A big congratulations to the DDB Network who garnered due recognition at a slew of award shows this week.
DDB has been named New York Festivals' Agency Network of the Year, thanks to Alma DDB Miami, DDB Chicago, DDB Dubai, DDB Brasil, DDB Colombia, DDB Group NZ, DDB Puerto Rico, DDB Paris, DDB Shanghai and Tribal DDB Amsterdam. They combined for a total of 19 medals and 5 certificates, with 5 offices claiming Gold winners.
Check out the full list of winners:http://www.newyorkfestivals.com/worldsbest/
DDB has also received seven Webby Awards and 3 People's Voice Awards. The 21st Century Beetle - Rock 'n' Scroll campaign by DDB Berlin garnered four awards including a Webby Award and People's Voice Award for Best Automotive Website, and Webby Awards for Best Navigation/Structure Website and Best Visual Design/Function Website.
Additionally, DDB was awarded a total of 28 CLIOS this year. A special congratulations to DDB UK's "Walk of Shame" for Harvey Nichols which won a Gold medal in the Film category.
Tribal DDB Israel Creates 1st Instagram Agency Website
The Tribal DDB Israel office has launched a fully functioning website using Instagram as its medium. The "Officegram" website is available to those who download the Instagram app and locate TribalDDB_Israel. The website builds awareness of the agency, and highlights the agency's espousal of new mediums and use of new creative opportunities provided by tech companies.
As part of Tribal DDB's first Instagram self-promotional website for Tribal DDB Israel, "Officegram" celebrates the interactive navigation on Instagram by encouraging users to navigate site content with hashtags such as tags #workers, #clients, and #office life. The Tribal DDB Israel office is supported by content on Statigram, as well as the global agency's global website (www.tribalddb.com) for those who have not downloaded the app.
As the world continues to be swept away by the mobile social network Instagram, the creative team at Tribal DDB Israel fell in love with Instagram as a digital tool. Instagram now boasts over 4 million users, and the highly visual nature of the site boosts its relevance for a lot of brands as well as allows for unique ways in which photos can be shared to communicate information in a creative way.
Tribal DDB anticipates that a number of brands will explore opportunities with Instagram and other up-and-coming social networking sites and mobile applications. Therefore, the brand website on Instagram serves as an expression of how much Tribal DDB loves digital tools and opportunities for collaboration with tech companies.
Via Instagram (mobile): Download Instagram app and search for "TribalDDB_Israel"
Via Statigram (online): Click here
Download screenshots (jpegs): Download zip file here
Tribal DDB San Francisco has created a full-length feature film for Benefit Cosmetics called "Glamouriety," which premieres during the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival. The film chronicles the lives of Jean and Jane Ford, co-founders of the cosmetics brand, and profiles its evolution from a storefront in San Francisco to a global phenomenon. The sisters' first boutique opened in San Francisco in 1976. In 1999, Benefit was acquired by LVMH, the world's leading luxury product group, which catapulted it to a global beauty presence with make-up counters in over 34 countries worldwide.
Glamouriety was created in the style of a 1970's variety show in an effort to capture the fun, quirky spirit and wide variety of products that make Benefit so unique. The film uses creative storytelling to highlight some of the muses behind Benefit's most popular products. It runs the gamut from animation to acrobatics, encompassing a rare combination of short films, comedy sketches, animated shorts and musical numbers, all showcasing the co-founders, their loyal customers and the beloved make-up brand.
The client wanted its employees to fully experience the history of the brand and its sense of humor. The film will become a deeper part of Benefit's culture, and ultimately contribute to a stronger brand.
A series of animated shorts throughout the film tell the story of the Ford sisters from birth to present day. Live action segments include a docudrama about a cross-dressing farmer who was one of Benefit's first customers, a spoof on a medical show inspired by the best-selling product Dr. Feelgood, and a sketch titled "The Glam Gospel," featuring Reverend Gloria, a beauty evangelist who performs makeover miracles. Musical numbers such as a heartfelt ballad about the genesis of "Benetint," a stain created for an exotic dancer's nipples, serve as anecdotal illustrations of the product's conception.
Conceived of and produced by the Tribal DDB San Francisco group in conjunction with LEGS in NY and Mr. Hyde in Paris, Glamouriety has been a labor of love and an incredible collaboration between agency and client. Glamouriety will continue to premiere in cinemas throughout 2012 in cities such as Shanghai, Seoul, London and Paris.
Chief Creative Officer: Lisa Bennett
Director of Content Production: Frank Brooks
Group Account Director: Jenny Leonetti
Created by: Mike Andrews, Daniel Mabe
Directed by: Georgie Greville, Geremy Jasper
Production Companies: Legs, Mr. Hyde
DDB SF's Lisa Bennett Discusses Judging at the CLIOS
DDB SF CCO and Head of the North American Creative Council, Lisa Bennett, served as a judge at the CLIO Awards recently. In the video above, she details her views on creativity in the industry, criteria for judging the film category, and the changing dynamics of audiences.
To preface her outlook on the industry, Lisa explains her holistic view of communications. In this day in age, a great idea comes in any form, so our industry becomes less about advertising and more about the sharing of ideas. In regards to the film category and its recent evolution, Lisa believes that fresh ideas remain at the core of successful films and that those selected as leaders in the category all share wonderful storytelling, simple and true insights, and are relevant regardless of who the audience is and where the film runs.
With regards to whether or not the medium matters for viewing the film, Lisa maintains that the experience may be contextual if one is watching on a mobile device while in transit, but that the majority of films are not contingent on the medium. When asked about how to captivate viewers in the age of audience fragmentation, Lisa suggested bringing viewers into the conversation in engaging ways to mitigate their being inundated with myriad messages everyday.
When asked about what the future of advertising holds, Lisa spoke to what we can expect will not change. "Bill Bernbach, one of the Masters of Advertising had it right -- a great idea can come from anywhere."
Given a shockingly high figure of half a million car crashes a year caused by women drivers applying make-up (in the UK alone), awareness of this underestimated danger needs to be raised. Based on this insight the aim of a viral video by DDB Berlin and Volkswagen is to address a target audience of young women drivers and educate them about the danger of putting on make up while driving.
The objective is to reach as many young women as possible all over the world. In order to do so, DDB Berlin picked up the latest viral trend among young women: haul videos. These videos are often put on the web by girls, who buy cosmetics and give make up tutorials on how to use the respective products. Together with the famous haul girl Nikkie, who has over 150,000 subscribers, DDB Berlin created the tutorial "a crash course to shine" carrying the message in a way that is designed for impact.
By using this platform the narrow target group is addressed directly in terms of age and interest. Having a famous make-up artist as the spokesperson makes the message relevant and even more believable to the target group. In only five days the video was shared, re-tweeted and has been watched almost 130,000 times. DDB Berlin and Volkswagen started a real discussion on YouTube with over 2,100 relevant comments. And this is exactly what we believe Social Creativity must do.
DDB New York announced the launch of "Safe Sex for Seniors," a campaign created in collaboration with SaferSex4Seniors.org, an independent collective of professional sexuality educators, researchers, authors, trainers, counsellors and therapists, whose mission is to provide better education and information to ensure sexual intimacy between older adults is as safe as possible. The campaign reminds mature adults that safer sex practices are essential, following unexpected research results declaring that the 55+ demographic in the United States has the highest growth rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
DDB recognized an unfulfilled need to support this important issue in light of changing social norms. With the tagline, "There are many ways to do it. There is only one way to do it safely," DDB New York's campaign features an array of elder couples of the target 55+ demographic demonstrating a variety of Kama Sutra positions.
Rather than taking a negative approach that uses scare tactics and piles on statistics to deter unsafe sex, DDB made the strategic choice to use humor and shock value. However, it was important for us that our creative response felt empowering to the 55, 60, 65+ demographic. Whether the younger generation likes it or not, our grandparents are having sex. We wanted to make a sexy ad that maintains a level of tastefulness and encourages seniors to enjoy their sex lives --safely.
While the ad maintains a playful tone, the truth remains that shocking statistics have recently come to light showing that the rate of STDs among older Americans, including syphilis and gonorrhoea, has doubled in the last decade, and the rate of HIV infection is reaching similar levels. From 2005 to 2009, the number of cases of syphilis and Chlamydia in seniors in central Florida rose 71% and 62% in the entire state.
Some experts hypothesize that this epidemic of STDs among senior citizens is a result of growing up in an age before sex education was the status quo. With DDB New York's rich history creating healthcare campaigns, we felt uniquely positioned to help ensure that a lack of education is not the reason this issue persists, and hope this campaign will help dispel stigmas around talking about safe sex practices for seniors.
The campaign will feature an educational video, as well as print media applications. To find out more about the campaign, visit: http://safersex4seniors.org/.
DDB and Tribal DDB China have developed a digitally immersive adventure as part of an integrated campaign to increase consumer engagement with the new VW Tiguan 2012 Edition.
Entitled 'New Tiguan Tomorrow Mission', the campaign includes exclusive online-only content to engage the target audience - extending the TVC that cemented its positioning as an "intelligent urban SUV".
The digital campaign lets the consumer play the part of a hero secret agent on a mission to accomplish the impossible. With exciting motor and car chasing scenes, players can experience the full extent of the car's amazing new features and technology.
Embracing the fast paced life of China's young achievers, DDB wanted to deliver a clear message that resonated with our target audience who are always aiming high to chart new territories every step of the way. We did this with a movie-like theme and treatment to bring to life the superior features of the new Tiguan.
The campaign leverages the digital channel to further engage our target audience with a more immersive adventure that amplified their experience, and generated a big buzz for New Tiguan launch.
Based on DDB's 6 degrees idea of Social Creativity, the new campaign encourages people to play with, participate in and pass on.
Play: Users take the role of the hero driver of the new Tiguan 2012 Edition in the digital realm and can play with the multiple angles shot to explore how the car performs across each new feature and technology: TSI, ESP, 4MOTION & PLA.
Participate in: Users can experience and explore the new Tiguan 2012 Edition online, register to be one of four lucky winners each week to win the ultra cool Rimowa and ultimately the grand prize of a 15-days free test drive.
Pass on: As the hero driver, players can select three of their friends from weibo social to join them on this immersive adventure journey.
DDB NY Latest Installment of The Fabric of My Life™
DDB New York is introducing the latest installment of its four-year The Fabric of My Life™ campaign with two television spots featuring two new celebrities. Following in the footsteps of actresses Zooey Deschanel and Kate Bosworth, actress/singer Emmy Rossum and actress Camilla Belle star in this campaign, a tale of two cities that is meant to represent the versatility of cotton in fashion centers from New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between.
The two spots seek to showcase a range of cotton apparel and feature Rossum's and Belle's renditions of the cornerstone original song featured in all of The Fabric of My Life™ cotton ads. By presenting cotton as the fabric of each star's daily activities in their respective hometowns, the spots illustrate a wide variety of distinctive styles, all composed of the same fabric.
The Fabric of Our Lives® song has enjoyed widespread recognition and the recent high-profile celebrities featured in the ads help to bolster the underlying message that Cotton permeates the closets of everyone and is appropriate for any occasion. DDB New York is proud to be building upon this long-standing campaign and increasing its relevance for Cotton.
The New York City story features Emmy Rossum, a native New Yorker, sporting a fancy frock for a black-tie event, riding a crowded subway in a fashion-forward outfit, and hosting a dinner party while wearing yet another dress, each carefully catered to her dynamic lifestyle. Rossum's rendition of the song encapsulates the attitude of optimism and opportunity commonly associated with the Big Apple.
The L.A. spots provide a point of contrast, accompanied by a different verse of the song and imbuing a more laid-back California vibe that coheres with Camilla Belle's lifestyle on the West Coast. Belle exudes effortless elegance walking through the lobby of a theatre, perfecting her routine in a dance class, shopping for produce at a local market, and lounging around in her backyard with friends. Both spots conclude with a shot of the celebrity's closet, replete with a range of styles made from the signature fabric.
This campaign breaks widely on April 9, simultaneous to the rollout of several digital assets on the consumer website, www.TheFabricOfOurLives.com. These include a multimedia tour of Emmy Rossum's closet, which is categorized by occasions, a blog by Camilla Belle, behind-the-scenes footage and still images from the shoots, celebrity bios and interviews, and downloads of the new cotton songs.
DDB New York has launched the "I Care" button, the product of a creative pro bono project that caters to the impassioned discussions about global issues across social networks. Facebook's 'Like' button, intended to show interest in a status update or post, can often seem inappropriate when applied to tragic current events or controversial social causes. Conversely, the "I Care" button can be embedded alongside the "Like" button as an alternate expression of engagement with a given topic.
The "I Care" button seeks to serve as an appropriate complement to the "Like" button and can be easily leveraged by individuals and organizations alike to exhibit and inspire social activism. Now people will be able to do more with a button than just "Like" something. They'll be able to say 'I care' about important topics ranging from child labor laws, to natural disasters, to world poverty, to name a few.
The "I Care" button can be implemented throughout websites for people to engage with the content and express their attention to, association with, or compassion for a given cause or issue to their broader social network. Moreover, DDB New York has built a website that aggregates all of the "I Care" trending topics in a centralized location, serving as a clear indication of what causes are eliciting the most support in real time (http://www.icare-movement.com/).
DDB New York CCO, Matt Eastwood explains, "As a network, DDB has long espoused the philosophy, put forth by our founder, Bill Bernbach, that Creativity can change the world for the better and we believe that the "I Care" button perfectly exemplifies this notion. This was an unsolicited project that we felt represented an opportunity to fill a void in the online social community and we are greatly looking forward to seeing the "I Care" button proliferated and, ideally, convert awareness and engagement into action."
The code for the "I Care" button will be available to websites to embed alongside their content. By clicking on the "I Care" button, Facebook users can link it to their profile pages to appear the same way a "like" would. The world's first "I Care" button is now live at MTV Voices, an international platform that highlights socially positive and inspirational content produced by a select team of global correspondents, international and local music artists and MTV's audience: http://voices.mtv.co.uk/2012/04/selfassured/.
Tribal DDB Launches Game Featuring 21stC VW Beetle
Tribal DDB Amsterdam has launched 'Hitchhike with a Like', a new fully interactive online gaming experience for Volkswagen, featuring the third generation of the legendary Beetle car- 21st century Beetle. The campaign, which has been produced in close collaboration with Facebook, is a true innovation in the field of social media gaming worldwide and launches across 10 markets today.
The campaign, which conveys the authentic spirit of the 60's Beetle car, promotes the new 21st Century Beetle as the 'new' charming rebel- combining the iconic design with the new powerful features of the modern car. There is a prize for the best player- a real 21st Beetle trip across Europe.
The idea is to allow Facebook fans that 'liked' the game, to virtually hitchhike to the greatest cities in Europe, getting picked up by different Beetle drivers each time. The game is accessible, easy to play and fun. Cities featured are carefully chosen hubs known for cultural and musical events, or considered design or architectural icons in Europe. Every ride is unique and generates an irreplaceable travel experience for the gamer.
There are 64 various characters driving 64 uniquely designed Beetle cars. Each of the 256 different rides bring surprising stories and outcomes, there are opportunities to earn extra points, unlock prizes and discover originally composed music tracks bringing the gaming experience to another level.
"This game is a real experience of the spirit of the 21st Century Beetle," Robin Cenijn, Interaction Designer for Tribal DDB Amsterdam. "It allows you to travel with the iconic car but in an absolutely modern way bringing in the social aspect of the journey with sharing rides and comparing them with your Facebook friends. Hitch a ride with a Beetle and travel across Europe. Where to? It doesn't matter. It's all about the journey, the adventure and the surprise, not the destination."
"The 21st Century Beetle may be faster, tougher and digitally re-mastered, but one thing remains the same - its spirit," continued Chris Baylis, Executive Creative Director for Tribal DDB Amsterdam. "We're taking a classic symbol that captures the rebellious spirit of the original Beetle and updating it for the 21st century. We replace the 60's thumbs up from the side of the road' with hitchhiking the 21st century way: with a Facebook Like."
Music is a central part of this campaign taking a leading role in determining the 'driving the spirit' as each ride has its own soundtrack reflecting the characteristics of the of the Beetle driver.
"We're super stoked with the completion of this exciting project," said Joep Beving, Music Supervisor for MassiveMusic Amsterdam. "Especially since the role of music is so eminent in the game. It was a challenging brief to come up with 64 songs that would hit the mark both from a storytelling angle as well as appeal to a music savvy online social gaming generation. A big chunk of the songs are from our MassiveTalent catalogue that features exciting and aspiring unknown artists. The other tracks were all produced by MassiveMusic. It's the ultimate type of project to showcase why music agencies like ourselves exist. Let's hope people will enjoy it as much as we do."
Interactive social gaming experience
'Hitchhike with a Like' is a social media based and driven interactive experience giving you the liberty of directing the way of the game. To start, choose a destination city and then decide which character would like to be accompanied by. Every time a character offers you a ride, a short teaser about his trip appears. You start as a Rookie, but with practice you can become a true hitchhike king. And maybe, if you collect enough points along the way, you could win a real Beetle trip across Europe.
To bring out a truly innovative work with an unambiguous interactivity level, Tribal DDB Amsterdam worked very closely with Facebook.
"The Beetle has always been an incredibly social car, so we were thrilled when we got the chance to explore how to develop a program on Facebook that truly unleashes the social potential of the new Beetle," said Alexander Schlaubitz, Director Customer Marketing (EMEA) at Facebook. The close and immersive interaction between Tribal DDB, Volkswagen, and Facebook allowed us to build a creative and engaging marketing program that we expect to create a lot of excitement."
Design and details
The game is intuitive, aiming at the short initial attention span of the user and requiring the best of play interaction design.
Tribal DDB Amsterdam's creative team has invested a lot of time into the development of the campaign. The result is a large amount of written content, exceptional copywriting with a high dose of humor, brilliant music background and top-notch design taking this game to the next level of social gaming experiences. Each and every detail of the game is carefully designed- even the 'hitchhike/Facebook thumb' takes on 5 different forms.
DDB UK has created three infographic films with the acclaimed information designer and Information is Beautiful author David McCandless, to highlight the FT's position in the US as a truly global provider of business news.
The three dynamic films will be projected in 3D on the wall of the Vanderbilt Hall in New York's Grand Central Station to create excitement around the FT in the US, reflecting the title as an innovative news organisation. The campaign strapline, 'Stay on Top of the World' underlines the FT's position as a leading global business news provider.
The animated infographic films will report global business stories in a simple and compelling way. During the 3-day event, spanning 27th, 28th and 29th March, the films will be projected in 3-D on to the wall of the Vanderbilt Hall at Grand Central Station in New York between 7am-9pm, to target around 75,0000 commuters each day.
New York commuters will be able to interact with the films in order to explore the stories in greater detail, via a touch-sensitive floor mat. The three topics are, The US and the Global Economy, The Growth of Mobile Technology revolution and the Global Recovery. The topics reflect the typically important, global stories that the FT covers in-depth every day.
The 3 films will also be live on a campaign microsite: www.ft.com/graphicworld. Here, people will be able to share the films and also their views about the stories themselves. They will also have the opportunity to access more in-depth coverage of the topics, and familiarise themselves with FT content, via links to relevant sections of ft.com. A week's free subscription is being offered, via the URL above, to incentivise interaction with the campaign.
The campaign is also supported by online banner campaign and OOH screens in Times Square as well as running on Taxi screens throughout NYC.
Simon Richings, Digital Creative Director at DDB UK said: "We are delighted to have created such an innovative campaign in partnership with a world-renowned title. The direct contact and feedback with the FT's consumers is key to the campaign's success and we are thrilled that we are able to create such scale and impact in speaking directly to this discerning audience in such an iconic location."
