Noticing media: Disneyland Paris par Toutatis!

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.

Introducing Playful Strategy

[Subscribe or listen to the podcast on: Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play Music, RSS feed. Please share with friends, and give the show a 5* rating and a review if you enjoy it!]

I can’t believe it’s already been nearly three months since the last episode I published for the podcast!

I’ve been spending time formulating what Ice Cream for Everyone is about, and finally got to a version I’m happy to share, and is on my updated website front page as well.

In the episode I’m quite simply sharing what I’ve been up to over the winter, this sort of manifesto, and a set of personal beliefs that I’ve been working on and helped me refine what the website, and this show is about – without changing much or anything of what I’ve been doing so far.

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IceCream for Everyone is a Playful Strategy Consultancy.

IceCream is often associated with happy thoughts and memories, perhaps ofchildhood, simpler times.

IceCream is also surprisingly complex chemically, technically an emulsion, acombination of two or more liquids that don’t normally mix together.

IceCream exists in a seemingly contradictory and ephemeral state, creating adelicious combination as a result.

Icecream requires the right ingredients, methodology, and temperature to go fromcomplex chemistry to a simple desert. Similarly, we use creativity, play, andcommunication to go from complex situations to simple solutions with ourclients.

Webelieve play, communication, and creativity are powerful assets for thedevelopment of businesses, brands, and everyone.

Webelieve dogma, bigotry, and blandness, are a hindrance to the development ofbusinesses, brands, and everyone.

Playfulstrategy is the application and use of structured play, and sometimes games, todefine and solve challenges in a business environment.

Playfulstrategy provides a recreational oriented state of mind fostering high levels ofreasoning, insightful problem solving, and empathy for participants.

Weplay with elements that don’t seem to normally mix together and combine theminto powerful ideas with our clients.

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A few of the things mentioned in the episode:

• Faris & Rosie Yakob’s Genius Steals Consultancy
• Willem’s Guest edition of the Strands of Genius email newsletter
• Sweathead podcast with Mark Pollard
• The Strategy Inside Everything with Adam Pierno
• Sam Harris introduces the Waking Up Course (10 min audio)
• Penguin Talks, The Future of Education with Pr. Yuval Noah Harari and Russell Brand (Youtube)
• Russian Doll (Netflix)
• Dave Made A Maze
• American Gods (Novel & TV Series)

Spring in Full Swing: Bond Villain & Branding May Day [Ice Cream Sundae]

Image Credit: Takashi .M

This newsletter was originally published via email on the 1st May 2016. You can also sign up to receive Ice Cream Sundae with the form on the right-hand side column or here (The newsletter format shifted from long to shorter form since).

Sometimes the date is helpful to avoid spending that much time wondering what I should be writing about. Easter was the last seasonal event I wrote about and I’m gladly going with the easy route here making this Sundae about May Day.

About help, I just found out the Mayday distress signal used mainly by aviators and mariners come from the French “m’aidez” Short for “venez m’aider” (Come and help me). A radio officer in London Croydon Airport invented the procedure in 1923. Much of the air traffic was between London and Paris at the time, so they wanted to make sure they came up with something everybody could easily understand. When used, the signal is to be repeated three times to make sure it isn’t mistaken for another similar sounding word.

May 1^st is a public holiday in many countries, including the UK. When I moved to London I remember asking colleagues what the May Day Bank Holiday was celebrating and none of them knew. The consensus seemed to be that I should be happy it’s a public holiday and enjoy it without asking so many questions.

One of my all time favourite operas, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, was performed for the very first time in Vienna on May 1^st 1786. 

The beautiful overture is an excellent excuse to provide a musical theme while you’re reading this. I’m listening to the whole opera while writing this.

