A home on the web for all my things; from old podcast episodes, to advertising, gaming, travel, books, skiing, roller coasters, and more. My professional website is over at www.playfulbrandstrategy.com
I'm just back from visiting friends in the UK and made quite the discovery that had me go back to and reconsider Marmite and its advertising.
I thought I was clearly in the "I hate Marmite" camp, decided probably over twenty years ago. That was reinforced by years of love/hate advertising that I've always thought clever and fun.
Sure it's a divisive product, but this past weekend as my friends were telling me how they love marmite, had lovely sourdough bread, I thought well I actually haven't tasted Marmite in a very long time. Turns out I thought "hey this isn't actually bad", let me have some more, and I had more the following day too. Same for my girlfriend, she thought she was firmly in the hate camp and we both changed our minds.
My main big surprise of the past week is I actually quite like Marmite. I might even love it.
Their latest ad campaign launched in June is fun, sure, but how much room is left for people changing taste? Not so much it seems.
Our tastes change over time, if you go as far as strongly conveying the idea it's about genetic material then how can Marmite acquire new consumers, as in haters deciding to give it another go rather than simply leaving it like it's set for life... Similarly if it's a given these are the two camps, do many self professed lovers share their appreciation, or do they give up because some are just haters..?
As much as I appreciate their brand positioning and advertising, I'd say going into genetics and scanning babies is taking a step too far - unless it's all just a joke, but the video seems almost serious enough that I wonder if people find it funny or not?
I noticed this good outdoor media placement at Disneyland Paris, which kind of leads me to admit something about my arguably leisurely lifestyle.
It’s a long story involving multiple trips with my nieces and nephews last summer and over Halloween last year, but in short I have an annual pass to Disneyland Paris. So from time to time, I get out my home office, and on to the RER A train to the happiest place on Earth (or Europe/France).
Yesterday, I worked at Disney’s Starbucks for a few hours, wandered around the park, did a couple of rides, lunch and some more work at Disney Village (a burger, at the newly rebranded Royal Pub. I have thoughts about its transformation from King Ludwig’s Castle, maybe for another time).
I was heading back home when I noticed these ads in the train station, for Parc Asterix. They just launched an exciting new roller coaster (2nd of its kind in the world), Toutatis, the Celtic god invoked by Asterix and his Gaulish friends in the comics.
The theme park enthusiasts I follow on Youtube and who tried the ride for the park’s PR day are all raving about it, and I’m looking forward to trying it. That’s where you might think I should be wary of market orientation and remember I’m not the target audience, except well, sometimes I kind of am.
Some takeaways:
Outdoor ads on the public transportation system and on your competitor’s turf might seem basic. But it is also a solid foundation, I appreciate it. Disneyland is similarly boasting a campaign for the end of the 30th anniversary (in September) all over town, however they don’t have actual news, they’ve been celebrating their 30th anniversary for like a year now. It’s partly reminding everyone Spring time is here and it’s a good to visit theme parks, and/or a response to Parc Asterix’s actual new news.
It would have been fun to see an ad specially created for the placement by Disneyland’s train station, though possibly only of interest to adland and theme park geeks, so not necessarily worth it – and taking away from Parc Asterix’s actual main news and goal of the campaign to be single-minded about promoting their new roller coaster.
That last point is important for the enthusiasts because the roller coasters at Disneyland Paris are nowhere as good as the ones in Parc Asterix, and I was reminded seeing these ads. Disney’s coasters are old and rough. The rebrands of Space Mountain into Star Wars, and the Rock’n’Roller Coaster reopening as part of the Avengers Campus last year were met with disappointment or even outrage by fans (and myself: altogether too dark, rough, disorienting vs. fun).
I have some time to notice and write things given I just finished a couple of client projects. I’m looking for new gigs, please keep in touch if I can help with your marketing strategy.
This newsletter was first published via email on the 29th May 2016. You can also sign up to receive Ice Cream Sundae by filling the form on the right-hand side column or here (since then the newsletter format changed from long to shorter form).
I was just browsing around for writing inspiration and checked some of my first blog posts from 2007. I’d started a series about my favourite brands back then, it seems like a good idea to bring the idea back in an updated version. This is the first of new Sundae series about my favourite brands, starting with a guilty pleasure I’m pretty much addicted to: Doritos.
The name itself comes the charming Spanish word “doradito” which translates as “a little golden” or “golden brown”.
You’ll also be glad to find there are persistent themes in my interests given the product was originally created and sold at the Casa de Fritos in Disneyland in California. I am of course referring to the previous Sundae newsletters I wrote about theme parks and roller coasters. Apparently some day in 1964 they found themselves with surplus tortilla, decided to cut them up in triangles and fry them like the traditional Totopo Mexican chips. They added some dry powder seasoning and they became very popular.
They were quickly overwhelmed by the amount of people who wanted the addictive triangles and a couple of years later Doritos was born, the first tortilla chip brand to be launched nationwide in the United States. Now with a global 39% market share, Doritos is the largest tortilla chip brand in the world.
I’m a complete sucker for crisps (or chips, depending where you’re reading this), particularly corn crisps and these little triangles come first on my list. They crunch and taste amazing. It’s also a family thing: I have 3 siblings and whenever we meet, you can sure there’ll be a bag of them close by.
Of course you may be reading this and thinking they’re disgusting cesspools of fat and chemicals, and you may be right. Then again, put one in your mouth and you might reconsider. Maybe chemicals like flavor and conservation agents aren’t all that bad. Doritos got a lot of flack over the years for the potentially artificial nature of their ingredients. Years ago the satirical news website The Onion published a fun article about Doritos celebrating their “One Millionth Ingredient”.
From a product innovation, branding and communications perspective Doritos is consistently one of the most interesting brands out there.
They’ve been making interesting efforts for a long time, for example you might remember the legendary product placement scene in Wayne’s World includes Nacho cheese flavoured Doritos. I used to know every single line of dialogue of the whole movie when I was a teenager, if ever you were wondering what I was doing with my time back then, a few hours involved watching and re-watching Wayne’s World.
Doritos have been associated with the Super Bowl for a long time, the most watched TV event in the US and most expensive and anticipated from an advertising perspective. Recently the average cost to air a 30 second ad during the Super Bowl went from $4 million the past few years to $4.5 million.
I believe it was in 2006 they started the “Crash the Super Bowl” marketing campaign, as far as I know one of the first successful examples of crowd sourcing and getting fans involved in the creative concepts and videos advertising Doritos. It was organised as a competition, anyone could submit video adverts and the winners would be aired during the Super Bowl. Given how successful it became they reiterated the campaign several times, and Doritos ads are now among the most anticipated during the Super Bowl. They’re often weird, funny and quirky.
The first winner “Live The Flavour” aired during the Super Bowl in 2007, the first ever consumer created TV ad to appear during the popular sporting event and raked the fourth best ad according to the USA Today Ad Meter Poll. Subsequent research showed Doritos saw a 12% increase in sales in the month following the ad and close to one million people visited the website where they could see all the Doritos from other competition finalists. They were expecting about 200 competition entries for the first year and received over 1,100.