Caroline Halliwell, Director of Brand and B2B Marketing at FT, said: "Infographics put complicated data into a format that can be digested quickly and they bring information to life in a modern, straightforward way. DDB has done a great job in using this device to explain the FT's global proposition to our US readership. The central idea is compelling and the execution is exciting and truly interactive - a great way for us to engage with potential subscribers."
The infographics, which are graphic visual representations of information, and data, were developed by David McCandless, acclaimed data journalist and information designer, and author of Information is Beautiful. The projections were created by KLIP Collective, based in Philadelphia, who are leaders in the field of 3-D projection mapping and the Illustrations for the animation were created by George Myers.
DDB New York launched a new pro-bono project called "Water is Life," created to address the global crisis from the dearth of drinkable water around the world, in conjunction with the timing of World Water Day.
DDB is targeting high-trafficked areas around NYC where polluted city water outlets are pumped out into the streetscape and attaching cup dispensers to these structures. The cups are limited editions, featuring different facts about the global water crisis, such as the sad truths that "4,500 children die from unsafe drinking water every day," "unsafe drinking water kills more people than war," "one in eight people lack access to clean drinking water," "80% of illness in the developing world comes from unsafe drinking water," and "400 million Africans lack access to clean water."
The installations are a simple and direct way to bring the issue home for New Yorkers, who do not want for such a basic, life-sustaining force. Leaders at DDB felt that the abundance of life in New York City would provide a stark contrast to the nearly 1 billion people who live without access to clean drinking water.
While walking around a city like New York, where one is quite literally surrounded by water, it's easy to forget that others around the world are not so fortunate. This project serves as a reminder to New Yorkers about the water crisis, and provides them with both the information about how they can help as well as the impetus to get involved.
The installations can be seen at bustling locations around the city, including inside the Bergen Street F/G subway stop in Brooklyn or by the East River Park. The cups in the dispensers feature a hyperlink for the Water is Life website (http://www.waterislife.com/), which includes information about how people can get involved through either donating their time, or money.
On the evening of February 28th, an eyewitness video and photo materials were published on the Internet, showing two teenagers sliding down the roof of the National Library. The materials were rapidly shared on the social networks and proliferated quickly. Some daredevil snowboarders had finally done what the Internet chat community had been talking about for some time now - what would happen if the library were to be transformed into a hill.
In just a few days, the four second long video received more than 70,000 views. It prompted feverish debate not only on the biggest Internet websites, but also in Latvia's television news reports in which journalists speculated about the identity of the daredevils and how they had managed to gain access to the top security site. The next day, the full version of the video was posted on OKarte's homepage: OKartes image TV, which has been watched by 35,600 youtube visitors to date.
"In this campaign, we wanted to show what the masks are all about. They find actual content on the Internet, put it into practice in real life, and post it back on the Internet so that anybody can share it. The masks not only talk about what should be done, but they actually go out and do it," explains Una Rozenbauma, author of the idea for the campaign.
A couple of days later, a "making of" video was also posted on the Internet showing how OKarte's TVC was filmed. And in just a couple of days, this video had already proved to be very popular. This has already been viewed by 24,200 people. In total, in just a week the campaign had gotten 130,000 views. And this was just on the Internet, thereby free if charge. Meanwhile, a reader's comment had appeared on the wall of the "Angels Studio" TVC editors' wall: "If that's video editing, then the editor should be sent to Hollywood!"
However, that's not all. Each of us now is able to sample what it's like to descend from the roof of the National Library. Virtually, of course.
Tribal DDB Amsterdam took top honors in the Music category at the SXSW Interactive Awards this week (http://sxsw.com/interactive) for their work on Philips' "Obsessed with Sound" campaign.
The winners were announced March 13, 2012, at the 15th Annual SXSW Interactive Awards ceremony in Austin, Texas. The SXSW Interactive Music category rewards exceptional projects related to musicians, bands, and the music industry as a whole.
Philips' "Obsessed with Sound" is an interactive music video featuring a performance by the Dutch Metropole Orchestra. The premise of the "Obsessed with Sound" campaign is that Philips makes it possible to hear every detail. The website gives the audience a unique opportunity to see and hear the Grammy award-winning orchestra as they perform a specially composed orchestral piece to demonstrate the crispness of the sound.
Sandra Krstic, Deputy Managing Partner, Tribal DDB Amsterdam, said, "It is truly rewarding to see the innovative and relevant use of music--and the superb performance of the Metropole Orchestra -- being recognized by the world's renowned music experts. The SXSW Interactive Festival and Awards are known for requiring exceptional standards of work. It is an honor for Tribal DDB Amsterdam to be in the winners' league."
The "Obsessed with Sound" campaign is the only SXSW Interactive Awards 2012 winner produced by an Amsterdam-based creative agency. The work has previously been awarded Gold in the music and innovation categories at both the Lovie and Eurobest Awards, and Silver for media innovation at Epica.
Joep Beving, MassiveMusic, added, "We're happy and proud to have been involved in such a beautiful project, especially one that enshrines music and the individual musician. It's rewarding to see Tribal DDB Amsterdam receiving acclaim for their work at SXSW. We are thankful for the opportunity to share the stage with them. We're the guys all the way in the back, waving at our mums."
Tribal DDB Amsterdam
Chris Baylis - Executive Creative Director
Bart Mol - Art Director/Concept
Pol Hoenderboom - Copywriter/Concept
Robbin Cenijn - Designer
Sandra Krstic - Global Business Director
Jan Willem Penterman - Technical Lead
Henk Rijks - Strategy Director
Niels Bellaar - Social Media Planner
Nikaj Gouwerok - Editor
Jeroen Jedeloo, Richard Land, Christy Wassenaar - Agency Producers
It all started with Bill Bernbach. He is the father of the Creative Revolution. He changed the way the advertising industry talked to consumers and to each other. He was the first to really team up copywriters and art directors. Bill taught us that talent should come from anywhere. And that advertising is not a science, but an art - the art of persuasion.
These days I sit in the same office Bill once occupied on Madison Avenue. A portrait of him that once hung in my office in Berlin has now come home. It hangs on my wall along with many of my favorite classic DDB ads.
It is an honor to continue his legacy at his agency. The magic that he and his teams brought to our business is the greatest our industry has ever seen. And his principles still have so much to teach us.
In this spirit I am launching "What Would Bernbach Do?" to celebrate his legacy and discuss today's issues.
"Let us blaze new trails," Bill famously wrote, "Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art and good writing can be good selling."
He still has much to say to us today.
Romance is in the air and with it comes the latest phase of the 'Give in to Gü' campaign by DDB UK. Produced for the luxury desserts manufacturer Gü Puds to promote their Passion Soufflé the campaign reveals two new sumptuously clever print adverts.
The national print campaign urges both men and women to 'Give in to Gü'. This is the very first time that a Gü campaign has directly targeted men, and it kicks this off with the launch of the limited edition product, 2 individual passion fruit soufflés in a special Valentine's Day pack.
Two press ads have been produced, one targeted at men and the other at women, playing on the gender differences that Valentine's Day conjure. The male targeted ad shows that buying the Gü Passion soufflé is an easy way to get brownie points, playing on that age old cliché of men picking up the cursory bunch of flowers for Valentine's Day with the line 'Think of them as edible roses'.
The female-focused ad toys with the idea that whilst buying the 2 soufflés as a gift for your loved one, it also guarantees a selfish treat for yourself at the same time. The cheeky headline says 'I saw these, and thought of me'. Both ads feature the trademark Gü black background and have 'hero shots' of the soufflés.
According to Ellie Fennell, Marketing Director at Gü: "The trend for couples dining in on Valentine's Day is increasing so we wanted a campaign that spoke to men and women about our new Passion Soufflé as an ideal dessert to celebrate the occasion. I think the DDB work got the message across in a very Gϋ way."
The Valentine's campaign comes hot on the heels of the Give in to Gü national TV campaign that aired in December when Gü saw a 40% increase in sales and reached 65% post-campaign brand awareness, which was an all-time high for Gü.
Take a look at the Gü Facebook page for more details: facebook.com/GuUK.
DDB UK has created a new campaign for the Star Alliance network with an innovative promotion that allows users to learn about the range of Gold Status benefits in a fun and entertaining way. The app-based competition called 'Picture Your Upgrade' allows business travelers to earn exclusive upgrades and prizes on their travels, simply by taking a photo of the airport journey.
'Picture Your Upgrade' encourages frequent flyers to get more out of their membership while they are traveling on business throughout the network. The app invites travelers to collect photos each week associated with a Star Alliance Gold Status benefit. This entitles them entry into the competition where they can win a relevant upgrade. For example, they can turn a photo of an ordinary airport lounge seat into designer furniture, or a snap of airport luggage trolleys into a luxury luggage set. Each picture will then be geo-targeted appearing on a map to help spread this example of Social Creativity and teach people about Star Alliance in the process.
The competition will run from February 8th until April 4th. In addition to the weekly prizes, users are entered into a Grand Prize draw to win Round the World Business Class tickets or an upgrade to Star Alliance Gold status.
AdAge and Creativity both published a story entitled, "Five Ideas From Around the World You Need to See: Five of the best campaigns from the year's smartest global shops" and DDB and Tribal DDB is proud to hold 4 of these coveted spots.
AdAge culled its entries for the International Agency of the Year contest in which shops around the world submit an array of clever ideas that solved problems for clients.
Check out the four DDB and Tribal DDB campaigns that were profiled in AdAge as being exemplars of Agency of the Year caliber work:
What to do with instruction manuals too difficult to understand
Tok&Stok, an Ikea-like retailer in Brazil, used Twitter manuals to demonstrate how easy its furniture is to assemble by shortening instructions to a series of 140-character tweets. Customers who bought a piece of furniture just had to find the corresponding hashtag, displayed on stickers on the furniture and product boxes. Besides driving home the point that this furniture is easy to assemble, the Twitter manuals caught the attention of a younger audience buying their first items of furniture.
Tok&Stok and DDB Brasil also took the easy-to-assemble message to much odder media, like a Tok&Stock business card that turns into a little paper chair if you follow the instructions. And a puzzle, with the same number of pieces as the item purchased, that shows you how to "make" the furniture as you put together the puzzle.
To bring back a brand, involve former users in a stunt to draw younger customers.
Another DDB Brasil client, toy maker Estrela, wanted to relaunch its 1980s toy-train brand Ferrorama. To generate interest among a digitally oriented generation, the company's president challenged Ferrorama's biggest online fan group to prove its faith in the toy's return with a mini-journey along the famous pilgrim's route to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. The catch: The little toy train had to travel the last 12 miles of the journey without stopping, even though the fan group had only 120 meters of old train tracks. The journey took five days, as the hardworking fans constantly picked up pieces of track and relaid them ahead of the train. People followed the feat in real time via video and tweets, and could interact with the team through the "Come back, Ferrorama" website.
Estrela relaunched the Ferrorama train set, and the product sold out in a month.
To reach young people, link music and fashion.
The iTunes-like StarHub Music Store in Singapore combined music and fashion -- two ways young people often express themselves -- by attaching radio-frequency identification chips to clothing in stores. When a piece of clothing was taken into a fitting room, it triggered an RFID speaker to play a music track in the dressing room matching the garment's style. Then a text was sent to the shopper's phone, offering a free download of the song he or she was listening to. The music and corresponding clothing were divided into 16 genres, including hip-hop, punk, rock pop, folk, ballads and reggae, totaling more than 10,000 songs. The RFID chips were used in eight fashion brands in 42 stores. The effort by StarHub and DDB Singapore had an average click-through of 84% and boosted paid music downloads by 21%.
Make the medium the message to demonstrate a key product feature.
Swedish winters require a rugged car. Volkswagen made a "winter-adjusted offer for a winter-adjusted car" to stir interest in its 4Motion four-wheel-drive feature. DDB Sweden put the car on a billboard plunked in the middle of a frozen Swedish lake. Once the ice melted and the billboard sank, the deal was over.
TV, print, in-store and banner ads all highlighted the billboard, which was streamed live so people could follow its Titanic-like destiny. A contest to guess when it would sink was a natural fit for social media. The billboard submerged April 14, after two months of live entertainment. Sales rose 38% in the first quarter of 2011 from the year-earlier period.
The night after the Super Bowl, I sat on a panel sponsored by the SF AD Club to discuss this year's Super Bowl spots. The panel was moderated by Jerry Gibbons of A-Team Advertising, and the other folks on the panel--Kristi VandenBosch, CEO of Publicis & Hal Riney; Erich Pfeifer, ECD at Venables Bell & Partners; and Steve Mapp, CD at Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners--and myself were asked to give our comments on the spots selected for USA Today's top 10 list.
For years, the USA Today list has been the "official" list of the best Super Bowl spots. Most of us on the panel have at one time another received a brief in which making the top 10 was the explicit objective. And even with dozens of other lists, metrics, and various ways to rate and rank Super Bowl spots, the USA Today list is still the most viewed. So who determines this most important list? According to the USA Today website, "286 adult volunteers in Phoenix and McLean, Virginia." Go figure.
No offense to the folks in Phoenix or McLean, but the panel didn't much care for their rankings. It's important to note that we all recognize the incredible amount of work that goes into making a Super Bowl commercial--from selling it through layers within an agency, through the layers at the client, securing a top-notch director, etc. all under the utmost scrutiny and pressure from inside and outside. So kudos to everyone who managed to get a spot onto the big stage this year--a great accomplishment in itself.
But we were asked to be critics (as is every viewer in America on game day).
When I got into advertising, my mother told me, "Just put a dog or a baby in everything." Apparently, I should have listened. It's no secret that the well-worn formula to the Super Bowl spot is to use at least one of these: dog (chimpanzee or other animal also okay), baby, sex, someone getting hit in the head/crotch, celebrity. Reading down the top 10 list, you have: Dog-Dog-Dog-Baby-Sexy candy-Dog-Cheetah-Ferris Bueller-chimp-sex.
So the safe play is to follow the formula. Which is what most advertisers did this year. And if the goal was to make USA Today's top 10, then they succeeded. But if the goal is to stand out or be memorable beyond Monday, the panel thought they were less successful.
The unanimous favorite of the formula ads was VW's "The Dog Strikes Back." It didn't live up to the Little Vader spot from last year, but it was a well-produced, well-shot piece of visual storytelling. The success of the commercial's button, which was set in the Star Wars cantina and linked this year's spot to last year's, was more debatable.
The panel also unanimously liked the Fiat spot, "Seduction." Compared to GoDaddy's annual hackfest, this spot is well shot, ties nicely to the product, and shows that a spot can be sexy without being sexist and tasteless.
Universally panned by the panel were the Doritos spots, which stuck to the Super Bowl schtick. They're consumer-generated spots, but the novelty of that has worn off. And the production value of them has gotten slick enough that they've lost any charm that a home-made shot-on-a-dime-with-dad's-camera spot might have. Which leaves them in a weird middle ground--slapstick jokes with little craft.
We also had a lively discussion of Chrysler's "Halftime in America" spot. We all admired the craft, though disagreed on whether or not Clint Eastwood was a good pick for spokesperson. This spot wasn't included in the USA Today poll because it ran at halftime, but we all agreed that it was the most breakthrough, and anyone who watched the game at a party commented on how the room went silent when the 2-minute pep talk to America came on the tube.
Audi's "Vampire Party" was also commended for its high production value, music, and the fact that it didn't telegraph humor from the opening shot.
My personal favorite Super Bowl spot was the little-seen Will Ferrell spot for Old Milwaukee. In a way, it was the anti-Super Bowl spot, running only in North Platte, Nebraska. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tejGMPAShdY
Jerry Gibbons concluded the panel by reminding everyone that the best in our business are craftspeople. A great concept, well-executed will always be admired, even if it isn't rewarded by the fine folks in Phoenix and McLean. And he implored us to approach everything we do and everything we create as if 111 million people were going to see it on the biggest stage in the world.
DDB Worldwide CCO, Amir Kassaei, was featured in Campaign this week after his appearance at DDB Dubai where he conceptualized his new creative vision for the DDB Network. Bringing a new creative edge is particularly crucial as DDB Dubai is in the process of adjusting to and redefining itself through a recent merger.
Amir has spent the past year in his new post as CCO traveling around to every DDB office to share his plan in an effort to provide a unified creative vision to the whole company, while each office continues to cater itself regionally. Amir's vision called "Lemon 2020" is a referent to DDB's founder, Bill Bernbach's, ingenious "Lemon" ad for VW and is a modern reinterpretation of Bernbach's focus on the core essence of DDB.
Amir's creative plan is based off of the axiom put forth by Bernbach that stated, "If you want to be successful as a brand, you have to find or create a relevant truth and deliver it, or communicate it in a fresh way so people start to share and care about it." Amir hopes in sharing his inspiring plan across the network, he will provide a cohesive definition and standard of creativity as well as support each office with consistent tools and infrastructure going forward into 2012 and well beyond into 2020.
Promoaction DDB Saudi Arabia started the New Year with a Green greeting in response to a contest to come up with an unconventional New Years card that spoke on behalf of a social cause: http://www.green2012-pddbsa.com/
The "Go Green 2012" is a digital interactive platform that was disseminated to all of our friends and clients inviting them to participate in making our planet greener. With every email greeting, the recipient was invited to plant a virtual tree on a specially created website. For each tree planted, DDB pledged to donate a dollar to the Saudi Environmental Society, SENS.
What a fresh and optimistic way to start 2012.
Being GREEN or environmentally friendly is one of the big new trends being followed by many companies in KSA. In the last three years, there have been a lot of initiatives taken by the government from city cleaning activities, environmental awareness programs, and establishing SENS. Similarly, private sector organizations have conceived of some unprecedented international environmental protection initiatives.
For those who would like to know more about these environmental initiatives in Saudi Arabia, here are a few useful links.
These are all positive signs for a country with an obsessive consumption culture, high disposable income and a thriving young population, in addition to being the largest producer of oil in the world. However, being a "Green" Company in Saudi Arabia is a bigger achievement than you may think. It is a matter of survival. Literally.
According to the Ministry of Labor in KSA, every business organization is required to employ a certain percentage of Saudi nationals as part of its total workforce. Only when the required number of Saudi nationals are employed, will the company be given a "Green" status. In case of non-compliance, the company can face heavy financial fines, hiring restrictions and even disqualifications. A company may not be completely "Green" today but based on how far they are from the required target, a company may receive an Orange or a Red rating code.
Now this seems like a brilliant initiative to create employment for a society with 60% local population under the age of 24 years and unemployment rate at a staggering 15%, but here is the reality check. Where do you suddenly find competent, qualified and willing Saudi workers who now have to replace up to 60% of your existing team? Here lies the real problem. Limited talent. Unlimited Demand.
Hiring, training and most importantly retaining staff especially in service sector businesses becomes such a critical criteria, that it may even challenge the feasibility of your business. To be a Green Company in these difficult times is quite an achievement. It shows impeccable resource planning, operational excellence and, most importantly, a great culture that is able to attract and retain local talent.
However the question remains unanswered. How do you find the right replacement talent? How about if every leading player in their respective industry takes their CSR budget and invests this money in developing local talent?
Instead of complaining let us start creating. Imagine if one of the travel industry giants takes the initiative to train young Saudis with basic skills and technical courses related to their industry. Within a few months, we can have a skilled supply of workers, trained to work in the travel industry all across the country.
There are some local industry patrons who have directed their CSR efforts towards skill development; Goody Kitchen is a great example of empowering women through training and skill development in the culinary field. Initiatives like these not only create new opportunities for young Saudis, but can also act as a social catalyst towards developing a progressive self-reliant community. Furthermore, it provides a great platform for organizations to demonstrate their commitment to the society by becoming visionary mentors to the local youth.
