Kirien Sangha

With the Olympics not far away, everyone is talking sports.

For those of us watch rather than play sports, usually with a cider in hand, we still appreciate the hard work athletes put in. 

All those hours of training are incredible and it's not something I would ever be able to do. These are however the favourite sporting moments of my lifetime. 

We all remember when Steve Jobs passed away in October, he unfortunately lost his battle to cancer. Upon his death, Jobs' Stanford speech went viral. He speaks about his early life, how he dropped out of college, how he followed his intuition, got fired and re-hired, and how you have to trust in something. The most powerful part of his speech was Jobs telling the students, "For the past 33 years I've looked in the mirror and asked myself, if today were the last day of my life, would I want to do, what I am about to do today? And if the answer has been no for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."   After watching Jobs' speech I began routing around a little and found many other wonderful speeches that other significant people have given at graduation ceremonies. Another powerful speech is Oprah Winfrey's speech at Howard university. We all know the great success story of Oprah, but here she shares two stories 1) how to get successful 2) how you have responsibility to give back when you do become successful. On talking about becoming successful, she says, "Don't worry about it, relax." She said all you need to know who is you are and the rest will follow.  
The first part of her speech can be viewed here - for some reason I couldn't embed it. Both Oprah's and Jobs' speeches share one theme, they are both relentless in getting across that you need to uncover what you are passionate about and get about the business of doing it. Which led me to think, how many of us actually uncover this in our lifetime?

As mentioned in a few articles back, Marketing Week ran a piece talking about brands that showed great innovation. I want to discuss how one of these brands utilised the media landscape to promote their message. 

If you are going to have an app for your brand, at least produce something that is useful. Pizza Express have done such a thing. Their iPhone app allows customers to pay instantly and securely for their meals through paypal, as well as find and book tables, read menus and receive/use special offer codes. 

“Innovation is about being the first and remaining the best,” read an article title in Marketing Week. In the article they listed 9 brands who they believed showed true innovation – Fosters, Bulmers, Capital FM, Pizza Express to name a few. I’ve selected Heineken as the one I want to talk about. 

When Bing went to Draoga5 to help drive trial of their Search and Maps, and increase their relevance with a younger audience, they used the launch of Jay-Z’s autobiography, Decoded, to help connect their client to a younger demographic.

They started putting every page of Jay-Z’s autobiography out into the world, it was printed on the bottom of swimming pools, it appeared on huge billboards, was printed on dinner plates in restaurants, even Gucci made custom jackets which had a page printed on the inside.

Where it got creative though, was when Bing tied it all together by creating an integrated online game that directed fans to each of the pages on the streets. They released the locations to the pages every day through radio, twitter and facebook. Every day people got together to solve the latest clues guiding them to street locations, documenting the pages they found.

Read more »