Advance

CANNES – DAY 2

23/06 2010 // aaron

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Here’s Special Correspondent Morten Kirckhoff’s report from Day 2 of the festival:

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Another beautiful day in the south of France – so of course we were inside all day! Another day with a shitload of inspiring stuff. The reality is that no one here is truly confident in what exactly to do, but everyone agrees that it needs to be done differently moving forward.

Agencies like Happiness Brussels,  Sid Lee and Taproot India each gave thoughtful presentations about ways to build a new model.

The common thread running through Cannes is the need to create effect by engaging consumers in new ways, especially social. And very often with bought media being used as a kick-starter for something bigger.

Insights that struck me today:

-      It’s not about creating a campaign, but about capturing opportunity for the brand. There are constant possibilities to create impact. It never stops.

-      Create ideas that enhance life.

-      People are increasingly engaging with brands, but disengaging with advertising.

-      Don’t create a campaign – start a conversation. Own it, confront it and subvert!

Best cases of today:

Durex Play. Moving Durex from ”protection” to pleasure, and taking the brand into the sextoys and lubricant markets.

Gatorade – Replay. A football match that ended in a tie 15 years ago. Now it’s time to replay the match:

And the fantastic campaign for Times of India, creating a hope for peace between India and Pakistan. All of a sudden ”advertising” made sense to everyone at the festival. TV ad here:

And my favorite of the day was Love Jozi, who counterfeited their own t-shirts to create buzz. They kept it secret for two years, eventually emerging as a stronger, better-known brand once the hoax was revealed:

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CANNES – DAY 1

22/06 2010 // aaron

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For the second year running, I’ve been left with the distinctly unglamorous task of updating the blog with reports from Advancers actually at the festival. I need to start giving some WordPress tutorials.

Here’s what Morten had to say about day 1:

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The bulk of the best presentations (and the most interesting campaigns) were all about social media – no surprise there. People are embracing the possibilities to engage with each other in more ways than ever!

Tribal DDB ran through a lot of numbers on how ”social” was dominating everything in people’s lives: 65% of time spent online is now ”social”. Friends and families connect (and re-connect) more that ever, and people perceive it as something that makes their life better. Brands need to understand that, and find new ways to become a part of the conversation.

A few good learnings from their session. Nothing new here but a solid overview:

- People with a passion, share more stuff. Start with the passion – and they will share (Nokia realized how tablefussball fans would share cool tricks, and built a campaign around that.)

- Feedback is gold. People like to give feedback. Most brands fear negative feedback. Embrace it to become better (also to make better products.)

- People want a conversation to be trustworthy and honest.

- To start a conversation, have something to talk about (not like Kingsmill’s Confessions campaign!)

- A relationship never ends. It’s a long-term commitment. Think beyond the campaign.

Other good examples of social engagement included:

- Monolopy and Google Maps creating the world’s largest ”online” board game

- VW’s ‘People’s Reviewer‘ for the Tiguan

Tags: cannes

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FUTUREMAN SPEAKS

21/01 2010 // aaron

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Einstein said he never wasted time thinking about the future, knowing that it would arrive soon enough regardless. That said, I decided to tie our creative director to a chair, placed a crystal ball in front of him and asked him to give me his expectations for the year ahead.

I’ve divided Morten’s thoughts into three rough subject areas. Feel free to add your thoughts in the comments.

Either/or

I don’t think we’re at a point yet where we can say the economy has rebounded enough to say that we’re approaching a ‘return to normal’ – whatever that was – and that’s resulted in a kind of ‘wait and see’ limbo.

That’s leading to two types of behaviour from clients: the play it safe and the bold. The ‘play it safe’ crowd are sticking to what they know media-wise and strategy-wise while the bold are striking out, embracing new tools and taking risks.

Both consumer behavior and the media landscape are undergoing such dramatic change these days that the potential for making an  impact with unconventional approaches is bigger that ever. A lot of brave clients are embracing that change. Needless to say, those are the ones we’re more interested in working with!