What about our industry? How about a College of Creativity! Any takers?
Okay, jargon alert! I'm going to talk about T-shaped people. While I'm there I may throw in the odd reference to silos, pushing the envelope and fluffing the sausage. So get your jargon bingo cards ready and eyes down for a full house...
Back in the 1950s Bill Bernbach, DDB's founder and philosophical guiding light, was the first person in the industry to formalize the Copywriter/Art Director relationship. Prior to this, writers would dash off witty headlines in between cocktails, cigarettes and sexism and the art department would then lay out the ads in a fairly predictable and formal way. But Bill Bernbach came along and shook it up. He didn't just get rid of the silos (make sure you tick that off your jargon bingo card) he also hired people from 'outside' the industry. He didn't hire WASPS, he hired immigrants, Jews - kids from Brooklyn. He mixed it up, challenging the collective wisdom with his hiring policy the same way he did with his ads.
But advertising today is a more complex business. We don't just create print ads and TV spots anymore, we need to innovate (tick), build relationships (tick), earn media (tick) - oh, and still sell stuff. So by my reckoning that makes us inventors, psychologists, media planners, marketeers and shit-catchers (not on your card?). What can we do?
There are two things agencies can do; they can either hire someone from every single discipline they touch; which is an expensive hobby as it's impossible to make everyone billable, or hire versatile or 'T-shaped' people (tick - that's the jackpot.) For those of you who've been living under an 'O' shaped object, T-shaped people describes those who have a strong single discipline such as copywriting - that's the vertical stalk of the T - whilst the horizontal top of the T reflects their empathy and ability to understand other disciplines. Of course, this was always true to some extent.
Writers have never just been writers, they've had to understand art direction, strategy, photography, directing, editing etc. But in these digital times, the list gets longer and longer as copywriters and art directors need to be able to talk media planning, UX, creative technology, service design, mobile technology, trend watching - but still be able to write great scripts and create compelling advertising that people want to share.
So where do we find these people? In Amsterdam at a local level, people with this level of expertise and experience are often found running their own agency. Even if they're not running their own agency, they're still very hard to find, very senior and very expensive. If you want a big T you have to pay for it.
At Tribal DDB Amsterdam we have hired a range of smaller T's with genuine variety in their make up. These idiosyncratic-mini-T's (I've just invented a new term that won't be on your cards) are actively mixed up thanks to our new office redesign to hopefully create an agency that can handle the complexity of modern advertising and the demands of digital. Here's how it works. We have classic creative concept teams (in name, not make up) who are curious about digital and love new stuff. We sit them in project teams alongside an interactive designer, a user experience (UX) person, a tech lead and just off to the side we have strategists and creative directors who work across multiple projects but can dip in at a moment's notice. Even project management and account managers are invited to share the space when the project demands it. The office has been intentionally designed to have all creative disciplines around one table sharing a space, knowledge, ideas and respect. So what we end up with are T-shaped pods that can handle anything clients want to throw at them.
Of course, finding the right people who can work in these teams is still a challenge, but it's not as hard as finding people who can 'do everything.' We have to hand pick these teams to make sure we have not only the right mix of disciplines (our vertical stalks of our Ts) but also a good and varied selection of tops to our Ts. Some creatives' 'tops' might be better suited to social media, others may have a traditional background that makes up their top, and some are happy talking e-commerce. But ultimately everyone learns from everyone else because we literally knocked down the walls, we think hard about casting and how we mix people up. Many innovative companies run on casual interaction - but what we have done is accelerate that casual interaction to help us come up with the kind of ideas our clients have come to expect from the agency of today; socially led campaigns with digital at the center.
You could say that we simply put a lot of smart people in a room and give them a bit more of a free rein than other agencies. It's probably the main reason I work in innovation driven advertising (tick); I like being surrounded by smart and curious people because it makes me smarter and more curious. My T gets bigger, which means I can spot the skills and interests of other Ts, who in turn help influence other Ts and help them grow.
We all know that our ideas are only as good as the people who come up with them, our work is only as good as the people who touch it and our ability to change and innovate is driven by versatility, a willingness to adapt and the need to fluff the sausage. (Full house!) More T anyone?
How does something enter the annals of popular culture? What qualifies as popular culture? It is kind of like - if you say you are cool - you are not. Other people have to recognize the qualities that make you cool for such a label to be authentic and credible. Author Andrea Hiott has chosen a subject that is undeniably part of global pop culture...the Volkswagen Beetle. In her book, Thinking Small: The Long, Strange Trip of the Volkswagen Beetle, she puts us in the passenger seat for an entertaining and educational ride. The vehicle's creation and its rich history truly make for a fascinating read. The book's first half takes us sequentially from vision to creation to near doom to resurrection.
Then the story really takes hold when the Beetle attempts to penetrate the American market. This was the time of big, big cars with huge tail fins. America was experiencing incredible prosperity, celebrating its superpower position, and enjoying a period of relative peace. Bigger was not just assumed to be better...it was. Enter the Beetle. It was viewed as ugly, noisy, underpowered, and uncomfortable. And, worst of all, it was small. Not to mention the fact that fourteen years earlier, many Americans were fighting their way across Germany, so few held any positive associations with 'The People's Car'. In fact, in one episode of Mad Men, an attendee at a party at Don Draper's home states, "the last time I saw one of them, I think I threw a hand grenade in it."
Those constraints and opposition to the product did not make for the best conditions. And that was precisely what Doyle Dane Bernbach were up against when Volkswagen commissioned them to do the advertising for the Beetle. But great challenges often yield great results and that certainly was the case for the creativity that followed. Voted the Number One campaign of the 20th Century by Advertising Age, the now iconic "Lemon" and "Think Small" ads addressed all objections to the car directly in a self-deprecating way that continues to resonate in Volkswagen communications. Arguably, those ads have their own place in popular culture right beside the diminutive vehicle.
Born in Germany, adopted in America but truly global in popular culture, the story of the Volkswagen Beetle is one of innovation and creativity - two incredibly powerful forces in business.
Changi Airport Group (CAG) has launched a campaign to communicate Changi Airport's brand appeal and experience to its travelers. Eschewing the traditional formula of enumerating facilities and services, the campaign sets out to raise the emotional quotient of the airport by focusing on the traveler experience.
Developed by Tribal DDB Singapore, the campaign which kicks off with a 90-second brand video, embodies the brand promise of 'The Feeling is First Class' to showcase some of Changi Airport's best kept secrets.
The campaign rides on the changing role of airports in the modern context. Airports today are no longer just places to catch a flight; instead, they are fast becoming destinations in their own right, where shopping, dining and entertainment converge. Changi Airport offers over 400 retail and dining outlets, together with a multitude of amenities including the world's first in-airport butterfly garden.
Changi Airport's highly acclaimed operational efficiency is just one of the elements of the unique Changi experience. The airport is focused on innovative ideas including an indoor slide, the roof-top pool, movie theatres and koi ponds, to create an unforgettable airport experience. This is encapsulated in the brand line: 'The Feeling is First Class'. Joy, Wonder and Delight, emotions distilled from the brand, are key themes played out in the video. These emotions are captured through intimate sequences of travelers indulging in the Changi Airport experience. Singer-songwriter Colbie Caillat's 'Bubbly', is used to provide a modern, yet emotive background to the lush imagery.
Mr Ivan Tan, Senior Vice-President, Corporate and Marketing Communications Division says, "We believe the Changi Airport experience to be unique, out-of-the-ordinary. Excellent service, operational efficiency and innovative ideas blend together to create a feeling that's first class. It's this special feeling that we set out to capture in this campaign."
Cut down versions will be flighted on expandable video banners on selected websites to drive users to a newly refreshed microsite (http://www.changiairport.com/the-feeling-is-first-class), which features the full video, as well as a peek into the highlights of Changi Airport.
Print executions of the campaign will also be launched in magazine titles globally. The advertisements will include a Quick Response code to lead readers to the microsite.
DDB New York has been awarded a silver and three bronze bullets for its "Call for Entries" campaign for the Art Director's Club (ADC). With the tagline, "Keep Fighting the Good Fight," this tongue-in-cheek campaign has gained traction both for its relatability to those in the industry as well as for its creative portrayal of industry challenges for a larger audience.
2011 was the biggest year since the YoungGuns began recognizing young talent in 2000. The online jury of over 100 people shared their nominations to the final jury of twelve, who discussed and debated all of the submissions before coming to a decision.
DDB, serving as The Art Directors Club's creative partner for the 91st Annual Awards, developed all aspects of the campaign strategy and execution. The agency worked with Finnish Illustrator, Rami Niemi to design artwork for 11 CFE posters and postcards showing humorous situations in modern day advertising that illustrate the impediments and obstacles to creating great work, with headlines such as "I think we should schedule a meeting" overlaying a visual of a meeting already in progress. Another poster depicts a photo shoot for a can of unbranded tuna, with the statement "I want it to be Irving Penn meets Helmut Newton".
Check out the Young Guns Awards 2011 Showcase: http://www.ygaward.com/showcase2011/
A special shout out goes out to all of those who worked to make this campaign great including Matt Eastwood, Menno Kluin, Aron Fried, Carlos Wigle, Juan Carlos Pagan, Rami Niemi, Leslie Silver, Carol Brandwein, and Jane Piampiano.
Les Binet and Sarah Carter get a little bit angry about some of the nonsense they hear around them... like the idea that highly creative ads don't actually work.
"Ah, but the Cadbury's Gorilla ad didn't actually work did it?"
"That Sony Balls ad? - very beautiful, but don't suppose it sold many TVs."
"It made me cry, but will it make people buy any more stuff from John Lewis?"
All comments heard in the last 2 weeks. Frankly they are not uncommon. Whenever ground-breaking communication emerges, the marketing naysayers can be heard soon afterwards. Yes, it's funny. Or clever. Or beautifully shot. But will it actually sell anything?
Grrr... There's an implicit assumption among many marketing people that creativity and effectiveness are awkward bedfellows. Creative ads bring fame and awards. But the ads that sell stuff are much more prosaic.
So we were fascinated to hear this week of a new piece of research which busts this most hardwired of marketing myths. Peter Field, in association with the IPA, has undertaken new analysis of the relationship between creativity and effectiveness. Using the IPA's dataBANK, he compares performance in creative awards around the world with actual business results, for a huge number of campaigns. So, does the creativity needed to win major creative awards improve a brand's chance of business success?
The answer? An emphatic Yes. Ads that win creative awards are significantly more effective than ads that don't. And the more creative awards they win, the more effective they tend to be. But the most striking finding is how efficient creative campaigns are.
Ads that win creative awards are 11 times more efficient at selling stuff than other ads.
That's an astonishing finding. It suggests that creativity is almost certainly THE most important tool at the marketing director's disposal.
The research also highlights two reasons why award-winning ads work so well. Highly creative campaigns get people talking, on and off -line both about the brand and the advertising. This amplifies the direct effect of the campaign.
The second mechanism is more controversial. Ads that win creative awards tend to be high on emotional impact, and lower than average on rational content. Conventional marketing wisdom says to shift product you need to get your selling message across. But this is a myth we've busted before. Conventional wisdom is wrong. Emotions have far more influence over people's buying behaviour than rational product messages do.
Back to the Gorilla myth. That ad said nothing about Cadburys Dairy Milk, yet econometric analysis for Fallon by Data2Decisions has shown a 60% higher ROI than previous campaigns for the chocolate. Highly creative and highly successful.
So why is this myth that creative ads don't work so pervasive? It feels to us that some clients feel uncomfortable with the very idea that ads like these could work. Because if these ads do move sales, that's a big challenge to their carefully honed models of communication. Surely their company can't have been wrong all these years in their systems and benchmarks?
But as John Maynard Keynes witheringly said: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?"
Alarmingly , research evidence is building which shows that this emotional selling approach, so prevalent in award-winning ads, doesn't tend to perform well in conventional quantitative pre-testing. What a waste! How many other potentially business-changing ads are piling up in that animatic graveyard?
This leaves us with the intriguing and entirely counter-intuitive thought that those "creative types" judging on creative awards panels, for all their oft maligned focus on the ground -breaking, the provocative and the artistic, may actually turn out to be more skilled at predicting an ad's business success than all the thousands of dollars routinely invested in pre-testing systems.
Back to John Maynard Keynes: "There is nothing so disastrous as a rational investment policy in an irrational world". He would have needed to look no further than a lot of current pre-testing for some proof that he was right.
Canadian Tire Unveils Canada's First Tree Powered By The Christmas Spirit
Canadian Tire is lighting up the holiday season and spreading holiday cheer across the country with the unveiling of the first tree powered by holiday spirit. The 30-foot Christmas Spirit Tree has 3,000 LED lights that are powered by messages of positive holiday spirit on social media channels including Facebook, Twitter and posts to ChristmasSpiritTree.ca.
Developed by Tribal DDB Toronto, the Christmas Spirit Tree captures all real-time blog posts, tweets, public Facebook messages and other online content containing specific holiday keywords and transforms them into data that is then visualized via the lights on the tree. Canadians may also text message "Christmas" to 70734 to affect the lights on the tree.
The brightness and colour of the lights will vary depending on the source and volume of the messages. For example, posts from Twitter and other social media are represented as white lights on the tree, whereas messages from ChristmasSpiritTree.ca or text messages are visualized as a spiral of blue lights moving up the tree accompanied by flashing strobe lights all over. And, the brightness of the lights represents the total number of per-minute messages being shared across the country, so at times when online sharing is at its highest, the tree will shine at its brightest.
The Christmas Spirit Tree will be on display at Toronto Union Station from December 12-26 from 5:30 a.m. to midnight EST daily and can be viewed via live stream at ChristmasSpiritTree.ca and on screens at Yonge-Dundas Square.
Tribal DDB and DDB took five of seven International Awards for KLM, StarHub, Singapore Elections, Estrela "Come Back Ferrorama," and Tok & Stok Twitter Manuals and was recognized for Excellence in Social Technologies at the Forrester Groundswell Awards fifth annual show, presented at the Forrester Marketing & Strategy Forum EMEA held at The Grove country estate in London November 16-17. The awards recognize excellence in achieving business and organizational goals with social technology applications and the wins further showcase the success of its work for clients.
Tribal DDB Singapore was honored with two Forrester Groundswell Awards. The wins were awarded for the StarHub "Musical Fitting Rooms" campaign in the Business to Consumer International: Mobile Application category and for the "Singapore Spring" elections campaign in the Business to Consumer International: Social Impact category. Tribal DDB and DDB° Amsterdam's celebrated KLM "Tile & Inspire" campaign was awarded the Forrester Groundswell Award in the Business to Consumer International: Talking category.
Tribal DDB and DDB Amsterdam's global "Tile & Inspire" campaign for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines utilized social media to generate crowd-sourced uploads of users' photos to feature consumer faces within traditional Dutch delftware blue tiles on a real Boeing 777-200 airplane. The airline unveiled the Boeing 777-200 airplane exterior wrapped in a selection of 3,965 crowd-sourced tile images and uplifting quotes. The campaign was part of KLM's ongoing effort to generate brand preference via engaging activation campaigns around the Brand's Dutch roots and their brand promise to supply "Journeys of Inspiration".
StarHub's "Musical Fitting Rooms" was developed by Tribal DDB and DDB Singapore by combining music and fashion - two powerful forms of self expression for youth - with RFID technology to create a hyper-personalized experience. Tribal DDB tagged RFID chips to clothes and installed RFID readers with directional speakers in the fitting rooms of selected fashion retail stores. When a garment was brought into the fitting room, the RFID chip triggered the reader to play a music track that matched the style of the garment. An iPad interface installed in the room then provided information about the suggested song, as well as a link to StarHub's online music store. StarHub's Musical Fitting Room introduced young shoppers to music that best suited their style and helped them to better express themselves through both fashion and music. It positioned the StarHub Music Store as the online music portal that is truly in tune with what matters to youth.
Tribal DDB created a useful informational tool before the Singapore General Election 2011 upon recognizing that over 44,000 counts of political buzz exploded on social media, blogs, forums and websites the week leading up to polling day. Singaporeans needed to make sense of it all, so Tribal DDB created "SG Party Time" to turn the data into simple, attractive infographics using data and analysis by Brandtology. The project was part of an effort to encourage openness and real-time tracking of the election outlook while remaining neutral and providing statistical analysis. Users could get a bird's-eye view of on-ground sentiments at all constituencies. They could see how well liked (or disliked) each party was. They could also see what people said about each party, in real time even as speeches were broadcast. In the seven days of campaigning, SG Party Time had over 252,000 page views with 6,000 unique visits per day, an average of four minutes per visit and more than six pages viewed per visit. The campaign was shared over 2,000 times on Facebook and reached an estimated 80,000 Twitter users.
DDB Bazil's Tok & Stok Twitter Manuals strove to achieve the greenest way possible to provide instructions for Tok & Stok's east to assemble furniture. As a solution, it leveraged Twitter to create manuals that were reduced to a mere 140 character tweets providing a link to the assemble diagram. Consumers simply had to find the hashtag of the name of the furniture item and follow the instructions. The promotion caught the media, the current and new brand's fans, architects, designers, and those who were simply considering buying furniture's attention. Through the social network, the relationship between the company and clients was strengthened.
DDB Brazil was also recognized for its Come Back Ferrorama campaign in which a toy company, Estrela, challenged the fans of Ferrorama, a toy train, on Orkut, Brazil's largest social network. The challenge was to prove their dedication by running the train on a long pilgrimage in Spain across 20km, using and reusing 120 meters of track continuously. The groups engaged with the public in real time by constantly uploading videos, tweeting, and providing photos of their five-day journey. The success led Estrela to relaunch the popular toy. Moreover, it sold out within the month and garnered as many as 1230 pre-orders, transforming the company's marketing and business strategy to espouse the digital and social world.
Taking a bold step by providing a place for locals and travelers to serve as advocates for the country, the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC) offers a dynamic new tool allowing travelers access to authentic trip advice from those who know the real Canada. The Explore Canada Like a Localwebsite and mobile app enhances the Canadian travel experience by sharing insider information on thousands of spots of interest, enabling travelers to plan their journey; serving as a comprehensive guide during their trip; and allowing travelers to share their own Canadian travel tips with other travelers.
Developed by DDB Canada and Tribal DDB in Vancouver, Explore Canada Like a Local includes homegrown expertise on thousands of great spots and tips that Canadians shared from the CTC's domestic LOCALS KNOW campaigns. It also pulls in real-time location data via Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla, including both positive and negative user reviews and check-ins at any given spot to help inspire travelers.
Explore Canada Like a Local users can explore Canada in a number of different ways: by theme (arts & culture, city breaks, culinary, luxury and outdoors), by destination (major cities, tourism spots and favorite local hangouts) or by travel lists created by travelers. Users can also create their own customized travel list, which they can share on the site and with their friends and family. Once users download the app, built for iPhones and Android smartphones, on their trip, they can use their list as a guide to check-in and to share their content with their social networks and on the site.
Users are also invited to submit photos, videos and tips to existing spots on the site, and to add relevant new venues that are not featured.
Explore Canada Like a Local will first launch in the United States, followed by staged rollouts in the UK, France, Germany, Mexico and Australia later this year. Print, online, iPad advertising, public relations and social media, as well as global partnerships with American Express and Lonely Planet are being used to launch this new tool.
DDB New York was charged with creating a campaign for The Art Directors Club (ADC) 91st Annual Awards Call for Entries which encourages creatives to "Keep Fighting the Good Fight," despite obstacles to creating great work.