In a good example of demonstrating it’s not worth changing a winning team – a French saying: “On ne change pas une équipe qui gagne” – the following year Doritos attempted to change the successful formula to offer musicians to “Crash the Super Bowl” but that ended up nowhere near as popular as the previous year so they brought the ads back and have been doing it very ever since.
Among my favourite finalist videos over the years two deserve particular mentions and are worth checking out: Goat 4 Sale and Finger Cleaner.
Doritos are known for a wide variety of flavours they test for different markets around the world and adapt their flavourings to better suit tastes in various parts of the world. They brilliantly leverage the product for promotion and advertising purposes as well. I believe that started with the X-13D Flavour Experiment campaign. As per their current brand tagline “For the Bold” it takes being bold to decide it would be a great idea to remove your branding and packaging to release a mystery flavour and open it as a competition for consumers to guess what the flavour is. The bag of chips was just plain black with “X-13D” in large white print on the packaging. Youtube and Facebook were just rising in popularity at the time and thousands of people posted videos of their tasting the mystery chips, which turned out to be cheeseburger flavoured.
People love Doritos and there are hundreds of thousands of videos on Youtube taste testing and reviewing all sorts from the brand, such as testing these Japanese Clam Chowder flavoured Doritos.
Doritos regularly plays around with flavours, Roulette is one of the latest from a couple of years ago and that they now bring back as a seasonal special flavour (I’ve seen it in shops in London last week). It’s a bag of Nacho Cheese chips with the added twist that one chip in every handful is a really hot chilli flavoured one. The ad here with furries for some reason.
I haven’t tried them unfortunately, though I’m afraid I might be as disappointed as every time I try a special large chain fast food item. I never find them as exciting as the ad claims. These speciality items are the result of a partnership between Doritos and fast food chain Taco Bell. It’s basically a taco in a Dorito shell including the original branding and flavouring. One of the stories in an article I read and linked to mentions someone who drove over 900 miles to get their hands on one of those when they had just launched in a few restaurants in California to test the market. A couple of years ago they were already selling over a million of these every day, over a $1 billion worth of revenue in sales in 2014.
In 2013 Doritos updated their logo, packaging design and adopted their first global campaign line and theme to be consistent across all countries where the tortilla chips are sold: For The Bold. Before the 25 different packaging designs existed around the world. The brand believed in today’s connected world where everyone accesses pretty much the same social media platforms it didn’t make sense to try and modify the product for different countries.
They are activating the campaign with a yearlong effort to find people ready to beat 50 different world records, all involved Doritos chips in some way. Examples provided are “Tallest house of cards made with Doritos” or “Farthest distance of Dorito chip tossed into mouth”.
Of course Doritos are to be consumed with moderation. I’m feeling a little peckish after writing about all this. I think I may well have to walk down to the shop later today and get myself a little bag of Doritos.
If you read last week’s edition about classic video games, I mentioned Game Camp London. Now I’ve published my first live audience recording for my audio podcast, it was a fun conversation. It’s here if you’d like to check it out.
If any of your friends are Doritos lovers too, please forward this Sundae over to them, they might enjoy reading more about their marketing and branding efforts.
As you might imagine given I produce my own, I listen to quite a few podcasts. I admit I haven’t actually been actively listening to audio podcasts for that long. While I listened to a couple of shows occasionally, it’s really since I moved back to Europe from Singapore that I’ve been listening to more, checking out as many shows as I can and catching up on both the most popular ones, and a few more niche ones, like revolving around games and game design for example.
The vast majority of popular podcasts are simply funded by advertising messages. The audience is as captive as the traditional TV or radio and as far as I know ad blockers haven’t found a way to remove portions of promotional message from audio files.
The format is pretty typical in most cases, with the show host reading a message from their sponsors.
That might be why I paid attention when my friend Lauren recommended the popular StartUp show, that I had heard of, though she also mentioned that in addition to the show itself being brilliant, their way of presenting ads was too.
It’s not so often I hear friends who don’t work in advertising or marketing tell me about the awesome ways in which a company advertises.
If ever you’re not familiar with it, Gimlet Media is a company created by Alex Blumberg, who previously worked for the National Public Radio (NPR). He wished to capitalize on the opportunity he saw in the growing interest with audio podcasts and left NPR to create his own media company.
In their own words:
Gimlet Media is the premier digital media company focused on producing high quality narrative podcasts.
Their first show, StartUp (season 1) tells the story of how the company started, if you’re interested I can only highly recommend you have a listen. I listened to one episode and binged the whole first season in a couple of days. It’s that good.
The other Gimlet Media shows are hugely successful (I love them too), to the point the digital media company was voted amongst the Top 100 most innovative companies in media by Fast Company in 2015, and that’s not the only award they received, for example Apple named Mystery Show the best new podcast of 2015 in their year end awards.
Alex Blumberg talks about creating excellent audio storytelling in StartUp and in other shows where he was interviewed, such as on the Tim Ferriss Show. This is something he is committed to in the production of all Gimlet shows, and just like my friend who recommended it, I really appreciate they have the same commitment to the way they advertise for their sponsors.
Rather than reading out what often turns out to be bland sponsor messages, they go out and find people who use the products and services they’re advertising, or somehow they create small stories around the sponsors. It highlights the sponsors in an interesting way, in the same way I’m listening to Gimlet shows for their interesting stories. They integrate the sponsor in their branded space by giving it a “Gimlet audio story lifting”. Every one of their shows also features the same music preceding sponsor messages, so it’s clear what is the main story vs the sponsored message. It makes the sponsor more interesting and in turn I’m more inclined to remember and talk about the ads.
Of course they weren’t the first to create this kind of native advertising in audio podcasts, but at the moment they have my (obviously subjective) vote for being the best and most remarkable.
Now every time I see a banner or paid search ad for Audible, I think of the person interviewed who listened to audio books during her long commute from the Asian to the European side of Istanbul. If I see something about Squarespace, I’m reminded of the fun and wonderful random websites the hosts of Reply All create, like Alex Goldman‘s Goldman Gripes. It makes sense to adapt the sponsors to what their audience are looking for, which is great audio stories.
Of course finding people who use the products and services advertised by their sponsors was all a little experimental, so they happened to make a mistake. It wasn’t great for the company, though it makes for a brilliant episode of StartUp where they explain everything about the way they advertise sponsor messages and the behind the scenes of this unfortunate event:
16/02/2016 Update: I just caught up with another episode of StartUp and it happened to be exactly about the same topic. I’m not the only person interested in Gimlet Media’s advertising, and this episode is about the tricky position of advertising compared with editorial content and endorsements. It’s definitely worth listening to. These conversations have apparently led to the idea of offering paid membership to listeners in order to start diversifying their revenue basis.
And there’s more I’m catching up with: Gimlet Media also announced they were starting to produce branded content. I’ll listen to the episode and probably update this post afterwards.