Transparency

Although still something of a buzzword, more and more clients are nevertheless waking up to the fact that the internet is making them transparent whether they like it or not. Most of the sensible ones are embracing it and trying to turn it into an advantage. We feel well-placed to help clients realise that thanks to our offering.

We believe the best brands are completely coherent – in other words, they always deliver what they promise. If you stick to the truth, you only have to remember one story.

Technology/media

This is where agencies can win or lose. As advertising people, we can’t afford to take our eyes off the use and effect of technology. Not so much in terms of how we push messages in different channels, but in the application of different technologies to augment a brand experience. There’s so many more ways to reach and engage with consumers, but that doesn’t make relevance and utility any less important.

Clients are finding this space hard to pin down and are still  demanding to know the answer to the question of how to get the most out of their money. We need to be able to demonstrate effectiveness and I expect we’ll see more methodologies emerging in the next year.

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THE LAST WORD ON ‘VIRAL’?

10/12 2009 // aaron

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A very quick post to highlight Bud Cadell’s convincing deconstruction of the misuse of the word ‘viral’ in our industry.

As Bud argues extremely cogently, most people throw the term around without having the first idea of what they’re talking about. He writes:

‘Here’s what a viral video would actually be: I receive a link from a friend to watch a hilarious YouTube video of a cat walking on a birthday cake. I click said link. Some malicious code on the page copies itself to my computer. That code continues to replicate across my system files. To make the marketers happy, that video also commandeers my social network profiles and publishes the same link to the hilarious video of a cat walking on a birthday cake. The same code has also corrupted my browser, now any video I want to watch is replaced with the link to the hilarious video of a cat walking on a birthday cake.’

The rest of the post is given over to some very sensible points about creating spreadable media. Or, as Bud argues it should be called, media that is simply ‘popular’.

This resonates with me for the same reason that I feel my heart sink when people start throwing out words like monetizing, value, community or conversation. In the rush to keep their brands relevant (and their jobs viable) too many marketers are losing track of the basics: be good, be interesting. Seth Godin said it best back in 2003 – be remarkable.

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AGENCY EVOLUTION REPORT

30/09 2009 // aaron

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The (utterly irrelevant) view from the Park Lane Hilton.

I was at Marketing Week’s Agency Evolution conference earlier this week. A little under-attended and a lot over-priced, it was nevertheless a very useful day with plenty of good talks and nuanced debate around the usual issues of integration, remuneration and the role of the consumer. Particularly helpful were the talks from clients, but more on those later.

Fallon MD Karina Wilsher chaired the event and opened with an appeal to move the debate past business models: ‘Model schmodel, the old-fashioned supertanker model is already dead. Clients want smaller collections of people tied to nimble, innovative, evolving structures that can shape and mould themselves into whatever form is needed to best solve their problems.’

Karina ended by saying that the agency of the future would not be unrecognisable from what we see today: ‘The best agencies will still have the best people, the best ideas and the best culture. Good ideas will still be central to what we do. Actions speak louder than words and any new model should still be servant to the idea.’

Up next was Ian Milner from Iris who gave a well-received talk that proclaimed the death of the ‘old-fashioned’ ad network but also spelt out how he saw the solution: ‘The advertising industry as we know it is facing an armageddon moment; there’s too many agencies and we don’t have a divine right to exist. If we want to remain relevant, we need to start playing a broader role all along the value chain. It’s about effectiveness. Clients want outcomes, not outputs.’

Ian even had some fancy graphics to illustrate this last point. One was a triangle with the words ‘Create advantage (not just pretty pictures and nice films) in the top segment. The bottom segment contained the words ‘Faster, action-oriented partner’ which would become a theme of the day.

He ended with some very useful thoughts around the need for agencies to be more commercially minded: ‘Most of us are pretty crap at business. We need to be more inventive around how we bill, whether it be shared equity arrangements or performance-related schemes. Agencies should employ more people from the client side who are better at engineering more time in the value chain.’

