The Ego-Friendly marketing

There is a truth nobody told you before: if you look at the names of modern product and services (Youtube, Myspace, iPhone..) you will notice that all of them show words like “you”, “I”, “me”. It’s all about the person, the individual. Because todays world sees the customer as the main character. Everything revolves around consumers, not companies.

Ok, after the most predictable and dull introduction ever seen in blogs history, we are ready to explore a trend of the Social Media marketing that can really be considered individual-centric. And maybe (or should we say for sure?) it also takes advantage of the exhibitionism that typify our life on the web 2.0.

As some of you may imagine, we are taking inspiration from a really cool recent Intel interactive campaign, that takes us inside the rooms of a very peculiar art exhibition, completely dedicated to ourselves: The Museum of Me.

But before talking about the Museum of Me, we want to remember some of the campaigns that clearly influenced the Intel initiative – from both the technological and the creative point of view:

• we already mentioned in this blog the Discovery Channel promotion for the TV show The Colony, supported by Facebook Connect technology. This panic-provoking application is able to access our information, taking us to a post-nuclear scenario.

• The Wilderness Downtown is a project by the canadian rock band Arcade Fire, in collaboration with the Google Chrome team. Users are allowed to insert their birthplace, making it become part of an interactive content that mixes video, audio and pop-up windows, proving the potential of HTML5.

• The Swedish Hero is a campaign to invite people to pay the public television fee; from a conceptual stand point it can be considered similar to the Intel one. Users could upload a picture on a website, to suddenly become worldwide acclaimed stars. 20 millions hits in 3 months, a viral success on Facebook and Twitter. But there’a downside: only 1 out of 20 tweets referring to the campaign came from Sweden, the one and only target. The result was a big exposure for the agency DRAFTFC Sweden, but we’re not quite sure about the national results for the advertiser Radiotjäns public TV fee-collector. If you don’t remember it, here’s one of the videos (for some reason the hero is a pirate..):

And now it’s time to talk about the Museum of Me. It’s an application that takes pictures and data from our Facebook profile, puts them inside a well crafted content and shows us the result, making tears of commotion wet our cheeks. Really pretty. And there is no way we won’t post it on our Facebook profile.

Well, I actually did not cry, but still: it’s a really cool concept, interesting and smart, and really well done. And as we were saying before, tickling Social Media users’ ego is always a nice way to drag attention, without being cheesy or annoying.

The great success of photomontage generators like Write on It tells us one thing: all of us like to feel like a star, even just for a few seconds. Being on the front page of a magazine, on a billboard, or having an art exhibition entirely dedicated to us: they are all positive emotions. We are curious, we want to see “how it would be if I was famous”, we might be delighted and eventually feel a little satisfied, even if for just a moment. So why not share it with our Facebook friends?

The Museum of Me is definitely a good idea, a pretty intense yet cute experience, where we can be the audience of our own show. But after the nice video and the mellow soundtrack, there’s the closing scene: a big logo right in the middle of the screen. It sort of wakes us up, remembering that, after all, it’s still all about a company that wants to sell us a product. And in the meanwhile, this company got access to some interesting data about us. It’s marketing, baby.

Guido Ghedin