May Day is an ancient spring festival celebrated in many European countries, rooted in pagan traditions. It apparently comes from Floralia, the Roman spring festival in honour of Flora, Goddess of flowers. In Latin, it was called “Ludi Florae” The Games of Flora. You probably know by now that I like games so that got my attention. The Roman festival celebrated flowers and fertility in a pleasure and fun seeking atmosphere. The Games were organised for the people of Rome, and remaining texts from that time tell us the entertainment in 68 AD featured a tightrope-walking elephant. In case you’re wondering what that looks like, here’s a video of an elephant walking a tightrope in a Thai zoo. I’m not sure what they have to do to train the elephant or if it’s a good thing for the animal altogether.

As mentioned, flowers are an important part of the celebrations. In France, it’s traditional to buy and gift a few strands of “muguet”, lily of the valley. Legend says giving the small white bell shaped flowers goes back to the 16^th century. French king Charles IX was visiting the South of France with his mother Catherine de Medici in 1560, their host Chevalier Louis de Girard de Maisonforte gave the young king the flowers from his garden for good luck. The king appreciated the gesture and decided to make it a recurring event. He would give ladies of the court lily of the valley every spring. The tradition quickly extended to the whole country and is alive and well to this day. There’s a folk song about it too.

A slightly mysterious recurring tradition of May Day celebrations is the Maypole erected in the centre of the festival.

Typically a wooden pole, sometimes decorated with greenery, flowers and ribbons tied to it. It is primarily found in Germanic countries, and people dance around the maypole during the spring festivities. We know the origins of the practice are old, dating from days of Germanic paganism of the Iron Age (Which includes Norse religions and more).

Unfortunately the exact significance of the maypole was lost on the way, even though the tradition remains. Folklorists continuously debate the meaning of the maypole. Some believe there is a relation with the Norse cosmological tree connecting the nine worlds, Yggdrasil. Others think it is a symbol of the world axis. Some ideas are also related to the pole as a phallic symbol and related to the idea of fertility associated with spring celebrations. Unsurprisingly people like Sigmund Freud supported these ideas.

As far as I know it is the rare seasonal holiday that doesn’t boast much by way of promotional marketing stuff. Some stores have sales going on but advertising symbols don’t immediately come to mind as they do for Easter or Christmas – speaking for myself in any case.

I wonder what the promotions or advertised products and services could look like for May Day.

Pizza Hut spring flower topping special? KFC Zinger spring chicken combo? How about a Durex branded maypole? That might be a step too far. To keep this on safer grounds, McDonalds could make up a May Day Menu featuring a spring onion burger.

These may or may not sound like fun. If I were to devise a marketing and brand strategy, I would start by identifying and specifying the challenge to solve or opportunity to take advantage of. Until this is clearly established there is no particular frame of reference to evaluate whether spending your marketing budget on sponsoring a series of May Day village fetes may or may not be a better idea than organising a competition for a lucky customer to win a dream summer holiday.

In a similar fashion to the kind of freedom the School of Communications Arts 2.0 students I’ve been recently mentoring have, May Day is an open brief here so I can make up whatever I want as long as it sounds plausible.

I could choose a specific brand and think about the marketing activities they could run at this time of year. As strange as it may sound, in this case it sounds like more fun to imagine for a moment I’m in charge of the brand called May Day. My next steps would be to ask many questions, such as: What are the values and attributes of this brand? What does May Day represent for people?

I was also reminded May Day is a James Bond villain’s henchwoman in A View to a Kill, the 1985 film starring Roger Moore, Christopher Walken as the villain Max Zorin who wants to destroy the Silicon Valley. Grace Jones plays May Day, Zorin’s lover and chief henchwoman, apparently ridiculous strong. While an interesting anecdote, it’s unlikely to be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of May Day as a brand. We can probably safely remove it from the equation.

As stated earlier on, May Day is about springtime. It’s about the revival of life after sleepy winter. It’s about days getting longer, the sun getting slightly warmer, bright colours, flowers and fertility. I could keep writing more concepts and in a professional setting I probably would because there is interesting meaning to consider tied to all these ideas. This is an enjoyable part of my job that brings us into the territory of semiotics, that is the study of meaning-making, sign processes and meaningful communication.

