Come and visit us at stand 123b and grab your free Walking Forward pen or if you’re lucky, Gavin may even stump up the price of a coffee. Simply utter the words ‘I have a £200,000 budget and I want Walking Forward Media to film a new learning project on swimwear in the Maldives, with business class air tickets during February 2013′, to claim.

Otherwise, come and see us and have a chat about how we can produce the most effective and engaging content for your next project.

See you there and if we don’t speak before hand – have a great Christmas and New Year.

One thing we did learn was not to talk to His Royal Highness about Wind Farming! Note the poor guy trying to hold it together after he receives a negative response to his project.

Some of Gavin and Rory’s footage will hopefully appear on ITV local news, ITN and Channel Five later today.

The latest viral internet trend is Dog Shaming, thought up by Tumblr Editor-in-Chief Chris Mohney. It’s a site dedicated to publicly discipline your dog for doing naughty and mischievous deeds that would only ordinarily stress out its owner, but instead has the said owner writing out a note and reaching for the camera and probably stifling a laugh or two whilst they are doing it! Well at least that’s what I did when I shamed my own dog two nights ago! Poor Leo! If you’d like to see pages and pages of pictures of dogs, including a cutie named Sinner who “peed on his owner’s leg at dog obedience class” and another dog who “once ate half a cake in two bites” then by all means go ahead, it’s well worth a look.

What this does seem to prove however is that viral trends in advertising and marketing are very much going to the dogs! Cute, cuddly canines are now springing up everywhere — from commercials to websites and more increasingly on viral adverts.  One of my favourite viral adverts of recent months is the ‘Slobber Dog’ advert for Friskies:

Even though this ad is to promote the Friskies cat food brand by showing the drawback of owning a dog, you still can’t help feeling a little bit of love for the furry friend we are meant to be disgusted by.  I guess Dog Shaming goes by this same premise.  In an era when consumers are looking for a special connection with companies and brands, most people find dogs endearing and just plain irresistible.

Here are four lessons to be learned from doggy style marketing (taken from entrepreneur.com – http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/217552):

Dogs Make You Look!

One of the chief jobs of every ad is to capture the attention of the target audience. No one can act on your ad if they don’t see it. Consumers are exposed to thousands of ads every day and are multitasking now more than ever before. This tremendous barrage of marketing messages — from mobile ads on our cell phones to stickers on poles at the gas station — has made us understandably selective about what we choose to notice. So when a commercial comes on and the first image is of a beautiful chocolate Labrador retriever sitting on a couch, people who have positive mental associations with dogs stop a moment to take a look. And when that happens, the advertiser has successfully scaled an incredibly challenging hurdle. Do your ads grab your customers’ attention?

Dogs Engage Our Emotions

Getting consumers to notice your ad is the first task, and the next is to engage them in a way that will be memorable. Memory and emotion are inextricably bound together. Think about it: When you recall a fun experience with a childhood pet, how does it make you feel? The emotions seem to come rushing back, and it’s hard to separate the memory from how the experience felt. For many people, simply seeing images of friendly dogs evokes warm feelings and in turn makes the advertisement more memorable. And ad recall is crucial to a high response rate since an ad has to be both seen and remembered to produce the desired result. What’s the best way to engage your customers’ emotions?

We Trust Man’s Best Friend

The recession has changed the way we shop, as consumers now scrutinize product and company information more thoroughly than ever. With precious dollars to spend, we want to spend them right. Companies must build an overall image of trustworthiness, and that’s why advertisers, some major websites, and even software programs use images of dogs. Progressive Insurance, for example, is running an amusing TV spot in which a dog presses a button to reveal competitive price quotes. Clearly, Progressive hopes customers will trust the company to offer insurance at a fair rate. What’s another way to engender a greater feeling of trust among your customers?