I just had a fantastic week attending the 2nd edition of the European Planning Conference in Prague this week. I was able to arrive a couple of days early and enjoy walking around and soaking in the atmosphere of old Prague earlier this week. The morning I arrived was bright blue skies and cold crisp weather, perfect for wandering and appreciating the architecture. As it started clouding over in the afternoon, I settled in a coffee shop to get some work done, particularly to write my conference talk. I had a few notes and generally knew what I wanted to talk about, but hadn’t properly prepared the work and the presentation just yet.
I met Kristijan who organizes the EPC a couple of years ago while we both worked for Saatchi & Saatchi in Asia. He was based in Vietnam, and I was on a business trip to Ho Chi Minh City, talking to wealthy car enthusiasts for market research purposes. A colleagues told me to get in touch with Kris, who was nice enough to take some time to show me around and sit down for dinner and a few beers while we talked shop. We kept in touch after that, he was about to move back to Macedonia where he’s from and told me at the time that he had a few ideas about organizing an event for planners in Europe. It was brilliant to have that perspective, given I often think of the centre of Europe in London or maybe Paris, and forget about the whole of central and eastern Europe that I don’t know well at all.
I was happy Kris invited me to speak at the conference, it was an enriching and fun two day event, I met fantastic people from all over the old continent: France, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Macedonia, etc. Kris told me the event was only one day long last year; he felt it was very rushed so he thought he’d try spreading it over two days this year. It was brilliant to also meet Jane (pronounced Y-a-nee or something I can’t actually write phonetically), Kris’ new business partner, they are in the process of creating a new agency, we talked about their new plans and I wish them the best in their new venture.
Tom Theys of FCB Global opened the conference with a talk he is testing and preparing for the upcoming Eurobest festival. I’m not going to give too many details before Eurobest, but it’s all about providing experiences and thinking ways to creative advertising and promotional pieces that will have an effect on changing people’s behaviours. This Nivea case study that I hadn’t seen is a great example of the kind of things he talked about:
Varia from Sid Lee in Amsterdam talked next, about the kind immersive and meaningful brand experiences they work on in the agency famously (at least partially) funded by Cirque du Soleil, who know a thing or two about creating memorable shows and experiences, like the Absolut Nights series of branded events for the famous vodka.
We ended the first morning with one of the two more academically inclined talks of the conference, Michael is working on a Phd, had recently interviews international diplomats to learn about their jobs, and studied the origins and principles of diplomacy. He told us of the lessons he drew from the world of international diplomacy and strategic planners could learn from it.
We had two energetic and brilliant talks in the afternoon from Achim Shauerte of BBH London and then Boris Nihom of Achtung! Amsterdam, both with interesting approaches and case studies from their respective agencies with slick, smart and fun presentations. Achim is really sharp, and Boris infectiously passionate. Boris shows us several interesting and practical case studies, like this stroller video. Before that Achim had told us of the process they went through at BBH to create this pretty bold (and possibly kind of disturbing) advert for Audi:
I’m adding these videos to illustrate a few case studies and ads, though they don’t do justice to the talks of course, there was more to it than that.
We all went for a nice dinner and beers to a nearby bar and restaurant in the evening to pursue geeky talks about advertising, marketing, branding, and more.
Friday Katharina started the day with a very interesting talk and an academic history lesson, as in the telling us of the principles of studying and learning history and the ways in which the discipline can be applied to develop foresight.
Robert who co-founded the idea crowd sourcing platform Future Bakery followed to tell us about his burgeoning nw business. He used to work for traditional advertising agencies in Prague for a long time before creative this new online platform a year ago. I wasn’t sure I understood what it was at first, and the more he told us about it, the more interested I was. It’s an online community – I guess à la Quora where he poses relatively simple questions to the audience of participants related to client briefs in order to crowdsource ideas and possible solutions to their business problems from a wide variety of locations and experiences. They’re not solutions or any replacement for the work of an agency or a creative professional, but they’re potentially ideas and perspectives you wouldn’t have considered otherwise. I was definitely left wanting to find out more about it.
It was a privilege to have Richard join us for a talk about whether it is more important for planners to be interesting or right. He lighted the room up with his enthusiastic energy and it was brilliant to have his perspective about planning and strategy today, as well as his comments on several pieces of great strategic work out of the APG awards case studies this year.
Tom and Richard both talked about the campaign to encourage women to practice sports in the UK from FCB, and, it’s worth checking out if you haven’t come across it:
Michail then told us of his original methodologies to create a compelling and original brand value proposition, including ways to cooperate with clients to create stronger value. It was very interesting and his models seem rich.
Finally, it was time for my talk closing the conference. I’d prepared a talk about what strategic planners can learn from tabletop games, one of my passions. I’ve actually recorded myself, hopefully I will be able to soon publish this as an episode to my podcast so in the meantime I’ll keep the details quiet.
I learned a lot and got time to meet and talk shop with amazing professionals in their fields. The European Planning Conference is really one of those where I’m not sure if I should just keep a secret because it was great to be with a relatively small committee and spend more time getting to know people properly as well as explore planning & strategy topics in depth, but at the same time it is a brilliant event and definitely deserves to have more European planners join for the conference next year! I hope I can go next year, I loved Prague and would happily go back. Look out for next year, I recommend it!
I’ve spent the past two evenings at the now familiar Google UK large meeting room for planning & strategy focused evenings of talks. That plus several brilliant interview recordings for the podcast and my brain is buzzing somewhere between wired and fried right now.
On Tuesday was the Account Planning Group’s Noisy Thinking event with the theme of “Planning in a Post-Capitalist World”. I attended the APG “Think like a CSO” event last week with Matt Willifer, CSO of the Engine group advertising agency WCRS, and that was great. Matt showed the us real working pitch decks and took us through the process of developing the strategy and creative for real client projects. It was a great morning event and enriching to see other people’s work. It’s quite rare for agencies and clients to be ready to share this kind of work to an audience, even when agreed to be confidential as it was for this event.
Back to Noisy Thinking this week, it was a pretty lofty theme so I wasn’t sure what to expect or if I’d understand much of it. I wasn’t even sure what post-capitalism meant, even though I’d vaguely heard the word. Even now I’d probably try to nod sagely if I heard someone say it and pretend something like being so torn on the topic that words couldn’t even properly express my opinion. I would generously let said person express their opinion on the matter, listen attentively and do my best to get what they’re talking about.
Apparently the term was coined (or popularised perhaps?) by author and journalist Paul Mason with a book published this year and titled Post-Capitalism: A Guide to our Future.
The first person speaking was Kirsty Fuller, the co-founder and co-CEO of Flamingo, who also sponsor the Noisy Thinking series of events. Flamingo is a insight and strategy consultancy, as I understand it they run large consumer research projects and advise businesses about people and culture to help them build better brands. Kirsty talked about social change becoming of increasing importance for businesses and brands, more than lip-service or greenwashing. She cited examples like Unilever and their Sustainable Living Plan. They are considered leaders in declaring and implementing significant plans towards reducing environmental footprint throughout their business and many brands.
The second speaker was Fern Miller, Chief Strategy and Insight Officer for DigitasLBi, a large digital agency and part of the Publicis Groupe. Fern told us of a really interesting piece of research they conducted with young people in several parts of the world and the influence social media and trends such as taking selfies was having on their behaviour, their self-image, confidence, and the way they see the world through the lenses of selfies and social networks.
