Category: Branded Content

February 11, 2018 Joseph Sassoon No comments exist

The seamless launch of the Falcon Heavy by Elon Musk’s SpaceX initiative last week is an impressive success: the rocket is incredibly big and powerful, and its technical advancement is such that NASA is now interested in purchasing some of its next flights.

That’s an extraordinary accomplishment. But what really struck me is the branding and advertising feat attached to it. As is widely known, the Falcon Heavy brought to space Elon’s Musk personal Tesla Roadster, and the car is possibly bound to remain fully exposed in orbit for… a billion years.

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May 3, 2017 Joseph Sassoon No comments exist

After almost a year of determined work my friend Alberto Maestri and I have finally published our last book, of which we are very proud. It’s called Customer Experience Design and it’s about how companies can design memorable brand experiences.

How relevant is this topic? Indeed, its importance can hardly be overestimated. Today all main companies are competing not just in improving their products and services but also in the so-called experience economy. And this new dimension of the economy is more and more digital – meaning that that the most competitive companies are those which succeed in providing highly satisfying online experiences, that are seamlessly connected to the physical ones.

The book contains a lot of references to many authors who in recent times have analysed these developments, providing excellent insights. It also includes a charming preface by Robert Rose and a stimulating final comment by Cosimo Accoto. Compared to the other authors dealing with the same issues, our main point of difference is the special role we assign to all kind of digitally shared experiences.

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July 19, 2016 Joseph Sassoon No comments exist

With the recently launched Pokemon Go app, the cute pocket monsters have taken the real world by storm. As everyone knows, in the first week from launch there were more than 7,5 million downloads just in the US. And the Pokemon Go mania has similarly grabbed the Millennial generation in many other countries across the planet, from New Zealand to Italy.

Such accomplishment is unprecedented. Numbers, however, do not describe it well enough. More telling clues are the crowds that flocked to Central Park last week, attracted by the sight of a rare Vaporeon; or the many young gamers you can easily spot everywhere, wandering the city, looking into their smartphone, and stopping excitedly for no apparent reason.

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The little creatures at the centre of this commotion – by the name of Pikachu, Squirtle, Charmander, Bulbasaur, among many others – may seem to make this case very specific. But in fact many brands can learn a lot from it. Here is what is making Pokemon Go an incredible success, opening new ways for other brands to engage and thrill their audiences.

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June 14, 2016 Joseph Sassoon No comments exist

Thanks to a smart piece by Jeff Rum in Social Media Today – 3 Steps to Effective Brand Storytelling Using Emotions – I discovered a Google video that I had missed. It’s called Reunion, and it was produced for the Indian market. It was published on YouTube on November 13, 2013 and immediately went viral, reaching 1.6 million views before debuting on television on November 15, 2013. As of today, the ad has earned more than 13 million views on YouTube.

As Jeff rightly says, Google could easily communicate with lists of facts and statistics (the vast number of people who use their search engine), but they don’t: “Instead, they run ads like this video, which cleverly tells an emotional story that hinges on the use of Google. Instead of being told about the product, we are seeing it in action”.

Not all Google ads are similarly effective, yet this one is enough to tell that Google, indeed, understands emotional storytelling. The story is simple. Baldev is an old Hindu man in Delhi, India, and Yusuf is an old Muslim man in Lahore, Pakistan. One day Baldev shows his granddaughter Suman a dated photo of two children: it portrays him and his best friend Yusuf when they lived in Lahore before the Partition of India in 1947.

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May 20, 2016 Joseph Sassoon No comments exist

On April 21st 2016 Samsung won the Tribeca Film Festival branded content award with an amazing 5-minute short, beating out other excellent brand productions.

The story is about a young man suffering from achromatopsia, a rare condition that makes people totally color blind. But Neil Harbisson did not surrender to it: he just convinced doctors to implant an antenna in the back of his head allowing him to hear colors. 

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