The main message of May Day as a brand could be something like: “spring in full swing.”

The mood is merry, chipper.

The function is to celebrate life.

The action involves dancing.

The effect is infectious fun.

The result is fertility, the creation of new life.

If we were designing a logo and branded materials, we’d likely choose green as a dominant colour.

This would be the start of defining the May Day brand. If we pursued this into strategic territories, we might consider the place of that event in the yearly calendar and how it differs or resembles other holidays like Christmas or Halloween. This is only one of the many aspects we could research to further develop this as a brand strategy.

While I’ve occasionally heard people tell me this kind of branding exercise is a lot of hot air (and admittedly in some cases I agree with them), when taken seriously and done well the brand strategy can and should form a strong foundation for any business. This can meaningfully inform all the business activities from product design, distribution, human resources, internal communications, marketing communications or customer service.

Possibly and ironically jarring with all this branding and marketing jargon, May 1^st is also the International Worker’s Day.

It’s a celebration of working classes and labourers promoted by international labour movements, socialists, communists and anarchists. The date was chosen in 1889 by newly formed Second International in Paris.

The date was chosen to commemorate the Haymarket Affair, the aftermath of a bombing that took place during a labour demonstration on May 4^th 1886 in Chicago. What started as a peaceful rally of workers striking and demanding eight-hour working days turned ugly when someone threw a dynamite bomb at the police. Seven officers and at least four civilians were killed, and many more wounded. May Day has become focal point for demonstrations by various worker’s unions, socialist, communist and anarchist groups.

When I lived in Perpignan last year, the building of the largest union in France, la CGT (General Confederation of Labour), happened to be across the small street from my room. That’s why on May 1^st last year loud recording & chanting of The Internationale by a group of unionists suddenly woke me up. That was followed by several speeches reminding me of all the progress acquired by workers over the years, from eight-hour long working days to paid holidays, as well as what was left to struggle about in their view. Speeches were interspersed with partisan and revolutionary song favourites like Motivés, Bella Ciao or La Cucaracha.

This is a whole different direction you could easily go in for a May Day brand strategy, worker’s have been associating meaning to the day for over a century and some parts of the world brand idea associations with worker’s rights and struggles are perhaps stronger than ideas of spring time and fertility.

There is rarely only one best answer to developing a brand strategy. In the meantime, whether you associate today with spring or with worker’s rights, have a fantastic Sunday however you celebrate it.

If you’d like to check out more Ice Cream content, I’ve published a fun conversation with Alexis Kennedy and Cash DeCuir from FailBetter Games who design and develop a fabulous online subterranean Victorian Gothic narrative game called Fallen London. The game is available for free online and now on iPhone application as well if you want to check it out.

If you’ve enjoyed reading this newsletter and know a friend who will too, please forward it on to them.

Till’ next week!

Best,
Willem

Brain Surfing & Strategist Survey

Image Credit: Afu007

 

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.

Insect Ice Cream near Borough Market

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.

What is Luxury?

I’m finding that one of the benefits of traveling to London temporarily is that I’m paying more attention to art exhibitions, and cultural events happening while I’m visiting. With that in mind and while I’ve been in London to meet with existing and potential new clients, I also reserved a couple of hours – luckily on a fine and sunny morning – to visit this exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum before it ends in about 10 days. It’s free and I recommend checking it out.

The exhibition, created in partnership with the UK Crafts Council, is an inquiry into the meaning of luxury through selected attributes. The curated craft and design pieces mean to illustrate and interrogate different aspects of luxury.

The first room, “Creating Luxury” featured two exhibits for several attributes, such as passion, exclusivity, innovation, etc. Some of these were pretty amazing pieces, with interesting choices of pieces to present contrast, such as an opulent yet described as very uncomfortable howdah (the chair sitting atop an elephant in India) under the term “pleasure”.

