Hasta La Creative!

Giffgaff, O2’s community-led mobile operator, has hired Emma Jenkins, former top digital marketer at Procter & Gamble, as chief marketing officer.

Advertising Agency: Ogilvy & Mather, Gurgaon, India
Art Director: Saji Johnny Kundukulam
Copy Writer: Saji Johnny Kundukulam
Illustrator: Saji Johnny Kundukulam

“Asthma can attack you anywhere.
Knowing your symptoms could save your life.
www.worldasthmafoundation.org”

Advertising Agency: Bates PanGulf, UAE
Creative Directors: Prasanna Hegde, Richard Nugent
Creative Group Head: Rajaram Ojha
Art Directors: Abdul Shafeek, Vidhu Pv, Haja Mohideen
Copywriter: Sheldon Serrao

Arrange 100 characters into the highest-scoring tweet of the day to win your box of Scrabble Trickster with this brilliant Belgian Twitter Scrabble promotion. Alas, only in Dutch.
– via Digital Buzz Blog

Mark Zuckerberg posted a picture of himself in front of his computer, and an eagle-eyed blogger noticed that his version of Facebook sports a larger-than-usual search box. An unintended leak or not, Facebook competing in search is only a matter of time just as, in retrospect, it was inevitable that Google would integrate social elements deeper into its main product.

This is why.

It wouldn’t be a revelation to say that no large-scale ad delivery system is perfect.

Reason one is that, at any given moment, only a fraction of the exposed audience is actively on the market for the benefit that the advertised product delivers.  Yes, I actually might be interested in switching to your cell phone plan, but talk to me in 15 months when my contract is about to expire. This is the efficiency problem of advertising: in order to reach the few people who are interested right now, the delivery systems by necessity overshoot and spam the crap bejesus out of thousands who promptly tune out.

Reason two is that few would admit they believe advertising. People consider the source and recognize the nature of the claims as self-serving and discount them accordingly.  This is the effectiveness problem. The advertisers’ typical recourse is to bypass rational thought altogether and to beat the claim into the audience’s subconscious through incessant repetition.

(Now is a good time to note that we are are talking only about ad delivery here. Effectiveness of creative is a different topic.)

That’s what the main media planning principles of “reach” and “frequency” are about — solving for efficiency and effectiveness. In the picture above, this situation is illustrated by the undesirable lower-left quadrant that says “You Are Here.” You are there because most of the existing large ad delivery systems are both inefficient and ineffective.

Except for two.

Google with all its imperfections is the most efficient way to deliver ads — only people who need something now would actively look for something and see an ad for it.

And even though it took them awhile, Facebook is figuring out that they have this whole effectiveness thing down. According to many studies (the one below, and others, including my own), friends are the most trusted source of product information. Facebook has hundreds of millions of friends, and Facebook also sells advertising, and now Facebook is putting two and two together to make advertising that comes from friends.

But Google and Facebook each solve only half of the efficiency/effectiveness problem.  The impeccably timed search ads Google delivers are still self-serving. And the perfectly trustworthy social ads on Facebook still show up at the wrong time. In other words,  Facebook and Google each have what the other doesn’t, and they are going to fight for it.

On Google’s end, this is what the whole Search Plus Your World business is about — fixing the source problem.  That’s why the push to get people to +1 stuff, and then connect people into social graphs via Gmail and Google+, and then use +1ers as implicit endorsers. Not, you might notice, unlike Facebook.

And Facebook needs to fix its targeting. “Interests” have an expiry date and “likes” of pop-culture icons are only tangential indicators of predisposition towards, say, vacuum cleaners. Facebook does have several more precise mechanisms for intent targeting useful for certain categories (a recent change of status to “engaged” is a reliable signal for the wedding industry), but by and large nothing as precise of an intent indicator as search.

Hence the picture of Zuck in front of an extra-large search box.

Update: Part II – How The Scammers Hijacked Facebook Likes

It started with a tweet from a friend:

Never one to pass a scam, I dutifully clicked and landed on a page with this URL: http://giftinterest.com/coffee_ob9ve

The ticking “packages remaining” counter communicates the sense of urgency.  I am feeling lucky; I am WAY ahead of the Internet crowd. Of 500 available packages, only 74 have been given away and 424 are left. Even if the total number of pins is already in excess of 39K. But who are you going to trust – your lying eyes or an unforgiving counter?  (More: see the source code of the scam page.)

The page beckons: “Pin it”. I pin it. Step 1 – check.

This is my pin. The picture of the coffee cups was not on the page I just pinned. Who cares. Five other schmucks users have already liked it.

I am thinking “Hey, that was easy. I am going to get not just one, but TWO cards”. I open another browser and type in that giftinterest URL again.

Oh, what a stroke of luck. Look, the number of packages remaining – 442 – now is larger than it was a minute ago. Someone must have returned theirs. I refresh the page. The number is different yet again. Eventually, if you let the page just sit there, it will go down to zero. Refresh the page, and it reset to  some random number greater than 0 but smaller than 500.

But whatever. I pin again.

This time, the pinned picture is different.

