The Launch of the Aston Martin Vanquish

Three weeks ago Aston Martin unveiled its new flagship model – Vanquish. The digital launch strategy for this is something that has been planned for over six months, we’ve received great feedback and have seen some fantastic stats that back up the effectiveness of what we’ve done.

The press release issued by our Brand Communications department with my quotes can be seen below, I will expand this post at a later date with my views on the strategy itself and what we did and why we did it….

Read the release on the Aston Martin website

Aston Martin Vanquish Smashes Web Records

27 June 2012 – The new Aston Martin Vanquish is already breaking records, just a week after making its world debut at WWW.ASTONMARTIN.COM.

Unprecedented global interest in Aston Martin’s new hero means the luxury British brand is rewriting its internet record books.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday last week – June 20, 21 and 22 – saw the three highest traffic days ever recorded on Aston Martin’s global website: WWW.ASTONMARTIN.COM as eager car fans around the world flocked to find out more about the stunning new V12-engined super grand tourer.

The brand’s experienced digital communications team has been watching the records tumble as users flock to the new Vanquish web pages, with more than double the daily average number of visitors to the site over the past seven days.

Friday’s traffic was driven higher still by a large number of automotive news websites worldwide, including TopGear.com here in the UK, linking to the impressive new VANQUISH CONFIGURATOR. In fact the TopGear story on the Vanquish was its most popular of the month in terms of views.

As for global interest, the growth in selected markets against the same period seven days earlier is just as exceptional with, for instance, visits to the site from the United States soaring by 102%. Closer to home, visits from the UK were up 162% while Germans, too, have been racing to grab a glimpse of the new car – visits to the Aston Martin site from that country soared by 216%. In China, where Aston Martin is still a relative newcomer, interest has been shooting up with visits to the site jumping 81%.

THE VANQUISH LAUNCH FILM – is currently standing at almost 200,000 views since Wednesday 20 June making it, comfortably, the fastest-growing video the Gaydon-based luxury sports car maker has ever produced. On Thursday last week the film ‘charted’ among the top 50 YouTube videos worldwide.

Currently, the Vanquish launch film sits second behind a One-77 video as the most widely viewed of the 150 video shorts Aston Martin currently offers on its YouTube channelHTTP://YOUTUBE.COM/ASTONMARTIN however all the signs are that the Vanquish will quickly overtake even its £1.2m hypercar sibling in the Aston Martin range when it comes to views online.

The film also helped the brand accelerate past three million YouTube video views in total.

The social networking phenomenon Facebook has also played its part in the remarkable story of new Vanquish. Aston Martin has released one image of the new car per day and the Vanquish picture posted on Friday is the most popular the brand has ever published, with more than 24,000 ‘likes’ thus far.

Wednesday, the day of the new sports car’s official global debut, also saw Aston Martin add another 4,000 new ‘likes’ for its Facebook page, another new record since Facebook restructured its page promotion.  The brand is now proud to boast more than 1.7m Facebook fans worldwide.

Finally, Twitter has also been playing its part in spreading the Vanquish message through cyberspace. The hashtag ‘#Vanquish’ as well as the phrase ‘Aston Martin Vanquish’ were top trending in the UK on Wednesday, while #Vanquish also briefly trended in the significantly more populous Twittersphere of the United States late on Wednesday afternoon.

This helped double the sports car maker’s follower rate through Wednesday, Thursday and Friday – with Aston Martin now being followed by almost 33,000 eager ‘Tweeters’.

Pete Norwood is Digital Marketing Communications Manager at Aston Martin. He said: “The unprecedented interest we’re already seeing in the spectacular new Vanquish from around the world is, I think, a very clear indicator of how exciting our new sports car is.

“I’m very happy that we’ve been able to generate such compelling content, and look forward to welcoming many more Aston Martin owners, and would-be owners, to our website, Facebook page and Twitter feed over the days, week and months ahead.”

Coventry City Musings

Thought I’d give some quick thoughts on our current situation, in truth I’ve wanted to forget all about the club since relegation but I will be back there next season (of course) so it’s only proper to engage my brain and keyboard.

To my mind the club faces it’s most important few months, months which will set in place a course of events which will see us become a fixture in League One or claim what – realistically – is our place in English football, a playoff challenging Championship team.