The second room, “A Space for Time” and The Future of Luxury” featured very interesting installations, projects, and design pieces questioning the place of luxury items: carbon based items shaped into diamonds which don’t have the same value as mined diamonds, a machine printing uniquely curated booklets of images randomly pulled from the Internet, a short film tracing the journey across the world and the people involved in crafting one unique luxury piece.

Ultimately, the exhibition invites visitors to consider what their own personal version of luxury is or might be.

I’m sitting in a coffee shop in London as I’m writing this, stricken by a certain duality: feeling privileged and lucky to manage my own time and location, while looking out the window at a continuously rainy and grey street which doesn’t look like anything luxurious at all. Being independent certainly carries benefits, however I’m not sure I’d call that luxury.

Unique and spectacularly crafted items have traditionally been the privilege of the very few, and to a large extent this hasn’t changed. That said, what seems to have changed is that the many are now very aware of what the few have. An entire industry of popular magazines or TV channels are dedicated to the topic.

In consequence, I believe other changes from the past have to do with the aspirations to own the same luxury items as the few, and perhaps growing resentment towards deepening inequalities.

I remember meeting a group of people in Kunming, China, a few years ago and talking with a female student. She visited the hostel where I was staying on a regular basis to practice her English. She was very excited to learn that I was French and grabbed my notebook to write all the luxury brands she could remember, asking me to tell her how to correctly pronounce Hermès and Louis Vuitton. It made me smile at the time, but I also wonder how long increasingly distributed and common items can retain their badge of luxury, or why we hold such as a fascination for a name and a bag or a scarf – even granting it an exceptional level of craft.

It also reminds me of Japanese movies about craftmanship, like this short about a traditional sword maker, or the documentary Jiro dreams of Sushi. They can likely easily fit within definitions of luxury, yet I wonder if the craftsmen think of their work as luxury, I doubt it actually.

The difference between the points above may well be the interest of celebrities and media. If some movie stars decided to start carrying traditional Japanese swords tomorrow, would there be sudden surge in their popularity? I think it is entirely possible, but then perhaps people are missing the opportunity to define luxury for themselves.

As for me, as much as enjoy stuff, I think my own version of luxury is pretty simple: idle time. Time is our most precious resource, so idly enjoying an hour or two of it sitting here and slowly writing this while I watch a busy street of London is the height of luxury.

On that last point, I highly recommend We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider that I am reading at the moment. You can listen to this great fifteen minute long excerpt called “Lazy: A Manifesto“.

Kidzania: innocent fun or capitalist wet dream?

I just spent some time in London for work, and a friend of mine who has a small child told me about this brand new theme park attraction called Kidzania, which sounded fascinating and terrifying in about equal parts. Shortly after I walked by their ad campaign in the tube and took a couple of pics. I became even more curious and looked it up.

Whatever I think of them critically, I'm a bit of a sucker for theme parks. I leave my critical thinking at the door when I walk in Disneyland for example. As a game, I spent one time in Disneyland Paris queueing with small children to get all the autographs of Disney characters in a notebook. I was younger than now though still taller than most of the kids at about 20 years old. I also love tabletop role-playing games, and while I did want to be helicopter pilot when I was 6 years old, once I found out I could also be a make-believe mischievous thief or a fire-ball throwing mage in tabletop games that sounded a lot more exciting.

Kidzania, originally from Mexico, and according to their website and Wikipedia page is a chain of family entertainment centres. Each one of their worldwide 16 locations features a fully modern albeit child-sized mock city full of law abiding, hard working playing kids. As I understand it from my friend's description, parents are encouraged to part with their child along with a substantial amount of cash for a couple of hours while they go and play modern hunter gatherers at the mall.

