Industry News: Blippa boldly Goes…

Love it or hate it – Star Trek has been serving up Sci-Fi to the masses for over 46 years now, making pieces of “fantasy tech” such as transporters and photon torpedoes household names. But tonight (29th April) makes a milestone for a slightly more 21^st century piece of technology – augmented reality. As the first ‘Blippable’ ad is aired this evening across the channel 5 network at 9pm. kick-starting the launch campaign for the latest film released under the franchise ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness.’

Those in the know, having downloaded the ‘Blippa’ augmented reality app made by a tech company of the same name, will be able to interact with the ad on a whole new level – accessing additional unique content, as well as being able to enter into a competition to attend the premier of the film in Tokyo.

Emily Fairhead-Keen, business director at MEC has been quoted by MediaWeek as saying:  "Screen synchronicity is not a 'nice to have' any more, it's a critical part of our planning.

"We should embrace smarter ways to engage consumers on both screens, especially with categories such as entertainment, which lend themselves so well to user engagement and the sourcing of additional content/prizing."

Of course, the same old fears associated with accessing AR content remain – namely the need to download the app, which is seen as a barrier to entry. But in this case prior knowledge of the ad is also necessary – as the spot will only last for 60 seconds, users do not have the luxury of being able to access the augmented ads at a time that suits them (such as the press ads run by Waitrose in 2011).

Despite the above concerns this ad has definitely got the agency talking today, we are always on the look-out for innovative ways to make our campagins stand out and many of us will be tuning in tonight with our phazers set to stun! Enjoy.

When will media planners start linking what with why?

It has been a bug bear of mine for nearly 30 years- almost the entire time I have worked in media- that there are very few complete media planners. Most fall into one of two groups, divided by the intellectual equivalent of the Grand Canyon.

There are the traditional “above the line” or communications planners. Focused on consumer insight they ape the anthropologists- spending hours intellectualising consumer motivations, and asking why a consumer might behave in a particular way. Have created their intellectual construct they rarely seek experimental data to prove that consumers actually did behave the way they predicated.

Across the Canyon we find the “below the line” or data planners. With their “my data is bigger than yours” datasets they can tell you to 5 decimal places what is happening in the world, but rarely why.

And its this latter group who are running the media mad house this week. Neilsen published their monthly online media usage figures for February on March 28^th. A harmless set of numbers that tell us how many unique visitors used the web per se, and then top ten sites within the major categories such as broadcast, entertainment. We learn that 41.7 million people went online during the month, and 8.5 million adults visited Sky.com. All very jolly.

But less so were the headlines that accompanied the release. “online numbers at lowest level for a year” “online uses down by nearly 1 million from January”.

No s**t Sherlock.  The shortest month of the year- 10% fewer hours of surfing than Janaury, and we are surprised when reach falls by 2.5%.  When, oh when will we manage to create a rounded media planner?