Barclays Street Party

Only just got round to blogging this. Last Friday Barlcays opened a new branch on Tottenham Court Road and decided to do it in some style.


They created a mini street festival, brought in street entertainers, marching bands and musicians. Lots of hoopla and branded goods being thrown out, bunting and majorettes. They even brought the Barclay's Premiership Trophy down where you could queue to have your photo taken with it.











It was pretty impressive and a lot of fun but it did strike me that it was a bit OTT for something as mundane as a branch opening and in these credit crunch times did feel a little bit ostentatious - on the other hand you could say at least they were bringing some happiness to people on the street.

Using Twitter to make money

I've seen a couple of examples recently of companies using twitter purely and simply as a cheap direct sales tool.

This is great for clients who can't or aren't allowed to measure activity purely in terms of branding. The two examples that I think are very simple are Dell and Jet Blue

1. Dell



Dell outlets has a twitter page and its very simple they publish alerts of new stock items and special offers with unique codes for Twitter so they can track sales back. So far they have over 1million followers and have sold over $3million worth of stock. Brilliantly simple.

2. Jet Blue

Jet Blue the personal jetting site worked out they saw very little sales in August due to the business audience going on holiday so they issued an exclusive twitter offer.


Buy any one flight in the month of Auguest and travel for the rest of the month free. Withing 2 days they sold out their entire August inventory something they have nver done in the prvious few years trading.


It just goes to prove simple easy use of social media tools can work, and it can be tracked back to Sales and ROI pretty easily.

Sky - The Ashes and online coverage

Hat's off to Sky who earlier this year got a few blog comments mentioning they had missed an opportunity to maximise their ashes coverage to the at work audience.

Last night I got this email - that said something like - you do not have to miss the ashes is you are at work tomorrow..


and now today I can watch live at work - very cool

Adapting familiar icons to the local culture

I just saw a quick post on the Animal NY blog and it had this brilliant picture on it.



It funny and has some nice touches but should you adapt something for local sensitivities - I remember always hearing that Manuel from Faulty Towers - who in the UK series was from Barcelona was changed to an Italian when it was aired in Spain. Not sure if there are any other but it is funny how some things get changed - Opal Fruits and Star Burst (admittedly this was purely costs I suspect), Coco Pops and back again.

Clearly when the international version means something weird its probably advisable but somethings are best left untouched.

Shoulkd you do an Iphone app

I just saw an interesting post on techcrunch blog about the best 35 iPhone apps of the year so far.

I'm not sure if its surprising or not but at first glance there doesn't appear to be any branded apps, no bits of branded utility, no brand names - just useful good bits of generic software. Admittedly its one persons view and it's not to say all of the branded apps so far have been useless. Probably more likely that the operators and bigger software companies who make useful software for other platforms just got their first. For example Kelkoo probably did a price comparison app so if Mastercard want to come up with a natty idea based on the priceless concept there is no point developing a price comparison app as someone else has already got the reputation. So brands are left to do pretty shallow extensions of their marketing communications campaigns.

I saw a fact somewhere else recently that the average branded app gets 1.2 uses and is then deleted from the users phone. So I guess the moral is if you have to so something shallow make it far from average.

Dare have developed this extension of the popular Barclaycard campaign about waterslides and it shows if the app is good enough it can get traction.
The free App for the iPhone has had 3 million downloads in just 13 days to make it the number one free App in over 50 countries. So what do I know.

Back from Holiday

Been away for two weeks and the first article I've just seen shows nothing much changes. Millward Brown announced that the most valuable brand in the world is Google.



The number of new and tech brands in the top 10 is remarkable if not unsurprising.

Anyway thought the list was fun.