The last speaker was Tracey Follows, APG Chair and Futurist at AnyDayNow – not the 2012 homonymic movie, but a consultancy she founded. They are a futures company specialising in the future of communications, media, and brands. Tracey started with the Paul Mason book reference, which most of the audience hadn’t read. It was an interesting theory talk about an idea that society is moving from being consumer-led to being user-led, and society perhaps moving to what Tracey called a ‘Capitalist +” model rather than “Post-Capitalist”.
I’m not too sure what the combination of talks really means for planners and the discipline in this “post-capitalist” world but it was certainly interesting. The more experienced I become in my job as a strategist, the more I think that while many elements of society are becoming complex, as long as businesses and organisations want to sell their stuff / ideas / services to people then there will be a role for me and other planners / strategists to help them understand how best to do that.
I caught up with John Griffiths at the end of the evening, and talked about some of the latest interviews of some of the first advertising account planners in preparation for the book he is working on with Tracey and that I’m really looking forward to, 98% Pure Potato.
Yesterday was the popular series curated by Neil Perkin of Only Dead Fish, Google Firestarters. I couldn’t help but notice that the room was full for this event compared to about half full the day before. The theme was “Mobile UX is eating the world” and again with three speakers, interestingly an all male panel compared to an all-female panel the previous day. I don’t mean any conclusions by the observations, I’m not sure if it had to do with the event organisers, themes, or more likely there was no particular reason for the observations.
The first speaker was Daniel O’Connell, Digital Experience Director at Barclays Bank. It was an inspired and excellent talk, brilliant to have the perspective of someone who used to work for an agency, now works on the client side, and telling us of the way large brands function that is so different from agencies. They have one of the best mobile banking apps around, and he explained some of the difficulties involved in getting new digital products through extensive cycles of testing and quality assurance, that represent magnitutes of time, effort and budget larger than the design side that – at least more traditional agencies (and maybe all of them) focus on.
Second we had Kartik, User experience architect and mobile specialist at DigitasLBi – interestingly the agency that had representatives at both evenings. Kartik had to take over from a colleague at the last minute. They had selected what they believed to be some of the best mobile user experience applications available at the moment, including favourites such as Citymapper, the game Monument Valley (Download it now, it’s beautiful!), Uber and Airbnb.
Last and definitely not least, my friend and ex-colleague Ume gave the best talk of both evenings – particularly because he shared an amazing project with us, including the process they have been going through at Us Two where he works. He works at a studio called Us Two, that interestingly designed the Barclays mobile application mentioned earlier, as well as the Monument Valley game. In a way they were the star of this mobile UX evening, which I think is entirely deserved. I also consider them friends given I’ve met them when they were only four or five people and starting to hire more people at the time. Ume had just started working on this project a year ago when I caught up with him last, and it was awesome to hear of the progress. He has been working on creating an open technology standard for the visually impaired to independently navigate their way through public spaces, in particular public transport. It’s a new non-profit organisation created in partnership with Us Two and the RLSB (Royal London Society for Blind People), called Wayfindr.
They have been conducting extensive research and testing with visually impaired and blind people to find a way to use technology in a consistent way and that can be used and repeated as an open standard, so that wayfinding applications like Google Maps or Citymapper can one day include audio instructions combined with beacons set in train stations that signal to the app to give audio navigation instructions to the person listening. Finding out about the research process and the current results was fascinating. They are looking for more sponsors as well as organisations that work with visually impaired and blind people to support their project, so if you know anyone that can help tell them to get in touch.
The project is visionary because it is exploring user experience and interfaces beyond the screens most of us are locked to with audio, working to include people rather than design exclusive products (that’s from Ume) and it’s solving a real user problem, empowering people to be more confident and independent in their use of public transports.
After a hiatus for a couple of years, the Strategist Survey (formerly Planner Survey) is back! If you’re a strategist, whatever the industry you’re working in we’d love to hear from you! The more strategists complete it, the better!
I joined Heather‘s team to support with the survey a few years ago, because I always enjoy meeting other strategic planners. Having access to the earlier survey results was very useful. It’s a way of participating in the community and I’m looking forward to the results of this year’s.
Heather has also just published a book, Brain Surfing. I was lucky to get an advance copy and just posted a review on Amazon. I’m copying my review below. Go get your copy now!
Brain Surfing is a fantastic combination of some of my favourite topics: travelling and marketing / advertising strategy. I always enjoy meeting fellow strategists around the world with whom I have interesting and enriching conversations over coffee, so this is like a concentrated expresso drip version of coffee meeting goodness in one book I wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else.
Heather has gathered and synthesised learnings from nine amazing professionals from different parts of the world, the kind of endeavour that takes, well in this case two weeks per person – 18 weeks – plus travelling and writing time after wards. All the best bits of that in a thoroughly enjoyable read. I just couldn’t put the book after starting and read it in a weekend.
The story flows seamlessly with a chapter per mentor, from Hong Kong to Edinburgh by way of a few other destinations around Europe, Asia, and the US. Each of the nine strategists have different specialisms in fields such as branding, business innovation, social media, advertising, and marketing. Each one of them contributed valuable stories and lessons to end their chapter. The conversations, research (including other must read book references), remarks and insights into the current state and evolution of the role of strategy and strategists in the creative communications industry are fantastic.
I highly recommend reading it, definitely a must for strategists in this field of work! Beyond that, I think it’s definitely relevant to anyone interested in business communications, perhaps for people who are questioning what they’re up to in their careers as well, and finally maybe for people who will enjoy a fun and novel approach to a travel book.
I read this article from Dave Trott in Campaign yesterday. He writes about content and makes excellent points about the advertising & marketing’s current obsession with this fabulous buzzword. It seems here to stay and agencies have built specialisms; based on it, so I’m not even sure it still qualifies as a buzz actually.
I’m also reading Bob Hoffman’s Men are from Mars, Consumers are from New Jersey at the moment and catching up on some of his blog posts I hadn’t read yet. I really like the Ad Contrarian. He really loves content too, so much so he publishes content on his blog for free first and then sells the same content in a book later. Genius. A virtuous circle I’m happy to participate in.
Dave’s article reminded me of a couple of Bob’s posts, where he dubbed “content” just the same old stuff we already had on the internet, only rebranded. Dave goes for a lorry (truck) metaphor that works really well too.
Both pretty much come to the same conclusion: it’s ultimately just stuff.
I agree it seems to be one of those buzzwords used to generalise and obfuscate advertising and marketing activities. Like we’re trying to disguise the fact we’re here to sell stuff, first and foremost. I’m not even pointing fingers, I’ve used the word in meetings many times, because it’s part of the jargon now. Even when I make a conscious effort to avoid it, it may well come into the conversation sooner than I think, and sometimes I feel like I almost need to use the buzzwords sometimes to be taken seriously.