The integrated campaign launched online at www.adcawards.org and through a global print mailing on November 1. DDB worked with Finnish illustrator Rami Niemi to design artwork for nine CFE posters and postcards showing humorous situations in modern day advertising that illustrate the impediments to and challenges of conceiving of innovative and creative work.
The agency also tapped renowned comedian Lewis Black, famous for his idiosyncratic comedy style, to create an original rant recording for the campaign. The animated rant video features Black channeling his inner advertising creative and fuming about the pressures of agency life with double-edged witticisms such as, "Comedy routines are developed over lifetimes. Movie scripts are crafted over years. But a compelling message to woo consumers into a buying frenzy... Yeah, we're gonna need that by three o'clock."
The online call for entries for the Art Directors Club's 91st Annual Awards is open at www.adcawards.org. Deadlines for entry are January 20, 2012, for Design, Photography, Illustration and Interactive; January 27, 2012, for Student, and February 10, 2012, for Advertising and Integrated.
Bob Scarpelli, Chairman of DDB Worldwide, was recently interviewed by the Yahoo! Advertising Blog in its Yahoo! Futurist series on his observations as someone who has been at the forefront of the rapidly changing advertising industry and who has witnessed its evolution over the course of his lengthy career. Bob credits much of his success as a creative to a simple ethos of trusting one's instincts and engaging audiences at a human level. These are basic truths he feels are applicable, no matter the medium.
Scarpelli pays tribute to our founder, Bill Bernbach, who revolutionized the industry, enshrining creativity as the most powerful force in business and bringing unprecedented insights and whit during the 1950s and 1960s that have left a lasting legacy on the industry. As Creative Director of DDB Chicago in the 1990s, Scarpelli evolved Bernbach's famous assertion that word of mouth is the most powerful medium of all, when he coined the term "Talk Value" which refers to ideas that not only permeate popular culture but inspire it and tap into the larger cultural zeitgeist. For example, the "Wassup" commercial for Budweiser became a viral sensation at the turn of the twentieth century before we even knew what viral truly meant, integrating itself into the vernacular and inspiring several parodies.
Today, DDB has evolved this notion even further to something we dub "Social Creativity" which encompasses "Share Value." In other words, advertisers not only have to ignite buzz around a campaign, but they must also inspire people to proliferate their content as well as endorse it to friends and family. Scarpelli underscores that we are no longer talking at people anymore, proselytizing them about the merits of our product or service. Alternatively, we are engaging with people and doing so instantaneously. Ideas must appeal simultaneously to the head and the heart, giving people an impetus to want to participate in the conversation.
In the contemporary advertising environment, marketers are sometimes stymied by how to measure their success on social platforms beyond the so-called "cool factor." The internet allows us to execute campaigns swiftly and inexpensively, but many of the ideas are not pre-tested. In light of this transitional period where marketers are still dabbling with digital, Scarpelli urges them to take risks and use their instincts, rather than be pusillanimous and overly reliant on the fixed metrics.
In terms of the future of advertising, Scarpelli postulates it will be a continually changing technological landscape. However, he qualifies this by adding that he foresees self-editing by people who feel like they are being inundated with a barrage of information and options. Consumers are becoming more discerning and will not appreciate come-ons unless they feel a proclivity for the product and a connection to the messaging, regardless of how innovative the campaign is. He cautions against advertisers exploiting a given platform or technology for the sake of doing so, admonishing them not to forget the core ethos of advertising and the necessity of having meaning behind the message and not letting the tools subsume the larger purpose of the promotion. The bottom line is that, regardless of how technological advances alter the ways in which ads are delivered, the power of a simple idea and insights into human nature will always be of utmost importance.
Mike Parker, Co-President, Tribal DDB U.S., writes about the fundamental to understand the consumer. This article was originally published by AOL where we contribute content for Advertising Week.
Friends, let's not make the same mistake again. I know that many of us have been in the digital marketing business for some time now - and have the grey hair to show for it! Let's take a trip down memory lane, shall we? When the web first began gaining traction as a marketing medium, our industry really started to focus on what was different about it. To be sure, there was a lot to be learned about this nascent, unprecedented medium. Most brand marketers knew they needed to explore the new channel but didn't trust that their agencies could understand and master it well enough to help them use it.
So from the beginning we designated specific "digital" folks and saw the rise of the digital agency. Here we are 12-plus years later at Tribal DDB. And we've realized that although it's important be knowledgeable about web technologies and the ever evolving way that consumers use them, it is still fundamental to understand the consumer. So in the end, digital marketing really isn't that different. Marketers still need to have a deep understanding of their consumers, focusing on who is on the other side of all the screens rather than focusing on the technology behind the screens themselves. People still have the same inherent needs and desires and generating insights and connecting with consumers through powerful messaging that moves them is still the tantamount goal of marketers and the requisites for business success. There needs to be greater emphasis placed on consumer insight than the kind of technology used to bring your creative idea to life. As a result, the "traditional" and "digital" are coming together in new and interesting ways all around us.
The rapid pace of change is what makes this evolving business exciting. In the last few years we have seen the explosive rise in the use of social media by consumers. Again, as an industry we find ourselves looking at a new arena and acknowledging that consumers are deeply involved with and passionate about social media. We are interrogating whether these new behaviors and new channels are so different that we need to start new "social" agencies to adequately confront them. It feels like déjà vu all over again.
It can be argued that since the invention of the telephone, there has not been another technology that facilitates peoples' natural social interactions. We are inherently social beings. We like to talk to each other, connect with each other, learn from each other, and stay close to people and to things we care about. It is challenging to successfully use social media for marketing purposes and have something that people care about enough to connect with. In order to create things consumers care about, it is essential that we understand our audiences and what drives them. That sounds an awful lot like where we started - with prioritizing consumer insights and great creative ideas that connect with people.
What is different about working with social media is that we can finally, achieve the two-way dialogue that we've all been talking about for the past decade at scale. The change that we have to embrace is shifting our collective industry mindset from the past where the publishing of an ad or the launch of a campaign was the end of our efforts, to the present where this is, in fact, just the beginning. When we launch something and put it out in the world, it should be the start of the conversation and interaction that we are having with our audience, not at the end. Our success will be premised on how effective we are at engaging consumers and how much participation and pass-along we drive. It feels like the bar of all creativity now needs to be based on how much share value our ideas have.
So let's not make the same mistake again and silo social media experts and initiatives because it looks new and shiny. To be effective in this new arena, we need to build upon past precedents that were successful and transform our insights into ideas and our ideas into connections. We need to work together to change all of our output to social creativity.
Mentored by Tribal DDB New York, a group of five Grace Dodge Career & Technical High School students were lauded first place this week at the Advertising Week Advertising Futures competition. This competition is made possible through a partnership between the Ad Council, the New York City Department of Education and Virtual Enterprises. The popular program is in its eighth year and is premised on pairing teams of high school students with top advertising agencies that mentor the students in creating an ad-- from conception to execution.
The winning students from Grace Dodge Career & Technical High School competed with students from more than 30 other public high schools in New York City--also paired with agencies -- to develop a campaign to tackle the issue of teen obesity. The students were tasked with creating a public service announcement for First Lady Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" initiative, which is aimed at encouraging teens to prioritize diet and exercise, and underscores the negative health effects caused by the extreme amounts of time logged online and using mobile technology.
The number of obese children in the U.S. is at an all-time high, with more children than ever developing obesity-related illnesses like diabetes, heart disease indicators, sleep apnea, and asthma. This is the first generation of young Americans who will see as high as 25 percent of their peers fail to qualify for military service because they are overweight, and this may be the first generation of kids who do not live outlive their parents.
Matt Scheckner, Executive Director of Advertising Week referred to the campaign as, "Brilliant work by Grace Dodge and Tribal DDB. While all of the students and agencies in Advertising Futures benefit by participating, there is a winner each year and we could not be more proud of or agree more with the campaign, 'Don't Indulge the Bulge.'"
"It was refreshing to work with students who thought creatively and who challenged us as well as themselves," said Kinney Edwards, Group Creative Director, Tribal DDB New York. "They wanted to win from the start, but questioned the very possibility with great disbelief. We asked them to focus on an idea that they could believe in, something that they could walk away from knowing they had exhausted all possibilities and which felt right and had meaning, even if the idea didn't win."
"Once we had helped the students frame the challenge for themselves, we initiated fluid thinking and facilitated an atmosphere of being open to all ideas," said Jason Macbeth, Creative Director, Tribal DDB New York. "Towards the end of the process we encouraged them to scrutinize all of their potential ideas, to be absolutely certain that the idea they decided to develop met the brief squarely. We're very excited about Grace Dodge's win."
The ad, which will run in The New York Times and appear on a Times Square billboard, was designed by the students to raise awareness and encourage other students to choose real play, real interactions, and real food. The creative is based on their insight that "the bulge" - which represents junk food, lack of activity, and increased time spent online, watching TV, playing video games and texting - is something that kids can either choose to indulge in or take an active role in preventing. The ad--"Don't Indulge the Bulge"--features happy, healthy, active students outside, opting not to give in to the "bulge." The illustration was created pro bono by Canadian artist Ted Hammond.
BC Hydro's Hydro to Home site has been named 'Webpick of the Day' by Communication Arts. The storytelling site takes consumers on the interactive journey of clean energy. Developed by DDB Canada/Tribal DDB Vancouver, the site teaches consumers how hydroelectric power is created and personalizes the journey of how energy gets from a rain drop to their socket at home.
Knowing that people care about power where and when they need it, and that British Columbians want to know that their power is clean and environmentally friendly, we knew we had to tell BC Hydro's energy story in a way that made it personal to each British Columbian. Our strategy focused on creating an interactive story with the audience's own home at its focal point.
Tribal DDB Amsterdam has launched "Obsessed with Sound," a new interactive audiovisual online experience for Philips. The campaign, which promotes the quality of the Philips audio range, launches across 11 markets including Germany, France, Russia, UK, USA, Brazil, Argentina and India.
The website gives the audience a unique opportunity to see and hear the GRAMMY Award-winning Dutch Metropole Orchestra as they perform a specifically composed orchestral piece. Throughout the performance, users can interactively isolate any one of the 51 individual musicians to hear every detail of their musical contribution.
The premise of the "Obsessed with Sound" campaign is to hear every detail. So often, the nuances of sound and music get lost when listening on low-grade speakers. This Interactive Orchestra gives consumers a more tangible feel for the difference made by Philips' audio products.
Philips is serious about sound. That's why it collaborated with the Dutch Metropole Orchestra -famous for its nonclassical approach to orchestral compositions. On the website users can watch the music video directed by Rob Chiu (The Ronin), accompanied by the Interactive Orchestra. A click of the mouse will highlight a user's musician of choice and isolate the specific instrumental track, giving an unusual way to hear every detail throughout the composition.
The audience can also find out more about each musician, from their musical preferences to the precise number of musical notes they play in the piece. Each musician also has a personal playlist with links to their personal blogs and Twitter feeds.
"In music, every single detail matters," said Chris Baylis, Executive Creative Director of Tribal DDB Amsterdam. "It's about the second violinist, the triangle player, the double bassist, and the producer, all the 'unheard heroes'. It's the collaboration that brings brilliance to a piece of music. The challenge of the campaign was to have visitors experience every detail of the audio piece, to highlight each and every nuance of sound."
"From the beginning to the end, we looked at how far we could delve into the details of the design," said Bart Mol, Art Director for Tribal DDB Amsterdam. "The challenge was to show a music video and visualize every musician in the entire orchestra. Every musician now is represented as a dot showing the height of every note being played at that time. Click one of the dots and you single out one musician from the whole orchestra, giving you a playful way to hear every detail in the piece."
The whole experience is accessible via Facebook along with trailers, behind-the-scenes footage and product information about the Philips sound range.
"The musicians we worked with were amazing," continued Pol Hoenderboom, copywriter, Tribal DDB Amsterdam. "One violinist even devoted 2.5 years of his life building his own violin. It's worth checking out all the different stories."
Alongside this campaign, Philips also launches the "Obsessed with Sound" music competition - a search for the best sounding composition. Entrants are challenged to make their own composition, in whichever style they choose, and submit it through Soundcloud.
The jury, consisting of Steve Lillywhite (Obsessed with Sound ambassador and ex-producer of the Talking Heads), Benjamin Herman (front man of the New Cool Collective), and the Metropole Orchestra, will then select the most promising entrant. The competition will close at the end of October and the winner will then be announced. The winning track will be arranged by the composer with the Metropole Orchestra to be played by the 51 musicians and recorded with an accompanying music video.
Client Side: Kelly Mcconville, Frank Pynenburg
Advertising Agency: Tribal DDB Amsterdam
Executive Creative Director: Chris Baylis
Concept: Bart Mol, Pol Hoenderboom
Art Director: Bart Mol
Copywriter: Pol Hoenderboom
Design: Robbin Cenijn
Creative Technologist: Ian Bauer
Director: Rob Chiu
Executive Producers: Marcel Kornblum, Mark Pytlik
DoP: Matias Boucard
Technical Lead: Jan Willem Penterman
Strategy: Henk Rijks
Account: Sandra Krstic
Production: Jeroen Jedeloo, Richard Land, Christy Wassenaar
Production Company: Stink
Interactive Production @ Stinkdigital: Peter Arato, Dan Beattie, Philip Bulley, Magnus Dahlstrand, Dave Luff, Marcel Kornblum, Neil Nand
Orchestra: Metropole Orchestra
Conducted by Jules Buckley
Composition: I'm No Prototype
Composed by: Berend Dubbe & Sonja van Hamel
Music Supervisor: MassiveMusic
With technology, e-books are now mini-portals of information and are veering into gaming, interactive programming, advertising, and online forums. This is having profound impacts on publishing. So given all of these enhancements, will we forget how to read and end up just "watching" a book?
The good news is the publishing industry has grown since 2008. A BookStats survey released August 9, 2001 revealed that in 2010 U.S. publishers generated net revenue of $27.9 billion, a 5.6% increase over 2008. Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1% increase since 2008. The increase is credited to e-books and juvenile and adult fiction.
Tina Jordan, the vice president of the Association of American Publishers adds, "In each category we're seeing growth. The printed word is alive and well whether it takes a paper delivery or digital delivery."
E-books are definitely on the rise. In 2008 they were 0.6% of the total trade market; in 2010, they reached 6.4%. According to the New York Times, "Publishers have seen especially robust e-book sales in genre fiction like romance, mystery and thrillers, as well as literary fiction. In 2010, 114 million e-books were sold."
To me, any uptick in reading is positive. Reading entertains, informs, and educates. It spirits us away, challenges our conventions, and exposes us to new ideas. It allows us to travel and experience so much without leaving our favorite chair.
And I love e-books. I bought a Kindle as soon as they came available. I now run the Kindle application on my iPad 2 and have a library of over 300 e-books. This has not solely replaced the physical book for me. I still appreciate the tactile and substantive heft of a military history or the pliable paperback when I head to the beach. To me, reading is a joy regardless of the delivery format.
However, not surprisingly, technology is disrupting the publishing industry as it did the music industry but with some interesting differences. An article in The New York Times from August 23, 2011 profiled the company Booktrack and its debatable 'value-add' to e-books. The article reads, "Booktrack, a start-up in New York, is planning to release e-books with soundtracks that play throughout the books, an experimental technology that its founders hope will change the way many novels are read."
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "Jane Eyre," "Romeo and Juliet" and "The Three Musketeers" are all to get this treatment.
This sub-category in digital publishing is referred to as "enhanced e-books". Of course, there have already been experiments with video and audio. The best seller "Nixonland", for example, featured 27 videos throughout the text (with the ad on the cover "Enhanced Ebook"). And Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth, which featured 88 video excerpts released in conjunction with the US screening of a made-for-TV adaptation.
Booktrack's foray into this area would work as follows: "Much of the music -- about nine hours' worth for the typical novel -- is instrumental or ambient noise. But during livelier passages, a reader may hear the patter of footsteps, a booming gong, a crackling fire or the tick of a grandfather clock."
Other e-book features can include: author interviews, suggested reading lists, book club guides, links to websites, interactive graphics, character voice-overs, gaming elements, different plotlines and endings based on reader choices, subject matter forums, and much more.
Currently, all of this 'enhanced' activity is comparable to the 'Extras' one gets when they buy a DVD (e.g., director commentary, actor interviews, bloopers, behind-the-scenes). It is additional content seemingly slapped on top of the book itself without adding much value to the story. And, most damning, it can be extremely distracting.
And it leads to the question, when does a book stop being a book? In the digital environment, books are fast becoming portals or what Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media calls an "interface to a body of information". So while Booktrack wants to add a soundtrack to "change the way many novels are read", I just hope that we do not forget how to read. There is a danger that video, audio, and interactivity will relegate the printed word to a supporting role or to the point where we "watch" a book.
In order to mark the hundredth birthday of the famous advertising expert, a week ago DDB Latvia launched a search through its website in order to find the best quote of the century by Bill Bernbach. After a week of voting, a Top 3 was formed out of more than eighty of his well-known quotes:
#1 Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.
#2 Adapt your techniques to an idea, not an idea to your techniques.
Third place is shared by two quotes that received an equal number of votes:
#3 A great ad campaign will make bad product fail faster. It will get more people knowing it's bad.
#3 Word of mouth is the best medium of all.
The influence and popularity of the famous advertising expert is undeniable. Within a week the voting on the DDB website has been generated by people from 32 countries around the world, including the US, the UK, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, France, Russia, Spain, Australia and many other countries. In total more than a thousand votes were cast for the quotes.
As promised, everyone who shared the chance of voting with their friends or followers were entered into a lottery. The grand prize was a book of Bill Bernbach's quotes.
Thank you to everyone who took part in the voting and marked the birthday of Bill Bernbach along with us!
100 years old and still teaching, still leading: Lessons from Bill Bernbach.
"The product, the product. Stay with the product. Simple and authentic....The difference between the forgettable and the enduring is artistry...I fear all the sins we commit in the name of Creativity."
This and more as remembered by those who worked with him and those who wish they had.
If my boyhood dream was to find a life in advertising, my earliest idol was Bill Bernbach, the legendary founder of DDB. I used to tear out the pages of Life magazine that contained the great Volkswagen ads. I'd tape them to my wall and admire their simplicity, their unique tone of voice, their irony and wit. But even though I like to think of myself as a dreamer of big dreams and thought of one day heading the agency that changed advertising forever would have, even for me, qualified as an impossible dream.
Bill and I met only twice. We shared a belief in humanity, an impatience with the status quo, a penchant for worrying, a passion for excellence and a commitment to the ultimate power of creativity.
Bill and a small band of revolutionaries exploded onto the scene in the middle of the last century to set a new course for advertising. My vision was to take Bernbach's philosophy into the 21st century by creating a global organization now numbering some 15,000 people in 96 countries--a worldwide culture that embraces Bill's principles and seeks daily to apply them in a modern, multicultural world, in a media landscape that bears little resemblance to the one Bernbach knew. Helping to create that organization and leading it has been my life passion and it is enormously gratifying to travel the world and find Bill's photo, his quotations and his philosophy present in DDB agencies the world over. So when a reporter asked me in 1986, "Who will be the next Bernbach?" I said, "There will be 100 Bernbachs. They will have different names but they will be the creative leaders who come to DDB To embrace Bill's philosophies and build upon them, applying them in their own countries on behalf of clients everywhere.
How Bernbach Changed Everything
Bernbach's revolutionary ideas about creativity and his keen insights into human nature gave birth to modern advertising. Before Bernbach, the high priests of advertising believed in rules. They tried to turn advertising into a science: They were of the same mind as Sidney Greenstreet in the 1947 classic film about advertising The Hucksters, when he said that the best way to sell soap was to "irritate, irritate, irritate" -- the idea was to hammer the viewer into submission with commercials that irritated the consumer with overblown promises of "fast, fast, fast relief."
