Monica Yoo

technology. science. marketing.

Meet the Princess Machine

This just might be my favorite promotional video…ever.

Last week, a company called Goldie Blox launched a video on Youtube which has hit a sensational 8.1 million hits thus far. It features the song “Girls” by the Beastie Boys, but with a female empowerment twist.  The video takes you on a journey of the ingenious princess machine made of pink and other pastel colored pieces. It’s quite the contraption.

This video is fun, cute, and very effective. It’s a win all the way around.

Here are the lyrics:

Girls.
You think you know what we want, girls.
Pink and pretty it’s girls.
Just like the 50’s it’s girls.You like to buy us pink toys
and everything else is for boys
and you can always get us dolls
and we’ll grow up like them… false.It’s time to change.
We deserve to see a range.
‘Cause all our toys look just the same
and we would like to use our brains.
We are all more than princess maids.

Girls to build the spaceship,
Girls to code the new app,
Girls to grow up knowing
they can engineer that.Girls.
That’s all we really need is Girls.
To bring us up to speed it’s Girls.
Our opportunity is Girls.
Don’t underestimate Girls.


Update:
On November 26, 2013, Goldie Blox pulled the video off Youtube with the Beastie Boys song due to a copyright infringement legal dispute. They’ve replaced the video with a new version featuring a generic song and no song lyrics. It’s just not the same.

Too Much Noise

I am an information junkie that reads just about anything I get my hands on – books, articles, blogs, advertisements, magazines, billboards, tweets and my most recent addition, food and ingredient labels. This may sound like a lot to absorb, but all of these things combined don’t even come close to how overwhelmed I feel when I wake up each morning and check my email inbox. I scroll through pages and pages of attention-grabbing subject lines like:

  • “Don’t miss this exclusive sale!”
  • “You’re going to LOVE this!”
  • “We miss you <3”
  • “Limited time only…”
  • “Ring in the new year with X, Y and Z!”

When I see the flood of these unread emails, a brief panic goes through me and I immediately skim the subject lines and do a single group delete. Done. Immediate relief. If I’m looking for something in particular, I may peek at a couple of emails, but those usually get zapped too.

I know what you’re thinking, “You could just unsubscribe from those emails.” You’re right, I could. However, I’m not going to just in case there comes a time I will want those emails. 99% of the time I’ll probably delete them all, but for that measly 1% I’m going to endure the daily pain.

It’s stressful being a consumer.

Then I got to thinking, marketers need to know their audience better.

Seth Godin writes,

You can no longer market to the anonymous masses. They’re not anonymous and they’re not masses. You can only market to people who are willing participants.

So true. No one, especially nowadays, appreciates feeling like they’re being mass marketed to, and I get it – the idea of businesses knowing your buying patterns and interests is creepy. However,  whether we want to admit it or not, there is some level of expectation that businesses should have an inkling of what we want. It’s almost offensive to receive “recommendations” or “suggestions” from websites and businesses when they are way off and totally wrong. Right?

Take Netflix recommendations for example. When I first signed up as a member, over 6 years ago, I’d flip through a ton of random hodge podge selection of movies. Fast forward to today, and I love what gets recommended to me. Perhaps too much.

Data. Data. Data. It’s out there. And as marketers, we just need to be better about slicing, dicing and making sense of it all.

 

Rooftop QR Codes

Ever heard of Blue Marble? If not, it’s a marketing service offered by an Austin, Texas based firm, Phillips & Company, that puts QR codes on rooftops.

Blue Marble™ is a patent-pending marketing service offered by Phillips & Company that enables any business to transform its rooftop into a space-accessible billboard by integrating a dynamic QR code into the physical site, taking an aerial or satellite image from space and making it accessible in leading navigation applications like Google Earth® and Google Maps®.

It’s an interesting idea, although I’m not sure if I see it being the most effective form of advertising. In theory, yes, it could reach a large audience, but realistically the people who end up scanning the code are probably those stumbling upon it on accident. It takes about a year for the QR code to show up on Google, so it’s possible that could change in the future.

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