As I predicted the team was relegated in one of the most frustrating, lacklustre series of games I can remember as a fan – but this was only compounded by the fact we had clawed our way back and got out of the relegation zone, only to then throw it away in a spectacular fashion. The first question to answer is therefore whether Thorn should now be in charge next season, still my answer would be no. A nice guy, yes, a decent manager, yes, a victim of our ownership structure and the carnage that came before him, absolutely – the right man to take us forwards, no.  I don’t blame Thorn for relegation any more than the iceberg can be blamed  for sinking the Titanic, the incompetence of those around him (both players and owners) did for us. However, I still think that fundamental mistakes cost us points which could have seen us get out of the scrape. An insistence on the diamond formation, an inability to make substitutions and the fact he couldn’t motivate some of the senior players suggests to me that if we stick with Thorn then what is a crucial season could peter out, we’ll make a change in November and any potential promotion challenge will be lost. So on issue one – Thorn out, somebody (Carsley?) in.

Now on to the more prickly situation with our owners. We are caught between a rock and a hard place in my opinion.  I am discounting the Hoffman ‘bid’ entirely as an option, we cannot continue to hold on for a white knight who clearly can’t quite manage to find his horse. I’m sure he is well intentioned and extremely passionate about the club but the ‘noise’ which surrounds his ongoing ‘bid’ clouds the fundamental issues here.  Unfortunately we have a choice between allowing our club to go out of existence by SISU continuing to own only the club (and no stake in the Ricoh) or we accept that they take the Higgs share of the arena and risk further incompetence.  Our only option is to accept the second one, however unpalatable or incompetent these guys have been at running a football club, the fact is you do have to accept that even competent owners would struggle with the club’s current structure – the only way we would be a profitable business is if we were bankrolled by somebody who had no interest in seeing their money again.  Therefore allowing SISU ownership of at least 50% of the Ricoh alongside complete ownership of the club at least partially removes one of the millstones around our neck. If the Higgs Charity are happy with the offer on the table then they should do the deal. The medium-term view here is that once we have brought the club and stadium together this will then encourage a more reasonable level of interest in the club from other investors, Coventry City is not a rational investment decision, Coventry City + 50% of the stadium is – even with SISU as the current owners.

In terms of players then it’s obvious to me that Cranie will leave, even though I rate him extremely highly, of course we all hope Keogh stays but staving off cash bids will be hard. So  we are resigned to another summer of free transfers and wheeling and dealing. However one thing which does frustrate me is that we will have another season of David Bell and Carl Baker, two wretched players at a Championship level, I have never been so frustrated by two professional footballers in all my time as a Coventry fan.

So in short, I’d replace the manager, accept our owners are going to stay our owners, support SISU in buying a stake in the Ricoh and then get behind the lads (and many of them will literally be ‘lads’) when they take the field next season.  I’ll be there in the cavernous stadium backing them all the way knowing that one day, one blessed day, we will turn the corner and begin the climb back to having a club we can be proud of. #PUSB

 

We Are Hunted

I’ve been using this site for a while now but it just keeps getting better and better:

www.wearehunted.com

A great site which aggregates blogs, embeds and ‘sentiment’ (there’s a 21st century word) to show the top emerging and popular music.  It’s fantastic for finding new bands and tunes, and is stunning from a design and usability perspective.

In the last week I’ve found three great bands I’d never heard before:

1) Silversun Pickups

2) Zulu Winter

3) Passion Pit

And even though it’s a small detail, the free-text search functionality is a joy to use!!

What is Google+?

I was interested to see this interview on Mashable today with someone I’ve admired for a while, Shiv Singh from PepsiCo, a really good piece with some salient take out points: http://mashable.com/2012/05/12/shiv-signh-pepsi-interview/.  The bit which caught my interest was Shiv’s statement and fundamental questioning around Google+ – what is it? Is it a social network?

I think he’s right in terms of stating that Google got it wrong by deliberately positioning G+ as a ‘social network’ when in fact it is simply a layer of integration on top of many of the existing Google products and services. I was with Google in April and their constant insistence was that Google+ should not be seen as a platform but a project, and specifically a project that is going to build and grow alongside the many other Google workstreams.  So that’s what surprises me even more, in that what they may say behind closed doors to a digital audience is in some respects different to the way it was ‘sold’ through many of the trailer / teaser videos, ie. a constant focus on an individual’s status updates – and therefore immediately positioning it as a replacement / partner for facebook.

