Food for thought: Fear managing is the new fear mongering
Forgiving a pretty face
Facebook to agencies: how will people share your story?
Is “The Pitch” an accurate reflection of our industry?
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The Beatles got their start in Hamburg. Why not you?
Want to compose a piece of music? Want the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra to play your composition? Click here.
“Sounds of Hamburg” is an amazing (though sluggish to load) project that truly engages music lovers and, arguably, potential tourists. Using live-cam motion tracking, the experience employs web cams, broadcasting live from various parts of the city, to compose classical music in real time.
You select different zones on the picture. Add different instruments to your zones. Every time someone or something passes that zone a sample plays (laid down by the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra, no less).
Two brands – the city and its orchestra – merged into one wonderful, innovative and highly addictive experiment.
Enjoy.
p.s. Kudos to agency Jung von Matt/Alster for their brilliance.
Advertising conferences are bad
A medley of miscellany from the marketing and advertising blogs:
Distracted Daddy
Grip copywriter Ian Simpson is on paternity leave – except he calls it manternity leave . . . He’s writing about the whole ordeal on his new blog, Distracted Daddy. “I’m a new dad with a new baby and a new blog. Hopefully I can learn how to do one of these new things well. Preferably, the new baby thing.” Recent posts include, “Dirty baby. Clean bath.” and “Baby AKA Baby.” Fun stuff from a funny man.
The Grumpy Brit
The ludicrously articulate scribe over at The Grumpy Brit continues with his insightful if prickly observations about advertising and its practioners. “. . . right now the marketing and advertising business is swarming with teachers while doers are decidedly thin on the ground. And like all teachers in the more rarefied realms of education, this lot spend most of their time traveling to august congresses and symposia, tweeting the future and churning out recondite papers (thus ensuring the future of august congresses and symposia).” I think this means advertising conferences are bad.
Makin’ Ads
Here’s some advice that’s probably good: “Copywriters should read poetry. Frequently.” So says Makin’ Ads’ Greg Christensen. “Poetry avoids clichés. It evokes images. It leads you down a path you hadn’t planned on traveling. And isn’t that exactly what you want to be doing as a copywriter?” Click through for his recommendations.
The Ad Contrarian
The unnamed shift disturber called The Ad Contrarian is talking specifics. “. . . throughout my career one of toughest things I have had to do is to convince my clients to be more specific.” Instead of burying our messages in vague promises (Cheap! Good! Fast!), he suggests hanging our value proposition on exactly that thing that makes our product special. (It’s $3.99! It will cut both tomatoes and shoe leather! It goes 122 km/h!) “The more specific the promise, the more believable the proposition.”
Elements of surprise
My first blog post for Big Orange Slide isn’t going to be a missive on the death of advertising/print publication/Facebook/skinny jeans. I’d #fail as an author on those subjects anyway: I’m in advertising, I want to street fight people who would rob me of my books, I signed up for Facebook TWO DAYS AGO and I’ve always worn ill-fitting pants, regardless of trend.
Luckily, I literally stumbled upon the inspiration for this post in the park, on my way to glut on shawarma.
“It” was a labyrinth – one of those maze-like paths that you follow to the centre. Being flat, you didn’t realize it was there until you were standing over it, but discovering it changed the tone of the park. This labyrinth recalled why I got into digital creative in the first place: the ability to manufacture what I will call Elements of Surprise.
From videos to easter eggs, Elements of Surprise vary in expression. They are the products of imagination, yearning and delight. They are the rabbit holes and garden paths. The human-interest stories, stop-motion videos, wild postings and site easter eggs. The old ideas in new places, and the new ideas in old places. They are the delightfully useless applications of the human mind, shining their laser vision into the productivity of your day.
And I’d argue that they’re the currency of the Internet.
Social networking tools aspire to help uncover them.
StumbleUpon is like crack for the MTV generation. Swinging from a Burtynsky photograph to the epic “Durham’s Got Talent” (google it, trust me) is second nature to those who have psychologically abandoned the necessity for dialectic narrative (big words +10 points).
Even if you’re looking to keep your Social Network presence to a minimum, look no further than the new Facebook “like” feature, a massive grab bag of individual moments and media that have sparked something in someone, for whatever reason, and a suggestive glove in the face of Google.
Optimizing sites for portable devices gives us another type of Element of Surprise to collect and share. Foursquare’s competitor Gowalla has a selling feature that allows people to uncover hidden treasures when they log a venue. Fun!
Social ranking is based on sharing them.
What do you have to do on Twitter to garner a cult following? Sure, you can click on that mysterious link that promises “50,000 new followers a day!” Or, you can just indicate something quietly delightful – and do it often. Elements of Surprise are magnetic, as proven by the thread of comments that followed your link to Michal Buble being hunted by a velociraptor, or the hits to your gallery of embroidered text messages.
Advertisers thrive on creating them.
If advertising is about designing something to generate interest for something, Elements of Surprise are some of the most valuable tools to own. They’re the secret levels in video games. The mysterious wild posting element to your campaign. The little easter eggs on your site, like *ahem* the fact that you can scratch the radio spot records on the new Grip site *ahem*.