But Bernbach said, "I warn you against believing advertising is a science." And instead of hammering away, he won people over with humanity and good humor with spots like the famous "Mama Mia" Alka Seltzer one of the actor risking big time stomach upset by doing take after take of a spicy meatball commercial. In its time, it was revolutionary. Instead of lecturing, Bernbach engaged the viewer with a story everyone could identify with.
There were other great commercials including the famous "Funeral Cortege" commercial for Volkswagen narrated by the voice of the deceased reading his will and leaving very little to his wife and friends, and a significant fortune to his nephew, who was smart enough to drive a Volkswagen.
Everything I know about planning I learned from Bernbach
Very often, advertising students and young practitioners ask me what you need to know in order to become a good strategic planner. It appears that in our universities, there is a very clear guide for those who want to be on the creative side or the account side. However, planning is still a dark area discovered only by those that come to work in an agency, maybe because they see how it works in the real world but rarely because there is a formal description for the position.
I would not able to describe scientifically what someone needs to know in order to become a good planner. Actually, it is very difficult to craft a definition of planning. I remember some years ago when we were trying to create the Colombian chapter of APG, we dedicated one of our first meetings to asking everyone what they did. It was incredible. We were a group of people all with the same position in different agencies and we all did different activities. Some were the quantitative support on figures and information, others coordinated the research projects, still others wrote brand stories or moderated focus groups. Some had an Anthropology background and others were fascinated with neuromarketing experiments. It seemed we all came from different planets.
The interesting thing, though, was that we all had something in common: That curiosity for understanding human behavior and the interest in finding new insights about a group of consumers and trying to find a unique path that would connect consumers and brands. That was when I understood that the essence of planning is the obsession for finding a new point of view, a unique thinking. It can be about a brand, about a marketplace or about a consumer. We were all obsessed with finding the best fuel for creative ideas. And then I understood that we had something else in common: We were all aware that in our hands was the responsibility of triggering the creative ideas. Almost all of us confessed that our job was inspiring the creative team to have a better input for creating better solutions.
The planner who wants his/her strategy to outshine the campaign is not a good planner. S/he might be a wannabe copywriter. I think that if strategic thinking does not make for a better creative idea then it is useless. No consumer sees the Powerpoint presentation. Consumer contact with the brand is through executions. The strategy goes on behind the scenes as a springboard. In diving, no one sees to the diving board but to the diver. The same happens with strategic planning: It is to make the creative idea bigger, more impactful and, obviously, more assertive.
I say that everything I know about planning I learned from Bill Bernbach, the man that is considered the most brilliant advertising mind of the 20th Century. However, even he was never considered a strategic planner at the time (the discipline was being born in the UK at that point). He always had that superior capacity to find the connection between consumers and brands. Bernbach used to say that "At the heart of an effective creative philosophy is the belief that nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his actions, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him". He taught us with these words what any strategic planner needs to know about consumer research: It is necessary to go further and understand what is behind peoples' words. In another one of his famous sentences he taught us what any person that wants to understand consumer behavior needs to know: "We don't ask research to do what it was never meant to do, and that is to get an idea".
My first meeting (if you could call it that) with Bill Bernbach was in an elevator. He said: "Hello." I mumbled a weak "Hello, Mr Bernbach" in return.
I was 22 years old, fresh out of art school and had been at Doyle Dane Bernbach for one month. It was 1963, and by then most of the first shots of what became known as the "creative revolution" had been fired - mostly by Bernbach and his troops.
Bernbach was leading the agency by roaming the halls and dashing in and out of art directors' and writers' offices, but hadn't yet made it back to where the Young Turks - such as myself - sat, slaving over glue pots and pasting ads together. So this encounter in the elevator terrified me.
After all, this was Bill Bernbach: the Bernbach that everyone in the agency constantly talked about and whose approval was all that mattered to every art director and writer at DDB.
Selling work and winning creative awards paled in the face of being able to say: "We showed the ad to Bill and he liked it."
"Bill liked it" were the three most important words in the world to a creative person.
For a year after, my exposure to Bernbach was limited to the halls, elevators and DDB Christmas party at the Waldorf Astoria.
One day, when I was a junior art director and in one of my rages over an ad that was killed by a client, I announced to the account executive: "I am going to see Bernbach. I've had enough of this client." And before I could stop myself, there I was sitting outside his office, next to his long-time secretary Nancy Underwood, and shaking like a leaf. To my amazement, the man sitting behind the round table spoke to me more like a caring grandfather than like the mythical figure I was in such a nervous state about meeting. He was patient, listened, looked at the ad and gave me some ideas for improvement. Before I knew it, I was back downstairs working on a new ad.
It was like a dream. Did I really just have a meeting with Bernbach? I went storming up there like a self- entitled creative brat and he treated me with respect and kindness. He took the time to listen to a young, egotistical kid from Brooklyn with an accent that made English sound like his second language. He provided me with lifelong inspiration and confidence by telling me that I was one of the young talents in the agency and he was expecting big things from me.
As the years passed, my relationship with Bernbach changed. I became more comfortable in his presence, but it was always clear that he was the teacher and I remained the student. He repeatedly asked me to call him "Bill", and my reply was always the same: "Mr Bernbach, I can't call you anything but Mr Bernbach." He'd laugh and we'd go on with whatever we were talking about.
I discovered things about him that I certainly didn't expect. If you presented to him and he didn't like a particular ad in a campaign, he simply ignored it. He would never address why he didn't like it, or why it didn't work - he just ignored it.
I learned this the hard way in a meeting with Bob Gage. We were showing Bernbach five new ads and I noted that there was one ad that he hadn't said a word about. I did this several times and, on the final try, I received a swift kick under the table from Gage. As we were leaving his office, Gage whispered to me: "If he doesn't talk about it, he doesn't like it." If Bill suggested a line for an ad, it was more than just a suggestion.
I learned little things about him - such as how he was a fastidious dresser and only wore blue shirts because someone once told him he looked best in them, plus they photograph well. On a trip with him to Chicago, I found he, like me, was a "white-knuckle flyer", and that every once in a while he spoke above a whisper. While I still adored him, I started to see that he wasn't perfect. I think this made most of us who worked for him love him even more. He was human and had faults - just like the rest of us.
My relationship with Bernbach became one of the most important in my life. To this day, it's hard for me to talk about him without tears welling up in my eyes.I still have the note he took the time to write to me when I left DDB in 1971. His ideas about the business have been my guiding principles. He pointed out that we are not in the communication business (as many thought then and still think today), but in the persuasion business.
That persuasion is not a science, it's an art.
Research, customer insight and product information may tell us what to say in an ad, but it is how you say it that really matters, and that has never more been true than today.
How you say it takes talent, and figuring out how to say it in the most impactful and effective way takes special talent.
This is what I, and every art director and writer then and now, owe Bernbach.
He made talent count. He made the business one where wit, intelligence and artistry not only mattered but were essential to succeed. He gave us and the world a different view of what we did every day for a living.
He called it the "aesthetic choice". Even though I worked for greats such as Carl Ally, Mary Wells and Jay Chiat, I never really stopped working for one man: Bill Bernbach.
This article was first published on campaignlive.co.uk, August 4, 2011
Bill Bernbach had the nerve and the wit to hire me in 1959. Some years later, I had the nerve and the wit to hire Bob Kuperman. Neither event made any headlines. Typically, people made headlines when they left Doyle Dane Bernbach, not when they got hired.
What happened in the interim was not magic. We breathed each other's air, celebrated each other's triumphs and wept over each other's failures. (A triumph meant that Bernbach had OK'd an ad, a failure meant that he hadn't.)
Bernbach's disciples learned the lesson. So I wept in David Reider's office and in Helmut Krone's, beamed for Phyllis Robinson and Julian Koenig, and generally felt my way around.
I also got lucky. Volkswagen came my way because I had worked for a few months for a Volkswagen dealer, and because Koenig left the agency and because Reider couldn't get along with Krone. I did El Al because I was born to.
I assaulted people in the halls, begging for work. I loved the business, and DDB people around the world knew it.
And, now, so do you.
By the time I published Bill Bernbach's Book: A History Of The Advertising That Changed The History Of Advertising in 1987, we at DDB had long ago concluded that what happens to society would affect everyone with ever-increasing speed, and that the most powerful force in the world was and would be public opinion, requiring all of us in the communications business to persuade, not sell.
What we learned together at DDB was that the metabolism of the world had changed and would continue to change at a rapid pace, requiring new vehicles to carry ideas to it. Our philosophy was to ally ourselves with great ideas and carry them to the public. We wholly believed that we practiced our craft on behalf of society, and that we must not just believe in what we sell, but that we must sell what we believe in.
I dedicated the book to those who would continue to energetically pursue this kind of vision, who would make the great contributions to our world of communications in the years to come. I am not saying that we predicted the web, but our belief at DDB in the power of persuasion, authenticity and public opinion was ahead of its time, and has certainly proven compatible with how media has evolved in a digital world.
Years ago, I wrote that Bernbach was a visionary with a visionary's zeal. And that he was also a worrier. Most of all, he worried about our doing nothing less than a brilliant job for clients. He believed the best way of winning new business was doing excellent work for the clients already in hand. That is why DDB did not do a new-business presentation for more than 20 years. Yet, he had a knack for dispelling the worries of other people. When Whitney Ruben, the head of Levy's Bakery, fretted about Bernbach's suggestion that the product's name be changed from Levy's Real Rye to Levy's Real Jewish Rye, Bill calmed the waters with the observation: "For God's sake, your name is Levy's. They're not going to mistake you for High Episcopalian." The "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's" poster campaign went on to run for many years.
When it came to our most iconic work, Volkswagen, our mantra was always: "The product. The product. Stay with the product." Simple and, ultimately, the manufacturing philosophy and the advertising philosophy were one and the same. The brand spoke with one voice throughout the world and people everywhere recognised that simple and authentic voice.
This was the DDB "shot heard around the world" and it was created by the vibrant people at DDB and Volkswagen of America. In many ways, the brand and the ads were just like us: irreverent, honest and different. A bunch of guys and women (Robinson was the first female copy chief in the business) who were up from the streets of New York - not the streets of Connecticut.
But the most impressive thing about Bernbach was not the specific ads that he inspired, but his creative philosophy that was built on a comprehensive examination of humanity that incorporated genetics, evolution, art, literature and a whole lot more.
When he was presented with the Partner in Science Award by the The Salk Institute, the citation read: "For his penetrating insights into the depths of human behaviour, for his constant refusal to acknowledge the distinction between art and science. For the simple act of giving himself, and, above all, for his help in explaining us to ourselves."
This last clause is extremely important. I once wrote that what Bernbach did was invent the "wheel of persuasion" because he could explain us to ourselves. He could explain us, change minds and perhaps even change men themselves.
That is what DDB means when it says its heritage is one of creativity and humanity, even - at times - creativity for humanity. That, and a whole lot more, is Bernbach's and his agency's legacy.
This article was first published on campaignlive.co.uk, August 4, 2011
This Saturday, August 13, marks the 100th Anniversary of the birth of DDB's founder, Bill Bernbach, the man who ignited the creative revolution in our industry. Rarely has one person affected an industry as much as Bernbach affected modern advertising and communications. He has been called the Father of Modern Advertising, the single most influential creative force in advertising's history. That is not an exaggeration.
"Everybody talks about change all the time. I think advertising essentially, the persuasion part of advertising, is going to be the same a hundred years from now. Because the man with talent, will be able to persuade and the man without talent won't, no matter how much knowledge you bring to him. No matter what mechanical devices you have...
That little thing, sitting by yourself and getting an idea, is far more important than all the technology in the world."
Bernbach's vision of creativity was built around the idea of relevance and substance - finding the relevant truth about a brand, a product or a service and delivering it in a fresh and unseen way so that people will start to care about it. Advertising, he taught us, is the art of persuasion. We are "the shapers of society." In the end, it is not only about being great as a creative in advertising, but also being a remarkable human being by trying to make things better in this world.
We recognize and honor him throughout the world this week.
Jeff Sweat, editor of the Y! Advertising Blog, explores how advertising agencies are embracing social causes and increasing their involvement in helping non-profits realize their potential and achieve their missions. Jeff spoke at length with DDB New York CCO Matt Eastwood about his efforts and talks about the how's and why's of agency pro bono work as he highlights some of the industry's best examples. Check out DDB New York's "Adopt Your Doggie Double" campaign, which gets a special mention in the article:
We live in a world of immediacy and information overload. It is difficult to keep up with the frequency of all the news, updates, blogs, reviews, videos, and more. That is certainly the case during the week of the International Festival of Creativity at Cannes. Attendees from around the world are developing, delivering and sharing in a week of incredible learning and celebration. So DDB Tribal's Hamburg office came up with innovative ways of aggregating, ranking, inter-relating, and sharing what is trending during industry-wide conferences first at SXSW and now in Cannes. The tool is called Table of Tweets that DDB Tribal Hamburg just developed for the Palais as pictured below.
Juergen-Rahlff Lindner led this effort and explained the four pillars of the solution:
Ability to visualize data in real-time
Uses the Twitter API
Uses the Cloud
Inspires creativity
In terms of technology it accesses Twitter for the content and employs the Google Application Engine to drive its functionality. I was so impressed with it and so were the Festival organizers who gave DDB Tribal prime real estate for free at the registration entrance. Here are some of its features:
It keeps running track of registrations to the Festival via Facebook and Foursquare
Cycles Festival-related tweets (but not in an overwhelming scroll)
Shows a Tweet-per-Minute statistic
Combs Tweets for popular terms then circles containing the words appear - the larger the circle the more often it has been tweeted
Circles are attracted to each other the more both terms are tweeted in the same context
Fading circles mean the term has not been mentioned for some time
Table of Tweets is a way of making overwhelming information instantly relevant says Lindner. I was excited by how this could be used to help clients better understand trends and their own brands. It should be a great tool for developing more successful campaigns. And, importantly, it will assist in measuring tangible business success. I was also struck by the design which is fun, friendly and requires little explanation as to The Data Vis's value. Congratulations to Juergen-Rahiff and his team for definitely an inspired and creative solution.
To promote the Flip VideoTM camera in Singapore, our team introduced the Flip Your Profile app. It let users dump their Facebook profile picture and replace it with a profile video, capturing anything from a short personal greeting to elaborate video montages. The DDB and Tribal DDB Singapore team gives an inside look at the making of the campaign.
The creative team of Paul Fraser and Mariota Essery give a behind-the-scenes look into one of our favorite campaigns this year for Philips' Wake-Up Light.
DDB New York and CLEAN & CLEAR® recently hosted a dance contest on Facebook in conjunction with the launch of the new MORNING BURST™ energizing body washes. The contest, which went live in February, invited girls to learn a dance that was specially choreographed by CLEAN & CLEAR® and featured on the body wash television commercial. Fans then uploaded their videos on the Facebook page for the chance to win the coveted prize of being flown to NYC to perform at a major Teen Vogue event.
There were hundreds of submissions from teens who enthusiastically learned the dance and entered the contest. The contest generated a huge amount of buzz on Facebook. Not only were there record levels of engagement on the CLEAN & CLEAR® Facebook wall, but the fan base also drastically increased from 50,000 to well over 200,000 and counting.
The expert judges at CLEAN & CLEAR® have whittled down the impressive entries to ten finalists. You can view the top ten videos and show your support by "liking" CLEAN & CLEAR® on Facebook, sharing with your friends and voting for your favorite video everyday until June 27th. Please go HERE to vote for your favorite video in the BURST-A-MOVE contest now and stay tuned for the announcement of the winner!
TiJi is one of the primary television channels for children under seven years old. The channel's central mission is to speak to children by engaging their active imaginations. For example, in 2008, TiJi communicated to its young demographic with the film "Le Ballon," which detailed the epic aerial voyage of a red balloon that escaped from the hands of an inattentive child. This film was awarded a Silver Lion at the Cannes Festival, two prizes at the French Art Directors Club, a silver nomination at the D&AD, a prize at the Festival de Méribel and another prize at the Festival Anima.
Today, TiJi is continuing this campaign with an explosive new film in the world of advertising for children. The premise of this film is that in the beginning of time, the world existed solely in black and white. As time elapsed, it subsequently became enriched with vibrant colors.
For this extension of the previous campaign, DDB tried to get into the mind frame of a child. It probed for an idea that could have been born out of a child's vivid imagination. In other words, we strove for a concept that could be at the same time funny, poetic and relatable. Whether it was for a child of five, or one of forty-five, whether they were French, English or Chinese, this would be a universal story that would draw upon peoples' imaginations. We leveraged our creativity to ignite that of the children. This story has the potential to become a children's classic that can be recounted to children at the zoo or while browsing a book on animals. If pandas and zebras are black and white, it's because they were forgotten about when the world was being colored in.
In order to achieve the objective of increasing Polo sales and SOM, we targeted a younger audience by emphasizing the exciting and stylish traits of the car mainly viewed as reliable and safe. We decided to dramatize "toughness" and "beauty" by featuring urban lovers performing a tango dance to the beat of hip-hop music. World-famous tango dancers, Manuela Rossi and Gaspar Godoy, starred in the spot, beautifully portraying the unexpected combination of refined dance moves with gritty beats.
The commercial successfully touched upon Volkswagen's classic approach to advertising by illustrating product truth through metaphor. Social media proved that the campaign was talk-worthy: over 250,000 people searched the ad, over 70,000 people viewed videos of the making of the ad, and 3000 people joined our Facebook following. More importantly, the campaign demonstrated that a social idea is about more than just social media; a powerful, conversation-starting "traditional" ad can be the cornerstone of a truly social campaign.
In the 1980s, Estrela was the leading toy brand in Brazil due to its popular products and advertisements. Ferrorama, Estrela's toy train set, enjoyed more than 2 million unit sales per year. However, Estrela discontinued the brand until 2009 when it decided to see if there was enough favorable customer sentiment to bring Ferrorama back. Tribal DDB and Estrela wanted to draw in the older generation who was still nostalgic for the brand as well as the new digital generation who had never heard of it.
They posed a challenge to the Ferroama community on Orkut, Brazil's largest social network, to elicit what it hoped would be a historic comeback. The challenge asked that people rally together to help make the train travel the last 20 kilometers of the route known as Santiago de Compostrela's Way (the Way of St. James). To do so, fans would be required to assemble and disassemble the toy tracks to run the tiny train along the life-size tracks, repeating the process for an entire 20 kilometers. If the challenge was completed successfully, Estrela vowed to relaunch the beloved toy.
Over 1,000 people followed what came to be known as "the journey of faith" on the central website for the challenge and on social networks during the 72 hours it took to traverse the 20 kilometers. This resulted in 600,000 views. There were posts about the challenge on over 90 blogs internationally and it was rated within the top Twitter trending topics in Brazil three times.
In addition to its pervasive online presence, the campaign was mentioned in popular Brazilian magazines, on radio programs, and on television stations. The loyal fans succeeded in convincing Estrela to bring back Ferrorama and there were 1,230 pre-reserved toys before they even officially hit the market. Young boys now see Estrela as a cool brand that will be around for a long time to come. This is a fantastic example of DDB's Social Creativity.
Tok&Stok is the largest decoration and furniture chain in Brazil. It has 33 stores, 3,000 employees and sells over 1 million products every month. With the expanding economy, Brazilians, especially the younger demographic, are buying more and more furniture. The biggest demand is for furniture that people can assemble themselves.
