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I’ve worked in Soho for around 2 years now - and surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) I’ve never been into a porn shop.

Until today.

After finally finding out of how to make book barcodes (for aMap), and buying the software to create them, I then discovered that there are two types of barcode, and wasn’t quite sure which one to use.

Given that we’re surrounded by bookshops on the Charing Cross Road I thought it would be a good idea to pop along to one of them and ask them which was the correct barcode to use for books.

Having been initially failed by the sales desk lady at Foyles, I headed across the road to the Soho Bookshop (one of the last independent bookshops in Soho - which sells mainstream books on one level, and then has a porn section in the basement). The sales lady in the Soho Bookshop didn’t know anything about barcodes, but said her manager might - who worked in the basement (obviously).  So I boldly descended into the basement, passed walls of porn mags and a carefully constructed butt-plug display, to find the manager standing at the sales desk.  Carefully putting my example barcodes on the till desk - adorned by a montage of giant cocks and the like - I explained my barcode dilemma to discover he knew nothing about barcodes (again)- but that if I wanted a porno, they had a great 2-4-1 offer . . .

So emerging from the basement barcode in hand (and porn free), I headed over to Borders to see if they knew their barcodes.  And thankfully they did.  Without a cock or butt-plug in sight, the nice Borders lady advised me on which was the correct barcode for books - which was a relief.

I never thought I’d hear Chris Moyles talking about “consultation”  - but he did just that in his breakfast show last week.

As a brand of research activity consultation rates pretty low in the general public’s perception - with most people associating consultation exercises with village halls, weak coffee, stale biscuits, and even staler conversation.

So it’s nice to see the self-styled “Saviour of Radio” bigging up the BBC Trust’s latest consultation exercise - and putting some real energy into it.  Maybe this is because this isn’t a village hall-styled consultation - but instead an easy-to-use e-consultation without a stale biscuit in sight.

Perhaps as Chris Moyles has now established himself as the Saviour of Radio, he should be looking to move on to save other communication channels.  “Chris Moyles Saviour of consultation” has a nice ring to it (ish)?!

N.B. this post about online consultation was first written on Rubber Republic’s viral marketing blog @ Brand Republic

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The Kensington Report is a rubberductions production for Heavy.com

We’re very proud of our latest seeding project, ‘Creature Discomforts’ because:

1) We’re working with great people; MCM Net, Leonard Cheshire Disability and Aardman.

2) The games are ace!

3) It’s all part of a great cause.

4) We like animals.

Seeding kicked off this week, and we’re expecting a great response. Check out the first game in the four part series, ‘Flyzzz’ - featuring Callum The Chameleon…and the Rubber Republic blog for a more detailed blurb about this campaign.

It was almost ten years ago that “The Blair Witch Project” purportedly first harnessed the power of online viral marketing to elevate what was a low-budget indie film into a $248 blockbuster. Back in those Web 1.0 days the word-of-mouth propagators were Blair Witch fan sites, Web boards, mailing lists, newsgroups and trailer sites. In 2008, “Cloverfield” went deeper into the Web 2.0 social media marketing zeitgeist, alerting budgeted marketers to the even greater potential of online, viral and WOMM (word-of-mouth marketing) as they bore witness to the power of shared content.

Today it’s not negotiated without a multi-layered marketing strategy, or better yet - controversy or the ‘shock’ factor. Word-of-mouth initially catalysed about Cloverfield through a faux site with a domain name that utilized the inner-city fear manufacture quality of a simple date: 1-18-08.com. The site was aptly burgeoning with destructive photography of New York contrasted with an individual’s party images, all of which you could interactively ‘scramble’ or ‘rubble’ through with your cursor.

In isolation, these party photos and horror images would give the impression of a mere ambiguous entity for a film promo site, but when layered with a faux social networking profile for the owner (Myspace.com/robbyhawkins) and given the propensity to be a shared content phenomenon by virtue of a 5 minute ‘shocking’ YouTube viral that featured a headless Statue of Liberty – the results would prove just as devastating as the imagery. To date there are seven YouTube videos dedicated to the film surpassing a million views each.  Paramount relied on hidden viral clues, buried websites, impassioned bloggers and a little widgetry to eek out online word-of-mouth that teased and enticed audiences.

Warner Bros reportedly used an equally innovative strategy to generate public interest in its July release, the new Batman film, ‘The Dark Knight’. Six minutes of the film were ‘accidentally’ leaked in a screening in Imax cinemas in December 2007. The footage was quickly uploaded on to YouTube where it received thousands of hits.  The campaign also used faux-vandalized websites, a real-life scavenger hunt, and user-submitted photos. But be warned - as Utalkmarketing note - considerable hype or online gimmickry doesn’t entirely polish a mediocre product and cease the IMDB rating PR machine. Utalk jest: “just ask the producers of Snakes on a Plane.”

