Why getting early negative reviews can be a good thing

by Ben de Castella on 19 December, 2011

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If you’ve ever struggled to convince a client on the benefits of allowing negative comments about their products, here’s one for you. A piece in Harvard Business Review (thanks @euanwilcox) reveals that getting bad reviews early on can actually be good in the long run.
The findings come from a study of 51,854 reviews contributed to Amazon, covering 858 [...]

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Idea Envy: VW BlueMotion Roulette

by Ben de Castella on 2 September, 2011

VW BlueMotion Roulette

This is one to file under ‘ideas you wish you’d come up with’ – in this case it was VW’s Norwegian agency Apt that got there first.
So how do you make people care about a boring-but-important feature like a car’s fuel consumption? What about asking consumers to upload their favourite fuel-economy [...]

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Unexpected Thinking : 3 of the best from Cannes

by Ben de Castella on 22 August, 2011

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The APG held a Cannes Highlights evening last night at the Verona, themed around ‘Unexpected Thinking’. As well as the usual suspects (Nike ‘Write the Future’, Walkers ‘Sandwich’, TippEx ‘Hunter Shoots A Bear’ etc) here are a few examples that hopefully haven’t been blogged to death…

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The downside of content personalisation

23 May 2011
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In digital agencies, we love content personalisation. It makes us look smarter in front of clients and hopefully keeps things a bit more interesting for the people we’re trying to communicate with. But there’s also a downside to excessive personalisation – or at least that’s the message Eli Pariser made in his fascinating TED talk [...]

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The best consumer segment ever: loves risks, drugs and the odd street fight

22 March 2011
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I had an all-agency session today where our client shared their new consumer segmentation. Whenever this subject comes up, I can’t help thinking back to an absolutely cracking segmentation from UK mobile retailer Phones4U. And yes, there is such a thing…
What I love about Phones4U’s segmentation is the recognition that if you’re going to create [...]

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The real Mad Men Christmas party: pretty dull actually

21 December 2010
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Droga 5’s recent full page ad in The Australian confirmed what we all already knew. Despite telling everyone who’ll listen that ‘the old agency model is broken’, most people in advertising still prefer the idea of a Sterling Cooper-style long lunch to a four-hour workshop on cross-media integration.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Except that [...]

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Stuck for Christmas gift ideas? How about some Scampi Fries?

18 December 2010

Attempting to clear some of my Christmas shopping on Amazon, I noticed a rather curious new section under my personal recommendations – English Cuisine Bestsellers.

Currently sitting at number one is a family size consignment of Scampi Fries. It’s great that an artificially flavoured wheat-based snack has been recognised as a leader in the world of English cuisine. Other [...]

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IKEA’s self-assembly banner ads

13 December 2010

With everyone banging on about ‘being part of the conversation’ it’s easy to forget about the humble banner ad…and let’s face it, a lot of the time banners sit somewhere between pretty forgettable and downright irritating.
Well, here’s a great example of why banners don’t have to boring - it’s an IKEA ad by Hamburg’s Grabarz & [...]

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