Jas Business Blog

With the consumer mind being bombarded with so much of ad communication these days, the BTL (below the line) ad campaigns have gained quite a lot of popularity among th advertisers. Also the campaigns have started attracting the complete set of consumption chain i.e. from consumer to the decision maker. Thats why you will find ads of McDonald’s happy meals being targeted at parents in India rather than the children themselves. Positioning is that such an outing of a happy time is best enjoyed by kids with McD’s Happy Meal. To face the competetion, McD is also one company which has a high focus on BTL campaigns.

But this one may still surprise you. McD picked up the $1,600 cost of printing report-card jackets for the 2007-2008 school year in Seminole County, Florida, in exchange for a Happy Meal coupon on the card’s cover(see picture). With 27,000 elementary school kids taking their report-card jackets home to be signed three or four times a year, that’s less than 2 cents per impression.

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is demanding that McDonald’s immediately stop advertising on children’s report cards. “This promotion takes in-school marketing to a new low,” said Susan Linn, director of CCFC and a psychologist at Judge Baker Children’s Center. “It bypasses parents and targets children directly with the message that doing well in school should be rewarded by a Happy Meal.”

But what remains to be seen is that how much additional traffic does this kind of campaign bring to Lufthansa, I haven’t checked the fares of it much but I have an opinion that whosoever will be pulled up by the campaign and decide to go to that destination will be a common man going for non business reason. This category will be more inclined towards the usage of low cost airlines. But there is no point putting sausages on bar-be-cue without first arranging for coal, so Lufthansa, after taking the low cost route in 2005 does provide a strong reason to fly it with this campaign.

Addendum
Low cost-No frills concept was triggered by Southwest–which actually jumped the gun on deregulation, taking advantage of Texas’ enormous size to avoid onerous interstate commerce regulations–ushered in the low-cost revolution with four revolutionary insights:
1) Flying just one type of aircraft will save a company millions on maintenance and bulk purchasing.
2) Point-to-point flights between smaller airports, rather than hub-and-spoke operations centered on a single large airport, allow each airplane to be used for several more flights a day, and more cheaply.
3) Passengers will appreciate the elimination of perks such as business lounges and free meals if the savings are passed on directly to them with a smile.
4) Air travelers will flock to the lowest prices, period.

And the impact? By the late 1990s, Southwest was the world’s richest and most profitable major airline, inspiring successful copycats (such as JetBlue) and even forcing money-bleeding behemoths like United Airlines to launch low-cost hopefuls like TED. Lets see how Lufthansa addresses this market now!

Our mobiles have gone from just a mobile version of landline phones to that of a small computer or hand held, the desktops have given way to the quad core functionality specific laptops or tablets, GPS has simplified the life for some and complicated for others and all the while we know that the digital cameras have just fought a linear fight of more Megapixels, more optical zoom and larger screen. Isn’t it? Though some vendors have been giving small features but nothing has changed the mainstream usage of digital cameras.

Well things may be in for a change now in next few years as many advanced features have already been integrated into these digicams and poise for a mainstream usage in next few years. These advanced pieces of technology can now not only identify which one of your friends are you clicking a snap of, but also if the person being photographed is happy, sad, angry etc. You would have already seen the adverts of Sony having launched the camera that can identify the faces from background and focus on these faces for better clarity, it can identify eight faces in one single shot! Take the case of Fujifilm’s new FinePix S6000fd, once Face Detection is activated, it automatically identifies faces in the scene and prioritizes them in as little as 0.05 seconds. It simultaneously displays a green rectangle around the top-priority face, and a white one around other faces before the picture is taken (see pic)

In another feature called auto tagging, the camera attaches tags as the pictures are taken. The tags can be of time, people names or geography etc. Like the cameras embed timestamps in photos, which makes it possible to sift through pictures by date. able to screen for photos only of a particular person could dramatically speed up the search process. Fotonation is one company which supplies face-detection software for dozens of camera models from vendors like Samsung, Pentax, and others. Location, too, is another useful attribute that can be attached to photos through a process called geotagging. Geotagging can be used both to look for photos whose location you know and to figure out what exactly is in a photo you already have at hand. Flickr launched a module in 2006 that lets people geotag their photos by dragging them onto maps. Photos tagged with location data before upload also can be shown on maps if a Flickr member chooses to enable the feature. The map can be set up to show photos from a particular time, uploaded by a particular Flickr member or tagged with particular text labels–”cable car” in this case. Flickr, which now houses 36 million geotagged photos–roughly 3 percent of its total archive.

Face recognition is another feature which is gaining commercial attention among the digicam software developers, these software can detect the images of people among a big set of images. Along with it a research into expression recognition is taking up pace, it understands what mood the person is – smiling, angry, anguish , sad etc. Marian Stewart Bartlett has showed results of her research of work at the Machine Perception Lab at the University of California wherein it lets a computer monitor 30 of the 46 codified components of facial expressions. That includes movements such as raised eyebrows and wrinkled noses.

Here as shown in the picture on the right, researchers have turned expression-recognition technology into an art exhibit showing the increasingly strained efforts by models to maintain a chipper smile for more than an hour. The top picture is when the model starts the show, but she wont be able to keep that smile for very long, which is acceptable, the software displays a green bar to show its acceptable. What wont be acceptable for channel’s marketer is a worn out smile, so the software observes the expressions and a buzzer goes off when a waning smile sends a monitor into the red zone. This sends a signal to the model to get the smile all backed up or to indulge.

In the demonstration, software tracked Stewart’s face from a video camera and recorded expression parameters. Analyzing the data, the computer can draw conclusions about people. For example, when comparing a video of a man’s face as he experienced actual pain from immersing his hand in cold water to another in which he faked the pain, people had about an even chance guessing which showed the authentic pain. The computer, though, had 72 percent accuracy, she said.

All in all you can say that the digicam R&D market is far from dead, rather than working on age old problems only say red eye reduction etc, the companies are pushing in the moolah to get the latest technological edge over each other and ask for premium from customer.

If you have been to Europe then its imperitive to ride TGV. TGV (train à grande vitesse, French for “high-speed train”) is France’s high-speed rail service developed by private major Alstom (also developed Delhi Metro) and SNCF, the French national rail operator. First established between Paris and Lyon in 1981, the TGV network runs across France and adjacent countries. TGVs link with Switzerland through the French network, with Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands through the Thalys network, and the Eurostar network links France and Belgium with the United Kingdom; where Thalys and Eurostar are fast speed trains developed by other countries.

Lets talk about speed now, how fast have you traveled in trains? Indian trains run at maximum speed of 160Kmph. On 3 April 2007 a modified TGV train reached 574.8 km/h (357.2 mph) under test conditions. The voltage on the test track between Paris and Strasbourg was boosted to 31,000 volts and extra ballast was tamped onto the right-of-way. By doing so, it beat the 1990 world speed record of 515.3 km/h (320.2 mph), set by a similarly shortened train (two power cars and three passenger cars).

TGV already runs at 320 kmph, and in case you have traveled by it, you would have already realised the effect its acceleration has on your ears as soon as it passes through the tunnels. See the video here -