If a poor product could be strategically resuscitated online or given its best chance of success then Paramount has now made it a far bigger business. They have created the perfect template for ‘Film 2.0′ with one of their newest releases: ‘Tropic Thunder’. So far, helpfully, they also have sentiment on their side with an IMDB rating of 7.9/10.

Tropic Thunder is an action comedy starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. as a set of prima donna actors making a Vietnam War film - with a ton of Apocalypse Now references. They are left in the lurch when their displeased writer and director decide to forsake them in the middle of the jungle, forcing them to fight their way out.

TT paints an even more multi-stranded online narrative than the mockumentary films ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and ‘Cloverfield’. Multi-layering is at its heart – affecting its concept, plot, characters and marketing. Cunningly there’s a whole host of back-stories for each of the main characters, including actors’ micro-sites and fictitious film trailers. Each of these layers are then given depth online using a mix of video, interactive and micro-site content, creating a whole web of cris-crossing layers that the fan can get absorbed in and share – helping extend the film’s overall experience, as well as providing powerful viral marketing fuel.

One online promo blog even introduces the notion of a new type of mockumentary that has its own faux trailer, but remember this mockumentary is a ‘making of’ a film within a film.

Still with me? This is just one of the online self-referential layered tactics they employ. Here’s the list:

Layer tactic 1: Tropic Thunder’s faux trailers and character Websites

Faux trailers of a character’s past films as an actor have been created and distributed on their own personal websites.  Paramount spawned an official site for star Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller’s character) as well as sites for some of his films like ‘Simple Jack’ (an action star going for an Oscar by playing a handicapped farmhand) and ‘Scorcher VI’ (an asinine action flick). Tugg’s favourite charity even has its own site, which for comedic reasons has the homepage load up a photoshopped picture of a Panda on Tugg’s lap.

There is also a site for Kirk Lazurus, the actor played by Robert Downey Jr., as well as his previous faux film ‘Satan’s Alley’ (with Tobey Maguire cameoing as himself). The film trailer frames both stars as two gay medieval priests in a parody of ‘Brokeback Mountain’. There’s also a site for the fictional company that turned Lazarus into a coloured man in Tropic Thunder. Jeff Portnoy’s (Jack Black) film, ‘The Fatties: Fart 2’, spoofed Eddie Murphy’s depiction of multiple characters such as in ‘Nutty Professor II: The Klumps’. Each trailer by their nature is geared to be embeddable viral phenomena due to their intertextuality provoking conversation.

They even concocted a site that sports classic 90’s GIF files for Cody Keith Underwood, the stunt coordinator played by Danny R. McBride in the movie.

Layer tactic 2: The ‘Rain of Madness’ mockumentary and blog

A faux trailer for the mockumentary ‘Rain of Madness’ has been released as a parody of ‘Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse’. The faux documentary includes a movie poster and an official website preceding Tropic Thunder’s release.

As Tropic Thunder is a comedic remake of ‘Apocalypse Now’ it’s only apt that it has a subsequent documentary on the making of the movie within a movie. Rain of Madness is the film of German filmmaker ‘Jan Jurgen’ that exposes how calamitous the shooting of the movie was. The site for the movie is a WordPress-powered blog that features the oddments of the documentary along with commentary from Jurgen about how moronic the people he’s working with are.

Layer tactic 3: Star actors go viral

One of the greatest facets of the viral campaign is a star-studded attempt at the creation of a viral.  It originally aired during the MTV Movie Awards and can now of course be found on YouTube generating millions of views. The video showed the three lead actors on a laborious mission to create a viral video for the Internet that could promote the movie. As the trio bounce ideas about, Downey’s role in Iron Man and the Orange ads are played on intertextually. Cleverly it was also filmed with a mobile phone camera to give it an authentic look.

Layer tactic 4: ‘Booty Sweat’ energy drink

Paramount has bizarrely reversed the conventional product-placement route by distributing a product that’s featured in the movie called “Booty Sweat!” - an energy drink. The studio believes the movie’s target demographic of young men is synonymous with the audience that will consume energy drinks and it works well since there’s already a degree of peculiarity with the film being a film-within-a-film.

Booty Sweat is sold on Amazon and its spearhead is a character in the film called Alpa Chino. He has his own site and MySpace page complete with product availability, a background bio and more, but that’s not it - on Alpa Chino’s site you can even insert your own mug-shot into a Booty Sweat promotional video and share the results.

Layer tactic 5: Social networking, widgetry placement & engagement advertising

The Facebook and MySpace fan pages for the movie contain the movie’s poster, widget, linkages to the various character sites and some of their MySpace pages, photos, the trailer and other videos. There’s also a game you can play that has a number of features, from a run-and-shoot game to a build a soldier feature.

A widget does appear to be a necessity these days. The TT widget (available on the site, Myspace page etc) contains access to the Downloads, a Gallery, Video, information on The Film and the ability to Get Tickets.

