I came across this one last week and I probably should’ve written about it sooner to capitalize on the all the iPhone mania but I wanted to sit back watch it for a few days. What Good is Your Old Phone, is the question being asked after 700k Americans purchased the new iPhone last week. That’s a lot of old phones. So Mind Comet, an interactive marketing agency, came up with the idea to have users submit videos of what they were doing with their old phones. One video shows a guy going at it with a jackhammer, another transforms two old phones into flip-flops, and the worst one is two guys breading and deep frying their friend’s old phone, yikes that can’t be good. There is a link at the bottom of the page encouraging people to donate their still functioning phone to Collective Good cell phone recycling.
The site was not commissioned by Apple. I can’t imagine any other reason Mind Comet would build the site other than to take advantage of all the iPhone buzz. So I started poking around and what I found was interesting. This site was intended to be a cute viral campaign with user submitted videos and the Mind Comet folks used all the typical tricks to try to get the ball rolling. The domain was purchased on June 18th, 2007 and presumably the site was launched a few days later since the first video was posted on YouTube on June 20th and one of their own submitted it to Digg on the 22nd. Then they hired a handful of bloggers to write paid reviews for the site via Pay Per Post, with the anchor text in the link “iPhone Review and Video”, to optimize on the term to their site, an old trick called “google bombing” (look it up on Wikipedia.) I strongly recommend the folks at Mind Comet read this:
Google recently added technology to their algorithms that penalizes sites that appear to be over optimizing. This is usually indicated by too much use of a particular keyphrase, for example always using the exact same word or phrase to link to one page in your site and all incoming links from other sites are also use the same phrase. To avoid the penalty just mix up your phrases a bit and, leading to the other warning to watch out for - usability -keep it human, use phrases that humans will understand. [via Entrepreneur’s Journey]
So they think they’re clever, but is it working? I’m not seeing any huge jump on Alexa or links to the site other than the paid ones. But considering all the chatter in the internet about the iPhone it’s damn near impossible to try and grab even 2% of that audience.
Like I said previously, the site is cute. The user submitted videos are kinda funny, albeit disturbing. I can’t imagine deep-frying a phone is very good for the environment or attempting to flush one down the toilet would send the right message for proper battery disposal or even good environmental ethics. At least they have that little link at the bottom of the page (below the fold) for donating your working phones. Personally I was waiting for the videos that were supposed to launch on July 4th at I Will Stomp On Your Cell Phone For You. So silly.
Of course, I think this is bigger news: The Only Phone You Need because someday all our cell phones will be VoIP and I will be buying the domain whatgoodisyouroldiphone.com.
Before I begin telling you why this site, Sliced The Movie, is so cool I need to talk to you about the robots.txt file. What is a robots.txt file, you ask? Well it’s a file that resides in the root directory of your site that gives specific instructions to the search engine robots about what to read on your site. When you are developing your site, presumably on a subdomain of your site, the first thing you want to do is something like this:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
That way the search engines won’t index your site while you’re still testing it prior to launch and it won’t come up in the search engine results pages. Worse, it won’t come up in the search results above the actual site. Yikes.
This is real basic, web development 101, kind of stuff.
Another thing you want to do when your site is entirely built using Flash is to make sure you have some meta data, like meta keywords, meta description, < h > tags, etc. This way the search engines know what to do with your site and if say, someone hears about this cool new website, they go to Google and type in the site name as a term (Sliced The Movie), you want your site to come up first not completely absent from the search results.
And I cannot stress how easy and useful it is to have a Sitemap. As well as non-flash content. Ok, I’ll shut up about all this stuff now.
Once you get past all the SEO mistakes the site is fun. It’s a spoof on horror films like Halloween, Saw or Friday the 13th. According to the Ad Agency’s press release:
“The website, www.slicedthemovie.com resembles a typical movie trailer site. Visitors can view and download the Sliced the Movie trailer that parodies several classic horror films. The “movie” opens on a group of fruits as they celebrate the end of summer at a relative’s isolated and abandoned cottage. As in most horror films, the visitors quickly become ill at ease as they realize something is not right at the cottage. Predictably, the power goes out and one by one the fruit are found “dead” – blended, sliced, grated and juiced to death. Periodically, a silhouette of the killer, a VEX bottle, can be seen. Typical imagery and themes from a host of classic horror films are visible throughout the trailer.”
The trailer was directed by Alex Wittholz and produced by Helios Design Labs in Toronto for advertising agency GJP (Gee Jeffery and Partners) also in Toronto for the launch of the new VEX flavor, Strawberry Orange Banana Hard Lemonade.
