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1. “Ahoy” was the original telephone greeting. Alexander Graham Bell suggested ‘ahoy’ (as used in ships), but was later superseded by Thomas Edison, who suggested ‘hello’ instead.

2. 72% of callers will hang up rather than leave a message on an answering machine

3. In a recent survey by Vodafone it was reported that UK business is losing £31.6bn (yes billion) each year because they are failing to respond to customers.

4. The first telephone answering service was probably in the USA and started taking calls for doctors in 1923.

5. 98% of people say poor telephone handling gives a bad impression of a company straight away (and 69% will never call back).

6. Britain’s first mobile phone call was made 1984 by the comedian Ernie Wise. It was made to Vodafone’s head office in Newbury which at the time was situated over a curry house. At the time mobile phones were the size of a briefcase and cost £2000.

7. Businesses still receive up to 80% of their incoming communications traffic via the telephone – NumberStore

8. 93% of business without telephone answering miss calls – callready

9.  Companies using virtual reception service save up to £12,000 per year – One Global

10. 71% of consumers ended a business relationship due to a poor customer service experience – kissmetrics

11. Only 5 – 10% calls get answered  – source: Honest Selling

12. 10-20% of all customer service calls result in a dissatisfied customer-fischerjordan

13. The average voice call lasts less than 2 minutes

14. 61% of customers take their business to a competitor after a poor customer service experience – kissmetrics

We shot on the Red camera to make use of the fast frame rate.

We spent three days with Preeti and the local village, following her routine and interviewing her about her life and how Coca-Cola have helped her. Find out more about Preeti and this scheme in the documentary below.

After having shot this film, we were asked to make a series of 8 more. Look-out for stories from Brazil, South Africa and the Philippines (due to be released late April 2012) as the women really do have the most inspirational stories.

5×20 Coca-Cola India

For those of you with hangovers from NewYear’s celebrations I advise that you don’t follow this link. http://yooouuutuuube.com

Yooouuutuuube.com is a crazy website that lets you tile your favourite YouTube videos in a low-fi 80s pop video kind of way, but it’s not recommended for those of you with weak new year’s stomachs.

For hardy souls with good sea legs, you can paste in the url of your favourite youtube video and tell your office mates that you have a weird virus and watch the hilarity ensue.

Check out how our Akshaya Patra commercial looks in Yooouuutuuube:
http://yooouuutuuube.com/v/?width=192&height=120&yt=qQCDgVqYE4w&flux=1&direction=rand

Happy New Year and Have fun!

Boko Creative

The front page of YouTube today is taken up with a large banner advertising a Mercedes Benz car, but rather than having a standard advertisement showing a shiny new car twisting and turning around country lanes with beautiful streaks of light shimmering across the paintwork, they have instead opted for a new, web 2.0 approach to marketing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bpCAsrez494

However, the old-school approach to marking is changing too. BMW are currently running an interesting campaign on YouTube with a James Bond inspired anti-hero stealing jewels and driving a cool car.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLSTfGZAJDE

It’s a good example of how advertisers are looking to engage an audience with a story but I think it would have been more interesting with an element of interactivity and more daring if the protagonist hadn’t returned the jewels.  The production value is fantastic as you’d expect from BMW and it’s an engaging story so I felt it worthy of a mention.

Many companies are adopting new marketing strategies to engage their audience, rather than sell to them.  This has been made possible by new interactive tools and the convergence of game and web video technology.  Mercedes have created one of the finest examples so far and I applaud them for taking such a bold move.  They’ve worked with Google to create a game in which the user has to escape from a dystopian world contained within Google maps.  I think that Google themselves have been very brave to allow their brand to be represented as having created a dystopian environment with their maps application so bug plaudits all round.

The production value of the piece is awesome to behold and the agency that created this piece AMV BBDO and Director Carl Erik Rinsch are to be commended.  It is set in stark contrast to the terrible spot created by Passion Raw for VW.  They attempted a semi ‘interactive’ video which fell flat on its face due to the terrible acting, hokey concept and poor filming.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mRy8qjRIpU&feature=aso

Just take a look at the comments on this piece to gauge the viewer reaction.

Renault sport however, came up with a much more progressive approach to interactivity with their Ange and Demon facebook game recently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBJMn4G7kEA

The functionality was poor and it felt a bit clumsy but it was still an interesting foray into game and video convergence.

The Mercedes ‘Escape from the Map’ spot however looks amazing, with awesome special effects, a beautiful and talented lead actress (@girlinmap, #escapethemap).  It must have cost a fortune but I’m really glad that there are companies with progressive heads of marketing, like David George, marketing director of Mercedes-Benz UK, who will ok an enormous budget spend on a new concept to see where it goes.  At the end of the video I entered my details and I hope that you will too as this will be a measure of success for Mercedes marketing chiefs.

To make a minor criticism, the functionality of the game is pretty poor with limited interactivity, but hey this is early days for this type of technology and ultimately I really enjoyed the distraction away from my daily routine.   It’s exciting to be writing about the beginnings of what will surely become a much more regular occurrence and I can’t wait to see where interactive video technology takes us in the coming years.

Marketing Mix Modelling

This commercial, which was shot for Akshaya Patra, an Indian based charity, won a major advertising competition which saw the Boko team fly off to India to watch the sunrise over the Taj Mahal as part of the prize.

We were also privileged enough to visit Akshaya Patra’s HQ in Vrandivan.  Akshaya Patra is an organisation which aims to feed 5 million children by 2020.  More footage of this will follow shortly in a micro-documentary about their work. We were inspired by the Akshaya Patra charity and developed the concept around some footage that we shot in Bangalore of a child on the streets begging for money. We were touched by the plight facing the starving children on the streets of India and decided to create a commercial for the UK Market to highlight how privileged UK children are compared to their Indian counterparts. Whilst our protagonist concerns herself with imaginary dolphins and interesting facts about space travel, she is set in stark contrast to a child across the road from her who is begging for food.

We used hand drawn animations to illustrate the childlike wonder of the little girl’s imagination so we see the dolphin and the spaceman from the point of view of her mind’s eye. The little begging girl also starts off as a mere figment of the girl’s imagination, however she soon becomes reality as we realise that she is not just imagining the fact that £10 can really turn a child’s life around, enabling them to stop worrying about how to feed themselves so they can concentrate on getting an education, thus breaking the cycle of poverty.

The directors aims were to inspire and move an audience into giving money rather than making them depressed.

We shot and gathered voice over in one day. Shots were gathered on several Canon DSLRs (5D MkII, 7D & 60D) which enabled us to use small cameras so as not to scare our child actress.  Edit and grading were completed using Avid and After Effects.

The Akshap Patra website states that their mission is:
Close to 13.5 million underprivileged children in India are out of school and into child labor in order to earn a single meal in a day. (Source:www.worldbank.org.in)

The surest way to break out of the cycle of poverty is through education. Education can significantly improve the quality of life of a family for generations to come. When the basic needs of a child, such as food are not met, education often becomes the last priority.

We are helping underprivileged children by providing them with a healthy, balanced meal that they would otherwise have to work for. The meal is an incentive for them to continue their education. It helps reduce the dropout rate to an enormous extent and increases classroom attendance.