Will Harris, marketing director from Nokia, was next at the lectern. He announced that while he was very much ‘pro agency’, there was a pressing need for most of them to reclaim their relevance: ‘At Nokia we are using those agencies that can get our message to the right people in ways that can enable those people to share the message. We’re looking at smaller, agile agencies with smart people and cohesive offerings.

‘We see the right agencies as partners, not suppliers. They need to understand our business more. We value truely transparent relationships and that means getting remuneration off the table as soon as possible. Lastly it’s about people. The best agencies have the best people.’

Mike Parsons from Tribal DDB pitched in with the digital perspective: ‘Clients are dramatically changing the way they want to build their brand. The move away from paid media to earned media is accelerating fast. At DDB, VW now spend more on digital than traditional, and that spend is mostly on web utility, not broadcast media like search or banner ads.’

I liked Mike. He had the approach of a genuine enthusiast and wasn’t shy when it came to detailing the necessary improvements around digital communication: ‘There needs to be better standards around measurement. No matter what some software companies might tell you there’s still no compelling measurement of sentiment out there and clients want it.’

There then followed a pretty wide-ranging panel debate, chaired by Alex West, global innovations director at Mother. Here’s the highlights from a discussion which focused strongly on remuneration and client/agency relationships:

Alex: ‘Clients are looking to us for more interesting remuneration models. We have to be inventive and push for fair reward for what we do.’

Laurent Ezekiel, client services director for LBi: ‘New remuneration models are all well and good but the reality is that the vast majority of blue-chip companies are too structured to allow for any significant changes to the model.’

Kerry Glazer, chief executive at AAR: ‘Clients don’t care about the size of your agency. Even the biggest agencies in the world are small-fry in corporate terms.’

Ian Pearman, managing director at AMV BBDO: ‘Clients would be well advised to look at how spread their prospective agency’s revenue is. Those agencies with the overwhelming majority of their revenue coming from one client might not be your best choice.’

Kerry: ‘The split between clients’ procurement and marketing departments is not a good thing. Many agencies just don’t make any money thanks to procurement guys coming in and renegotiating fees down.’

James Tipple, UK marketing director for Yahoo, agreed that cost-squeezing can be counter-productive: ‘We need to be closer partners with our agencies. We’re taking a more collaborative approach at Yahoo and trying to phase out the project-by-project mentality and think more coherently.’

Graeme Dignan, founder and CEO at Erasmus Partners: ‘There needs to be much less ‘them and us’. If you were trying to build an amazing building and you treated your architect the way some companies treated their agency, you’d end up with a shit building. We need to get closer and share common goals with clients.’

Kerry: ‘We know that the value and power of our ideas goes beyond the time it took to have them and we need to start acting like we know it. Why is it that KPIs are always around the agency performance and never about the client’s?’

Ian: ‘Why not try and institutionalise the right to play? Take the last 5% of any budget and use it for experimental, innovative communication that moves the brand forward in other channels and other ways.’

Phil Rumbol, UK marketing director for Cadbury’s, was among the last speakers on the day and his focus was very much on how agencies’ main role should be to help brands earn, create and maintain cultural relevance: ‘I see an agency’s main role as working much closer with its client and acting as a purveyor of brand ideas and as guardians of brand behaviour.’

The three preconditions for this to take place were as follows:

- Stronger client/agency relationship (agencies need to be more flexible and responsive to clients’ needs)
- Reconcile artistic and commercial tensions
- Volume of activity up and cost per unit down

Overall, a worthwhile day. Maybe nothing really new but it was good to see some industry heavyweights clarify their thoughts, and to get the clients’ thoughts.

As far as Advance is concerned, we see the debate around the future of the creative agency as a key issue for the industry and we’ve been busy aggregating the best discussions and viewpoints over at our Agency Future project site.

Please let us know your thoughts about where we go from here, either in the comments here or in more detail at Agency Future. Cheers!

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A WORTHY CAMPAIGN, BADLY EXECUTED

03/08 2009 // aaron

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The text in the ad above translates as follows: ‘Think of those who have to carry it – put less in your luggage.’

