As expected, there was a fair bit of discussion on StopPress after Localist’s decision to shift away from print and focus on mobile. And, with the help of Projector Media, 8com’s Paul Jones and Will Hall, it’s created an entertaining, innuendo-heavy ad featuring B&D, full bodied bears/beers and artistic bollocks to show that the app learns to love the same things you do and can also help you avoid things you don’t like, such as Huntly or drinking tea with mimes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F7XS-ICMFcU
“The aim of the ad was to reposition Localist as a personalised recommendation engine for the best things to taste, buy and do locally,” says Localist chief executive Blair Glubb. “Hence ‘my Localist App learns to love the same things I do’. We’ve had great feedback about it, having pushed it out via social media in the first instance.”
Indie agency Projector is no stranger to attention-grabbing, often controversial advertising and creative director Darryl Parsons, he of 42 Below fame, and managing director John Coghill have done a good job of that for Moa in recent years. Localist started off with M&C Saatchi as its agency, and while Glubb says it still has a great personal and working relationship with Tony Burt, Dave King and the M&C team and will use them in the future “if and when we have work to do which is a good fit for their skills”, its “focus is now very much on building out our local recommendation engine capability and growing consumer engagement and usage, and we’re essentially running this in-house.”
“Now that we have around 40,000 consumers registered on our platform, and traffic growing month on month it makes sense to do most of this on our own platform,” he says.
As for how the new App and website, which were all built in house, are going so far, he says the gang is pretty pleased with the results since launch.
“November saw our App downloads lift by 140 percent, with new visitors up 70 percent,” he says. “And traffic to our site jumped eight percent to a new record of 377,000 visits.”
