Sony Ericsson’s global Hopper Invasion campaign is well underway and thought it about time to give you an update on it (I first wrote about it here). The campaign promotes their new Entertainment Unlimited range of phones, namely the Satio, Aino and Yari. It all started a few months ago with a teaser site allowing people to create their own personalised online hoppers and a promo video showing 500 hoppers being let loose in Barcelona. They then did an online flash mob by taking over the yahoo.co.uk site for an afternoon using the personalised hoppers created by users online. (click here to see that) Next they created a fun interactive concept using twitter (with a unique hashtag), a warehouse full of deflated hoppers hooked up to pumps, and a dedicated website showing live video feeds from the warehouse. The general idea is that each time anyone on twitter types #pumpt the tweet is picked up at the warehouse and a hopper is given a burst of air in real time, all visible on the hopper website. The warehouse will stop pumping up hoppers on the 6th December and in the meantime Sony Ericsson are asking participants to tweet ideas for what to do with them. They will then pick the best one and make it happen. So far its becoming a great success, over 240,000 online hoppers have been created, and after just 7 days over 400 hoppers in the warehouse have been pumped up, and the #pumpt hash tag has been a trending topic on twitter. To follow the Hopper campaign on twitter click here, or to see the hopper live feed click here. (They also have nice Facebook and Picasa profiles set up)

According to Dave Hilton, UK marketing director at Sony Ericsson there is “clearly a desire to freshen up our advertising”. One of the ideas is to add several more colour options to its logo, which traditionally has been a silver and green sphere since 2001. New colours will include pink, blue, orange and purple. The new logo colours will only be part of the companies latest, biggest yet £8m ad campaign to promote its upcoming Entertainment Unlimited phone and service offerings, namely the Satio, Aino and Yari handsets as well as its PlayNow music- and film-download service. Their last big branding makeover was the incredibly successful “ I Love* Sony Ericsson”, where the Love* was the Sony Ericsson logo (see fun example below). That campaign helped to increase Sony Ericsson’s market share by 15% as well as increasing profits by over 100% in 6 months and was done by the Wolff Olins agency. Sony Ericsson UK is also currently finalising a campaign due to launch next month, which will offer consumers who buy certain handsets the opportunity to win tickets to next year’s football World Cup, which takes place here in South Africa. Hat tip: Marketing Magazine