I don’t have anything against content at all. How could I if it’s just stuff? It’s too wide a topic to even have an opinion about. Thinking about it, things I love could be categorised in two broad categories: people and content. I thought maybe weather might be another category but then realised the weather could perhaps be considered the content of the atmosphere or immediate environment. And even people start as the content of a womb and finish as the content of some urn or box. Someone with more scientific knowledge can correct me or add more accurate information.
I enjoyed Dave’s description of the creative industry’s fascination with ever improving delivery systems that become more important than what is being delivered. Similarly many catch-all words like content, used to simplify an increasingly complex communication and media landscape, are practical shorthands but it’s important to remember they often come at the price of clarity.
This is also making me think of Pepsico’s president of global beverages Brad Jakeman recent rant at a conference where he mostly berated agencies in the advertising and marketing industry for interrupting his Youtube videos. He also doesn’t like the word advertising. As if advertising wasn’t built on interruptions in the first place. Nobody ever wants the interruptions, nor do they want to be sold to. Yet people generally understand that they’re getting something for free or at a low cost in exchange for the course of activities to be interrupted for advertising and promotional messages. That’s the deal. It works for pre-rolls online, for ads on TV, or for interrupting your usual shopping experience with a 2 for 1 promotion. At the same time he’s saying the industry should be disruptive. Isn’t it the same thing?
PepsiCo have already spent considerable money on cause related and social media focused marketing with the Pepsi Refresh Project a few years ago, which was a fascinating exercise. They apparently spent about $20 million on it and the main Pepsi-Cola and Diet Pepsi brands each lost 5% market share in the same year. By all means, I would love for Pepsi to stop advertising with 30 second TV ads long enough for the rest of us to observe the consequences on their sales and share value. We’d finally get a chance to see how valuable television advertising really is (I suspect it’s still extremely valuable).
Brands are competing for people’s attention to sell stuff and can make videos, images, or anything as interesting and compelling as they want, if there’s no media for people too see it, the likelihood of the stuff being seen (or I guess consumed) is close to null. I don’t know the number of Youtube videos siting there with 0 views but I bet there’s quite a few of them hanging around. And ultimately if you really want people to be interested go and focus on what your product or service is first.
This is where Dave’s truck / lorry analogy is key, there’s nothing wrong with being in the shipping business, it’s just that I think he’s right in pointing out that we might be losing view of what it’s in it. Amazon’s delivery services could be fast as lightning or dropped by a drone, but if they don’t deliver what I ordered I’ll definitely be disappointed. To bring this to a real world example, I used to work on the Subway (sandwiches) account while at Saatchi & Saatchi in Singapore. Whatever you might think of the product, it’s an interesting business because it’s entirely made of franchises, and a board of elected franchisees works alongside the brand marketing team. They have final say over what they do with their marketing budget. They are most often small to medium business owners with little time for nonsense, and it kept our work very grounded in their sales realities. When we pitched a creative idea for a campaign or worked on the annual planning, we had to show them a+b how much they stood to gain or loose with the promotions in a store, in addition to why the concept would be a good idea for the brand. I really enjoyed it. It was challenging but also offered interesting opportunities to produce measurable and effective marketing activities.
We concerned ourselves with what was carried in the lorry, how well the lorry worked, what it looked like, where it was going, and even who the stuff on board was for.
One thing is sure, if we’re really in the shipping business now it’s a good thing I’m finally bothering to learn to drive and pass my license this year.
I had organised to meet my friend James in Borough Market last month while I was in London. It used to be one of my main haunts for a few years, while I worked at iris. I lived nearby so I could be in walking distance to the office. I was already salivating at the idea of eating one of Kappacasein’s famed grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. I hadn’t had one in two years, and I think it’s still the best in town. I know some have tried to imitate them. I remember trying a grilled cheese sandwich in Maltby Street Market last year and it wasn’t as good. But I digress.
It was a lovely sunny morning and the streets around Borough Market were already crowded. I hopped off a bus at London Bridge and quickly made my way over to the tube exit where we’d organised meeting, thinking I was already late. I just about walked past a sign, my brain assembling bits of information at the same time.
FREE. Ice cream. Insect-like icon?
I stopped and turned around to check the red sign. Given the name of this blog, you can imagine I just can’t ignore a promotional sign advertising free ice cream, with the added intrigue of an insect looking icon. It piqued my curiosity. It’s like they made it for me. It’s a funny feeling to know or imagine that you are the target audience of a piece of communication. I didn’t think that on the spot. A that first moment I was just intrigued and curious enough to stop, and then excited about the promotion.
As I looked at the sign, a guy in a red shirt smiled at me, asked if I wanted to try the insect ice cream, and handed over a flyer featuring The Economist logo. Now the red made sense. The insect ice cream still didn’t.
I smiled back and said something like: “Hi! Really!? But what does The Economist have to do with giving out free insect ice cream?”
You might have come across the promotion already, I checked as I’m writing this and I see this promotion garnered some press in London and Hong Kong over the summer.
They went on to explain that The Economist had run a feature about the future of food being insects, and that they thought it would be a fun device to sell a promotional offer for The Economist: 12 weekly issues for £12 and a free book.
Only a few months before, my brother’s business partner Omar had featured an insect dish in his fun “Nipponexican” inspired menu for his two-week chef’s residency at Carousel. He gave a short speech about insects being a sustainable future for food worldwide before serving a grasshopper taco. I was tuned in to the idea.
One of the friendly attendants serving insect ice cream
There were two flavours available, and that’s when I realised it was “normal” flavoured ice cream with insect bits, rather than insect flavoured ice cream. Chocolate with grasshopper bits, and strawberry with mealworms. My mate James was running late so I had time to chat with the friendly attendants taking care of the promotion while tasting the ice cream. It was pretty good, just like good ice cream with crunchy bits.
I’ve tried crickets and grasshoppers a few times now, and I find it has a kind of texture that breaks. I might have small flat bits that get stuck in my teeth. Other than knowing I was eating insects, it didn’t that make much difference to the ice cream flavour. I recommend trying insects out if you have the opportunity. It’s like most food in that it really depends how it’s prepared – once you get over what it looks like.
Now back to the promotion and feeling like I’m the target audience. By the time my friend James arrived and was also trying the ice cream I had signed up for the promotion. He told me he was already a subscriber. This is a little embarrassing. I like to think I’m the kind of person that reads The Economist. Except I’m really the kind of person that very rarely buys magazines and doesn’t go beyond paywalls online. The fact is I rarely read The Economist, even if I like the idea of it. I mostly stopped buying print magazines when I was still a teenager, and now I have so many articles online to read for free I don’t bother paying for subscriptions. I’m also not loyal to any one publication. I must have read like three articles on the website since I subscribed. Paying £12 isn’t enough to change my reading behaviour, which is kind of interesting in itself.
However I am sensitive to ice cream and intriguing promotions. I think the main lesson here is that if you really bother thinking about your promotional activity with a specific kind of person in mind then it doesn’t feel like a hard sell on the receiving end. That also means the risk of excluding the people who just won’t go near insect ice cream, by the way. I think it’s better than a middle road of nobody caring at all. I enjoyed spending a few minutes having a new experience, a useful book (Pocket World in Figures), and the opportunity to trial The Economist. That alone was probably worth my time and money.
