Nike has recently launched the《踢出火》(“Ignite Your Game”) marketing campaign in Hong Kong just before the end of 2008/09 football season. Its incredible Arsenal vs Manchester United TV commercial frequently appears in major TV channels as well as on the homepage of YouTube geo-targeted for Hong Kong visitors. There are ads in print out-of-home media, but it is digital media making the integrated campaign more engaging to raise far more brand/products awareness for Nike.

Video Worth a Thousand Words

Comparing with standard banner ad, display ad with stunning video is much more effective in building brand awareness and delivering the campaign message to audience. This incredible Arsenal vs Manchester United match video shows how players, featured by Fabregas and C. Ronaldo, ignite their game during the remaining additional time. Video worth a thousand words in online marketing too.

Interactive Campaign Site

To convert the awareness into engagement and make it more viral, this Nike Football Ignite Your Game campaign mini-site is really stunning. There is a lot of trainings and challenges hi-res videos demonstrated by many football stars how they get ready to ignite their game, and so do the audience. Its interactive complement what standard and video ad cannot achieve.

Targeted Football Fans in GoalGoalGoal.com

Nike Football also partners with GoalGoalGoal.com, a local soccer forum, to create an individual section for “Ignite Your Game”. They publish latest soccer news and updates about their Nike 5 Football competition in Hong Kong.
Besides the interactive campaign site, GoalGoalGoal can effectively attract the targeted group of football fans and create more awareness of “Ignite Your Game” campaign among them. It makes the whole campaign a more integrated one.

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Pixazza launched a service similar to AdSense for images on March 24, 2009, it prompts relevant product details and listings onto the images. Google is also one of the biggest investors for Pixazza, and it once again helps bloggers and long tail participants to turn their photo into money after providing contextual advertising in text by AdSense.

Pixazza inserts tiny yellow-and-blue tags onto the images, and detail product listhings show up once users mouse-over these tags. You can see the available offerings by different retailers, and just a few clicks away from purchasing the products.

More than just AdSense for Images

• Crowdsourcing. Unlike AdSense which analyzes the content on a web pages, Pixazza relies on its crowdsourcing platform to enables groups of volunteer and paid experts to identify the products in the photos and tag them.
• Visually Trigger Buying Intention. AdSense provides content-related advertisements in text and hope to get users’ attention, while attrative photos can trigger immediate buying intention and Pixazza can increase the conversion rate by directly pointing users to the retailers.
• Rewarding Consumer-generated Media. New media enables people to create and publish their own graphics and photos easily, Pixazza can turn their creativity into cash if they drive sales to any related products. It creates a new win-win affiliate marketing network of photos besides the text and banner ads.

You can check Pixazza out in I’m not obsessed, and see if you’re interested in those designer brands worn by those celebrities. If you’re publishers, sign up to give Pixazza a try and share your reviews here. Perphaps I should bring Pixazza to this blog some day.

Extended Reading

• Pixazza “Product in the Picture” Service: AdSense for Images by Business Week
• Google Invests in Pixazza, An AdSense for Images by Mashable
• Pixazza開站策動三贏革命，把每張圖片自動變成廣告賺錢 by Mr. 6

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HSBC Hong Kong has just launched their new homepage on April 1, 2009. There are noticeable minor changes to the main content section on the right in the homepage, but it definitely lags far behind in Web 2.0.

HSBC new homepage is still old fashioned

Compared to the old homepage above, the new homepage does offer users with the followings:

• A more interactive layout
• Timely promotion updates and exclusive offers
• Introduce commentary video on HSBC website, which it is the very first time I’ve seen in local consumer bank.

HSBC has not started to leverage the power of social media to benefit itself in viral marketing, nor enabled users to share and discuss the information more easily through any Web 2.0 applications. As one of the biggest corporations and the largest online service provider in Hong Kong , I am quite disappointed to see HSBC has not taken any step to adopt Web 2.0 in their online strategy.

HaveMyBank.com – Social Media Marketing Tryout by Citibank

It reminds me about a recent social media marketing tryout by the most active online advertising giant, Citiank Hong Kong. It has worked with Publicis to launch a digital campaign, HaveMyBank.com, in December, 2008. They experiment the use of social media to promote their latest mobile banking service by publishing video clips of Vivek Mahbubani, Fu Wing (苦榮) and Siu Hak (小克), and hope people are convinced and will share them with their social networking platform.

Seems like either they have not carried on with idea or the campaign does not go well, there was no comment for 5 weeks on the website and just moderate video views on YouTube. But at least we have a start for both advertisers and agencies to try out a social media marketing for financial institutions. I look forward to seeing  more Web 2.0 usages by banks and hopefully some Banking 2.0 ideas in Hong Kong soon.

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