Once the kids are in the non-magical kingdom, they have the chance to train as model citizens of an ideal capitalist society, in other words they take on jobs and earn Kidzania money for it. Each new kid in there has a dedicated bank account, and can withdraw the local Kidzos currency from any of the citys ATMs. The website doesn't specify if or what the currency exchange might be if one child travels to a different Kidzania location. So apparently you have kids role-playing and dressing up in adult jobs like firemen, dentists, journalists, business men, cooks, air host(esses), etc. Altogether over 100 different roles jobs. Once they earn and learn by role-playing their jobs, they can spend their Kidzos on entertainment and items from the Kidzania shop.

'Zupervisors' are there to help the kids in their work play time and of course major brands are there to sponsor activities relevant to their field, hoping to make loyal customers of children at an early age, given when they're 18 years old they never listen to them.

Domino's Pizza, Coca-Cola, DHL, Sony, Nestlé, Danone, Unilever, etc already have branded booths where happy children can 'play work' using their branded products and working in their companies.

While I mostly find the idea of this corporate capitalistic ideal society for children frightening, I'm also ambivalent: it is true that role-playing is natural for kids, and imitation play is as well. Play in all its forms is to be cherished, mammals all learn through play, and we humans are no exception to that. I'm also not too sure the play should be this close to the 'real world' as we know it, and it feels way too close to training kids to being obedient corporate drones to work, earn, and then spend.

Or am I being too cynical..? What do you think?

Google's Project Re: Brief. It's like Inception for Advertising

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.

The four original ads and their art directors and copywriters are:
Harvey Gabor - Coca Cola 'Hilltop' or I'd like to buy the world a Coke song
Amil Gargano - Volvo 'Drive It like you Hate It'
Howie Cohen & Bob Pasqualina - Alka Seltzer 'I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing'
Paula Green - Avis 'We Try Harder' their copy platform and brand positioning

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!

My favourite brands continued - Skittles

I thought I'd pick up on a theme I wrote a few posts for when I started blogging, you probably guessed by now, about my favourite brands and why I like them.

So let's talk about Skittles.

To start with, and that's pretty obvious, I like the product. They're definitely amongst my all time favourite candy. I love the flavour and sorting them out by colour as I pull them out of the pack to choose which I feel like eating first (keeping reds for last, or until I have three to eat at once is a traditional strategy of mine). I love the sour Skittles as well. I had as a small kid in the States but while growing up in France, Skittles were few and far between. They were hard to find so it made more special than say, Haribo. Which by the way, I still don't understand why I can't find Tagada Strawberries in the UK - what's up with that Haribo?

They started out in the UK in 1974 and were subsequently released in the US in 1979, produced and marketed by Wrigley which also is a division of Mars Inc.

I also love pretty much everything they've been doing for marketing and advertising in the past few years. They've become well known for creating completely weird adverts in the past few years which seems to have really taken off in 2006 but I'm not exactly sure.

I found a few older ads; in the 80's Skittles was definitely traditional in the advertising:

The weirdness was creeping in beginning of the 90's with their 'Is that real?'

Then we have the string of silly, to full blown weird, to plain creepy ads, I love most of them:

And the famous 'Skittles touch'

The title of this ad brilliantly allows me to smoothly segue to the reasons why I love them so much. As you can see, this last ad was uploaded on Youtube titled: Worst Skittles Commercial Ever! I like to say the best kind of advertising is polarising, and these definitely are.

Brands can't be everything to everyone, particularly not FMCG brands that can hardly differentiate from their competitors. After all the competitors in the category are basically bits of sugar with flavouring so the brand itself and the way people remember it or not makes all the difference. If your brand or at least your communications are polarising, it gives something for people to talk about (or argue about).

I've read here and there blog posts from people comparing these ads to branded pieces of content such as Glass and Half Full Productions from Cadburys and wondering whether they were relevant, but I think there is a significant difference: where Cadbury's have created content with no relation whatsoever to chocolate, Skittles ads always feature the product. Moreover, the fact they feature the product in these weird settings forces people watching to think, even for the briefest of instants, whether they like the way the candy is being represented because it's not how candy is usually shown in ads. And that's brilliant.