It’s part of a campaign from the workers’ union 3F supported by Copenhagen Airport that encourages people to think carefully about what they’re packing out of respect for the nice people that have to load their luggage onto the planes.

The problem here is that the key message is completely wrong. When people go away, they pay a lot of money in airport taxes and they don’t want some Tom, Dick or Harry telling them that they are packing too much.

Unfortunately for the campaign, there is a much more effective and useful message that can be found in the supplementary information but which is not being communicated to the public:

‘Hellere to på 20 end en på 40′ which translates as ‘Better two that weigh 20kg, than one that weighs 40′.

This is information that makes sense, and which might feasibly have a chance of making harrassed holidaymakers think twice about the way they pack. Pack to the drawingboard, we say.

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BAD LANGUAGE

30/07 2009 // aaron

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Everyone is slowly drifting back to the office after our summer break and, as we’re all still in holiday mood, our first post is high on irreverence and humour and low in seriousness.

Snickers’ ‘Snacklish‘ campaign (see above) has been around for a while and, as such, it’s slowly but surely becoming a victim of its own ubiquity. The folks at Olde English have pulled no punches with these. Brilliant:

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A COUPLE OF GEMS FROM CANNES

24/06 2009 // aaron

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Morten cabled these over last night. One’s an ad reminding us of the importance of hand hygiene, the other’s an inflatable cushion that looks like a poo – a nice bit of self-promotion for a Belgian radio station. I’ll leave you to decide which is which:

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SOME PRINT AND POSTER THOUGHTS FROM CANNES

23/06 2009 // aaron

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Gavin and Henrik are two of the more senior creatives we have at Advance, and, as such, I’m somewhat amazed that they’ve crafted the following insightful blog post detailing their thoughts on the print and poster category at Cannes. Frankly I wasn’t expecting much more than the occasional video of Henrik lighting Gavin’s farts.

Anyway, here’s what they have to say:

“We went to see the press and poster shortlist at the Cannes Advertising Festival. The news is that the premise for good print hasn’t changed. Good print still has to be fast and simple – perhaps even more so now than ever with all the interactive channels competing for our attention. So here are three great visuals that we predict will win GOLD…

Alka Seltzer – Black Humour Beautifully Crafted

A great idea that projects an immediately unique brand identity with a naïve yet sophisticated graphic simplicity. Visually vibrant and simple this is story telling with a diabolical sense of humour. It just doesn’t get better than this.

Ben & Jerry’s – The Joy Of Ice Cream

Visual execution of the joy of what it feels like to eat tasty fresh ice cream. These ads were so immediate in their emotional relevance that we didn’t even bother reading them– we tasted them – and they tasted good.

Harvey Nichols – The High Fashion Hub comes to Bristol

Harvey Nichols creates immediate empathy by introducing their new store in Bristol featuring Wallace and Gromit. They have definitely connected with the locals’ mentality by celebrating the unpretentious Bristol spirit. You can’t help but appreciate the healthy irony that is generated by using the down-to-earth, blue-collar claymation characters to represent a brand that sells high-end fashion brands. This is what happens when high fashion brands come to Bristol… and it’s wonderful! We can’t wait to see what’s happening virally and on TV.”

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YET MORE FROM THE WORLD’S PREMIER FESTIVAL OF SELF-CONGRATULATORY ONANISM

23/06 2009 // aaron

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Our Cannes delegation are exceeding all expectations and sending back more posts than I know what to do with. Part of me is kicking myself for being too lazy to explain the WordPress back-end to them before they went. Anyway. Here’s Annette’s report on the seminar with Twitter founder Biz Stone:

“Our last seminar for the 2nd day at the Cannes festival was spent in the company of Biz Stone,  co-founder of Twitter, the social media platform du jour. The essence of his talk? Stop talking, and start tweeting. So here’s my take:

Biz Stone, an inspiring and impressive must-see. Key take-out: Twitter is about the triumph of humanity, not the triumph of technology. #Cannes

Here’s a picture Annette sent back. I’m assuming it’s the aforementioned Mr Stone:

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