AIMIA Connect 2009

AIMIA Connect was marketed as “A one day Digital Media Industry Conference designed to educate and entertain you with a selection of case studies on recent AIMIA Award winning Australian digital media projects and campaigns. It will also bring you the latest forecasts and trends by some of the most prominent thought leaders in the industry” and I have to say this description was pretty apt.

The speakers were chosen from winners of the specific AIMIA sector award, i.e. Front Foot Media won the AIMIA Award 2009 Best Mobile Product and by virtue of this was chosen to speak at the event.
Most of the speakers were enthusiastic, captivating and entertaining, therefore making a whole day slip by as if it were a hour. For me “mobile” seemed to be the topic of the day, even invading presentations that have very little to do with the mobile industry. There was so much great content provided that the AIMIA Connect 2009 recap will be spread into three posts.

Paul McCarthy – What does it mean to win a AIMIA Award?

Paul is the Chair of Judging of the 15th Annual AIMIA Awards. After a short introduction to the awards he gave a quick recap regarding the AIMIA awards and what can result if you win one of these prestigious prizes, this means:
• More business
• More clients
• Opening doors to developing alliances
• Corporate recognition
Paul then went on to introduce the first speaker, Jennifer Hiley.

United Nations Voices Project

Jennifer Hiley – Mobile Integration Specialist

The Hyperfactory

Jennifer starts out with a slide showing how much noise is the marketing environment in today. How do companies get through all the spam out there? Irrelevant of channel or platform, all the public wants is to be given a voice and heard.
The United Nations Voices campaign was started to give people who are not normally heard a voice. Using mobot (an image recognition technology) you (member of the target audience) would photograph the person’s mouth with your mobile phone (from an outdoor display unit) and MMS the picture to a specified number.
The person whose picture you captured would call you back shortly after you sent the picture and tell you their unique story. Each call lasts about two minutes and the revenue generated is donated to the relevant UN charity. Extracts of these conversations were played and were very emotive and seemed to carry the theme of the campaign excellently.
Over three months an awareness increase of 82% was recorded and 76% of participants who listened to the end of the conversation made additional donations. Another interesting fact was that the average engagement time was four minutes, which is incredibly long for this type of campaign.
Jennifer also came out with some impressive statistics, especially how mobile traffic has tripled in the past year, in May, with 32% of people reaching the mobile world was done through Wi-Fi networks.
One underlying messages to come out of this presentation is ” mobile is the conduit to all digital platforms, this is the one device we all lean on, we should utilise it.” This was a really effective emotive presentation and was a great way to open the workshop.

Retail Spaces: Who’s hurting Who?

Andrew Apostola, Creative director

Portable Content

Why would anyone shop online when the real world shopping environment is so much more tangible and socially enjoyable? Only 3.57% of people who visit online retailers purchase products online. Conventional retail is an expensive proposition, rent, wages, overheads etc. Mortar and bricks retail is now just window dressing and used to enhance the brand for online products.
Apple redefined the retail environment from taking products that used to be behind closed glass to being out in the open available for anyone to use and interact with.
Online retail will eat into physical consumer space, you have to look to start migrating your offerings online now!

“Jump the Web” Project

Joshua Hunt, Digital Producer

Soap Creative

This was a web campaign was for the Jumper motion picture. The objective for the campaign was to drive hype for the movie launch online and create a rich digital experience without a website destination. The idea was to utilise online portals to recreate a scenario from the movie. Put simply characters would be able to fight and teleport in and out of online content.
The timings were very tight so everything had to be right first time. There were three key stages in the production. The script, the shoot and the animation. Before the main shoot a test shoot was done to trial the script and the footage required to execute the animation.
This campaign had great results with the jumper animation seeing 365,000 visits with an average interaction time spent of four minutes. The after affects of the campaign included a significant shift of most of Soap’s clients towards high impact, entertaining rich media creative.
Part two of the AIMIA Connect 2009 recap will follow during the week.

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