The ability to create a site like this has everything to do with the rapid pace of internet growth, from interactive technologies to the ever increasing data processing speeds brought on by broadband, allowing you to watch huge files seamlessly. But given this rapid pace of growth and constantly changing technologies it becomes more and more important that creative agencies understand the medium. There is more to internet marketing than creating a site, producing a fancy commercial and putting it up for viewing. You also need to know how to get people to your site.
I know we already talked about Derek Jeter recently but I have to mention this awesome site: XM Call Stars. It’s a site set up to promote XM radio. Basically you have your pick between Derek Jeter, David Ortiz, and Cal Ripkin Jr. to call or email a voice message to someone you know. You fill in some information about that person like their name, where they live, their favorite baseball team and silly things like where they’d wear their favorite team’s items and what they do at home. Then you choose to either have it sent to them via email or an actual phone call. I didn’t try the phone call version because it’s difficult to know if the person you’re sending it to will actually answer the phone. But the people I emailed it to went nuts for it. This is a great example of interactive marketing.
This site is interesting. Unilever launched Vive Mejor to open up its products to the Hispanic market. According to recent U.S. Census Board data (October, 2006), the U.S. population has reached more than 300 million. At more then 44.3 million, the Hispanic population is the largest of the minority groups (14.8 percent of the overall U.S. population) and the fastest growing — at a rate of 3.4% between July 2005 and July 2006. So why haven’t more companies done the same? I hate to say what I’m really thinking but I’m betting most companies still operate under the illusion that the Hispanic population isn’t a worthy demographic. If they are still thinking that they are so very very wrong.
“Vive Mejor was created by Unilever as an interactive experience for the Hispanic consumer as a way for them to be entertained while learning more about their favorite brands - in-store and on line. ViveMejor magazine, available free at major participating grocery stores and ViveMejor.com, are both available in a fully bilingual format. The new summer issue includes a cover story on Mexican TV hostess Karla Martinez, an article on beautiful summer skin, tips for family vacation planning and delicious variations on favorite Latin recipes like Dulce de Leche Tea Pops. The magazine also offers useful tips that incorporate well-known Unilever brands, such as Dove, Suave, Caress, Knorr, Lipton, Ragu, Hellmann’s and more.
According to research conducted by Unilever in major Hispanic communities, such as New York, Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston, Hispanic shoppers have unique buying patterns that match their family-oriented lifestyle. With this in mind, ViveMejor gives Hispanic shoppers the information they need to make the most of each shopping trip.”
Even though I grew up in California I didn’t learn how to speak Spanish. Having studied Italian in college and living in Italy does help a bit, you know both being latin based languages, but I still wouldn’t be able to give the site the full review it deserves. I like the premise and I hope more companies will follow suit. Unilever is an amazing brand with a strong background in excellent web based campaigns and they’ve done well with many of their properties. It’s a really well rounded site with sections for recipes, ideas for home, beauty tips, even horoscopes.
The domain itself has been through a number of incarnations since it was first created in 2004 but according to the Whois the last record change was January 31, 2007. Interestingly the domain once transferred to Unilever was only signed on until 2008. You’d think after taking over the domain they’d sign up for 5+ years to avoid the domain dropping by accident. Not gonna draw any conclusions on that one but my suggestions if they want to build up site authority they should sign the domain for a least 5 years.
The winner was Diesel for their Heidies.com site. Featuring two girls named Heidi who hijacked the Diesel website for “15 MB of fame”. The girls post a video of themselves in a motel room with a guy chained to the the bed. They are demanding a ransom of a future as models for Diesel. The site is funny, the pictures are racy and the whole thing was pretty damn well executed.
My hats off (if I wore a hat) to the folks at Diesel and creative agency Farfar.
What is a Brand Dump? Do you remember in college when you had to take an essay exam and before you even started writing you would grab a piece of scratch paper and dump all the crap you'd studied on it? A Brain Dump. It's kind of like that. It is when conventional brand marketing meets online buzz marketing and the internet becomes the dumping ground for marketing microsites. This site is dedicated to following the online marketing efforts of major corporations through the use of buzz and viral marketing. (more...)
There is a link at the bottom of the page encouraging people to donate their still functioning phone to Collective Good cell phone recycling.
So they think they’re clever, but is it working? I’m not seeing any huge jump on Alexa or links to the site other than the paid ones. But considering all the chatter in the internet about the iPhone it’s damn near impossible to try and grab even 2% of that audience. 
When you are developing your site, presumably on a subdomain of your site, the first thing you want to do is something like this:
Even though I grew up in California I didn’t learn how to speak Spanish. Having studied Italian in college and living in Italy does help a bit, you know both being latin based languages, but I still wouldn’t be able to give the site the full review it deserves. I like the premise and I hope more companies will follow suit. Unilever is an amazing brand with a strong background in 
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