I figure since I don’t drink coffee anyway two cards are enough. I go back to the giftinterest page and click “Final Step”.

Yes! Here I learn that the value of the card is $100 (but only if you qualify).  The page asks me for my email.

The pop-up window tells me to write “I Love Starbucks” on Facebook. That I can’t do. I love Dunkin’ Donuts. 

The rest of the story is familiar to everyone who has ever taken Free iPad surveys.  You get into the funnel…

… and fill out a bunch of surveys and leave your personal info…

… and at some point you are gently prompted to install some spyware…

Needless to say, it is very unlikely that Starbucks has anything to do with this project. Giftinterest.com was registered on February 24, 2012 in private, and both coffee-blends-now.com and yesusrveymedia.com (the two domains that popped up in various fine prints) are registered to a company in India.

Bonus track:  An identical scam is promising free H&M cards to the unsuspecting pinners.

Update: Part II – How The Scammers Hijacked Facebook Likes

Cats can has cheezburger, but dogs are getting their own TV programming.

San Diego dogs subscribed to Cox or Time Warner now have their own 24/7 TV channel called DogTV, soon to roll out nationwide. “DOGTV offers scientifically designed content for dogs of all ages, and all breeds. If your dogs can hear or see, then DOGTV is right for them. DOGTV is working hard to produce fresh content all the time, so your dog will always get new, exciting visual and auditory stimulations.”

DogTV will make money through monthly subscriptions, although dogs look like a promising advertising audience. According to the site, “nearly half of those surveyed had dogs that showed some interest in what was happening on the television screen.” Which is more that can be said about most people. Besides, dogs are also afraid of remote controls.

For the busy dogs on the go, DOGTV also offers a YouTube channel and a Twitter feed.

(TrendHunter.com) Actress Mila Kunis stars in a playful kitschy cover shoot for the Harper’s Bazaar April 2012 issue that pictures the stunning actress in bubbly pastel fashion on a merry-go-round. The shoot is called ‘The…

La nouvelle Ferrari California 2012 devrait être présentée officiellement au Salon de Genève avant d’être disponible dans quelques mois. Avec des lignes magnifiques et un poids allégé de 30 kg par rapport à l’ancienne version du modèle, ce bolide proposera un moteur plus puissant.

Previously on Fubiz

• Shelby Supercars 2012
• Savage Rivale
• Lamborghini Aventador

Copyright Fubiz™ – Suivez nous sur Twitter et Facebook

The Pinterest Giveaway Scam got pretty big today; at one point about 10% of Pinterest homepage pins were scam pins. In addition to the Starbucks offer, I counted at least three others — for H&M, iPhone (of course), and GAP.

What fascinates me about the scam is the authors’ crafty use of recognizable social media symbols to create an illusion of authenticity, and — more importantly — an illusion of endorsement. In other words, exploitation of cognitive biases, also known as social engineering.

Let’s take a closer look at the “Starbucks” page (now available at http://giftinterest.com/coffee_4y8l1 but likely not for long). What do we see?

1. Pinterest’s favicon, hotlinked directly from Pinterest’s servers.  Other variations of the scam used Facebook’s favicon.

2. A countdown of “packages remaining”.  The counter resets at a random number lower than 500 (probably between 200 and 500) at the first page load, and then counts down to zero.

3. Fake “Pin It” button with a fake pin count set at 39K. The “counter” is a static gif, shared by the four different scams.

4. Hidden “pinnable” images. If you use the official Pinterest button on the scam page, it will tell you it can’t find images or videos that are large enough to be pinned.  When you push the fake “Pin it” 39K button on the page, the more advanced variations of the scam would serve a randomly selected image and serve it up together with with a randomly selected page URL to appear in the pin description. Here’s one such image from the iPhone/iPad scam site (http://pinterestpromo.info/i/?start).

You’ll see how all these images are hotlinks from Pinterest — they are actual but unrelated pins by the site’s users.  For example, one of the sources is this pin from a year ago, a picture which in turn was pinned from Apple’s site.

5. Friends’ endorsements.
At first, I was puzzled by the pictures of my eleven friends who, it seems, all have liked this site. My first guess was they all got somehow tricked into clicking the Like button during one of the later steps of the scam funnel. I asked a couple of them to go through their recent Like history, and none of them could find a record of “liking” anything related or even remember seeing the scam in the first place.

Look closer at the source code:

These pictures are displayed through a Facebook widget called Facepile, and what these pictures show are the faces of my friends who liked Facebook’s own page and not the scam site (all four scam sites I saw used the same widget and showed me the pictures of the same eleven friends.)  The trick is not immediately obvious because each time you load the page the widget shows a different set of three names and a random sequence of userpics.  

Here, let me try to embed the same Facepile widget into this blog post:

If you are logged into Facebook, you should see pictures of your friends who liked this. What “this” means is left to reader’s imagination.

In other words, anyone can grab a facebook.com/cocacola, for example, and use it to fake their endorsement of an unrelated site.

Oh, and the author behind at least one of the scam sites is open to employment offers, with his email address tucked into the source code:

Update (March 6, 2012) Most of the scam pages have been taken down, but here’s the source code of one of them: