Here’s a new social media project from King James (or should I say+One?).
Trevor Townsend, ‘South Africa’s Travel Blogger Extraordinaire’, was recently launched into a mixture of mediums. Trevor was born when kulula.com approached us to come up with an engaging solution that would showcase their monthly travel deals and leverage social media in an entertaining way. Kulula.com is all about making travel easy and accessible, so working across radio, press, a blog , a twitter account and a facebook page, we created Trevor to become an online persona who would amuse while being informative.
The Team on Trevor:
Writers:Â Â Â Alex van Tonder / Devin Kennedy / Jabu Sigege
Art Directors:Â Alix-Rose Cowie / Linton Davids
Web designer: Linton Davids
Creative Directors: Alistair King / Bruce Wright
Client Service: Candice Hogg / Melanie de Winnaar / Annemarie Blaensdorf
Trevor’s blog: http://www.trevdoestravel.co.za/
Trev’s twitter: http://twitter.com/trevdoestravel
Trev’s facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Trevor-Townsend-South-Africas-Travel-Blogger-Extraordinaire/311086418643?ref=ts
11 Comments
silly question .. is he “sponsored” by kulula to travel all the time? or does he blog on trips once in a while ( like a regular person ) would be cool to see actual pics of him on holiday or are those still coming?
.. maybe im jumping ahead… interesting campaign .. will track with interest ..
rad..
guess im the only one ? haha
I don’t buy into this crap. Rather find a real blogger that is also into travelling that I can actually relate to, not a boardroom-imagined “Trevor the travel blogger” that goes on imaginary trips and spews contrived humour.
From Facebook: “Just been to Mauritius. It was delicious. How can I describe the beauty of the Mauritian beachscape? It is as beautiful as Angelina Jolie wearing a dress made of the babies she has had with Brad Pitt.”
Are you kidding me?
hahahahahahahahahaha
nuff said …
Good fuck. The internet just got lamer.
C’mon does social media now give excuse to load up any old design, how about a bit of art direction. This looks like powerpoint stuck onto wordpress!
Where’s the craft, not to mention conceptless twack!
debated this one a bit yesterday .. lacks a bit of cred for me.. hopefully it evolves into something believable and interesting.
would be cool if he did actually go to places and interacted with locals etc. Even if it was just in SA to start. A made up character pretending to travel is a bit odd.
This is really stupid & badly executed. I can only imagine the spam this will generate.
This is a typical example of a traditional advertising mentality being applied to a “social media” campaign.
The sad bit is that the people who executed this campaign don’t care. They’ve been paid and all they’ve done is add more noise for the brand. Agree with coda, why the hell didn’t they find a real blogger? Easier to fake it I suppose. And to top it all off, wasn’t this done by King James who just recently launched their social media agency?(they’ve got a fancier, far trendier name for what they apparently do, it’s not just social media you know, its ‘advertising’).
Hey guys. Thanks for the feedback. The challenge was to create a way of conveying kulula’s travel specials, which happen weekly, and are usually a table of prices – not to create a travel blog. We are pretty upfront about running it – you can see he’s not real, so to criticise it on that basis is missing the point entirely.
Trevor is essentially a fun way of presenting pricelists, which will go out weekly, regardless of whether we dress them or not. Our audience are those in the market for travel and holidays and subscribe to kulula’s specials already. Hopefully a bit of context helps you understand how he fits into kulula’s communications.
hi Alex
Yes, i think putting it in context does help a bit. Perhaps i expected to much from a campaign that is a lot smaller in scale than i had imagined and was created as a fun way to get monthly deals across. Perhaps i was mislead into thinking he was real by the “real” sounding tweets ( been delayed, at airport etc.) and making it sound like he is actually traveling when infact it was tongue in cheek.
anyway good times .. its friday