10 MILLION GLOBAL USERS IN 3 MONTHS!
Bossa Studios is owned by News International and with their first Facebook game ready for launch, they called on the expertise of the late night salon to bring it to life. The team was employed to oversee everything from strategy and idea creation through to deployment of the campaign helping Bossa manage their team of agencies, which included PR, experiential, and viral. The final campaign encompassed a simultaneous offline launch to 30,000 gamers and an online launch focussed at the Facebook platform. The launch included a video seen by over 124,000 viewers this was before a viral campaign kicked in. The launch was so successful that the volume of players ended up crashing the game. There is a target of 10 million global users by Christmas 2011 and they are currently looking to smash this forecast.
The Late Night Salon was employed by Emerge to initially work on its digital activity. Two years on, The Late Night Salon is now their lead agency with our range of work including, BRANDING, PACKAGING, EXPERIENTIAL, DIGITAL, SOCIAL, MEDIA BUYING, ADVERTISING and STRATEGIC PLANNING. The Emerge story is one of our proudest moments. since taking on The Late Night Salon we have helped the brand shine in the very competitive functional energy drink sector and outgrow the rest of the market. The success has been down to a combination of high profile activity such as the creation of a retail recruitment strategy, a full rebrand and using our strong relationship with media owners IPC to Sponsor the NME Radar tours combined with hard working day to day tactics like, continual social media coverage, product sampling and trade support.
Image: shows the new packaging design we created for the entire Emerge range as part of the rebrand.
To see other examples of work we have done for Emerge and other brands CLICK HERE
Speedo approached the Late Night Salon and asked us for an update on their packaging for their kids range. Nothing too crazy there you think, but when we actually looked at the market and what was going on, this was not just a packaging brief but a whole reinvention.
With Zoggs hotly on their heels and increasing their market share with an impressive range of products, it was up to us to really define what Speedo is to the global kids swimwear market.
We started off by digesting lots of research. From this we concluded that for kids of all ages to connect with the packaging kids need to be mirrored in the packaging, it also worked for the parents as they were able to identify very quickly and easily that this was a product for kids. So the Sea Squad was born, characters ranged from a baby to early teens, capturing our market perfectly, all dressed in sea creature suits clearly thinking they are all super heroes.
Next up was how do we communicate everything on 20 different sized pieces of packaging to a global audience in over 100 countries, a challenge that was met by our highly creative and skilled design team, there was an emphasis on non language specific tools, so icons for technical details, colour for stages and characters that had universal appeal really came into their own, with illustrations from the very talented Aaron Blecha also being used to show parents and children alike how to use the products.
So is it a success we hear you cry. Well a few months into the new packaging being on the shelves and we hear that sales are up by 25% with markets from around the world really getting behind the new branding, so much so that the packaging project that turned into a branding project has now turned into a retail POS project and a digital project.
After working with Emerge for about a year now we have not only seen amazing results.
MORE THAN 300% INCREASE IN BRAND SALES FROM £3MIL TO £10MIL IN JUST ONE YEAR. WAHOO.
But we are also getting to have loads of fun with the brand too. Recently we acted as cupid between Emerge and the notorious music brand NME. The joining of these two brands fits perfectly with the proposition that we created for the brand and allowed us to bring this element of the brand proposition to life with Spend Less. Gig More.
The newly named EMERGE NME Radar Tour kicked off in September 2010 and ran for 3 weeks around the country and gave followers of Emerge on Facebook the opportunity to see some of the hottest new acts around for free.
The Late Night Salon not only worked on the partnership deal but we also got to get our creative paws all over the project which included Social Media, Digital, Experiential, Advertising and we even got to play with the NME logo a bit.
With the tour being a massive success for the brand as well as all of the other activity that has been going on this year all heads are thinking about how we top an amazing 2010. But we can't wait to try!!
Marketing Week Live - Silenced by the late night salon augmented reality demonstration.
The Virgin Atlantic Sales and Marketing Director, Paul Dickinson was stunned into silence along with everyone else by a question asked by Ross Popejoy our Account Director here at the late night salon.