Our challenge was to hook this new audience onto Tok&Stok's furniture that is ready to assemble. To do so, we chose a new and interactive medium through which to communicate with our target audience. We posted the assembly instructions of Tok&Stok's furniture on a Twitter profile.
The manuals were reduced to a maximum of 140 characters, including a link to the furniture's diagram. Consumers merely had to search for the hashtag aligned with the name of their furniture and follow the straightforward instructions. Stickers with the hashtags were also placed on the products.
The Twitter Manuals were an innovative way of showing everyone, especially the younger demographic, that Tok&Stok's furniture is easy to construct. It was also a useful tool for those who already had Tok&Stok's products: In order to assemble their furniture, all they had to do was consult Twitter. Lastly, the campaign exemplified the company's steadfast commitment to the environment: each manual of 140 characters on Twitter saved a sheet of paper.
Terra commissioned DDB to create a campaign that generated traffic and publicized its sports website http://www.terra.es/deportes during the South African World Cup between June 11th and July 11th 2010.
To accomplish this, we decided to use Julio Cardenosa, a former player on the Spanish national team, well known for having missed an extremely easy goal during the 1978 Argentina World Cup. This was unfortunately an error that eliminated Spain from that championship and made him famous for being the player with the worst luck in the history of the Spanish national soccer team.
In order to garner publicity for Terra, DDB took the fate of the Spanish soccer team into its own hands by unleashing Cardenosa's bum luck on our competitors. First we sent Cardenosa to Brazil, the favored team, so that his curse would be omnipresent and his bad luck would spread to their fans, their mascots, their stadiums, and their coach. We created a website where people could follow his journey and win t-shirts to adorn during Brazil's games. And it worked. Brazil was eliminated in the quarterfinals.
Even after the execution of our effective scheme, Spain still had other adversaries to face. In order to jinx them too, we created a Facebook Application through which people could wish bad luck on the other national teams. Cardenosa appeared on the most important TV programs to garner publicity for his mission.
Finally, we helped to realize a dream come true: Spain won its first World Cup, thereby making 46 million Spaniards exuberant.
As many as 4,437,240 people visited Terra Sports throughout the campaign. Traffic to the Terra Sports website increased by 68% (NIELSEN), thereby endowing the campaign with a hefty 230,000 € in free publicity.
Volkswagen asked us for a new brand ad that would appeal to a diverse array of New Zealanders while showcasing a broad range of Volkswagen models, including the highly anticipated new Amarok ute.
We were asked to bring to life the idea that 'There's a Volkswagen to suit everyone' and found that, despite underlying differences between each model, there was an undeniable commonality among the consumer experience with the car.
Every car sporting the VW badge exhibits a shared philosophy of innovation, responsibility and safety, all values that are quintessential to Volkswagen and to New Zealand drivers.
In this 60 second spot, we draw parallels between the cars and the people who drive them, observing how all Volkswagen drivers are 'the same, but different'.
When you buy a Lottery ticket, you are simply buying a dream. There's no tangible product, no rational benefits to sell; It's just a ticket of hope. The purpose of our brief was to impassion consumers to fall back in love with the fantasy of winning and inspire them to believe in the power of a lucky Lotto ticket.
We decided to create a story around a winning ticket with all of the classic ingredients: love, loyalty, hope, and betrayal. We gave consumers an emotional reason to engage with and to believe in the brand again. The commercial was launched with a media road block, airing on all of New Zealand's five major channels simultaneously.
DDB was faced with the challenge of combating flat sales and cutting through the clutter of food options to ignite excitement over McDonald's New York style burger. To do so, it decided to take a deeply entrenched icon in Hong Kong--the red taxicab--and color it yellow like those of New York City. It then implemented a two-week long promotion through which people could take advantage of free rides in the freshly hued cabs to any McDonald's restaurant around the city and enjoy a New York burger free of charge.
This deal drove traffic to McDonald's, both literally and digitally, as buzz of the promotion permeated blogs, Twitter, Facebook, publications ranging from Campaign Asia to Time Out, and even national television. Over 1,000 passengers capitalized on the free ride and thousands of others took notice of it.
Within just two weeks, McDonald's sold over one million New-York-style burgers, meaning one in seven people enjoyed a burger while the campaign was going on. Many of the McDonald's stores sold out of the burger on the launch day and the New York burger remains one of the best-selling new burgers introduced to Hong Kong in many years.
This unconventional campaign drove record sales and profits not only for the new product, but also throughout McDonald's entire business, illustrating how an effective concept with Share Value can be amplified to achieve so much more than its initial goal.
Volkswagen unveiled a compact, powerful car that delivers both speed and style: the new Polo GTI. With it, Volkswagen is setting eyes on drivers who prefer life a little faster.
Tribal DDB Singapore has launched a digitally-led campaign that demonstrates speed in a trendy and unconventional way. Speed is presented in the form of a challenge - Beat the new Polo GTI by matching the fast beats of Singapore's top beat boxer, Dharni.
Beat boxing is an art form of vocal percussion where one imitates sounds, beats, instruments and rhythms using only vocals. Participants will need keen eyes and ears, as well as fast fingers, to match the correct letters to Dharni's beat box soundtrack. The highest scorer wins a weekend drive with the new Polo GTI.
"The Polo GTI offers a fast and fun drive - perfect for those who prefer a little more excitement on the road," said Jamie Lee, GM, Marketing Communications, Volkswagen Group Singapore. To demonstrate that spirit, we moved away from traditional media and ventured into new media, to provide a platform for a more dynamic expression of this new car."
"Not only did we give speed a new beat, we created a following through an influencer," added Jeff Cheong, Head and Executive Creative Director of Tribal DDB Singapore. "The story and the highly addictive game forms part of the social-creative strategy. It's a bold move for Volkswagen Singapore to lead a car launch with digital and we are very encouraged by the results so far."
For those who are unfamiliar with the car, the website includes a digestible introduction with snippets for key features. The new Polo GTI is available for viewing and test drives at Volkswagen Centre Singapore. The campaign kicked off on April 22, with a teaser video showing Dharni beatboxing in a Polo GTI. He created a piece that fused familiar car sound effects with very fast beats. The video quickly went viral, getting over 10,000 hits in the first days.
In the official video, Dharni takes on the spirited personality of the new Polo GTI, to create an exhilarating beatbox track that fuses rhythmic elements of man and machine. The excitement is also being shared through radio.
About Dharni
Dharni is currently ranked as the 5th top beatboxer in the world.
He has performed in different parts in Europe and Asia, and has opened for artistes like Black Eyed Peas, Kanye West, Jin, Lady Gaga, and Mariah Carey.
This week, DDB New York launched two high-profile campaigns for long-time clients Hertz and Cotton that received wide acclaim in publications from The New York Times to Adweek, WWD and The Huffington Post.
"The Gas and The Brake," a new global marketing campaign for Hertz, features the voice of actor Owen Wilson, and is designed around the question, "Are you the Gas or the Brake?" The campaign illustrates the universal personality types of the Gas (aggressive, exciting, adventurous) and the Brake (conservative, reserved, cautious), to invite travelers to identify themselves as one or the other, and to demonstrate the ways in which Hertz caters to all kinds of travelers. The campaign also introduces Horatio, Hertz's new brand ambassador and the light-hearted embodiment of Hertz.
For Cotton, DDB this week introduced the third phase of Cotton's long-running campaign, "Fabric of My Life." International film actress and fashion icon, Kate Bosworth, is the new face of Cotton in this installment, where she unveils her musical talents by singing the latest version of the campaign's familiar song. Featuring Bosworth's closet with cotton fashions by well-known designers such as Prada, Rodarte and Nina Ricci, the spot showcases the use of cotton in high fashion apparel, while simultaneously exemplifying the physical and emotional comfort of "the fabric of our lives."
Beth Ann Kaminkow, President and COO of TracyLocke, delves into the pop-up store phenomenon, a form of guerilla retailing which allows for temporary brand performances. She deems pop-up stores one of the best ways to target a niche audience and explains that pop-ups, ranging from retail to real estate and everything in between, inspire marketing campaigns premised on a planned spontaneity that maximizes the innovation and amplifies the short-term investment. This piece has great relevance for pop-up shopping and resonates with the broader consumer journey today.
Dr. Leonard Berry, is known as the disciple of service. He has examined what good service means for such brands as Mayo Clinic, Charles Schwab, Enterprise Rent-A-Car, and Midwest Express Airlines. The author of "Discovering the Soul of Service: The Nine Drivers of Sustainable Business Success," Dr. Berry talks here with DDB's Pat Sloan about what makes for a long and strong customer journey.
Q: What role has the recession played in companies' attention to service quality?
A: The recession has caused many managers to disproportionately focus on reducing costs and prices. This is a natural reaction but also a missed opportunity. A recession is the perfect time for a firm to recommit to service improvement because competitors are likely going in the opposite direction. Excellent service creates value for customers, and superior value - the best way to compete at any time - is the only way to compete in tough economic times.
Q: Doesn't lower price equate to value?
A: Not necessarily. Price is part of value but not its equivalent. The true meaning of value is benefits received for burdens endured. In determining what to buy and where to buy it prospective customers ask: "What am I going to get and what am I going to have to endure to get it?" Burdens have a monetary component (price) and a non-monetary component (for example, inconvenience, mistake-prone service, rude service personnel). Excellent service plays a central role in increasing benefits and reducing burdens.
Make a quick list of highly successful organizations over time (Target Stores, Singapore Airlines, Netflix, The Container Store, Wegmans, FedEx, Mayo Clinic, SAS Institute) and they all have far more to offer than price. Price, after all, is the most easily imitated element of the marketing mix. Companies that compete strictly on price rather than overall value have a shaky future, recession or not.
Q: Won't service improvement increase costs?
A: In the short term, yes. In the longer term excellent service is a profit strategy because it is likely to reduce the hidden costs of poor quality and increase market share. Let me explain. Whereas the investments required to improve service are largely transparent, such as the costs of better technology, the costs of poor service are not. Reperforming services to correct errors, extra supervision due to a lack of confidence in the preparation and capabilities of service personnel, and poor employee morale (and high turnover) due in part to dealing with many dissatisfied customers, illustrate hidden costs of poor quality. In terms of market share, there are only three ways for a company to increase it: attract more new customers, do more business with existing customers, and lose fewer customers. Excellent service helps a company do all three.
Q: You've written about the need to manage the customer experience as a way to frame service improvement. What does this mean?
A: Customers actual experiences in using services evoke a perception of value that determines brand preference and loyalty. Actual experiences of customers trump all else and these experiences need to be managed. Customers always have an experience when they interact with a service organization. They do not necessarily have a positive one, however. In using a service, customers filter a series of "clues" and organize them into sets of impressions about the service. Anything perceived or sensed by the customer - or apparent by its absence - is an experience clue. Collectively, the clues in the experience tell a story of the service's quality - or lack of quality. Focusing on improving the clues customers perceive in using the service guides the improvement journey.
DDB Canada and the Canadian Tourism Commission (CTC) have just launched an extensive integrated multi-media campaign in Europe, Canada's top priority growth market, in an effort to achieve aggressive goals to increase visitation and hence tourism export revenues to Canada.
The campaign, a mix of print, TV, online advertising and social media, takes a creative approach that rallies around the insight of sharing "traveler to traveler" experiences. This insight is rooted in the fact that travelers are highly influenced by word of mouth and they trust each other more than marketers. The campaign presents "real" experiences of travelers, and these experiences are shared with our potential travelers when they interact with the campaign elements. This traveler to traveler transparency lends a high level of credibility to brand Canada, and is a critical key to success to the share value of its campaigns: consumers want to participate in, play with and pass along the real experiences that are presented in the creative work. This is true social creativity, connecting people with people and people with brand Canada.
The creative innovation can't just stop at the insight however. With the knowledge that digital technologies have essentially changed the way travelers are researching and booking their travel with access to information more easily from numerous sources, interacting with multiple media simultaneously and joining communities to share as well as seek "peer" validation, the campaign took on a social-media inspired look and feel with all elements driving consumers to a campaign site featuring the authentic traveler experiences.
Within the campaign an innovative technology approach to online advertising was unveiled; the culmination of collaboration with Google Maps and Street View that virtually transports travelers onto real Canadian city streets with the simple click of a mouse. The unique DoubleClick Rich Media ads highlight key places and experiences in Canada, and intrigue you to explore more. To view an example of these ads, visit: http://uk.keep-exploring.ca/
"With the vast majority of people researching their travel online, the objective of these online ads was to give people a real and authentic glimpse of Canada, bringing our city streets directly to interested travelers, by harnessing the power of Google Maps and Street View," says, Ernst Flach, executive director, global marketing, CTC.
DDB Canada contacted Google with the idea of making Google Maps and Street View work directly within an online ad, so that travelers could not only locate a destination on a map, but could also explore things to see and do at each location.
"What makes this execution so effective, is that it utilizes a technology that the target audience already uses to research destinations, but it introduces this technology within a new context to offer inspiration in a whole new way," says Cosmo Campbell, creative director, DDB Canada. "It was a great experience working with Google - discovering new ways to adapt their technology to work in unexpected places."
Each online execution ends by directing travelers to additional location-specific information on the Keep Exploring campaign site where they can further explore what each destination has to offer, including special deals on partner sites. The campaign site also allows travelers to share information with their social networks, provide comments and ask questions about each destination.
The Webbys recently announced the nominees for the 15th Annual Webby Awards and the chosen few included several campaigns from the DDB network. The Webby Awards is one of the Internet's most respected symbols of success, showcasing some of the best and most shared work on the web. This year the Webby Awards received nearly 10,000 entries from all 50 U.S. states and over 60 countries worldwide.
Webby Awards winners are chosen both by members of the Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and by the public. That means all of us have the opportunity to participate in, play with, and pass along some of our best examples of Social Creativity. Vote on your choices for the Webby's People's Voice Awards now through April 28 at http://webby.aol.com.
If you need a little inspiration, here is a list of DDB work that has been nominated this year!
• Bud United Campaign - DDB Chicago/Tribal DDB Amsterdam
Interactive Advertising/Best Integrated Media Plan http://budunited.ddbchicago.net/
In addition to the nominations, several other DDB campaigns from around the network have been recognized as Official Honorees by the Webbys. The winners of the Webbys will be announced on May 3, 2011 and they will be honored at a ceremony in NYC on June 13, 2011 which will be streamed live.
People often say that dogs look like their owners, so DDB capitalized on this idea to help people find their perfect pet while simultaneously assisting local shelters in finding homes for needy dogs.
On Saturday, March 26, 2011, DDB launched a daylong digital campaign that promoted pet adoptions on behalf of The Shelter Pet Project, a joint venture between The Humane Society, Maddie's Fund and The Ad Council. The "Adopt Your Doggie Double" campaign was selected as the winner of the second annual Create for a Cause contest sponsored by The Ad Council and Yahoo! to reward the best digital advertising concept for a public service campaign. The prize for winning this prestigious contest was a full 24 hours of donated media space on Yahoo!'s home page, one of the most highly trafficked advertising properties on the Internet.
The campaign was designed to ignite user interest and emotional investment in adopting a dog at a local shelter. Users were invited to provide a web camera photograph of themselves from which an algorithm, designed in house at DDB, employed facial recognition technology to analyze the user's features and matched them with a look-alike canine counterpart. After the user had been paired with their "doggie double," they could share the results with their friends and explore a PetFinder.com-powered engine to identify similar dogs up for adoption in their area.
Following the Adopt Your Doggie Double campaign run on the Yahoo! page Saturday March 26th, the creative for the campaign is now viewable at www.showcasedwork.com/doggiedouble/. More information about The Shelter Pet Project can be found at the Shelter Pet Project website, www.theshelterpetproject.org.
Here are three key insights from the SXSW Interactive festival, during which 25,000 attendees descend on the Austin, TX, and attend workshops, seminars and keynote speeches to find out the latest and greatest developments in Interactive. Members of the Tribal DDB team from New York, Vancouver and Toronto, Canada traveled down to the capitol of Texas to attend.
Mobile is the new black
Mobile devices are ubiquitous and an enabler for consumer engagement in multiple environments. Retail will most likely benefit from this the most, especially as mobile devices will become 'mobile wallets' more and more over the next 2 years and be linked to loyalty programs. Location-based services will lead to right message, right person, right place marketing. The space + time (SPIME) of the individual (and eventually) groups of individuals will lead to more relevant messages being delivered. However, privacy concerns will need to be resolved to protect consumers.
Mobile Tagging (QR codes, Microsoft Tag, etc.) will be integrated further into offline and online campaigns to create easy access to content. Tagging will likely become obsolete over the next three to five years, though, as full-image recognition linked to search becomes a key campaign engagement mechanism.
Marketing will really start to take advantage of gamification. Mobile Gaming, for both fun and work, will lead to more valuable connections enabled by the technology and introduce entertainment to the environments that the consumer occupies both online and offline.
Emotional content, not just clever ideas, will drive engagement
Quirky engagement mechanisms do not always work. Those that do work depend largely on great content, but that's not always enough. We need to start speaking to basic human needs (think Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs) and building content accordingly. Video will quickly become the primary content type online and in both applications and marketing campaigns.
Company-produced content promoting product and brands will give way to open platforms allowing both known and anonymous consumers to create and post content of their own brand properties. Companies need to plan to change their PR, sales and marketing capabilities to accommodate the interaction and conversation that comes with this interactivity.
Agencies need to start learning from software companies
The creative, strategy and planning capabilities of modern marketing agencies often still use the approach of research, concept development and build in short timescales across multiple paid, owned and earned channels. Whilst these often work well, and great work is produced, there is usually a disconnect between the client team and the main client stakeholders. In software development, teams use the Agile method. This method is based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.
Agile development accelerates the delivery of initial business value, and through continuous planning and feedback, ensures maximized value throughout the course of development. As a result of this iterative planning and feedback loop, teams are able to continuously align the deliverables with desired business needs, easily adapting to changing requirements throughout the process. By measuring and evaluating status based on the undeniable truths of working, testing concepts and creative, more accurate visibility into the actual progress of campaigns is available. Finally, as a result of following the Agile process, a build concludes with a campaign that much better addresses the business and customer needs.
The move towards this approach will give modern agencies the edge needed to compete in the marketplace and also deliver amazing work for clients.
Sometimes the best place to start is with a problem. By noticing something that can be fixed or done better, then figuring out a way to do it. That was the genesis of the new website first-stop.org, created by a group of friends who work at DDB, Tribal or freelance in San Francisco.
Every day, art directors and designers are bombarded by paper promo mailers from photographers and illustrators. At DDB San Francisco alone, our small creative department receives about 60 lbs of promo materials in a month. Multiply that by all the agencies all over the world, and each year you've got a forest--at least had a forest until you cut it down for paper promos.
We thought this seemed like a wasteful practice, both in trees and in money. These mailers were from very talented artists, to be sure, but considering all the digital tools we have today, we knew there had to be a better way. But we also knew that we couldn't just ask people to stop promoting their work. We had to give them an effective alternative.
That's where first-stop.org comes in. Created to provide a tree-friendly alternative to paper mailers, First Stop is a site that features the work of photographers and illustrators from around the world. All we ask of the artists who sign up is that they pledge to reduce the amount of paper materials they mail out.
But we also realized that in order for First Stop to be work for the artists, we needed a second audience--art directors, designers, and art buyers. And that's where the second part of our mission comes in--to provide a resource for the agency folks, a central directory of some of the most talented artists available.
Since launch, we've been adding new artists almost daily. We've also been listening to feedback from artists and ad people on how we can make the site more useful to them. We have a long list of upgrades planned, including a filing cabinet that allows members to save links to their favorite artists in one place, and a location tag that will allow people to find local talent.