Paramount also utilized a new ‘engagement’ ad unit on Facebook to promote the movie. The new banner ads, which included a quote from Rolling Stone critic Pete Travers, impelled visitors to click and launch a video clip contain which they could then comment on.

With all this layering and inbuilt “talkable content”, Tropic Thunder’s a really great example of how film-making and marketing can be integrated together to ultimately create a self-marketing “social” film.  Welcome film 2.0.

Go on, give it a good beating with our latest seeding campaign for SEGA (Samba De Amigo comes out on the Nintendo Wii in the next few weeks)

After watching a great Google Techtalk on using generative research for systems architecture (Digging Beyond User Preferences by Indi Young), I was inspired to spend some of my Sunday afternoon playing with Post-it notes while thinking over some work I’m doing on our ad network and viral seeding applications.

I’d like to point out that I’m not following her process exactly in the images below…

Here’s what you’ll need:

Three Colours of Post-It notes

A very large piece of paper on the wall, or a large whiteboard

Stage 1:

Come up with a full list of use cases for your application (you do know you’re user’s use cases don’t you?). Pick a colour of sticky note and write them all down.

Stage 2:

Organise all of the the use cases into similar conceptual ideas on upper half of the piece of paper, so if two people are looking for statistics on a particular item (but for different reasons) then those two use cases would be in the same column. Move the columns around so that they each type of user’s use cases are close together.

When you’re finished this stage, you should have a piece of paper that looks something like this:

Stage 3:

Now choose another colour of sticky note and write down the features that your application currently contains. Stick these below the “tower” of use cases which they specifically fix.

Finally, time to do some brain storming over new features if you are in the planning stage, and write theses on the final colour notes (or if you’re in the middle of implementing a feature then put this on the final colour sticky note). Add these in the same way as before.

The idea of this all is to try to draw your attention to which use cases are being fulfilled by the existing system, and which parts may been more thought in the future.

You can also group the columns by the type of user that has those use cases (not shown on the image above). For example, in the above image we actually have five different groupings of use cases, and I’m glad to say that the section that appears to not have features to support it (just left of centre), is the group with only one user, Me, so it’s probably the least important section of the system to get up and running - I have my own external tools to support them.

When the Euroball game was first conceived in the dark doldrums of the Team Rubber creative dungeons we decided to Google ‘Euroball’ and see what we got.

Apparently Euroball is “a European collaboration to build a gamma-ray spectrometer for nuclear spectroscopy“. Obviously, with all of Team Rubber’s prolific experience in the area of spectroscopy and viral marketing, we were confident that this was an incorrect definition. Euroball is quite clearly a magnificent penny football game pushing the boundaries of mouse dexterity.

Ok so we wanted to make a successful game that promoted JVC, and Euro 2008, and got our Euroballers instantly addicted, and promoted friendly rivalries between friends and countries, BUT none of these now compared to the task of defeating those pesky nuclear physicists.

So, we set about our main goal, and now, to mark the 100-day birthday of the game, I am pleased to announce our complete and total success! From now, when anyone searches for Euroball they will find the one and only online penny football game.

(Our other goals aren’t doing too badly either)

Well done Euroball team!

Through Rubber Republic’s Viral Manager tracking service, we track millions of viral campaign interactions and collect huge amounts of data on the users who interact with our campaigns. Our team use this info to develop great campaigns.

Slowly over time we’ll be open sourcing this information to help other marketers plan and commission the most effective campaigns.

The first bit of information we’ve opened up is on the usage of Flash versions amongst web users. If you’re commissioning a flash-based viral campaign, you need to know what flash version to specify, otherwise people may not be able to see your viral.

You can use our handy free stats to help you plan your viral campaign. » Check them out at ViralManager.com.

Believe it or not it’s the summer, and maybe the weather hasn’t been all that good to us but here at the Team Rubber office it’s a different story - the yellow walls are beaming with optimism and we’d thought we might give you a round up of what work we’ve been ploughing through and making us proud these days.

Over in the world of film, our very own Rubberductions director Matt Golding teamed up with three other creative geniuses and together they won the “Phone Film Fest” competition at the Port Eliot Literature Festival in July for their film “Port Eliot - The Locals View.” Watch the masterpiece of a movie on Youtube.

Delib have witnessed the takeoff of their project for Defra - the environmentally-friendly game known as MyAbodo. It enables you to make your own house known as an ‘Abodo,’ decide on a variety of living factors and see what kind of environmental impact you have in your very own home. You can also embed your Abodo onto your MySpace for all to see. Have a play at MyAbodo.com.

In viral sector Rubber Republic has recently celebrated the 18 millionth unique viewer mark on their tracker Viral Manager. They’ve also designed a new environmentally themed game for new child-orientated social network Webbliworld.com (site Made in Bristol by Aardman Animations and Enable Interactive). The game is Wij’s Polar Peril. Charge up your EcoZappa and have a play!.