Playgroup | Helping brands build genuine brand equity

Six out of the top ten biggest sites on the web are now social. However behind the trailblazers is an increasing tail of debris. How should social media marketing be evaluated? The brains at Ryan Macmillan have come up with a new framework snappily pacaged up in a neat acronym: KUDOS.

The acronym stands for the attributes a piece of social media activity need to display to be successful:

Knowledgeable

Useful

Desirable

Open

Shareable

When you start applying it to real world social media campaigns its amazing how many fall short in a number of the categories- particularly 'Useful'.

Simple, sound principles.

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Just in case you hadn't gathered G.I.Jonny won a Webby last night, not just any old Webby but The Peoples Voice award.

The category was Rich Media Advertising- not for profit, and although the 'Try Drugs' campaign pipped us as the category winner, I'll take people power any day.

G.I.Jonny was created for the BBC to promote HIV and AIDS awareness amongst 16-24 year olds. The concept was based around creating your own action figure, arming it with the facts about HIV and sending it out to protect your mates. 

Congratulations Playmates, the BBC, and our friends at The Viral Factory. 

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Its so difficult to execute flash driven video concepts perfectly. Every now and then someone gets it right and it takes your breath away. Ikea have done it with this beautifully produced slo-mo microsite.

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The brilliant first episode of the new AMC series Mad Men aired last Sunday night, but are these dinosaurs of the ad industry still roaming the earth?

Set in a New York advertising agency in the sixties the recurrent themes seem to be smoking, boozing, sexism, and mass manipulation.

Secretaries are goosed indiscriminately, a client gets short shrift for being a woman, and the ad executives tip back the whisky before the big pitch. All vignettes from a distant era. Or are they?

Take away the pomade and the typewriters and the agency stereotypes still stick- they've just shape shifted a bit. Sexism in the workplace is still rife but less overt, drink has been replaced by powdered stimulants and oligarchic attitudes still pervade within the advertising industry.

As traditional ad agencies still scrabble to get to grips with digital and the democratisation of the consumer, Mad Men's retro styling actually looks like a thin veneer over the present.

http://www.amctv.com/originals/madmen/

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Here are some of my 'Googlescapes'. All the images are pilfered from Google image searches and lovingly assembled into distopian vistas. I start by searching for something quite mundane, however the imperfections of search throw up brilliantly unpredictable results sending me on wild tangents. The collages are a search driven stream of consciousness, and I never quite know where I'm going to end up. Each 'Googlescape' is named after the first search.

Barbecue

Playground

Wet and Wild

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