Lynne Kiesling
1. [this one is obvious] The right team won, YAY Steelers! Although there was more drama in getting to the end than was strictly necessary …
2. The Polamalu update of the old Joe Greene Coca-Cola ad. Warms the cockles of my old-school Pittsburgher heart!
3. GE’s Scarecrow/”If I only had a brain” smart grid ad:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1XqLPa9BoA]
This Wizard of Oz meme has been running around the smart grid community for a while, and I think GE did a nice job of creating an image of the potential value creation from smart grid technology. Of course, it’s only a 30-second spot, so they focused on distribution automation from a utility perspective, and not on the potential for new end-use products and services for retail customers.
The other thing that GE has done well is actually issuing the ad on YouTube themselves. I wish IBM would do the same, because some of their smart grid ads are very clever, and I’d be happy to do some viral marketing here on their behalf, but they don’t seem to really get the social networking thing. I’m surprised and impressed with GE on this count.
This Advertising Age column also compliments the GE smart grid spot and GE’s ecomagination “reality-augmented” web site. Again, the site focuses on specifics slices of the smart grid space, slices in which GE specializes (such as smart meters) even if they don’t tell the whole story of the smart grid value proposition. The GE smart grid web site does a nice job of enabling visualization and, well, imagination about the potential value of smart grid.