As one photographer said, the industry was probably headed toward all-digital promotion eventually, but it doesn't hurt to give it a little kick in the pants. Our hope is that First Stop becomes the go-to place to find photographers and illustrators. And maybe saves a few trees in the process.
Tribal DDB Amsterdam woke up to a great surprise today on the FWA site. The Philips's Wake Up The Town website, http://www.wakeup.philips.com, was awarded the prestigious Favorite Website's Award (FWA) Site of the Day. FWA showcases projects that use cutting edge technology with inspirational ideas and we're tickled pink (shucks!) to be a SOTD winner again.
The idea is quite simple: Philips tested the Wake Up light in one of the most northern cities on earth, Longyearbyen, where the sun doesn't shine for an entire four months. Filmmaker Doug Pray documented the Wake Up The Town campaign from October to December, and aired the content on the website with documentation on the experiment.
The website featured profiles of the residents so users could track their moods each morning when they woke up to light instead of darkness. The interactive feature made following the residents real and tangible. Additional videos on light therapy by Senior Application Scientist, Dan Adams, from Philips, added credibility and more information to the existing footage. The website provided a comprehensive and holistic view of the experiment from both an educational and a humanistic vantage point. Art director Mariota Essery and Paul Fraser, leading creatives on the team, explained, "The project is a good example of an idea that is being rolled out through all sorts of media, specifically social media."
It is hard to keep up. And it's difficult now to imagine a time or place when true creative work was rare and had to be passed, intact but tattered, from hand to hand, or only recounted: a treasure, like Homer's The Iliad, whose survival relied on the willingness of a living vessel to carry and spread it with fidelity. Now our art stands alone and often runs, with little motivation on the part of the creator.
So much of the beauty we're making now is just mash-ups and homages, like 35MM, a two-minute simplification of classic films, brought to life by Sarah Biermann, Torsten Strer, Felix Meyer and Pascal Monaco.
These are great to watch because you can see how a message manifests itself to another person, how we can never, none of us, see something exactly the same way, and how the seed of that ingested mass communication grows and mutates into other stories we can't control.
And yet somehow there remains an underlying known aesthetic, a cue or value that we can recognise...
The repercussions for us in this exponentially expanding creative environment number at least two:
1. We're no longer just competing with broadcasters or similarly-marketed products for space and airtime; we're competing with everybody who feels sufficient inspiration to publish something. That means we have to work harder to compel, provoke and remain relevant - all while maintaining fidelity to the natural growth trajectory of our brands.
2. The virtually-diminished barrier to entry for creating something and then being able to share it is also a blessing: it means you can experiment infinitely and feed directly from the feedback of others ... in real-time.
Take advantage of the second. The landscape we face isn't an unconquerable rock face; it's creative rejuvenation. It's the chance to start producing the best work of our lives ... and plenty of it.
Editor's note:Dr. Daniel Müllensiefen, Lecturer in the department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, is a co-founder of the Goldsmiths MSc course, Music Mind and Brain, a unique programme which focuses on the biological and cognitive aspects of musical behaviour. He was appointed Scientist in Residence (SiR) at DDB UK in 2010.
I started with DDB as Scientist in Residence last September and ever since I've tried to sell myself as an 'all-purpose scientist', versed in psychology, computer science, and neuroscience to the DDB planners and account management department - not sure how successful that was because my strong background in music research keeps coming out from under the rug! The DDBers keep coming back to me with projects and ideas most of which have a music angle of some kind.
A couple of projects that I'm currently giving some advice on, involve finding the right piece of music that would bring out the best features of brands in the fast moving consumer goods sector. The products themselves belong to categories I don't buy myself and I where I don't have much experience. But that might even be an advantage because the general factors that determine the perception and appreciation of music and its associative power shouldn't be different for people buying food or costumers of body care products than for anyone else, right? So, probably a good terrain for me to experiment with some objective and unbiased bit of advertising science.
DDB has a rich history. From the continued relevance of Bill Bernbach's writings to the creative revolution with our work with Volkswagen to our leadership in digital communications and Social Creativity. It is an inspiring legacy and an ever present challenge to be the very best. One of the many touchstones from our past comes from famous colleague Bob Levenson. He was hired by Bill Bernbach in 1959 and became one of the most successful creative directors and agency executives in the industry. Indeed his often noted skill was as copywriter. In 1987 he honored his mentor and friend by writing: Bill Bernach's Book: A History of the Advertising That Changed the History of Advertising.
In Levenson's own words, "We knew we were onto something, in terms of changing the face of the business. Bernbach was always urging us to find ways to attract attention, but also to make the product the star. That's what it was about. You can overlay all kinds of fancy language on top of that, but in the end it's about making somebody want what you're selling. We were working against what the conventional advertising norms were at the time. (Bill) cared more about how someone would approach a problem and find the heart of the matter. And put it down in some way that it hadn't been put down before."
And Levenson did just that when he responded to a contest from Time Magazine in the late 1960's. Ad agencies were invited to create an advertisement in the public interest. He penned a manifesto for the ad industry that conveys so much honesty and respect for the profession and its constituents that it still resonates with incredible power today (and it won the contest). The original advertisement is below and is followed by the copy to more easily read. Enjoy, share, and DO THIS OR DIE.
Editor's note:Lucas Cabral Maciel is a 21 year-old student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) who has won DDB Brazil's student competition and a grand prize of a 99-day trip around the world to nine cities where he will hunt trends and publish his findings daily on www.99novas.com.br and via www.twitter.com/99novas.
I'm just going to go and print ... my shoe! - 3D printing at the Disseny Hub Barcelona
Goodness me! I must be going crazy! The moment begged an expression along the lines of "Son of a bitch!" but as decorum prevents me from writing it, I'll tell you what I saw, and leave you to brag about where you first heard it. First, take a look at these objects below:
You might say, "what a great lemon squeezer, what a beautiful design..." But what if I told you they're all ... prints? That's right: 3D prints!!!
Oh, come on... hasn't everyone wanted to make a photocopy of something at home? Imagine that bean stew on a Sunday, when more guests come round than you were expecting; you could just run to your room and print off a few more bowls? There are lots of designers and engineers in the world all working to make this possible, and Disseny Hub Barcelona (DHUB) has organized a permanent exhibition to publicize the infinite possibilities opening up in the field of "additive manufacturing" technology.
To give you an idea of what I'm saying, here are some of its advantages:
Biology (I'm still amazed by this): We can actually create or recompose HUMAN TISSUE using this technology! A highly promising field in biotechnology has just been born.
Cuisine: yes, there are studies looking into printing food too, using ingredients as raw material.
Material design: with the composition of layers, material is added only where it is needed. The creation of new materials and technologies becomes possible through different internal microstructures.
Medicine: one of its earliest applications (and until now, the most well-known) was the construction of tailor-made prostheses to perfectly integrate with the patient's anatomy. The same also applies to sports material.
Plastic arts: A whole way of working freely is now being unveiled.
The fact is, all this is way beyond just "cool": we're talking about a technology that could completely revolutionize the way we create objects! The majority of machines that we create exist to replace known processes (sticking, cutting out, joining, separating, mixing, heating, cooling...), but there is a small group of those machines that actually creates processes. "Additive manufacturing" opens the way for the human imagination to materialize ideas that previously could only be imagined, or at best, visualized on a computer screen.
My intention here is merely to whet your appetite on the subject. No technology can be called a trend: a trend is the type of behavior that people show when using it. If "3D printing" is already causing such a stir now, even though it's still extremely expensive and restricted, just imagine when it becomes accessible in our homes.
Bobby Pawar, our dynamic and energetic (that is an understatement!) Chief Creative Officer at DDB Mudra Group, and his team have been outstanding at creating ideas that have caused conversations and provoked participation in India.
Their latest idea has quickly become the most talked about campaign in the country.
As Bobby explains, India is the world's most diverse nation. It is home to many disparate cultures, 22 languages and more than 1000 dialects. The problem with having so many mother tongues is that sometimes the people who speak one language discriminate against the people who speak another.
January 26, 2011, was India's 62nd Republic Day. On that day, DDB Mudra launched a campaign intended to help Indians realize that they are all one proud, patriotic people, no matter which language they speak.
In India, movie theaters are required to play the national anthem before a screening of a film. Usually a video of a fluttering flag accompanies the anthem. The video causes an "impatient wait," as Bobby put it. So our team's idea was to substitute that expected video with one featuring speech and hearing impaired children "singing" the national anthem in sign language-- a poignant demonstration that patriotism speaks one language, that of the heart.
Not only has the video caused an important conversation to take place in India, it has started to create its own Share Value with over 700,000 views on YouTube so far in the first few days.
Congratulations to Bobby and his team in Mumbai for an idea that helps uplift society. Given the current unrest in the world, their simple thought is especially resonant today.
DDB Latina's President, Juan Carlos Ortiz, has written a highly creative book in a very creative way - all of it was written on a BlackBerry 30,000 feet above the ground! "Cortos/Shorts" is the first book written 100% on a BlackBerry and Juan Carlos Ortiz did it entirely on airplanes, during his business trips around the globe. A book that belongs to a new world, one of digital globalization, with no geographic boundaries, this bilingual book (one side in Spanish and the other in English) shares over 80 short stories on ideas and creativity. They are stories, anecdotes and lessons learned from the best teacher of the communications business: life itself.
You can acquire the book in digital version where it was originally launched. The ebook is available at ibooks, nook http://migre.me/3MD3z, and at Smashwords:
Music in the Hispanic Market: Different Generation, Different Tunes
Editor's note:This article was originally published in Advertising Age
Music has always played an important role in my life. My father lost his own father at an early age and supported himself and his mother by playing violin and sax for an orchestra back in Romania. He wanted me to follow in his footsteps and imposed violin lessons on me at age 6. It wasn't the hippest instrument a young boy could think of, and at 12 I finally had the guts to rebel and quit my lessons. Little did I know that my old man (who was initially opposed to my pursuing advertising) had given me the basis for an important component of my work, and that my early musical education would come in handy on more than one occasion.
A lot has been said about the role music can play in Hispanic advertising, more so than even in the general market (whatever that term means these days). We can say music is one of the clichés of our industry. It wasn't long ago that it was mistakenly considered to be the central idea -- as opposed to an executional component -- when it came to reaching Hispanics in the U.S. I remember when I first moved to Miami back in 1993 and I saw a commercial for a bank in which all the cashiers were dancing salsa. I remember asking myself, "Would I really want to deposit my money here?"
While music might not necessarily be the core idea for a campaign, in many cases music can help make it or break it, especially through its authentic use and application. Without a doubt, music is a universal connector. It's the language of youth and a way to self-express and self-define. Over time it has gone from being a communitarian cultural event that gathered the masses, to a very personal and intimate component of a person's life. That conversion to the individual started with the Walkman and has evolved with the expansiveness of digital technology. Our playlists are now part of our DNA and they can be considered to be an X-ray of the diverse parts of our lives.
Editor's note:Lucas Cabral Maciel is a 21 year-old student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) who has won DDB Brazil's student competition and a grand prize of a 99-day trip around the world to nine cities where he will hunt trends and publish his findings daily on www.99novas.com.br and via www.twitter.com/99novas. The tour includes stops in London, New York, Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Mumbai, Bangkok, Shanghai, and Tokyo. In order to qualify for the prize, Lucas was asked to prove his fluency in English, demonstrate academic excellence and show a mastery of general knowledge through a 30-question quiz that required a minimum passing grade of 93. We will be sharing some of Lucas' findings here at ddb.com as he makes his way around the world in 99 days.
At last, a post! Forgive me for the delay. You're probably thinking that for somebody to start writing at this time they must be busy doing lots of things. And this summary of my first day in NY shows some of this.
When I woke up I decided to really get going. I remembered that I still hadn't bought the camera to use on the trip, and this started off my whole day. It was worth it though, as I saw an incredible place called BH Mega store: a real Mecca for photography and video professionals. It's not just the quality of the products that impressed me: the store is organized and integrated in such a way that I wasn't sure whether I felt like I was in "Modern Times" or in a Jetsons cartoon! The order came in a box, down a spiraling conveyor belt, then rolled right up to the place where the clerk was waiting with my order in his hand. Perhaps the opening of Rá-Tim-Bum would be a good illustration...
Phyllis Robinson, one of the brightest creative stars of the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency in the fifties and sixties, died in her sleep this past New Years Eve. She was 89 years old.
Although Phyllis retired some years ago, her legacy and her influence lives on. In presentations to students, I still use her campaigns for Levy's rye bread and Ohrbach's as timeless examples of how to make brands famous by writing in a conversational tone. In fact, when I was asked a few years ago by a reporter to name the ad that I believed to be the most important of all time, I chose Phyllis' ad from the fifties for Ohrbach's--the one featuring the cat with a hat and a long cigarette holder and the catty headline: "I found out about Joan." The ad is great on its own merits, but the more important reason I singled it out was that, when Volkswagen decided to introduce the Beetle to the U.S. market, they did not conduct an agency search. Instead, they simply said, "We want the agency that does Ohrbach's" - and thus, thanks to Phyllis, the creative revolution was born.
Beyond her pattern-breaking work for Levy's and Ohrbach's, Phyllis went on to make Polaroid famous with commercials like "Father and Daughter," a spot that still tugs at the heart and that, along with her other work, won her a spot in the Copywriters Hall of Fame. In 1999, Advertising Age magazine named Phyllis one of the 100 most influential figures in the history of advertising. Without question, she was one of the most influential figures in DDB's storied history.
Polaroid "Father and Daughter"
In a tribute to Phyllis last week, New York magazine referred to her as "The Original Mad Woman." She was an original for sure. And we'll always be grateful that she was an original at DDB.
The links here will lead you to more information about Phyllis and to some examples of her work. What they can't convey is the elegance and style of the woman who so inspired all of us who knew her, and whose work inspired millions more.
Earlier this year, Volkswagen and DDB Stockholm named San Francisco's Kevin Richardson the winner of the Fun Theory Contest. Richardson came up with the "Speed Camera Lottery," which uses the speeding cameras at intersections to reward those who obey the speed limit with the fees paid by those who violated it. Richardson recently saw his idea realized when VW brought it to life in the middle of a major Swedish crossroads. Here is Kevin's story in his own words.
"My name is Kevin Richardson. I started out as a film and TV character animator before moving into producing and designing kids and family video games. I currently work for Nickelodeon Kids and Family Games group in San Francisco. Working in entertainment and digital media means that you spend most of your time indoors, which is a problem for a guy who prefers being outdoors. So I've often wondered how I could apply game dynamics to a public setting, but was never sure where to start.
Late in 2009, the Piano Staircase video was circulating around our office. After seeing it I excitedly googled Volkswagen's The Fun Theory and learned that there was a competition for the best idea that conveyed their challenge "Can you change human behavior for the better through fun?". Traffic safety is a subject near to my heart. I have three daughters, and over the last ten years I've (unfortunately) seen three children struck by autos while on their bikes. None were fatalities, but these accidents left a lasting impression. Applying the Fun Theory to traffic safety, I asked myself: could we get drivers to slow down through fun?
The current system "rewards" bad driving behavior through heaps of negative attention: fines, the court system, increased auto insurance and so on. Oddly, drivers who obey the law get no attention whatsoever. Turns out, obeying the law is actually quite a lonely endeavor! Here was my thought to put things back in order: The Speed Camera Lottery. The idea is that if a driver OBEYS the speed limit, their photo is snapped by the speed camera. If a driver exceeds the speed, the camera snaps that driver's photo, too. The speeders pay into a pot that the law-abiders can win! It's fair, simple, fun, and rewards positive behavior. Viola!
Michael Bugaj at DDB and Marcus Thomasfolk at Vokswagen in Stockholm contacted me in early 2010 to tell me I was a finalist. I was both surprised and thrilled. Then, a week before the official announcement of the winner I was asked if I might be able to attend the award ceremony in Stockholm, though no winner was yet announced.
I have always wanted to visit Stockholm but never had a reason. Now I did! The team at DDB and Volkswagen helped with all the arrangements. I brought my family with me and we spent the week exploring Stockholm which is a marvelous city with great people and is family-friendly. DDB and Volkswagen held the ceremony at the downtown VW/Audi dealer where all the finalists were duly acknowledged and their ideas discussed. What blew me away was that the folks at DDB had created a computer simulation of the idea which I saw for the first time at the ceremony. There was a personal touch to every part of the trip including the plush VW auto for our 3-year-old daughter. And I must admit it was a thrill to sit on the hood of a Scirocco, my first car in the USA after my 1969 beetle.
Seeing the Speed Camera Lottery device built and tested in the streets of Stockholm has been a thrill on many levels. If I had to sum it all up, I'd say Volkswagen's The Fun Theory campaign challenges us to look at the world through the lens of the most basic of all desires: "fun," and to focus on the positive end that we want to achieve."
The next generation of 3-D technologies is frustratingly close. The Issue 22 of Contagious included a report on some of the 3-D technologies on the not-to-distant horizon--and how they will impact TV, cinema, and even print. Here we continue this thread with a few of the earliest attempts by marketers to pioneer 3-D advertising.
Some of brands already using this technique seem like obvious candidates--like Pixar, who recently launched a 3-D website to promote the release of Toy Story 3 in 3-D. The medium and the message marry up tidily for Pixar, but other brands playing in this territory don't necessarily have such a clear-cut claim to 3-D.
HBO's True Blood is advertised in the June issue of Playboy Magazine, which reportedly includes 3D glasses and a 3D centerfold.
La Derniere Heure, a French-language newspaper hailing out of Brussels, ran a special 3-D edition in March too. And there have been many others in any number of markets all over the globe.
So what? There are a number of gimmicks that might give a similar benefit. How would this be any different from, say, a creative execution based on Augmented Reality (AR)? How does 3-D differ from other crazes? And why should anyone care, given that we were rocking the same goofy red/blue lenses two decades ago?
The real value in this opportunity might lie in the fact that the decades-long quest for 3-D carries a stronger emotional charge than, say, AR. As cool as it is, AR came out of nowhere--but we have history with 3-D. It's a flawed technology that we grew up with but never stopped believing in. So it is very meaningful.
See, next-generation 3-D is a particularly magical breakthrough. We've found a way to make an image leap out of the screen at you in high-definition and in full-color, and that feels like magic to many people. The image leaps from the screen the same way a genie would leap from a bottle to physically occupy the room.
There's the sense of victory attached to it, too: we've conquered the physically impossible, so there's hope for the future. Who knows what else man is capable of? That feeling is a great thing for a brand to align itself with.
Never mind that the 3-D effect that we're stuck with for the next few months is below par. Never mind the fact that the glasses are dinky and that the colors are all messed up. That's missing the point.
It's about the zeitgeist.
It's about being here at a time when anything seems possible. Each of the ads above shows that the brand is sharing in this magical victory with us, and as such, is relevant.
Acoustic Alliances: The Benefits of Music in Advertising
As brands look for more customized approaches to create authentic connections with today's often over-communicated-to consumers, partnerships between advertisers and music have become more and more commonplace. Increasingly, mainstream media is picking up on the significance and benefits of music in advertising. Music intensifies pictures, colors words and most importantly acts as a neutral conduit for creating an emotional connection between brands and consumers.
Is there a formula for hitting the right tone with music and advertising? The truth of the matter is finding a hit song is one of the last bastions of gut instinct, artistic talent and sheer luck left in the entertainment industry.
While many brands would like to partner with the most-well known or hottest artist du jour, in many cases, brands are better off partnering with an under-appreciated past master or a rising indie talent. The rewards are not as obvious in the forefront, but can be a real conversation changer for the brand.