As the interviewer in the clip also points out, the fact the phrase Google 2.0 is now being used suggests that they are certainly rethinking the ‘what’ – in terms of how it is positioned in the minds of potential users – in ‘what it is’.

Aston Martin facebook Timeline Launch

So last week we took the plunge and launched the Aston Martin facebook timeline:

As a brand we are extremely lucky in that we do not struggle for stunning photography of our cars and this shot of the New V8 Vantage sits really nicely as our main aperture image, I imagine other brands will be hard pressed to find something appropriate.

So it looks great and with extra coverage / interactions on our page from the Geneva Motor Show it’s been quite an active first week – we’ve received some nice comments which is always appreciated.  Alongside the new presentation of the page there are also some functionality improvements that will enhance the ‘brand’ experience, the We Are Social blog  gives a good summary.  I think messaging between page and fans is long overdue and for FMCG / service sector brands will prove invaluable to helping manage and solve customer complaints.  We do get a few of these but it’s obviously quite rare. In addition the improved insights panel and real-time stats is excellent, combine this with the ability to see rolling seven day likes on competitor pages and this will be great for weekly reporting and to see spikes in sector / brand interaction.  All of that said, my favourite element is presentational in that the timeline is designed to work all the way back to ‘foundation’, and the UI works extremely well in managing this volume of posts.  A historic, milestone based timeline certainly something we will be creating in the coming months ahead of Aston Martin’s centenary next year.

Despite my general praise, one of the most disappointing elements of the new design for me is how Timeline decreases the visibility of fan interaction and wall posting.  Many brands within the old design allowed users to post on the main wall display (we filtered to Aston Martin posts as a default but full visibility was only a click away) but the new design isolates user wall posts to a much smaller part of page real estate.  From a selfish ‘brand presentation’ perspective this helps deliver a clean brand experience, whether that be imagery, video or status updates, but it got me thinking about whether and how facebook brand timelines differ from a brand / product blog. The differentiatoin of brands building up a presence on facebook – and the attraction for fans – was that the brand was ‘laid bare’ to the public for it to interact with, bringing great benefits but also great responsibility for brands.  By reducing facebook brand pages to a more sanitised area then in short aren’t we left with a group of glorified blogs which happen to exist within a highly active social space?

Clearly the benefit to facebook is to reduce the visibility of spam and also to encourage brands to invest more heavily on advertising a cleaner and more controlled socialised brand presence, but it does grate with me slightly that one of the key and original elements of a facebook brand page is now more or less optional.

Visit the Aston Martin facebook timeline

My initial thoughts on Path

I’ve just opened a Path account after seeing it featured on the BBC’s Click this weekend.  For those who haven’t heard of it, Path is basically the ability to log / record your ‘path’ through life with quick updates and photos.  So it’s really designed for the ‘I’m at Starbucks with Joe and here’s a quick pic’ type stuff – so it rolls in Twitter and Foursquare alongside the increasing mobile use of Facebook check-ins and shorter status updates.

My initial thoughts are good but I do think it is basically an improved interface / layer to sit on top of your existing networks.  I say this becasue it  basically adds a layer of templates for quicker Twitter and Facebook updates.  I remember a time when mobile phones (particularly Nokias) came with a set of templated messages with statements devoid of all emotion like ‘I am late’ ‘Happy Birthday’ or my personal favourite ‘I’ve done something really bad to a close personal friend, can I confide in you?’  I did use them on a couple of occasions and generally they were pretty useful if you didn’t have the time to fire a unique message off.

In short, Path strikes me as doing much the same but for social interaction – giving you templates which allow you to quickly make a statement / update without necessarily having to think about it.  So for example we have the ‘I am asleep’ ‘I am awake’ option which for me will replace my no doubt infuriating ‘Morning all’ ‘Evening all’ tweets.  In addition you have the ability to add thoughts and pictures easily and of course then seed this content out on to multiple networks (Twitter being the predominant one for me).  On top of this you have a simply gorgeous UI on the iPhone app, meaning it works seamlessly in the palm and could almost have been designed by Apple themselves.

So all in all I don’t think it will necessarily take off as a bespoke social network itself (do we have room for anymore?) given the only thing it really adds in terms of unique content creation is some photo filters – but I do think it will be useful for people like me who would like to tweet or update their Facebook status more regularly with (yes I admit it) a ‘lower level’ of interaction.  Of course that begs the question of when Twitter will buy it or just replicate it….

If you’re on Path feel free to add / follow me.