Random culture with their all round insightful posting shows us the latest from a London based agency Daft London who seem to have put together some package for Oxfam and the Make Poverty History (brand?).

Play bit unfair here

From a marketing perspective, I think this is genuinely good stuff and something very few are actually doing in the “grab your dollar” charity space. I ask the question though, is it too good? All this lights and whistles surely had to come at a cost. Who funded it? If it was internally commissioned from within OXfam, how deep did the creative bill eat into the stash to reduce poverty?

I guess eliminating poverty is quite a task and needs the leverage of a few billion people, I can’t fault Oxfam for trying something new in the market to get first dibs at your donation dollar. Lets just hope it doesn’t get to a point where we get MPH and Red Nose Day head to head to see who will out creative the other…No thanks, I want to be confident that my money actually gets to Kiaan in Bangledesh.

ARE YOU IN?

In his post “What would happen if Microsoft were to re-package the Ipod?”, Idle thoughts points us to an impression of what Microsoft would do to the beautiful artistic temperament of Apple.

It’s brilliant!! If you haven’t seen it, check it out here: YouTube

After seeing it, I can’t help but comment on how far off tech giants like Microsoft are when it comes to marketing communication. While it is not clear from the video, could you imagine the type of language being used on MS’s Ipod box! Technolatin - “a vocabulary of vague but precise sounding words that work like the blank tiles in Scrabble: you can use them anywhere, but they have no value…”

Thank goodness MS are not into baby products or we may start to get marcomms that would suggest that a baby serves as a platform for vomiting, is a seamless solution for reducing sleep time and that it supports crying!!

Kudos to MS for everything it has done…but please come to real terms with your customers (me included) before you slowly slip into the dark, dark abyss.

Read this latest article “Microsoft unveils Marketing Initiative” by Peter Svensson and see how many technolatin phrases you can pick…Is your company “people-ready” or “attempting to prolong a pre-internet, proprietary one-size-fits-all computing model”?

To all you marketers out there,

How will you react to someone writing to you asking for free stuff? Scam or perhaps an opportunity to build genuine “sneezers”.

Seth Godin points us in the direction of the $39 Experiment: Asking random companies for Free Stuff. Seth wraps it up nicely - a little treat and a little time could generate a whole lot of brand equity for your business.

This may have been an exercise to test the limits by Tom Locke, but what an excellent example of how companies could build genuine 1 on 1 conversations with their customers with very little output. Del Monte foods seems to think so, if it was a genuine customer, think of the cred for their Think treats brand.