Anyone remember those geeky sci-fi role-playing books of the eighties?

You know the ones where the story follows a single direction for the first few pages and then the reader is faced with two or three options of how to progress the plot – turn to page 82 to fight the dragon; turn to page 54 to run away; turn to page 41 to use your magic invisibility potion and sneak past undetected?

Well the latest Tippex campaign should have fans of those books frothing at the mouth as they raise the bar with their offering. Why limit yourself to two or three choices? Type ANYTHING you like to progress the plot and watch in astonishment as it unfolds on screen before your very eyes.

OK, admittedly the “story” of the advert and any outcome is less than a minute long and it took me about six attempts before I found some verbs that the ad couldn’t deliver, but even then it gave a humorous take on the standard “Error #404” bad request message.

The way this has been made, the relevance to the product and the subsequent coverage it has achieved has made it an instant hit – and surely it will pave the way for hundreds of other brands to launch similar campaigns.

Unfortunately though, I still can’t think that I’d actually have much use for Tippex these days.

I read an article in Marketing Week recently which explored the new buzzword of digital marketing, ‘Social eCommerce’.

Social eCommerce is the integration of eCommerce and social media and it’s a movement that has really taken off in the past few months. However, I do wonder whether this concept has been introduced to the digital mix too soon, especially at a time when some retailers have not even mastered the art of providing good transactional sites and many websites still remain difficult to navigate and fail to entice customers to buy their products.

Amazon is one of the first companies to embrace social eCommerce and they have definitely earned that right, as advocators of the eCommerce explosion.

So what have Amazon actually done?

Amazon has launched a new program that lets shoppers access their Facebook pages directly through Amazon.com. The program allows them to receive personalised movies, music and book recommendations based on the preferences listed within their profiles on the social networking site. The application also keeps track of friend’s birthdays and can automatically provide you with gift suggestions based on their listed preferences.

Amazon, sensing the backlash about privacy, has already promised not to share information with Facebook or any outside sources. However, despite this promise, there still seems to be scepticism about other companies going down this route and it remains to be seen how popular this new feature will be.

Whatever the cost, brands in this day and age need to be continuously demonstrating that they are moving with the times and this is probably why Amazon have been prepared to take the risk.

Please let us know if any of you have had any experiences with social eCommerce and whether you feel it will take off.

The news that Lean Mean Fighting Machine has lost the Coca Cola account after it’s Dr Pepper social media marketing campaign put a reference to “2 girls one cup” (I won’t put a link to that here!) on the Facebook page of a 14 year-old girl shows the pitfalls of a medium where the brand owner loses a certain amount of control in the direction that a campaign can take.

Before the days of interactive marketing, a brand would commission its agency to produce work that was carefully monitored and signed off at every stage and then released to the world. There would be the occasional blunder – anyone remember the Hoover Airmiles sales promotion offer during the recession of the early nineties? – but on the whole, it was the brand rather than the agency that was holding the reins.

Whilst the development of technology has allowed brands to communicate with consumers in exciting new ways and at relatively low cost, the sheer speed and scale at which these campaigns can gather pace (and notoriety) shows how the brand can go from hero to villain in an instant.

Agencies know that they sometimes need to push the boundaries to give the brands they represent the edge over competitors but, as LMFM found out to their cost, it can be a very fine line between what the intended target audience, people outside this (as was the case here) and the brand owners themselves find humours or horrific.

How ironic the old Dr Pepper slogan of “so misunderstood” must seem now – but maybe not so much as “What’s the worst that could happen?”… Well, you could lose a multi-million pound account.