to be able to do” (C.J. Kettler, CEO and co-founder) Continue reading →

by YannigRoth

Can This Start-Up Become the French Quirky?

Click to access novin.fr

I just discovered a new French start-up in the co-creation/crowdsourcing/open innovation field, it’s called Nov’In. The website describes itself as “the first social network for innovation,” allowing anyone to submit ideas that could turn into reality – if the crowd likes them – and have them sold in stores. Sounds familiar? The founder of the start-up, Ismael Meite, explains that his idea came from seeing the success of Quirky, “which has a turnover of  about €30 million” (I don’t know where he got that information from, because Quirky is privately funded, but anyway). Here’s how it’s supposed to work… and my opinion about it. Continue reading →