Love it or hate it?

Marmite has had a lot of trade press coverage recently, launching their new cereal bars with their most outrageous campaign yet. As part of the campaign they have been the first advertiser to use the new Facebook sampling ads to encourage users to try the new cereal bar and to become fans of the page. This is a truly integrated activity with multiple strands that all pull together to feel like a cohesive rather than disparate campaign.

This is running concurrently with the introduction of Marmite XO, their new extra strong product, which has been named by its Facebook fans and subsequently launched on the site. There has also been a lot of effort put into building the community including special Marmarati events, a first peek at the product and a gallery of peoples’ reactions.

Why this is important for Cadbury?

It’s a great example of an what an FMCG brand can achieve by thoroughly embracing and integrating digital into a broader campaign. Their thinking seems to be closely aligned with Cadbury – pushing for media firsts, thinking carefully how to use social networks and online media, looking after existing fans and creating brand ambassadors. Marmite is in a unique position as a product rarely elicits such polarized responses. They have embraced this to create a brand that everyone you can like, even if you hate the product itself –no mean feat.

Facebook to launch Mobile location features

Facebook have been very slow on utilising their 400 Million+ mobile following by implementing an ad funded model, choosing instead to let the surge to mobile organically improve Facebook updates with spontaneous real-time updates becoming the norm rather than a reflective end of the day update.

Next month this is widely expected to change with the introduction of location based services. Frighteningly this will mean users will then have the option to be visible to their friends wherever they currently are as well as being able to keep up to date with their status updates.

Why is this important for Cadbury?

Facebook already has an incredible amount of data on their users that advertisers have at their disposal but we’ve been waiting for that extra dimension that embraces the evolution into a real-time interaction model. Dependant on when Facebook decide to monetise these changes, Cadbury will soon be able to drive point of sale activity via mobile handset, targeting a specific demographic only when they’re within close proximity of a retailer.

Google Fiber raises the bar for broadband suppliers

Last month in the US Google announced plans to give away high speed broadband up to 1 GB per second – One hundred times faster than we have today. During the trial Google will choose cities with a need for rejuvenation, promising between 50,000 & 500,000 people will have access to the Google Fiber service. Despite speculation that the service will be rolled out worldwide if successful, even as the trial currently stands user expectations from broadband services will no doubt increase with comparison. To stay afloat ISP services will have to compete and it won’t be too long before we in fact rue the decision to name today’s speeds as ‘Broadband’

As we’ve seen previously the increase in internet speed opens up the potential for a much richer and more engaging experience. Moving to a 100 times faster internet allows communities and organisations to use a ‘cloud computing’ infrastructure with more fluidity, changing the way we store and retrieve our personal data.

Why is this important for Cadbury?

A large increase in internet speeds would eliminate limitations over what could be provided to their audience within ad formats. The Fairtrade fortnight album could be downloaded straight from a standard format, the 2009 Creme egg game could be hosted within an expandable MPU and moving forward we could even host a high definition feature length film which could be expanded to full screen.

If Google Fibre internet speeds were freely accessible we could pack all the attributes of a content rich micro site into an ad format and distribute it to our audience and where they want to be, rather than pull them towards a destination to engage.