Deadly Viper Character Assassins

Deadly Viper

The Deadly Viper Character Assassins is an infectious brand created by the non-profit organisation ethur to promote their most recent initiative targeted at people in leadership positions aiming at talking and raising awareness of the reality’s of things like grace and integrity. It was promoted heavily through networking and has relied heavily on the effort of it’s own initial release and the combined blogging of three individuals on various topics aimed at breaking taboo’s and getting people to share experiences.

Deadly Viper after finishing it’s branding compiled a book looking at the themes of grace and integrity which they then published in house and gave away free at a leadership conference. They encouraged people to talk about it with other people who read the book and to just be open and honest about the struggles of people in position of responsibility, so rather than a defined product the aim was to create discussion on integrity and grace and the pitfalls people can stumble into which thanks to the extensive and successful branding could be talked about in relatively easy terms by addressing them as various “character assassins”. The creator Mike Foster simply felt that he loved the idea of Ninja’s and worked this into the branding and Ninja’s are a fairly safe and for some reason popular notion to talk about, it’s a lot easier to say “Hey, want to talk about Ninja’s?” rather than “Hey, want to talk about your integrity as a leader?”. They’ve since released a free audio-book of the original Deadly Viper book and have generated massive traffic to the Deadly Viper blog/website purely off the back of the brand, initial release and word of mouth. This has since been sustained by giving the brand a presence on various social networks and other websites such as twitter and flickr which suggests a look at trying to reach people increasingly where they are rather than simply trying to draw people directly to the site.

To write love on her arms/ TWLOHA

TWOLHA

TWLOHA started out on myspace as a way raising funds for a friend of the creators’ treatment to help get out addiction and self-harming, they did this by selling T-shirts with the phrase “to write love on her arms” which very quickly became a brand. The creators were friends with a couple of bands and got the bands to endorse the T-shirts to raise awareness, the fans of the bands then got into the product because of the endorsement which started getting other people talking or sharing their experiences over the issues of depression, addiction, self-injury and suicide. All the while TWLOHA continued to make sales and increase brand awareness which they then turned into an initiative in encouraging and getting people to seek help and be open about they’re struggles and feelings.

TWOLHA you could say exploited a niche by appealing to a particular subculture within music which seemed to resonate with various issues common amongst young people found within that subculture. However many people’s first experience with the brand will be a T-shirt worn by a friend or someone in a band and eventually this will cause someone to ask what that’s all about which is an effective example of viral media. TWOLHA found it’s base in utilising existing networks of new media for a low cost means of starting up their campaign, they’ve since taken to new media to better communicate their intentions to people who might of heard of the brand but not met anyone directly involved as much of the brand awareness is done by people who buy into the brand with a t-shirt.

Junky Car Club

Junky Car Club

Junky Car Club was another initiative set up by the non-profit group ethur. The basic idea was to challenge peoples understanding of the big car culture in the US and to instead teach to “live with less so we can give more.” As a movement it was quite exclusive as you could only join the Junky Car Club effectively if you were driving what they classified as a ‘Junker’. The whole aim behind this was to raise money for Compassion International a children’s charity for kids living in poverty around the world, Junky Car Club used social networks but also the cars themselves, extensive print branding in the form of stickers and calendars, membership schemes, membership cards and junky car conventions to raise awareness. They also then got special deals for people involved in other ethur initiatives like exclusive VIP parking at a leadership conference the deadly viper character assassins were featuring at.

In an interview with Mike Foster (the creator) he said they invested $1,000 dollars into Junky Car Club which has in turn raised over $20,000 dollars for Compassion International. Junky Car Club perhaps has the least web presence of all ethur initiatives yet is perhaps one of the best examples of getting the most out of ‘audience participation’ especially since a concept of the Car in America is so tightly wound up with issues like; consumerism, materialism and social identity it helps not only the drivers but their passengers think more about the alternatives to such a culture.

Social Vibe

Social Vibe

Is a brand new social networking site with a difference. Social Vibe is free to join and upon joining users are asked to pick a ‘sponsor’ which is mandatory to membership, they are then asked likewise to pick a ‘cause’ (which is mandatory) to support. They can then ‘advertise’ themselves by placing social vibe applications on other existing social networks where a user has membership or just by getting people to see their advertisements raises money for the cause of their choice. This not only virally promotes the brand and charity selected but also Social Vibe as a network in of itself which carries a feel good factor of not only online narcissism but an undercurrent of the fact that you too can change the world just by being part of the website.

Social Vibe as a social network has taken a different approach to exploiting an increasingly crowded market of social networks by making it possible to integrate itself within and alongside existing social networks. Social Vibe is all about getting brands into networks of friends and by using the idea of raising money for charity in return for opening people up to the steady constant advertisement or brand presence of a well to do corporation, the network plays on individuals who want to be seen to be socially conscious or aware to their friends and likewise people who see their friends with a social vibe application on their profile will want to get in on that too to show that they and their friends are similar in an increasingly number of ways.