Apple store in Sydney

I saw this today in Sydney's George Street. I had a fleeting thought that it would be interesting if there was nothing actually behind the big blue poster awning covering the supposed new shop construction, and that one morning it suddenly wasn't there - a sort of pop-up pretend-to-construct-a-store.

It also struck me that such a vast piece of surface could have been put to some more interesting marketing use other than just being a great big coming soon poster.

People could have interacted with it in some way - perhaps a giant scratch card surface like the one in the post below about the Royal Festival Hall's 'Hidden Love Song' programme. Or a projection site of some kind, or a simple spilling on to the pavement or interacting with the buildings around it in some way.

Like the £106 million architectural wonder, the Eden Project cleverly did in Cornwall, UK, people might have been encouraged to come and watch the build progress. Eden Project sold tickets to come and see 'the big build' from a platform high above the disused China Clay pit as the vast biome structures took shape.

Perhaps it's a testament to Apple that something special is expected to be their business as usual. Once an expectation of innovation is set, there's no turning back to doing the normal kind of things other less innovative brands would do unnoticed.

Comments

[Rob B]

This is becoming more evident as certain brand activities are now cultural events in their own right e.g. Apple store opening in Exeter, the 'making of' blogs/youtube/flickr entries of works in progress, particularly Sony 'Event' ads and the new Honda live TVC

[Errol Flanagan]

Rob, nice to hear from you, how are you and hope all's good.
Tell me more about the Sony and Honda stuff - I'm intrigued. and why do you think; a) these brands are doing more of this kind of thing and, b) what are they measuring success in terms of?

If they're monitoring people talking on the internet or elsewhere, how are they doing it and how do they equate that to hard cash income and brand health? What do you think?

[Rob B]

Hi Errol,
All good here, still planning at BL but moving more towards the digital end of planning, we have a new 'Head of Digital Brand Experience' so I may be able to answer some of your questions!
Firstly, to answer question (a) A planner at Dare Digital told me was that in the digital age EVERYTHING a brand does is advertising from your active comms (TVCs) through to your internal operations (employment policies) because no matter what you do someone will be talking about it in the digital realm and you have to be a part of that conversation for better or for worse. I attended a conference on digital media recently, it was stated that we moved from interuption to engagement, now the next step in the comms evolution is moving from engagement to conversation - what brands like Honda, Cadbury, Coca Cola and Sony are doing is giving people a topic of conversation. Interestingly, all 4 of the above brands are with either W+K or Fallon
Honda have just created an ad for the Sky+ age, they created a teaser campaign that directed you to a series of video blogs of practice runs for a live TV ad, an event that went out last week at 8.10pm where a 'will they or won't they' skydiving stunt was performed to spell HONDA in one jump with the tag line 'Difficult is Woth Doing' the media choice was surprisingly lame (during an ad break in Celebrity Come Dine with Me) because they know the real buzz will be the next day over water coolers, emailed youtube links and blog embeds
Coca Cola have created a 'movie brand' in the 'The Happiness Factory' complete with teaser trailers, posters etc
Sony 'Balls' 'Paint' and 'Bunnies' created pre-release buzz by using publicly available spaces so that members of the public could post their own sneek previews of the 'Next Big Ad'
And Cadbury's drumming gorilla was shot in a way that would allow people to remix, mashup and spoof for redistributionInterestingly, there is now a growing trend towards brands by-passing agencies and going directly to production houses... scary stuff
As for tracking and ROI I'll leave that for the next post (I need to think/ask about that one)
Hope all is well and happy with you
Rob
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA3GL1mGfCQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnzFRV1LwIo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tdVrACpz4c&feature=related

[Coach Purses]

I couldn't agree with you more! And thanks for the blog award! I'm just thrilled to receive this award from you. I'll be sure to keep this blog an interesting place for my awesome readers, such as yourself, to keep coming back to!