This is a tough one. I think it’s one of the best marketing ideas I’ve seen in a while on one hand, and depressingly ridiculous at the same time on the other. My cynical side is struggling with the exciting possibility of eating a McWhopper, and even the idea of bringing peace and type 2 diabetes to the world one McWhopper at a time! And there goes my cynical side again. I guess I could also go and buy a Big Mac and a Whopper and just put them together myself without waiting for World Peace Day, but that’s besides the point.
It is definitely and already great for Burger King, and I’m pretty sure it’s already unexpected (?) positive media exposure for McDonald’s, and they haven’t even responded as far as I know.
Is it any good for the World Peace Day and the Peace One Day NGO..? That’s just one of the other areas I have doubts about.
My first impression is that the Peace One Day’s message is drowned out. It’s certainly benefiting the burger makers. Let’s say it is about making the world a better place, if so then how are they doing that exactly? Are they handing out some cash on the 21st September? How would that cash be spent?
My second set of doubts come from looking at Peace One Day – I’ve only had a quick look at their site and a couple of video so I admit I could be missing information. Their main message seems to be: ” Awareness creates action, and action saves lives”. I saw it on their website, and on this McWhopper video.
I’m not convinced awareness creates much immediate action. I knew smoking was bad and I kept smoking for years, it’s an easy example and I’m sure we can easily think of similar ones. And certainly not all action saves lives. Some actions even eliminate them, actually.
I also thought of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge from last year, and the numbers tell us the viral sensation raised $115 million for the ALS Association. They also produced a nice infographic to tell people how they’ve been spending the money so far. I find interesting in comparison that the whatever you thought of the ALS ice bucket videos, the message was pretty clear and straightforward: Throw an ice bucket over your head, commit to donating to the ALS Association, and nominate friends in your video to keep the chain going. The ALS Association is spending the money on research, patient care, etc.
I don’t see this kind of simple message with the McWhopper Proposal, and certainly not the difference it’s going to make for peace in the world. The ice bucket videos weren’t branded, so maybe it’s just a bad comparison altogether. World Peace is a great ideal but not as simple as researching a cure to a disease, even the most difficult one.
The video suggests Atlanta as a middle ground between two US locations, none of which are or have been at war for a long time. Maybe well played Burger King, but what are you actually going to do in the name of World Peace then..?
I agree that these companies have the kind of size and influence required to make changes on society, but in this context I fail to see how Burger King and McDonald’s can make a positive difference towards peace in the world with a McWhopper restaurant in Atlanta. If anything, it may just be showing how much more people like fast food than the idea of world peace.
I also think fun and play is important, and if that’s only what Burger King has in mind, then great. That said, just tell us what this is actually doing for World Peace, because I don’t think the so called “war” between two fast food giants is what the UN wanted to solve by creating the International Day of Peace.
Bronze plate printing an advertising for the Liu family needle shop at Jinan. Song Dynasty era (960 – 1270). One of the earliest existing examples of printed advertising.
At first I didn’t take any special notice at the title, I might have been paying more attention to the Cannes Lions part of it. I was mostly nodding to myself in agreement at several points made as I was reading. And then towards the end the title question appears again and that’s when I really took notice:
“The question for the future, then, is this: will advertising ever again be about the people it serves?”
You might think I’m being too concerned with semantics, and you might be right. I may well be focusing on a different definition of the word service than Tracy had in mind. In any case, I thought: “Wait a second, when has advertising ever been about serving the people it’s made for? Who does advertising serve?”
Just to be clear, I enjoyed the article and I agree with Tracy’s interesting points made about creativity vs. media and technology, about the fascination of the industry with technology at the detriment of creativity or better understanding people.
At the same time I can’t help but thinking there is a slight leap made in the article that jarred with me. It’s related to the word serving, and the notion of service. I went to read the Wikipedia article about advertising for a quick history overview, to make sure I wasn’t missing anything obvious about the origins and history of the practice.
I picked the image above from there, apparently one of the first still existing examples of printed branding and advertising, for a needle shop in Song Dynasty China, between 927 – 1270. It seems like an old enough example to suit my purpose. Along with the rabbit brand logo representing the Liu family name, the text above and below reads:
“We buy high quality steel rods and make fine quality needles, to be ready for use at home in no time”
Who does this serve, first and foremost? I say it serves the Liu family needle shop. Advertising serves the client, the company advertising or promoting their products and services. It doesn’t serve the consumer, not first at least. I don’t think it ever has, so it would be difficult to have it be about that again.
Advertising, the modern 20th century style of it in particular, is about creating demand and persuading people they want or need something, whether they actually need those things or not, or whether it’s useful or not.
Both World Wars and cigarette advertising are famously what allowed the advertising to grow into what it is has become today. I remember visiting the Weapons of Mass Communication exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum years ago, which was very interesting in that regard. With what we know about the ill-health effects of smoking nowadays, I find it tough to say those ads were serving the people they were destined for.
I absolutely agree it’s ideal if advertising is made for the people it is destined to. It is better when ads are concerned with real people, their lives, motivations, feelings, concerns, etc. In rare cases I’m even inclined to believe advertising serves the consumers as well as the advertiser.
It is probably part of the reasons most people dislike advertising: everybody knows it’s trying to have them do something, most often buy something – possibly against their will. Nobody likes the impression of being influenced or manipulated against their will.
I’m writing all this because I believe it is possible for advertising to be relevant, entertaining, and even useful to the people it is destined for. I think that’s an important point the heart of Tracy’s article, and if I’m correct in my understanding I agree. I don’t know if there was a time the industry did a better job at that, but I’m sure it can do better now. I aim to help with that in the work I do with clients, though I admit I don’t always succeed as much as I’d like to.
I also think mass communication can be used to make a positive difference for people. I recently found out about The International Exchange and it’s great to see this type of exciting projects in the world, committed to making a difference with the help of communication professionals.
That said, I’m questioning the distinction of who advertising serves because I think it’s important to be honest and realistic about it. The next question could be: if it serves the advertisers, then how can it serve them better by being for the people they are targeting?
To finish on a another thought, I particularly liked this definition of service in the Merriam-Webster:
2c. Contribution to the welfare of others.
Going one step further with this definition in mind, if advertising served the people it is targeted to, then how would it influence products and services being developed by advertisers, rather than the other way round?
22/08/2015 update:
In the middle of an unrelated conversation a day after writing this, a friend reminded me that the origins of the verb to serve and servir (we were talking in French) are from the latin servire, literally “be enslaved”, related to servus “slave”. The meaning then extended to being a servant later on, and then even later into the figurative kind of meaning I used for this post.
Taken in this sense, the title also makes for an interesting question to ponder: Who is enslaved to advertising?
As some of you may be aware I enjoy craft beers and was also home brewing beer. The interest was shared with my good friend and previously colleague JP in Singapore. Given we had a few evenings of enjoying craft beers we thought it would be a good idea to combine two of our interests, namely beer and advertising, into a podcast or video show.
