V21 is the leading annual conference in Victoria, Australia for bringing together digital media businesses and practitioners to help develop and better understand creative and commercial opportunities that digital media can bring to business.

The V21: 2012 Digital Summit focuses on creative and commercial success in the digital age. A roster of high calibre speakers has been assembled, including two-time Emmy Award winner Seth Shapiro, co-found Stuart Eccles of Made by Many as well as Darren Woolley of Trinity P3, Jason Davey of Bullseye and Hamish MacKenzie of ANZ. Each speaker represents a cross section of native digital media businesses; companies who are leading their industry in product and service provision, or going through a major transition. Speakers are presenting case studies across several industries including media, entertainment, publishing and retail.

Tim O'Neill, Joint Managing Director of Reactive commented "The AIMIA V21 Conference is a great opportunity to hear (and share) the latest trends, insights and best practice examples, and is a regular event on the Reactive calendar. It's for agency decision makers, account directors and anyone in a business who is serious about growing their reach and response in the digital world."

The V21 Digital Summit starts Friday 23rd of November 2012.
For more information about V21 visit https://www.v21.com.au

Someone at Channel 9 is running around stressed. Meetings are happening to discuss how to handle this and the social media monitoring companies, the social media commentators (me included) are already gearing up for another "How to handle a social crisis" Slideshare deck.

Australia's biggest TV channel and Olympics broadcaster channel 9 is being "smashed" on their Facebook page over their coverage. Mostly around the coverage, or over coverage, of swimming. In heir defence, swimming is usually the area where Australia does the best in the medals so 9 probably over invested in their prep around swimming.

The page is getting around 10 angry posts a minute and I found a lot of them funny. There's even some memes (both good and bad) popping up.

The example below sums up Australia's youth well.

But it's not all young kids there's also some people that will pick out any fault whether it be the pronunciation of a country or even when the channel accidentally broadcasts old footage. Whoops.

What surprised me was this "Dear Channel 9" post by Matthew Taylor which has since reached 94,000 likes and 4,000 comments. It's as if it was posted by Lil Wayne himself.

Foxtel, Australia's only pay TV provider, must be loving it. If they don't have a reactive ad coming out soon to capitalise on this I would be surprised. Foxtel's games profile, Follow The Games* is dedicated to the games in this period.

It'll be an interesting few days to see how Channel 9 respond to this and how the other networks cover it. Oh and more importantly how the "social media experts" say they should have handled it.

It also begs the quest does Australia's largest television network have anything to gain by running a Facebook profile for the channel itself? Sure their shows desrve a place for fans to chat but people don't like a channel, they like the content on it. Their 54,000 fans are nothing compared to their viewership and unlike brands they already have a channel to reach and engage people with, it's their own network.

Wook and Nate will discuss the key technology issues around Mobile and strategies for creatives to drive success now.

Creatives worldwide can join Hangout on Air: youtube.com/creativesandbox

There's a special opportunity for a maximum of 8 leading creative agencies who have done work in Mobile or are planning a special push in the arena, to reserve a spot on screen in the Hangout with Wook and Nate, available on a first come basis. Contact Jeff Sundheim (jsundheim at google.com) to check availability.

Mysterious WAKE UP ads have been appearing for the last few days counting down to May 4-5th (or 980,690 seconds from now) with Wake-Up-Australia.com.au being the destination.

The flash banners on News.com.au show a idealistic scene that then fills with black ink to end on just WAKE UP in white text.

The bold design stands out as does the intrigue of having something unbranded spend so much money on advertising.

And just by chance (or maybe it was staged) popular Aussie Youtube blogger Blunty3000 was witness to a bus load of people people shouting "WAKE UP" with the same white text on black background.

What is this for?
Who has this much money to spend on a unbranded teaser campaign?
Didn't they learn from KONY2012 that you cant expect the public to stay interested in anything for more than a week?

My initial thought was for a solar energy company (the black in representing oil), then it might be a new NAB campaign for people to wake up about bank fees, it could be a new coffee/iced coffee but this is some serious spend that would rule them out.

The agency who registered the domain is Tongue and their client list doesn't give much away. They are part of the STW Group so could be helping out a larger agency in the group with the domains?

I'm guessing the WAKE UP ads will ramp up and all will be revealed soon. Wake Up! budget accommodation must be loving it as any search traffic is helping them as the campaign doesn't currently have any search buy (That's another lesson when doing a teaser campaign)

Interested to see how this pans out and if the teaser phase is justified. There's very little chatter on Twitter about it despite all the activity and a simple call to action. I'm waiting for sky writing, newspaper wrap to follow on from the bus protest and banner ads.