From a recruitment standpoint, agencies and clients that allow for these playful objects of discovery have an aura of difference. They recognize Elements of Surprise as strategic frivolity: small intoxicating glimpses into a culture of rigour, fun and humour. For me, an agency that sees the maraschino cherry as a necessary part of the Manhattan is the kind of place I want to work at.
In sum, Elements of Surprise have got an incredible knack for bringing people together and rallying interest.
Or maybe just turning high calorie lunch runs into long-winded blog posts.
Clever cats
Puma launched a key piece of its sustainability strategy earlier this month. Essentially a rethink of their packaging. The result has garnered them much well-deserved PR.
The brand partnered with industrial designer Yves Behar to rethink the way shoes are packaged – less packaging means fewer raw materials, less energy to produce, less weight to ship, and so on.
“Clever Little Bag” is the result. (A short video on YouTube tells the story.)
This innovation replaces cardboard shoeboxes with reusable shoe bags. As a result Puma will reduce water, energy and diesel consumption on the manufacturing level by more than 60% per year.
In other words: approximately 8,500 tons less paper will be consumed, 20 million megajoules of electricity saved, 1 million litres less fuel oil will be used, and 1 million litres of water will be saved.
Additionally, during transport, 500,000 litres of diesel fuel is saved and, lastly, the replacement of traditional shopping bags with the lighter built-in bag will potentially save up to 275 tons of plastic.
Innovation is hard. It costs money. It’s time consuming. It takes your best minds off the core business and, more often than not, is fraught with the risk of failure.
But home runs are all the sweeter for their rarity. That’s why swinging for the fences is something Puma deserves a mountain of sales for in return. And even more of our respect and admiration as marketers.
To be a client (again) for a day
For 15 years, I worked on the client side of marketing and I loved it. I was fortunate to work for a number of great companies: Kraft, Oland Specialty Beer Company and Labatt. I enjoyed working with talented people to build and grow some great brands.
For the past two years, I have been working on the agency side of the business, here at Grip Limited, and I am finding that I love this side of the business as well. It’s very different, but equally exciting and challenging, and I am happy I made the move over to agency side.
With this move, however, comes a change in orientation that is hard to describe, but it is very real. You think about things in a different way, and while you are still working to build brands (your client’s versus your own, primarily) you are on the other side of the table and the role you play is a different one. That is until, once again, you are the client.
This happened to me last week.
There has been a project underway at Grip for quite a while to redesign and evolve the Grip website into something that accurately demonstrates our digital capabilities. I had been constantly using the analogy of the cobbler’s kids not having shoes when I tried to explain to people how we have this incredible digital capability at Grip but a website that looked like it was designed 8 years ago (which it was, by the way).
This all changed last week when we launched our new killer website. If you have not already, you really should check it out, here. While I could make this post all about how incredible the site is, it is what it made me feel when I saw it that took me back to my client days.
When Colin Craig (the genius who led the design of the site) walked me though the final version, it was like I was a client again. I eagerly watched as he toured me around the site, showing me the content, the unique ways the site could be navigated and some of the fun little Easter eggs that are hidden within (next time you are listening to one of our radio ads on the site, try scratching the 45 with your mouse like a DJ).
With each passing moment I became more and more impressed with what the team had created. I got this proud feeling. It was not just that the team here had done such great work, it was that I was seeing something that made me feel better about the Grip brand – a brand that, understandably, I have a huge amount of passion for.
It was one of those magical client moments that I am fortunate to have had a number of in my relatively short career. It was one of those moments when I thought to myself, “This is so much better than what I thought it would or could be.”
These moments are what drive us to want to be marketers and, as agency folks, they are what make our clients willing to trust us to help them build their most valuable assets: their brands.
I spent some time over the past couple of days trying to distill this experience down and trying to extract what it is that makes these moments as powerful as they are. How can we, as an agency, more consistently deliver this feeling of sheer excitement and joy to our clients? Here is what I came up with:
1) Truly understand what you are being asked to do for the brand, even if it is not perfectly articulated in the brief.
When our executive team briefed Colin on the site, we asked him to build something more contemporary that better fit with the Grip brand image. A weak brief, indeed, but Colin had a lot of the background from his time here at Grip. He truly understood what we wanted and needed. We needed a site that demonstrated how powerful the digital team here at Grip had become, something that showcased the talent of the group. Something that made clients want to work with us and talented individuals want to come and work for us. Understanding this nuance meant the difference between a good site and an incredible experience. We need to find this nuance for our clients.
2) Find a way to deliver a little more than is expected.
This may seem obvious, but it can be very powerful. When, as a client, you see something that truly comes above and beyond the ask in a meaningful way, it takes you back a little. This feeling of discovery is wonderful and impactful. How can we make sure we always come back with something a little better than expected? (Notice I say better not more – there’s a difference there that runs deeper than semantics.)
3) Present your work with passion and enthusiasm.
It will show through if you believe in the work you are presenting. Again, no rocket science here but the enthusiasm you have for the idea can and likely will be contagious. People want to be excited about the work. It helps if you are excited presenting the work. When Colin took me through the site, his excitement in moving from section to section rubbed off on me and I became exponentially impressed with each new element.
I hope in the future that I continue to have days like these, that I can look back upon as moments in my career when I was truly blown away by the over-delivery of what was presented to me. Equally, I hope as an agency that we can provide these moments for our clients on a consistent basis. I believe we can.