We only recorded a few test episodes that weren't particularly well prepared (to say the least), though I still think it had some potential. I decided to leave Singapore and move back to Europe shortly after, and while we recorded another test via a video conversation (that I might publish as well), the idea has mostly been taking virtual dust in a corner of my hard drive.
I talked about it with JP and thought we might as well publish it and let people be judge of the potential for some kind of show, or lack thereof. Apologies in advance for the bad video quality, it's raw and was shot with a point & shoot camera. Plus batteries ran out in the middle of recording, we didn't realise until later and we only saved the early portion of it. I'm eating almost throughout - lesson learned, it's not recommended for recording video. Enjoy.
Video advertising credits (also watchable in better quality):
It's a day late but in any case here are my favourite videos from the past week.
At the Cannes advertising event, or rather festival of creativity as it is now called, apparently the most awarded campaign this year celebrates some of the basest greedy human behaviours in a desperate plea for attention. And apparently it worked out well for them. I don't like it. Particularly that it's about Christmas, and it's a time of year I love to spend with loved ones and sharing moments where I don't behave like a selfish spoiled brat.
This Lacoste video on the other hand, is gorgeous - quite the opposite and a beautiful film to boot.
John Oliver keeps kicking ass in his new weekly news show, and HBO publishes whole segments on Youtube which is awesome:
13/07/2014 Update: I haven't updated this segment last week or yesterday. I think I'll drop the idea, still considering. I was thinking it might make for easy blogging, which may be true but it's also lazy blogging. I'll think about it and post another update by end of July on the topic.
Happy summer solstice everyone! I just realised I spent most of the longest day of the year working on a video edit for an upcoming podcast project I'm working on. Oh well. I diverge, anyways the point here is I'm starting a new series of simple posts, with a little alliteration for title and the videos I've enjoyed watching the most in the past week.
First up, I don't exactly know how I missed this campaign when it first came out in 2012 but in any case if ever you haven't seen this fantastic ad for Southern Comfort, check it out:
By far one of the best I've seen in a while, and the music excellent too. I actually have all the ads running in loops on my projector screen as I'm writing this. The others in the series are great too, you can watch them over on their Youtube channel. I believe we can thank W+K for those. I wonder if selling more Southern Comfort. They did keep with the campaign since 2012 so I guess it must be.
Next, I was just catching up with John Oliver's new show on HBO Last Week Tonight, there are several brilliant segments available on Youtube, and amongst the ones I watched a special mention of serious laughing out loud action goes to this special letter from POM Wonderful, the makers of the pomegranate juice, which I also know for being the title sponsors of Morgan Spurlock's documentary The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. I still haven't tried the juice but seeing this I'm not sure I want to...
It is the Cannes Lions international advertising festival at the moment, so I reviewed some of the advertising work from the past year the industry press is saying will probably win awards, I had seen quite a few though this one I hadn't and is really compelling. A bit offbeat and an original, inspiring way of communicating a public service announcement:
I'll finish with the pretty amazing new OK GO music video, mind blowing once again. This time they are playing with optical illusions in a huge warehouse:
In my last post, I wrote about the idea of celebrating the bottom of the ad barrel with a series of posts. Yesterday I spent some time looking for a number of ads, wondering where to find these ads and how to evaluate what would be worth writing about while struggling to keep my eyes open watching one boring ad after another. In hindsight perhaps not the best use of two hours of free weekend time...
This made me think of a slightly different approach because there's no hope for any kind of objectivity in this exercise. I'll primarily try to keep note of ads I'm shown in Youtube pre-rolls that bore or irritate me, and I'll talk about them in the blog while attempting to recreate the creative brief that could have led to the creation of the ad. Of course everything I'll be writing in these kinds of posts is humorous parody (hopefully, mostly).
Without further ado, let's talk about this series of Gillette videos. I was shown this one in pre-roll:
I was not too happy to watch this ad again, but in the spirit and intention of benefiting the rest of humanity with marketing pseudo-science, I did anyways. I still remember being shown this ad on Youtube, of course while trying to watch another ad. They use the first five seconds before users can skip the ad effectively to capture the male users' attention, like blasting full fog lights from the speeding Gillette road train to the unsuspecting stag quietly crossing the road.
'Hey guys, I know there's a lot of rumours out there flying around about body-trimming' - 3 seconds in.
The poor target is hooked. As a naive consumer the questions immediately come to mind: Who is this guy and why does he look bare chested? Is he in a shower? Why is he talking to me like I'm his friend? Am I friends with this guy? Am I in the bathroom with him? Are there really rumours flying around about body-trimming? Should I know about them? Am I out of the loop? Why does he look so creepy?
The paralysis and horror shape up for the following few seconds. I don't skip the ad, I just viscerally need to understand why this person wants to tell me about chest shaving so badly. And maybe there's something I should know about it. We're at 15 seconds in the video. My finger is ready to click the skip button on my mouse but I can't seem to. 18 seconds. Now he's caressing his chest hair. This is really weird. His goatee is weird too. He's basically just taken a whole minute pretending to teach me something but telling me I can use shaving gel and start shaving / trimming under the shower. I'm pretty sure I knew that. I stopped before the end of the long video the first time, but the memory will be there forever and I would like to share it with you.
Let's analyse it a bit further, we'll go through the usual steps and imagine what the creative brief might have looked like. The creative brief is the document that usually leads to the advertising idea and execution for an ad like this one, it typically has the following elements:
Business context and objective:
While Gillette are usually content with getting the male audience excited about their new products by borrowing visual tropes from high end luxury and sports car adverts, this time they would like to create a meaningful and lasting personal connection with the guys. Plus they need to sell a huge bunch of trimmers, and if more men shaved more hair in more places, they would obviously buy more blades. Target audience:
Men, ideally of the young Millennial variety but we'll talk about 18-45 years old to be on the safe side. Most of them shave, and even bearded hipsters trim. Plus a recent survey mentioned in Cosmopolitan states that 95% of men now 'manscape' so it is widely known and accepted. Audience insight:
Given 95% of young men already manscape, the leftover 5% probably need help to figure it out. Also men really appreciate being told how to do stuff like shaving, many would like the idea of a shaving companion with them in the bathroom. Single-minded message:
Gillette is men's friendly manscaping confidant. Thought-starters:
- Perhaps a series of videos, like on Youtube, there are plenty of 'how to' videos
- Feature creepy guys inviting the unsuspecting watcher in their shower
- These could be actually pretty useful and informative videos for those who have questions about manscaping, but we'd like to make sure we remove useful information from the video in order to amp up the personal connection opportunities. For example, some men might have legitimate questions about shaving with or against the grain; do not answer those or provide an opinion. It's a trap.
- Ensure the media plan reaches people at strange times. If advertising on Youtube, no frequency cap required.
I'll finish with my actual opinion about the ad and a question. Overall I think there might be a decent idea in there somewhere but it's badly executed. I started watching a few other videos in the series and didn't find them any better.
I find the guys featured creepy, is it me or do others think that too?