2011's Trends

Mainly Video 55
HTML 45
Flash 32
Agency Staff 30
Charity Donations 24
Built Something 20
Facebook Connect 18
Tweets/Twitter 16
Live Streaming Video 11
Agency Hipsters 9
Agency Staff Singing 8
Augmented Reality (AR) 7
Tumblr 6
Ironic Use Of Xmas Jumpers 6
Upload Your Face 6
Mobile App 6
Projections 5
Animated Gifs 6
Mobile 5
Games 5
Win Prizes 5
QR Codes 4
Instagram 4
World Record | World's First 4
Digital Controlling Real Life 4
Occupy Something 4
Maps API 3
3D Printing 2
Swearing 2
Unity 1
Sexy Santa 1

Plan B [GR]: Kris at the Office
Plan B have also hired Santa for their agency. Follow the exploits on the blog.

They previously hired AIR to do the music for their agency website. Expensive but worth it.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of Sonic the Hedgehog, JWT Sydney and SEGA have launched a multi-platform campaign based around an augmented reality app that can be used in conjunction with out-of-home, TV, magazines, online banners and websites. The campaign has launched exclusively in Australia and the Sonic Vision app is only available in the Australian iTunes store.

The 'Sonic Vision - Catch the Blue Blur' iPhone app (www.sonicthehedgehog.com/getapp) allows fans to capture Sonic in the real world by locating augmented reality markers around the country using built-in maps and GPS.

To catch Sonic, players can point their iPhone at a poster and a gold ring appears on screen. Sonic speeds past onscreen and players have to respond quickly to capture him. The markers also appear on websites, banners, in magazines and on TV.

SEGA is also distributing Augmented Reality Markers to bloggers and gaming websites encouraging them to be part of the campaign by voluntarily embedding the markers (example below) within their pages to attract Sonic Vision players.

Capture Sonic Here - A Sonic Vision AR marker for blog owners

Fans can also submit their points to a leaderboard and follow the progress of other players, win Sonic prizes and share their scores on Facebook.

"JWT has recognised the rising prominence of mobile amongst gamers and created an experience that is a fitting celebration of a gaming icon like Sonic the Hedgehog," said SEGA marketing manager Neroli Baird.

The campaign also coincides with the much anticipated release of Sonic Generations for Nintendo DS, PS3, Xbox 360 & PC. Sonic Generations delivers the definitive gaming experience for Sonic fans new and old and is considered the ultimate celebration of 20 Years of Sonic gaming,

Like the Contiki page for extra clues then watch the videos which not only give you clues to the location but do a nice job of selling the sights of the area. A promotion that actually does the job of selling the product. A rarity these days.

While he's mooching around the moors (and during the week before) he'll have the facial hair
of your choice around his chops.

But he ain't cheap! He'll only do it if your donations reach £2,500
So what will it be? Vote & Donate - https://www.manwalksintoabarbershop.com/

And for those looking for best practice in "social media" look no further than video games. The developers and publishers live and ie by their fans and go to great lengths to "service" them daily.

What caught my gamer eye today was Mortal Kombat. A game that is banned here in Australia.

Mortal Kombat is about to release the 9th (yes 9th! since debuting in 1992) game in the series next week and they have rolled out the big guns. A cosplay/casting video of their 3 female characters for no other reason than to give the male gamers something to fap about. I present Sonya, Mileena and Kitana. They will be at launch events taking photos with the fans all over Europe.

The videos all push to the Facebook page to vote but in my book they all win.

And if that wasn't enough how about a live action web series from Machinima for thos who like a little more back story

Here's the trailer

and the first episode. Just a fraction over 4 million views in a week. And not one article in any ad press about this "viral" success story.

Mortal Kombat is not bulletproof like the Call of Duty series so the marketing teams has to work much harder to build the buzz and I think for this game they have done everything right. The game looks great, the amount of content produced to promote the game is astounding (just check the Youtube channel and FB page)

and Snoop hooking up with Rico their muppet for a new song.

Rico's first outing late last year did quite well for Air NZ with the Happy Hour video reaching 380,000 views

Just last year they did a NZ Rugby team safety video which earned them 800,000 views.

These come 2 years after 5 million+ views to their safety video with the body painted staff

You can imagine the other airline marketing departments asking their agencies "we want to be like Air NZ" as they lust after the Youtube view counts and press generated from these endeavours.

Mark Webber celebrates about the impending Children's Pageants coming to Australia. Original Qantas banner here https://adsfac.info/ads/QAN355/198799.0.0.swf