They've also bravely been experimenting in the social media scene. They were slammed and criticised by many people a couple of years ago for their website that was basically a bunch links to live and real time social media sites (kind of a copy of the Modernista! agency site at the time, one of the reasons they were criticised in the industry). It turned into a mob lynching as people quickly realised anything tagged #Skittles was shown live on the website.

Skittles stuck with it. They didn't shut down their website. Everybody argued about whether it was brave or plain stupid. I liked it. There are a lot of other posts about it so I won't linger on that right now - the gist of my thinking is that many people were talking about a PR and social media / community failure when this was a website redesign and the way the brand represented itself to people rather than interacting with them. Essentially they gave the brand over to people to represent them for the time the site was live, and people responded in all their brutal beauty and ugliness combined.

Their Facebook Page is one of the most popular brand pages on the social network, over 8.5 million people subscribed and one of the only ones I appreciate the updates of, for the same reason I like the ads: they're complete nonsense and when I catch one on my news feed, it makes me smile.

The latest project / campaign they ran via Facebook a few months ago was genius: Mob the Rainbow. Raising cash for someone nobody thinks about, in its last iteration to fulfil someone's dream. As opposed to what we can often see on charity sites or generic brand campaigns, the dream here isn't grandiose, doesn't involve giant mansions or white sandy beaches. This guy's dream is to own a bowling alley and he needs a scolarship to help go through bowling management studies. Completely weird but also completely real and engaging for their community on Facebook.

As far as I know, Skittles also never changed their tagline: Taste the Rainbow. The rainbow has always been with them, they've only evolved the expression of the rainbow over time.

Loads of people create content online about Skittles and own the brand, whether it be people creating fake weird ads, flavoured vodka shots, or people arguing about the ads.

So there you go, I love Skittles. I might even buy some on my way home.

My favourite brands continued - Ben & Jerry's

You might have guessed I love ice cream, and Ben & Jerry's are definitely my favourite. I'm reading Ben & Jerry's Double Dip at the moment and I really recommend it if you're interested in looking into how they built their business and what it means to be a values led business. It has a lot of accounts of their personal experience and the experience of a lot of other people (Ben & Jerry's employees, customers, business partners, etc.) really interesting and easy to read as well.

I love the fact that Ben & Jerry's are authentic. I can really get that Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield are two guys just like me or anyone else. Their commitment to make a great product, please their customers, make a difference in the world with their business, and have fun along the way is really inspiring. I could keep going on about it but I'll probably be paraphrasing the book more than anything right now, so better if you read it.

In their last campaign for them in the UK, Fallon managed to cram all this information in their spot, released last summer (viewable on the Fallon website with the work they did on other good campaigns for Ben & Jerry's, I haven't found a video of it on Youtube).

I checked a couple of other ads and I really liked the campaign done in the US (I think it was last year realised by Laika/HOUSE. The premise for these series of short ads are a funny visual representation of the names of the Ben & Jerry's ice cream flavours. I think they're fun and pretty clever:





Add-on: I actually just saw this video presenting Ben & Jerry's from Ecobiz which is interesting.

My favourite brands continued - Doritos

I didn't realise it was almost a week since my last post... I actually did such a great job of advertising Nintendo to myself that I was just compelled to clean the dust off my GameCube and start playing Metroid Prime, which I had bought and never played...

Anyways, let's talk about the little bits of gold given that's what "Doritos" means. I'll have to watch myself and be careful not to go on a huge snack eating binge after this.

I'm a complete sucker for crisps, particularly corn crisps and these little triangles come first on my list, they crunch and taste great. It's also a family thing: I have 3 siblings and whenever we meet, you can sure there'll be a bag of them not far... Beyond that, I've looked into what they've been doing lately on the communication side and found out one of the most amazing campaigns they launched last year in the US, called "Crash the Superbowl". As everyone knows, the Superbowl is the most watched event on TV in the US, about 90 million Americans tune it to it every year, it's the most expensive time slots for advertising and unofficially became a competition for the best ads as well.