After giving a talk to Marketing Week Live about Smart Marketing in a recession. Ross asked a question about using emerging technology like augmented reality to help you stand out, there was a stunned silence from the whole room. Ross then had to give a summary of the technology and at the end of the session, several well respected brands asked to see the demo in which we use the Virgin Galactic Spaceship.
Augmented reality is relatively new in terms of using it for marketing, it has been around for a few years now but mainly being used in educational establishments. It is predicted that by the end of the year the technology will really have started to gain momentum in terms of using it to market products and brands. It offers the consumer a truly unique experience, allowing them to interact with the product or brand in a totally new way that creates a real wow effect.
If you speak to an agency who know what they are doing and have the license to use the software then the only thing that limits the quality of the experience is the creative idea behind it. With the technology moving into computer gaming at a rapid rate, expect to see some pretty amazing things from the marketing community all stimulating big PR exposure.
If you want to discuss anything about augmented reality, discuss projects or see some of our examples then get in touch.
A challenge indeed!! We have just recently finished a project where that was our key challenge. our client, who is a charity based in the UK was trying to do just that. The Charity focusses on working with family groups on very difficult subjects through a series of drama based workshops.
Once they have got through the pressure of starting a conversation around your peers, they then have a huge success in working out who needs help and who doesn't.
The key challenge for us was to be able to create a two way conversation with children online.
After seeing many other companies try and do this by getting children to register with secure passwords on their site, we took a look at the audiences behaviour pattern. It wasn't long before we identified that after leaving school for the day the children would then quite happily spend 2 hours speaking with their friends online via instant messenger.
So we decided that is exactly what we would do, so we created our own version of an instant messenger service with a live counsellor on the other end to talk through life's little and big problems. So far it has been a great success with the trial and other government bodies have expressed interest in how they can use the service.
If you have a similar problem, trying to work out how to engage with kids in the online world, then why not call on our expertise by clicking here.
We produced 6 websites, 6 blogs, a banner ad campaign, a flash game, a social networking strategy, packaging design, logo design, press ads and a whole lot more for under £35k.
How I hear you ask????
Well as the late night salon is a boutique design agency, we only charge what we need to, with no extra cost going to the running of a large machine. So the question you should be asking yourself is, are you paying over the odds with your current agency? Our point is that in todays current economy where frankly making the marketing budget work harder is key, some businesses need to be aware that they may be paying too much for the work they are receiving.
Now in no way do we suggest that you should let the quality of the creative slip in any way, in fact the latest trends are showing that the most creative work seems to be coming out of the smaller agencies, they also seem to have a better understanding of digital and emerging technology and how to truly run an integrated campaign.
If you would like to see how much more you could get from your marketing budget then click here and get in touch.
How do you increase your sales by 2300% by not doing a single thing?
Well this is a story about how one product did just that. This is a classic example of how not focussing on your key audience can achieve a greater return in sales. The product in question is a t-shirt called 3 wolves 1 moon. The t-shirt has been selling on Amazon for about 2 years at maybe one or two a day. But when Brian Govern a 32 year old law student posted a tongue in cheek review, it sparked a global frenzy that has seen the t-shirt become the number 1 selling piece of apparel on Amazon.
To put it into context they are now selling 100 of these t-shirts every hour and have just ordered another 400,000 prints to keep up with demand. On top of that the rise in demand has moved them to increase the price by an average of $5. It doesn't take a genius to work out that this product has now become a multi million $ revenue stream for the company, all by accident.
If you want to know how viral marketing could help not only increase your brands presence but also product sales why don't you get in touch and we can try to help you create your very own 3 wolves one moon viral campaign.
The Late Night Salon goes back to University with a filming brief from De Montfort. We were delighted when we got to hear that we were going back to University, unfortunately there was no partying this time around. Instead we would be getting to grips with what the students love about their time at De Montfort.
Keep your eyes open to see the series of short films which we will put on our site once we are finished in post production.
We have been working with our friends at Blacks for quite some time now but we are very excited about their new ranges coming out this season, which is just as well as we are going to have to write copy explaining how amazing they all are.
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