Much like dating, forming perfect brand partnerships can be a bit of pot luck. Everything looks good on paper - audiences are matched, promises are made, contracts, products and services are exchanged and off you go. At least in theory…

In actual fact it is the X Factor style spark that really makes for the brand love-in and gets you bang for your proverbial buck. Never has this been truer than for our client Flip Video. All about capturing different perspectives and behind the scenes footage of life, Flip needed to find a partner that had access to creative, urban communities and shared its passion for sharing the moment in a memorable way. We didn’t just want ‘brand ambassadors’; we wanted to build a Flip movement.

Enter Secret Wars, the world’s premier live art battle. Working in a similar way to Fight Club, Secret Wars battles take place across the world and are organised and promoted through word of mouth. Hosted in the darkest corners of cities across the world, from a basement bar in London’s East End through to a deserted meat market in Malmo, these events are about street artists creating live art in a competitive and yet cool environment.

We’ve armed the artists with Flip cameras so they can film behind the scenes footage, artist profiles and audience reactions as they make their way from city to city (not all of the footage is suitable for public consumption!). Not only do we have the usual branding at the events but, more importantly, we can use the content across all media, from Facebook and Twitter through to Metro and MTV.

Watch this space for how the partnership develops in the coming months but in the meantime check out Secret Wars on Facebook and watch the videos on the Flip UK fan page.

Engaging with influential bloggers is an important part of the work we do and last night Paula and I attended an Arcadia fashion blogger event for client Flip Video.

The private room at The Ivy had been adorned with Macs flashing up the websites and blogs of Arcadia’s brands such asTopshop, Burtons and Dorothy Perkins.

We gave a new Flip MinoHD to each blogger and encouraged them to film content, demonstrating how to upload video content to their blogs. An edited video of a recent Miss Selfridge fashion shoot was playing on loop to show the kind content that can be captured.

We got speaking to the infamously anonymous Disney Roller Girl, who was very keen to start vlogging. Men’s style blogger Style Salvage and over-40’s fashion blogger Thats Not My Age were equally as excited when they found out a Flip was awaiting them at the dinner table. There was also “traditional” media in attendance, such as Angela Buttolph, Editor of Grazia Daily (pictured here with Grazia Fashion Editor-at-Large Melanie Rickey), who spent the latter half of the dinner quizzing each blogger on their personal style with her new Flip cam.

Over the past couple of months the Flip team have been working with ITN and Save the Children, on a project looking to track progress made in rebuilding Haiti, all through the eyes of Haitian children. The aim was to show how learning new skills (like filming) can help the kids deal with life moving forward and give them a sense of achievement.

Working with award winning camera man Dave Harman, who recently won a Bafta for his filming of the earthquake, we provided 6 Ultra HDs for the project. He and the Save the Children team then took the Flips to Haiti, taught the kids how to use them and then captured the resulting footage.

It was agreed that Save the Children would then use this content on its website and ITN would produce and broadcast three special reports over the coming year.

As you may have seen, the first feature resulting from our ITN/Save The Children partnership was broadcast on last Tuesday’s News at Ten. This is the first of three news features; the second will be broadcast in the coming weeks and will show what the children have filmed about their life in Haiti.

In addition to these broadcast features, ITN (who produce the news programme) have also set up a microsite that captures all the behind the scenes details of the project, with comment from the children themselves and Save the Children: www.itv.com/news/filmingtheirfuture.

Donations to Save the Children can be made at http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/en/donate.htm

In the product category we picked up the award for best European Webcast for our campaign for Unilever entitled “What If People’s Hearts Stayed Young?” which promoted globally a joint initiative with the WHF as well as encouraging uptake of Unilever Becel’s Heart Age online tool. The campaign was also shortlisted in the Best Multi Country Programme Category.

We also picked up the awards for Best European Product Media Relations for “Do you Flip?” a campaign for Flip Video (part of Cisco) to drive awareness and sales amongst youth audiences and mums. The campaign also picked up a certificate of Excellence for Best use of Broadcast for the same campaign.

Both awards have taken pride of place in our reception and are having hourly polishes…

Setting out late last week to oversee the pre-recording of the competition (currently airing this week and already having a very positive impact!), I was thinking that perhaps my dreams of becoming a world famous actor and telling every Tom, Dick and Harry that “I now work in television” might finally come true.

What a day, from the director’s cries of ‘ACTION!’, presenter Jeff Brazier frantically rehearsing his lines and my role ensuring that the right products were in the right hands at the right time, although not my hands as I was very firmly ‘behind camera’.

So, as far as my acting career goes, suffice to say it doesn’t! But hey, remembering other peoples’ lines was never my forté anyway. I’ll definitely leave it to the professionals. Perhaps I’ll take up singing instead. Now, where’s that X-Factor contact?

]]> http://www.kaizo.net/2009/11/26/my-%e2%80%98this-morning%e2%80%99-big-break/feed/ 0 http://www.kaizo.net/2009/11/20/brands_should_broadcast_themselves/ http://www.kaizo.net/2009/11/20/brands_should_broadcast_themselves/#comments Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:58:39 +0000 Rhodri Harries http://www.kaizo.net/?p=1146

On Wednesday Kaizo ran a successful messaging session with 300 top executives from across Europe for a large multinational corporate. The team pulled off the challenging task of capturing all 300 on video as a way of helping them to develop key messages. The activity also demonstrated that new technologies (in this case, Flip Videos) make it easy for everyone to use video to present themselves and the brands/ companies they represent not just in campaigns but every day. And it’s crucial as this is what customers will expect very soon.

Take the example of my 2 year old. She has a weekly video call on Skype with my parents, both in their late seventies, sunning themselves in Cape Town, which far from being confusing for her (or them for that matter), is accepted as being the norm. And when her baby brother was born recently, it was a video of the two of them playing that the Grandparents were asking for.

Accessible technology has enabled brands to turn into everyday broadcasters, and the audience is ready, waiting, willing and able.

And so another PR Week Awards ceremony has come to pass, with the great and the good of the UK’s PR industry nursing either happy hangovers or bitter disappointment from what was certainly an ‘eventful’ evening.

The Met Police’s enforced removal of the climate change protestors who chained themselves to Virgin Atlantic’s table, added a certain je ne sais quoi; as did the dedication certain PRs showed to personally demonstrating the dangers of binge drinking and losing their newly-won awards!

But enough of all that, the real news is that we won (yes, we won!) ‘Best Consumer Campaign’ for our Flip Video campaign ‘Now Playing You – the Launch of the Mino’. Beating a very strong shortlist of brands including Cadburys, Sainsburys and Aldi, the judges commented that “The Flip Mino has torn a gaping hole in the market, which is testament to Kaizo’s sensational work’. Nice….

What more can we say, apart from bring on the PRCA Awards on the 3rd November, where we’re up for another two awards ‘Best Technology’ and ‘Best Media Relations’!

Judges commented: “The Flip Mino has torn a gaping hole in the market, which is testament to Kaizo’s sensational work”. Hopefully, the PRCA judges will feel the same when judging the ‘Best Technology’ and ‘Best Media Relations’ categories, for which we’re shortlisted, on the 3rd of November.

Image source: www.prweek.com

It’s always an informal affair, very much focusing on what we’re there for; getting the product in the hands of the media. With three Kaizo clients in attendence this year, the room was buzzing with banter on everything from how Flip Video got onto X Factor through to the latest on Buffalo and Gemalto.

But don’t take our word for it. We went armed with our trusty Flip and asked some other (some might argue more important) people what they thought. We thought we’d share…because we’re like that!