Dog Lovers Feel a Kinship

For an ad to be effective, it has to ring true. The target audience must identify in some way with it, either because they’re literally pictured or there’s a story to which they can relate. According to a survey from the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association, there are about 77.5 million dogs owned in the United States, and nearly 40 percent of all households have at least one dog. For many of us, our dogs are vitally important members of the family. So when an ad features a dog, pet owners relate to the situation, person or family being depicted. We feel a kinship and begin to establish a connection with the company or brand being advertised. What’s the best way to convey connection and community among your customers?

In all, advertisers are putting pups front and center because they grab attention in a memorable way. Dogs in ads engage the audience and subtly convey that this is an advertiser we can trust. And as consumers, we see ourselves reflected in the story being told by the advertiser, which motivates us to choose the advertised company or product over others we feel less warmly about. Now that’s puppy power.

Did you happen to know that currently the second largest search engine is YouTube?  In fact anyone even mildly doubting the benefits of video marketing should read the latest YouTube statistics (http://www.youtube.com/t/press_statistics/):

Traffic

• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• 70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
• YouTube is localized in 43 countries and across 60 languages
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on Earth

Mobile and Devices

• Traffic from mobile devices tripled in 2011
• More than 10% of global YouTube views come from mobile devices
• 3 hours of video is uploaded per minute to YouTube from mobile devices
• YouTube is available on 350 million devices

Social

• 500 years of YouTube video are watched every day on Facebook, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute
• 100 million people take a social action on YouTube (likes, shares, comments, etc) every week
• More than 50% of videos on YouTube have been rated or include comments from the community
• Clicks on the ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ button on YouTube have doubled since the start of 2011. For every ‘dislike,’ we get 10 ‘likes’- people like to tell other people about the stuff they love.

Indeed one of the most successful internet marketing video campaigns ever, started out on Youtube.  American small town blender company Blendtec’s campaign “Will it Blend?” cost under $100 to execute back in 2006 but subsequently gave the company a huge return-on-investment in terms of its worldwide brand recognition and sales. 186 videos later, Blendtec’s retail sales are up a reported 700 percent, its YouTube site has 200,000+ subscribers, and it has been featured on major mainstream media outlets like The Today Show, The Tonight Show, The History Channel, The Wall Street Journal and others. Now millions of people across the internet are enjoying the blending of items ranging from a household broom to even the iPad 2, making the Blendtec blender one of the most sought after blenders.

Speaking of iPhones, “Webverts” or Viral Campaigns aren’t the only way to cash in on video marketing either. Love them or hate them, another example of a large company who understands the value of video marketing is Apple.  Apple provides detailed video tutorials for all of their products available all over the internet simply because they know if people know how to use their products then they will do just that – use their products!

We at Walking Forward Media think that positive evidence for using creative video to communicate with your audiences is stacking up fast. If you haven’t taken the dive into video marketing yet you may be losing a large portion of your customers and business to the competition.

Since many of us, businessy type, adults grew up with The Simpsons, South Park and Family Guy, it’s no wonder we enjoy seeing this type of 2D animation in our work lives!

Smapping, our most recent animated video project was created with the Powerpuff Girls and South Park in mind, and designed to advertise a social mapping application that integrates into Facebook allowing you to plot out your life on a map and include photos and comments. You can backdate your Smap pins to plot out childhood photos, create events to advertise a party or let your friends watch you on that once in a lifetime around the world trip.

The applications uses may far outreach it’s obvious social uses. We hope it will be taken up by businesses to advertise their events and news, it could be an invaluable tool for estate agents to plot their For Sale properties…who knows!

Check it out for yourself at www.smapping.com

We met some wonderful people (along with a few oddities) and have strong hopes for some solid work ties in the near future.

Hello to all of those we met and chatted to!

…And to Sarah Milne from Brit Bound, thank you for giving us a glimmer into your world so we know what will be in store if we tag along on a Monopoly board night!

Having said that, our home for the weekend was a hotbed of creative work. Our team, along with Ian Sanders of Xperient Training and two VERY professional actors got along famously and it was a real privelige to work with such talented and nice people.

Thanks everyone!

We also had a great time with the boys from Pro Motion Media; we should be rivals but instead we went boozing and had dinner with them!