If only everything in life was as reliable as...

Got my new car finally. 15 week wait from our friends at Volkswagen whilst it was built and shipped over from Mexico. Almost forgot what colour I'd ordered.

Now when I first started work in this industry, there was a lot of talk about CRM and Peppers & Rogers were all the rage with their chat about putting customer needs first, etc. etc.

So why is it now, in our hyper-modern digital world that I entered into a black-hole of communications between putting the order in and finally receiving the thing?

• Confirmation of order received by the factory? Nope.
• Running specification of its build - when, how and by whom? Nope.
• Realtime 'dotted line across the ocean' as it crosses the Atlantic? Nope.

That would be have been great on my iGoogle or as a Vista widget.

No, just 15 weeks of silence. Poor show. (And that's without mentioning that they somehow lost my details on the database for the payment. Hmm - must talk to the people who run the database).

Not really a dig at Volkswagen particularly as no-one in automotive seems to have cracked the 'waiting game'. Or in any other delivery-based sector it seems. (Well, FedEx and UPS are not bad, I suppose).

When we dreamed about realtime CRM in the early 90s, it was a bit of pipe dream. At best it turned into welcome packs and quarterly newsletters & magazines, booming the direct mail and contract publishing industries for a while. But I don't understand why digital is not really being used to allow people to access the level of detailed information they want, when they want and how they want. It's not DM, but I do get welcome emails and quarterly email newsletters. Lazy.

I'm sure there are some great examples. Just none for things I'm buying at the moment....

Rant over!

Shameless Plug

Been having a lot of fun over the last few months with Harveys and itv / Coronation Street - with the big launch of the new sponsorship idents last week.

Check out the Corrie content on the website too that we've done - and play the Rovers Pub quiz that we've put together with the excellent Player Three.

It seems that every half decent TV programme has a sponsor these days, and I have to say that so many idents seem to be half baked ideas with little or no relevance to the programme they're sponsoring.

Corrie is one of the only programmes that consistently pulls a large mainstream audience, and Harveys could easily have been lazy, viewing the deal as 'cheap' airtime and settling for a cheap and nasty ad. But I think they've been brave by investing in CGI ads, online gaming, interactive and mobile internet to leverage the sponsorship with a long term strategy to help make Harveys stand out from the glut of me-too furniture retailers lurking near a out-of-town centre near you.

Harveys will have to ensure that the product and service are up to the right standards to ensure that people who try them for the first time are left satisfied. And that means in the store, waiting for delivery, the actual delivery and after-sales queries. Unfortunately, all the clever advertising in the world won't overcome negative reviews and word of mouth, which has been a problem for them in the past.

The right sponsorship deal has the power to change businesses - not just in terms of higher awareness, intrigue and google searches - but as a platform to consider and sort out every way in which the company and brand can and should add value to the customer experience.

Roll up, roll up - get your Web x.0 here

How many agency folk feel a bit like they're in the following enforced sales scenario at the moment?



Thanks to logic and emotion for that one - brilliant blog from a innovative thinker

Back to the future

Was in one of those random meetings today about 'what the next five years will hold for us, and how will digital take over the world'. And jokingly someone mentioned that we would soon see a resurgence of the 30sec spot...

And so, the conversation turned to half an hour of chatting about TV ads we currently love. And we had the usual suspects of Phil Collins / Gorilla (and whatever chocolate bar it is), bouncing balls, splashing paint and the soon to come plasticine bunnies for Sony.

And the delightful food-porn that is the Lurpack ad. (Which apparently saw an increase in sales over 20% a week after breaking - now that's an IPA award if ever I saw one!)

Ok, I know that the networks are dying and personalised and relevant 'TV ads' will soon be distributed through mobile, RFID tagging at point of sale and beamed into my head through the headphones on my next-gen ipods (maybe).

But there's nothing like some good old fashioned nostalgia. So I'm loving the new/old Aquafresh ads happily sitting in prime time. Quite refreshing in a world where most ads currently seem to include some whimsical floaty people with some whimsical floaty acoustic guitar music in the background (yeah, thanks Sony / Jose Gonzalez for starting that musical trend).

Let's bring back jingles, I say.


[And for some more predictions in Blogworld, check out this recent Holy Cow post - good stuff Mr. Hancock]