Last year, Doritos decided to give the power to its consumers with this new campaign. Starting online, they built a cool looking 3d website called"Snack Strong Productions" that looks like a kind of Universal Studios Theme Park. Anyone could upload their own Doritos ad, the videos were viewable online and people were invited to vote for their favourite one. The winning video of the competition would be broacasted during the 2007 SuperBowl. I think it's a brilliant idea, I don't think anyone has done such a thing before and it anchors digital as a backbone for an integrated campaign that truly interacts with the brand's consumers - it's all going T shaped as they say... I have to find out more about how successful the campaign was, but I know there was over 1100 applicants for the competition where they weren't expecting to have more than 200, and here's the winner:



According to USA Today, the ad was voted 4th best out of the 62 adds shown during the Superbowl, and this is the first time Frito-Lay makes it into the Top 5. User generated content rules it seems... The campaign also won a Gold Media Lion at Cannes this year. You can read about the winners success on their blog: The Doritos Story. And now Youtube is featuring hundred's of videos of other applicants, that many Doritos ads being viewd by thousands of people, here are the 5 finalists and some comments from the Doritos marketing department:



With the success of the previous campaign, Dorits decided to renew the Crash the Superbowl campaign this year, this time with music - I fail to see the connection between music and Doritos, at least at first thought, but I guess if it works, why not. You can read a USA Today article about it here.

I think the x-13D flavour experiment campaign produced by Doritos this year was very interesting as well. They released a new bag of crips under the mysterious X-13D flavour, more expensive than the others and invited consumers to guss which flavour it was as part of a competition. (it turned out to be "Cheeseburger"). I think the idea was brilliant as well and I wonder how well it sold. I saw some videos on Youtube of people trying it and saying there were disappointed, but I guess it's still buzz and more word of mouth for Doritos. In any case, I'm really happy my favourite brand of crips is embracing interactivity with consumers in an original and engaging way. Here's a post about it on Brand Autopsy.

I didn't find much about what they were doing on the advertising side in the UK, but I did find out that Doritos was the 4th fastest rising brand this year in the top 100 grocery goods in the UK with a growth of 18% and making into the 91st position. (from "The UK's most valuable grocery brands" on www.intangiblebusiness.com).

To finish, I think it would be nice to see Doritos do more things of a socially oriented intention. That said, I have found they participate in one venture that I think is pretty cool. They sponsor a site called "Do Something" Anyone can submit a project they are commited to realising and they can win a grant to realise it check it out.

My favourite brands continued - Nintendo

I'll always remember the first time I saw "Super Mario Bros." played on the NES console. I was eight years old and visiting friends of my parents with my father and elder brother in Long Island, NY. I was fascinated, it was clearly the best thing ever and I needed to have one for myself - the strange and mysterious name of Nintendo stuck to my mind as being the best, most fun and technologically advanced games. I knew about and had played the hand held Donkey Kong game (you know, the orange split screen one where Mario made his debut as "jump man") but I hadn't associated that with Nintendo yet, the NES is where it started for me and a lot of other people.

Nintendo is the oldest existing video game company and console manufacturer, in fact the company was created in 1889, they started by making playing cards and started making video games end of the 70's after hiring the people that are at the heart of Nintendo's success: Gunpei Yokoi and Shigeru Miyamoto (creator of Mario, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Nintendogs, etc.). Nintendo is Japan's third most valuable listed company with a market value of over $85 billion.

