Visitors to San Francisco’s Montgomery Street Station have recently been treated to a unique viewing of one of Utah’s scenic icons, Delicate Arch. It’s all part of the Utah Office of Tourism‘s USD2.2m ‘Utah Life Elevated‘ advertising campaign. Utah Tourism’s advertising agency, Salt Lake City-based Struck, unveiled a one-of-a-kind outdoor advertising effort that focuses on bringing San Franciscans to Arches National Park. This great video shows how effective it was at engaging pedestrians, who stopped to take photos, scan QR codes and simple marvel at what they had just seen.

It wasn’t so long ago that Sunshine Village were the villains. After their epic social media fail in January 2011, there was a large amount of negativity attached to the brand. That certainly hasn’t all gone.  The Support Ski Patrol wronged by Sunshine Village Facebook page is still active and has almost 8000 fans. However, where once Sunshine Village simply took their Facebook page down to prevent their fans ‘engaging’, now they are celebrating them. Almost every day since March, they have been changing their Timeline Cover Photo to include the ‘Sunshiner of the Day’ – a great way to keep your fans engaged and feeling connected to the brand.

In our current social media led world, brands need to be continually monitoring what is being said about them online. Toy manufacturer, Mattel, recently did wonders for their own brand loyalty by responding to a parent-inspired Facebook page called ‘Beautiful and Bald Barbie!  Let’s see if we can get this made‘ for children who have lost their hair through illness or cancer. The page launched on 20 December 2011 and went viral.  Within days it had 2000 fans.  Now it has almost 160,000. In March 2012, Mattel announced that they would produce a bald version of the fashion doll.  It will not be sold in stores, but will be distributed to children’s hospitals next year. Mattel said that it made the “decision not to sell these dolls at retail stores and profit from them, but rather more directly and immediately get these into the hands of children who can most benefit from a play experience with these dolls.” By listening to what their customers have been saying about them, and – most importantly – responding, Mattel have generated a tremendous amount of brand loyalty.

At Skipedia we are always looking out for great practice on Facebook. STA Facebook app is one of the best This great competition app currently running on the STA Travel Facebook page is one of the best we’ve seen.   Developed in partnership with Tourism Australia, the campaign has been designed to increase youth travel to Australia. The app is nicely presented on their Facebook page, with a strong call to action on the app image, but it’s once you click through the fun starts, as you are welcomed by their ‘careers advisor’ Ned. Ned delivers great engagement It would be lovely if we could all invest in a design heavy campaign like this, but we’ve seen plenty of attempts that have cost enough, but failed completely. This works because it is incredibly ‘sticky’ (to use a phrase from the Noughties). The design is clear and the calls to action are obvious.  Ned is so engaging that you keep watching and ultimately you are almost compelled to ‘like’ the page. You never know, if we’re lucky, we might just win a working holiday to Oz…

Last week we highlighted some companies  breaking the official Facebook Cover Photo guidelines for Pages. With Facebook Timeline for Pages still only a few weeks old, it increasingly seems that their guidelines are unenforceable. We noticed two more dubious Cover Photos this week, from the ski areas of Sun Peaks and the Portes du Soleil: Does it actually matter? With an estimated 42 million Facebook pages already in place, of which 4 million are businesses (the others are public figures, movies, sports teams etc), how likely is it that a Cover Photo with a special offer or a call to action on it is likely to be spotted? Surely Facebook is too busy trying to get companies to do business on their website, rather than discourage them? Should you join in? It can only be advantageous to include your website address, or special offer on your Facebook Cover Photo.  Timeline already makes a Facebook brand page more of a destination, so brand owner will want to make most of any visit to that page. We believe it’s inevitable that the Cover Photo will become a key – active – marketing tool.  However, for now, our advice would be to take [...]

‘Please Feed The Bra Tree’ That’s an attention grabbing line, isn’t it?  The bra tree in question sat beside a chair lift in Mount Norquay this winter and was part of a campaign by ‘Axe’ deodorants (more well known as the Lynx brand in the UK). The campaign also included cheeky chairlift safety bars and posters by chair lifts. Peter Machalek, Adbloc’s senior partner, commented “AXE loved that their target audience would spend over 7m minutes captive on a chairlift with the AXE message unavoidably in their faces.”  

Less than a month ago that Timeline became the standard format for brand pages on Facebook. When the new style was announced, we pointed out the key Timeline features. Last month we looked at a early adopters who had already converted to Timeline. We also looked at the UK’s largest ski company, Crystal Holidays, when they launched on Timeline. It’s still very early days for Timeline. And some companies are already pushing the boundaries by breaking Facebook’s guidelines for what the Timeline Cover photo can and cannot include: Cover images may not contain: Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website” Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends” Neilson Holidays This Cover Photo from Neilson Holidays went live today (27 April 2012) and contravenes the price information guideline. Mark Warner Holidays This offer went live a week ago.  It probably breaks guidelines on three counts, by including a percent discount, a price figure and you could also argue that [...]

Using hashtags on Twitter for promotions is still a new area that we have written about before.  So this recent Tweet Treat campaign by Domino’s Pizza impressed us. On offer was a great reason for followers to take part: cheaper pizza! The promotion, which ran from 0900 to 1100 on 5th March 2012, reduced the price of a Pepperoni Passion Pizza by one pence every time someone tweeted the hashtag #letsdolunch. The price dropped from £15.99 to £7.74, and Domino’s kept it at that price for four hours that day. A similar campaign also took place in Ireland the same day with the hashtag #pizzalunch.  This led to a drop in the price to €13.24 from the original €20.

Another campaign Skipedia liked from last season was from Thyon in Switzerland’s Quatre Vallees. Possibly inspired by Whistler’s Embedded campaign, Thyon took a more light-hearted approach to employ their own esquimau to live for 14 days in his own igloo on the mountain. The candidate was chosen by interview from a shortlist of 40 candidates. Once on the mountain, Pierre – the successful Eskimo – uploaded videos to YouTube and Facebook, pulling in tens of thousands of impressions.   He was also visited by skiers and snowboarders in his igloo every day, to see what was going on, and to enjoy the free ice-creams he handed out. Crucially, the Eskimo story was picked up by the television station TSR, earning a huge exposure for a relatively low cost campaign:  

Nude skiing isn’t something you see very often, so we at Skipedia liked this innovative campaign by the (Swiss) Portes du Soleil. The campaign was run via YouTube and a dedicated site - http://ski-nu.ch/. Once the video finished, users were invited to ‘participate’, taking them to the Portes du Soleil Facebook page. On arrival on the Facebook page, visitors had the chance to win prizes such as a private torchlit descent for 9 friends (see video below), equipment for four people and other unique or high value prizes.