I haven't wrote about advertising for a while, and given I'd like to ramp up activity around here I thought it would be a good idea to come up with a new series of blog posts, something I could write about on a weekly basis perhaps.
It is pretty commonly accepted that 99% of ads are pretty boring, bad, run of the mill, etc. Just turn your TV on and see for yourself. Or walk outside and notice billboards, read a magazine, or pay attention to banners online. There is a lot of industry press and awards for the 1% of good work out there, so that's covered, but what about the wide majority of ads that allow admen to eat and pay bills every month? And what about the 1% at the other end of the spectrum, the very worst stuff, the boring bottom of the ad barrel? Sure the catastrophes get some press, like really stupidly offensive stuff, but how about the mind-numbingly mundane..?
I feel not enough is written about bad ads and bad practices. Well actually, there are typically a few posts every year about the worst ads. I just want to write about it, I think it could be fun. So this upcoming series of posts aims to celebrate or at least provide some online coverage for the worst and most boring ad campaigns out there. Some of my commentary might be insightful, but don't hope for too much of that.
Of course given 99% of ads are pretty bad to start with, where do you find the really boring ones? It is going to be pretty subjective. Plus I work in advertising too so I might have to be slightly careful... (Perhaps a good time to remind everyone that this blog is personal and doesn't represent the views of my employer).
This is one of the main reasons I'm starting with an opening post, if you have suggestions or ideas as to how or where to find these ads please tell me in the comments. In my experience and given I don't watch TV, Youtube pre-rolls are decent place to start - I'll pay more attention. If I keep at it properly, there could be some kind of small competition for vote for the worst ads... Maybe Ads of the World can help too? I'll be doing some more research.
If you have more ideas, please keep in touch in the comments, or Twitter, or you can send me an email via about.me. Thanks!
I hadn't yet heard of Google's project Re: Brief and came across the full version documentary that was released a couple of days ago. Cheers to Ben for the link. I watched it this afternoon, here are some thoughts about it. For info, this video is a project initiated by Google to bring several advertising people who created iconic ads out of retirement and bring them on with young teams with the intention to use their experience and insights for new digital media advertising. The video director is Doug Pray who also created the excellent Art & Copy documentary.
Firstly it's very "meta" to such extent I think the ultimate person targeted for this video is basically Abed from Community (or an advertising equivalent if such a person exists). It's a documentary that is an advert from Google for Google, featuring advertising people, talking about advertising and working on new adverts for other brands and overall celebrating advertising for advertising people. It's like Inception for advertising. An ad inside an ad inside an ad. It's certainly heavy on advertising and technology geekiness and the main audience is most certainly that: people who work in marketing and advertising. Which makes perfect sense as that's who Google sells their ad technologies and platforms to.
It is an excellent idea from Google to promote themselves and by the end of it they're probably the brand coming out with the most original idea of all the ones covered, well obviously given none of the other ones would have come to life otherwise. I recommend watching it if you're in this business or if you're interested in finding out about the inner workings of advertising - I'd also recommend watching Morgan Spurlock's brilliant The Greatest Movie Ever Sold if you haven't seen it, just for some counter-balance on the advertising theme.
[There are probably some spoilers following and given it's a geeky advertising documentary, these are geeky advertising thoughts]
The subtitle is 'A Film about Re-imagining Advertising' and that part I was kind of disappointed about, because they don't actually re-imagine anything about advertising. On the contrary, they focus on the heart of the ideas and concepts that the iconic ads they had made in the 60's and 70's were about, regardless of digital media and online display advertising. Which is great, and I think that's how things should be - but it's not really re-imagining anything. It's a good sub-title in that it helped make me want to watch the hour long documentary, though not as strongly as 'from the director of Art & Copy and the makers of these famous old ads for Coke, Avis, Alka-Seltzer, and Volvo'. They start on a premise that they want to rethink online display advertising because it hasn't really changed in 15 years but I don't feel there's any progress from that particular perspective by the end of the movie - after all the format of TV ads haven't changed that much either and there is nothing wrong with them (or is there? There are no direct stats as for online banners). Maybe they'll bring out some results from the campaigns later..? They are focusing on narrative, storytelling, and extensive technology for thei ads. That is no different from the celebrated campaigns these days; I haven't really followed Cannes this year yet but let's say Old Spice for an easy relatively recent reference.
I was disappointed by the lack of current context in terms of media consumption habits for the audiences brands are trying to reach in advertising. There were a few mentions in terms of media that struck me: Cohen and Pasqualina (I think it was Cohen's comment) say: "Three [TV] Networks, when you put it on, everybody saw it". In the following scene Amil Gargano says about the Volvo ads: "When you ran an ad like that in a full page bleed in Life magazine [...] it jumped off the page."
While these creatives are rightly focusing on the concepts and ideas for the ads, their experience of their success seems interestingly tied to media and the media context of the time they were ran. There was a lot of mentions in the film of very complex technologies and the huge amount of things you could do with them though almost no mention of the people these online ads are trying to reach and their behaviour, only mentions of the technology available. There are hundreds of TV networks in the US alone, over a trillion websites people can visit, people surf the web and multi-task across different devices like using their laptop or iPad while watching TV, the print industry is dying right now, many magazines are closing down, etc. I am doubtful a full page ad in Life magazine has the same impact today than it had in 1962.
Or does it?
I wouldn't know, the last time I bought a magazine was at least 2 years ago. The film is about re-imagining these classic ad ideas and expanding them using complicated digital technologies for advertising which is great and they are or at least seem to be great digital executions, but not really anything about the premise of innovating on online or mobile display ads. They talk about interactive banners on mobile and tablets in the film, I have never clicked on a banner with my mobile phone or iPod Touch - I don't know if many people do.
My best guess as to the intention is to inspire more brands to take risks with digital advertising as well as storytelling. Again, I'd be really curious to see results from these campaigns. Effectiveness and proof - if at all possible - is what might encourage more brands to go in these directions, because they are business decisions first. If there is no conclusive proof, I wouldn't be surprised if many marketing directors choose to keep investing in what they know or feel works: TV advertising and online search ads for example, and reserve these kinds of neat digital media cross-media shiny things for a day they'll have extra budgets to play around with...
All that aside, the ideas and executions they came up with for Coke, Volvo, Avis, and Alka Seltzer are really lovely, and I thought the most interesting common denominator - aside perhaps from Ralph - is that they are about real people and real stories enabled and/or with nifty technology. Coke in particular given people played and had a direct experience with the interactive Coke machines was probably the one that really stood out for me. Volvo and the 3 million miles car seems full of lovely stories though Honda also had a similar activity with someone completing one million miles with their Honda Accord last year.
Avis was interestingly the only of the four brands who rejected the first idea and they told them what they wanted and the team went and created something to match. As Paula Green says: "It was a very important learning meeting because in saying what [the client] thought, she outlined a lot of stuff that we didn't know". Or in different words from Morgan Spurlock after his pitch meeting with POM Wonderful in The Greatest Movie Ever Sold: "Then basically they told me what they wanted me to pitch". A reminder of how important it is to get as much information and the right kind of information out of clients for a brief.
Tell me what you think of the film if you watch it!