During the NES and Super NES generations, Nintendo's communication was mostly based on the fact that they were the hottest things in town. Their slogan until 1992 was "Now you're playing with power!". This might bring back some memories (and just the haircuts are worth it!):



And this one which seems to come straight out of James Cameron's Aliens or maybe even Tron:



And this is probably one of the cheesiest ads I've ever seen, for "The Legend of Zelda" apparently it says it was banned, I'll have to look into it:



They kept the same style of message at the beginning of the Super NES times:



Nintendo was also the first video games company following the 1983 games crash to introduce a "seal of quality" which was mostly a marketing strategy to reassure consumers that the games sold were well made and would be suitable for the entire family. Thinking about it now, it actually doesn't mean that much (they've now changed it) but it worked for me as a kid, I remember I looked out for the seal, and that definitely meant it was quality for me! It closely associated the words and I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same for a lot of people. Simply put: Nintendo = Quality. Of course, their products generally reflect this quality, otherwise they wouldn't have had a lasting effect.

Nintendo dominated the home console market with the NES (60M units sold vs Sega MS 13M) and Super NES (49M units sold vs Sega MD 29M), until the release of Sony's Playstation. Nintendo had created a strong family and child oriented image, and Sony positioned the Playstation for a more mature market and marketed the console as a necessary element of a living room HiFi system alongside the TV. In that time, Nintendo stayed behind in the "console war", though still making profitable products and leading in the handheld console market.

Now I think that what's happening right in the console market and Nintendo's choices are fascinating. Rather than trying to make a bigger and better console, they started looking at the way games were played, started looking at the vast amount of the population that doesn't play video games rather than trying to win back market shares from the relatively small portion of people that does. The trend had already began with the release of the handheld Nintendo DS and is now continued with the Wii, released a year ago. With the Wii Nintendo has concentrated on the experience of playing and creating fun games accessible to everyone.

I think the $200M advertising campaign to launch the Wii is brilliant, with the slogan "Wii would like to play", simple and to the point, to me watching the ad is infectious, I just want to go play! Portraying a wide variety of people tells us anyone can enjoy the wii, of any age or background. I think the major and impressive shift for the video game industry in the campaign is that the focus of the advertising is on the people playing, and not the technology anymore. (I'm making a uninformed assertion here, I'll have to research this more, but it feels right)



Have you created a Mii? I don't ave the console (yet) but I went to see some friends who have it and they created my "Mii" the experience was exactly that, it was really fun!



All right it's a long post, but I'm close to being done. This one is hilarious, it's a spoof on the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads:



The Financial Times announced in September this year that the Wii had outsold the Xbox 360, which came out a year previous, and is far outselling the Playstation 3 as well. And with the release of Super Mario Galaxy, widely acclaimed as one of the best video game ever made (and in some cases the best) it looks like the Wii is this Christmas's console of choice. I know that when I saw the new Mario ad, just a few seconds were enough for me to definitely want one, I don't even play video games any more but I'll make an exception for this one - just need to get a job first!

My favourite brands

I've been working on what my favourite brands are and why, which I quickly found out can become a pretty vast question. Even though after giving it a bit of thought it's not that hard to identify what they are for me, the "why" part can be extensively expanded. I'm still doing some research, so I'll probably add things later as well.

So here goes: Nintendo, Doritos, LEGO, Ben & Jerry's, and Disney.

First of all these are my personal favourites because my experience of them is directly linked to my past, great moments and memories of my childhood, teenage years, and actually up to nowadays as well. The positive experiences and value I've had from these brands has always far outweighted the very few times they've disappointed me.

I've found them over time to be reliable for value, memorable in their communication, and I've been loyal to them for most of my life - not that I necessarily buy their products every week or never those of their competition, but these do really stand out for me. I know that I whenever I see an ad from them, I pay attention, and also generally want to run buying whatever that was (I don't always do that either) and I generally share my experience of these brands with others in a good way. It would really take them doing a lot of really bad stuff to come out of my favourite list.

I'll add a French saying to this, roughly translated: "You can't argue taste or colours". Now there's much more that can be said, argued, reasoned, explained about the brands themselves and I am going to expand my answer for each brand separately in other posts, but these are the core reasons why these are my personal favourites.