Paste Magazine, a serious Music (note the capital M) magazine recently ran a cover story on the artist Santigold. Yet, incredibly, they spent a solid three paragraphs of the article talking about Bud Light Lime. They elaborated on the brand's partnership with Santigold, the brands marketing strategy, how it was the biggest product launch in the history of Anheuser-Busch InBev and they gave credit to Bud Light Lime for playing a part in launching Santigold's career. This article was one of a dozen articles in various industry and non-industry publications to come out since the campaign launched in the summer of 2008.
Inspiration for picking music for ads can come from anywhere and everywhere. For instance, more than ten years ago while I was living in London I heard a song with an echo-plexed Portuguese chatter, some Latin sounding percussion I couldn't quite place, and before I could think of anything else, a blazing fuzz guitar belted out a descending guitar riff so primal, it made "Satisfaction" sound like an overcooked prog rock jam. Turns out that the song was from a 1960's Brazilian group called Os Mutantes, often referred to as the "the Brazilian Beatles". I never forgot the music or, more importantly, how it made me feel.
Fast-forward 13 years - I'm working with a script for a McDonald's commercial that featured several children playing soccer where the mood of the spot was inspirational yet humanizing. I knew right away it was time for "The Mutants" to finally make a mark on the mainstream American psyche. After their track "A Minha Menina" soundtracked the "Victory" spot, Billboard and Adweek declared it one of the top five best music uses in the history of advertising.
Advertisers get big credit from consumers when they add real value to culture-- like turning people on to a great piece of music. In addition, one of the best ways for advertisers to positively affect the music industry is to get as much good music to as many ears as possible. A brand's reward for doing this can often be the kind of in-print exposure no media dollars could have targeted or, better yet, hundreds of blog posts discussing the music in the spot and linking to your video or website to hear that music.
The space.
The culture.....we are all equal.
The kick off meeting, before we go down a certain road.
The medium is the message; content is king, the long tail, web 2.0, 360 degrees. We love buzz words in marketing, we just can't help ourselves. My favourite is "true integration". It's my favourite because when practiced it goes a long way to creating ground-breaking work.
I know this because I work in an agency that is, I believe, truly integrated. We all know that agencies around the world can no longer just create that one stand alone solution for clients. To create the kind of work we all get jealous about, we do need to integrate traditional, digital, PR experiential, and direct.
A week has passed and I am still on a high from DDB Group Asia Pacific's wins at Spikes Asia. Thirty-seven awards plus Network of the Year and Agency of the Year to DDB Group New Zealand - an amazing feat considering only a few years back we were at the bottom of the heap.
Douglas Faudet, vice chairman, DDB Group Asia Pacific, with the golds, creative and network Spikes awards
But, Spikes Asia is not all about awards. It is a two-day festival with seminars and workshops dedicated to improving creative craft. This year, like last year, DDB's strategy was to invest in speakers that challenges creatives goals and visions - both professionally and personally. In 2009, DDB Group Asia Pacific hosted Sir Ken Robinson - one of the world's leading thought leaders in creativity and innovation and one of the most popular presenters on ted.com. This year we hosted Bryce Courtenay, and once again we brought the house down.
Bryce Courtenay is Australia's best selling storyteller and the author of 'The Power of One' which was also made into a Hollywood movie. He is passionate about human potential and he drew on his own life experiences to demonstrate he need to embrace change and live your dreams. Mesmerizing and at times confronting, he left the audience with one of his favorite quotes, "if you are skating on thin ice, you may as well tap dance," which reminded me of DDB's four freedoms - the freedom from fear; the freedom to fail; the freedom from chaos; and the freedom to be. After his seminar, people flocked to the sidelines, to hug him, hold him and to cry in his arms.
DDB also hosted its annual lunch. This is an opportunity for our senior management to invite our top clients and media to a closed-door VIP session with our speaker. Launched last year it has already started to build a reputation with many clambering to be invited. This year we had 60 people!
me with Bryce Courtenay
As one last special treat, we invited Bryce to address the staff at DDB Singapore. Why should only senior management and clients have an opportunity to be inspired? Once again every single person was at the edge of their seats listening intently to his many stories and beliefs.
To have had the opportunity to spend two days with Bryce is a time I will never forget. And then to pick up all those awards! It's moments like these, which makes the job worthwhile.
Maybe the scale of the photo is throwing you off but it is actually a new space-saver from Whirlpool. According to the literature, the Sub-Tub Bath & Washbasin Unit doubles as a bathtub and vanity. When the vanity is hidden, there's full access to the whirlpool-equipped tub and OLED screen that allows users to set a customized image during use. Once finished, you can flip down the OLED to utilize the unit's pair of sinks and mirror. Perfect for dorm rooms, Japanese hotels, and my brother's apartment.
Perhaps you are familiar with DDB's work with VW in Sweden called The Fun Theory. That concept continues with "Fast Lane". It challenges commuters to move a little quicker at the Alexanderplatz subway station in Berlin. People can either take the staircase or have fun and save time by sliding down the Fast Lane. This follows on the piano, bottle deposit machine, and trash receptacle that established VW's Fun Theory as generally accepted science.
New Jersey-based, Automated Media Services, has developed 3GTV, little screens attached to the shelves of supermarkets aisles, which will run commercials of products carried in these stores. 3GTV will allow media agencies to buy commercial time just as they do on TV channels, and bring advertisements to the retail point of purchase. The company hopes to influence people at point-of-sale with information and promotion concerning specific products.
Arguably, many aspects of healthcare require reinvention and innovation so along rolls a new medical cart called Pocket. This is meant to replace the ubiquitous carts that healthcare professionals use for just about everything. Going forward these carts will need to perform increasingly high-tech tasks, all while remaining easy for caregivers to move and clean, and still feel friendly to patients. Created by a health care company called Modo, Pocket was designed by a division of Steelcase called Nurture to address the changing needs of healthcare.
I will take three of the following please...
Aussie Marc Newson, is responsible for this new luxury powerboat designed for the Italian company Riva. I love the retro look and lines. Can't you picture Sean Connery's James Bond or Frank Sinatra or JFK lounging on this beauty? Unfortunately the $1.5 million price tag takes the wind out of my sails. But just look at the sleekness and personality...
The cockpit is definitely an homage to the 1960's but with all the latest technology one needs to ensure the Gin and Tonics do not spill.
Well one can dream can't one? And that sometimes is the beginning of the creative process - to envision something almost dreamlike. Send us your favorite examples of creativity, innovation and design for our next 'Random Bits of Creativity'.
It's time to start thinking beyond viral and even beyond mobile, at least as we think of them now. In this blog post, I'll talk about how to enable new forms of creativity by harnesssing emerging technologies to elevate the OOH consumer brand experience.
Experience Proximity Series
The Experience Proximity series is an interactive 3-D media platform designed to redefine the out-of-home consumer experience. The Experience Proximity series presents first-of-its-kind mixed-reality digital signage that is capable of transforming both time and three-dimensional space. The only limitation to augmenting any physical location is the creative vision of the designers.
The Experience Proximity consumer experience platform uses proprietary technology to spatially register and align a targeted physical area with one-to-one, millimeter-to-millimeter precision. By tracking the dynamic viewpoint of the observer, the Experience Proximity Lens allows 3-D virtual content to be spatially aligned with and immersed within the surrounding environment. As the observer moves, the content is dynamically repositioned, creating a window-like viewing experience.
OOH Interactive Signage
KABOOM! This larger-than-life superhero smashes into your theater lobby. As an observer enters the "proximity zone," the experience proximity display transforms into its immersive mode, engaging the movie patron by using full body tracking and in-world registration. Advanced 3-D rendering capabilities and dynamic gesture recognition allow the observer to cross into this imaginative world by interacting with the characters and engaging in a full micro-gaming experience.
Retail Consumer Experiences
Merchandise comes to life as stunning lifelike visuals and audio transport your customer into a remote natural paradise. By engaging the natural senses, experience proximity can capture the customer's attention and provide an emotional connection to the product. Allow this experience to become reality by enabling the customer to book a campsite for the weekend.
The Meek Have Inherited The Earth: The power and future of social media in the new decade
Social connectivity is the driver behind the greatest leap in human and brand evolution so far this century. Social media is the single greatest agent of change in both the wider world today and specific commercial channels. From the news being reported real-time through Twitter, to brands developing and altering their products based upon social feedback and democratically enabled creativity and utility - the meek have truly begun to inherit the earth.
Bernbach said: "Word of mouth is the most powerful medium of all."
Trusted conversation, referrals and advocacy are the most powerful purchasing factors in the marketplace, making social media the most important but least defined of the digital channel tiers. Those that get the fundamentals right will be the most powerful brands of the new century.
In this Cannes seminar, delegates learned how to best leverage social media. In addition to drawing on examples from across the industry, TribalDDB highlighted client Hasbro, and delegates heard a leading brand's beliefs on this new age of social media as well as how those are informing future business and marketing decisions. They also heard about the latest social media practicalities: the way that brands can harness the social power of Joe Public, create marketing mechanics and experiences wherein public opinion is facilitated and incentivized in order to reach a specific campaign goal, and how to best facilitate this social creativity.
The first two and a half days of the Festival have been a blur of activity. As in years past, the majority of attendees appear to be more interested in seminars, workshops, and screenings than the actual award shows. The days (and the auditoriums) are packed with discussion of digital, mobile, brand integration and the agency model of the future -- topics we have been discussing and debating over and over for years.
I would argue that the best conversations are the ones being had after a long day of these presentations. You can go to seminars and screenings all day, but nothing compares to the depth of knowledge shared this week through face-to-face communication. Which is why you'll find a great number of the more seasoned marketers hanging out on the Carlton Patio -- the center of the advertising universe during the Cannes Lions.
Early scuttlebutt has centered around the topic we have all been discussing as of late -- what method of communication is most relevant to consumers today? As my friend Chris Rossiter, director of production for Leo Burnett US, put it, "We are living the dream of Orson Welles -- reaching everybody in every form imaginable."
So, who's to say there is one best method? That branded content trumps a TV spot? Or that print is dead or digital is king? Maybe we should stop trying to name a winner and start coming up with more ideas worth talking about.
According to director, film-maker and creative genius Spike Jonze, "No one genre connects best with consumers. It's all about the idea." He believes that the idea must come first and then we can decide how best to communicate it. I don't think you'll find many people here that disagree with that. At least, I hope you won't.
Interestingly, that notion has led to a great deal of discussion around the kind of people we want to work with and that we want working for us. Maybe that's why Cannes feels like one long round of speed dating.
So, after my first few days here, the biggest reminder I am giving myself is that it all comes down to people. The people that develop the ideas, buy the ideas, and ultimately, the people that engage with our ideas, pass them along, buy our products and of course, talk about them with their friends.
The Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival has long been viewed as the "Oscars of Advertising." The creme de la creme of award shows in our industry. But rather than one single night of festivities, the very wise staff of the Cannes Lions created a week-long event consisting of not one, but four award shows, hundreds of screenings and dozens of seminars. The festival that was once known as a gathering for industry creative types and the directors and production companies that bring their ideas to life, gradually transformed into a conference worthy of global marketers such as Microsoft, McDonald's, P&G, Yahoo!, HP and Google.
Clients everywhere caught wind of this phenomena and soon, those at the top of the advertising food chain were not only attending, but actively participating in seminars and conducting workshops throughout the week. These savvy marketers recognized the value of immersing themselves in creativity occurring in their industry and others around the globe. And it certainly didn't hurt that the festival was taking place in the French Riviera. The sessions and seminars comprising the Cannes Lions gradually became more focused on the changing media landscape and trends in marketing attracting not just creatives, but clients, client service types, reporters, and so on. Very wise indeed.
Needless to say, the third week of June in Cannes, France is now teeming with clients, creatives, directors, producers, planners, recruiters and reporters from all over the world. It's a regular who's who of marketing. And with that type of crowd, one can only imagine the conversations taking place up and down la Croisette -- the main boulevard in Cannes that runs alongside the waterfront. The patios of the hotels and bars that line the boulevard are a hotbed of social activity. Talk of what ideas will take home the biggest prize, which agencies are the hottest, which marketers have the highest get it factor, and of course, rumors, gossip and speculation on the next big thing.
So, I've decided to blog this week on the "scuttlebutt" in Cannes. According to trusty old Wikipedia, the term scuttlebutt corresponds to the iconic colloquial concept of a water cooler, which becomes the locus of congregation and casual discussion. Seems appropriate. After all, Cannes does become one giant water cooler during the Festival. Or for some, one giant wine cooler.
Purists take note: mainstream media is picking up on the significance and benefits for both brands and bands of breaking new groups in commercial campaigns, Hertz’s Journey On from DDB New York being among the most recent to show the cross over. Of course, trade magazines have written about this for awhile but it’s interesting that broader media is now following the story. In a recent interview with Time Out Chicago senior producer Gabe McDonough talked about the impact Santigold’s association with Bud Light Lime had on the singer’s career and also gave some tips on techniques for picking music for ads such as listening for a guitar line that recedes so as to allow for a voiceover. And when put on the spot and asked to soundtrack some brands off the top of his head, Gabe didn’t disappoint.
Creativity and technology: Time to let the cat out of the bag
It’s remarkable what can happen when technology loses its caboose status in the creative process and moves to the front end. Cardboard games move into the present and the future. And, perhaps most importantly, we can all start to have some fun with choices and actions that previously no one would have thought of as entertaining and many would have pegged as pure drudgery. That premise is proven by Volkswagen’s “Fun Theory.” Something else happens as well when technology is given a seat at the creative table: our work and our people start moving in new directions and new circles. No better proof of that than the inclusion of Andreas Dahlqvist, Matt Oxley and Matt Ross alongside James Cameron and others in “The Creativity 50” from Creativity and Advertising Age.
Energy provider ENTEGA and DDB recently staged a demonstration in Berlin, a demonstration of some 800 snowmen. To increase public awareness on climate change, ENTEGA and DDB called on the public to build as many snowmen as possible in one day. The expectation was that the melting snowmen would function as a warning sign of global warming. The event lasted for three days during which time the exhibit was paired with discussion sessions, readings, concerts as well as a climate change display. The snowman demonstration is part of ENTEGA's series of thought-provoking activities and events with which ENTEGA and DDB Berlin aim at a better and more interactive dialogue with society.
DDB Group Asia Pacific hosted Sir Ken Robinson at the inaugural Spikes Asia Festival, September 2009. Having watched Sir Ken on Ted.com, where he claims schools kill creativity, I was already a big fan of his beliefs. Watching him 'live' was an awe inspiring and moving experience as he presented his arguments in an articulate, entertaining and thought provoking way. With many of his beliefs aligned with our Four Freedoms, Sir Ken made me proud I worked at DDB.
Congratulations to our European region for capturing the first-ever Network of the Year award at the 2009 Eurobest awards last week.
Eight different countries contributed to the win including work from both DDB and Tribal DDB which, along with the Philips team, was awarded the Grand Prix in Interactive Film for the Philips 21:9 Carousel film.
Other notable work included the Gold Print and Gold Outdoor for the IKEA Beast campaign by DDB Germany in Düsseldorf and the Gold Print campaign for Harvey Nichols Winter Sale by DDB London.
I have been thinking a great deal about fiction. Reading for me is an absolute joy but I must confess that this has not always been the case. I was that normal kid and teenager who resented being told what to read while in school. My now voracious appetite for reading truly began when I chose to do it for myself, for my selfish enjoyment.
There was one brief but notable aberration to whom I must credit my brother. Thirty years ago, when I was 13 years old, he left a spine-bent paperback copy of Stephen King's The Shining on our shared nightstand and the foil cover intrigued me. I read that book over two eye widening nights that was a record for me to that point and for some time following.
A eulogy for advertising and a proclamation for creative business consulting.
For the last ten years, media and media consumption have been changing at such a rapid pace that any assessment of them is rendered obsolete the moment it's done.
For advertising agencies, this is akin to a tidal wave appearing out of nowhere on a beautiful summer's day. But what do agencies do? Too many do not consider what the consequences of these developments and changes will mean for the world. They do advise their clients to take their ads beyond traditional print and TV into every conceivable medium because "you simply cannot reach people the way you used to."
What this reveals is these advisors are still thinking in terms of "advertising ideas back in the day" and suggesting the only difference here is that traditional ads will now appear on the internet as CRM programs and POS posters.
DDB Stockholm has just launched a campaign for Volkswagen based on the belief that the best way to get people to make positive changes in life, like taking care of the environment, is to make it fun. We call it "The Fun Theory" or "Rolighetsteorin."
We have begun a number of experiments to test the theory, like encouraging people to take the stairs by turning each step into a musical note. You can find a collection on the website thefuntheory.com
The Piano Staircase
A competition is even underway to encourage people to come up with their own ways of challenging or applying the theory to various scenarios. The winner will be chosen bay a jury of Swedish experts in behavioral science and environmental issues and will receive 2500 €.
Volkswagen will present their answer to the theory later on a new site and feature their range of environmental technologies and cars.
The campaign is attracting a lot of attention across the globe and was even featured on Discovery Channel's Daily Planet. In the first week of the launch, it got more than 3.3 million hits on YouTube. But most importantly, it reinforces the emotional connection of the Volkswagen brand and its environmental technologies to innovation, fun and doing the right thing – all in a very understated way that reflects the Volkswagen heritage.
I always aspire to see work produced that's of the caliber of Whassup. That was a word on the lips of people around the world. It's really tough to capture peoples imagination in that way. TalkValue on a grand scale.
Our Carousel ad is not quite in that league but I'm delighted to see CSI have copied us. It once again shows the value of creativity, creative business solutions, and that word of mouth and even plagiarism are signs that we are making an impact, first and foremost on the Philips brand and also on popular culture. As a gentleman far smarter than me once said, "Properly practiced creativity can make one ad do the work of ten."
BIG ideas are not about geography or culture but rather a new world of communication that crosses all frontiers. That's the word from Colombia's Juan Carlos Ortiz while interviewed by Lions Daily News, president of DDB Latina and a juror on the Titanium and Integrated Lions Jury. "I'm looking for big ideas that can travel everywhere,and use the new world" said Ortiz, the man credited with consolidating the DDB Latin markets--US, Hispanic, Latin America and Spain-- to create DDB Latina. He added the ideas should "engage with people and have a relationship with them."
Great creative ideas can come from anywhere, it's true. Even an old Ottoman Empire gunpowder factory, now the most well preserved Byzantine structure in all of Turkey. DDB&Co in Istanbul is proof of that. A dark horse at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes last week, DDB Istanbul finished in the money at the Festival's Agency of the Year competition where, among agencies the world over, it earned a No. 3 ranking.
In an increasingly mobile world where the home office is promoted as much to save money as to give employees flexibility and teleconferences along with webinars are replacing the invaluable contact of in the flesh meetings, DDB Istanbul's old stone home and creative record remind us of the value of working as a community and that face to face interaction drives the creative business and the currency of ideas.
Thursday at Cannes, DDB had the honor to present David Plouffe, campaign manager for Barack Obama who joined us to speak about "The Art of the Possible. The Audacity of Successful Brands." David Plouffe explained how the campaign happened and why it worked and shared his insights on how to harness the power of social networking to build brand loyalty. Watch the excerpt of the talk:
Bonjour. I just landed in Cannes today via Brussels. I'm tired but excited about my 11th Cannes experience. First thing is to register, check in and get ready for a kick-off dinner with Bob Scarpelli and a few DDB friends.
While everyone seems to be debating the pulse of Cannes - or if you're Ad Age's Bob Garfield, whether or not there should even be one - I am still looking forward to this year's Festival, our prospects for winning, the clients and press that are attending, our many jurors and of course the seminars featuring some faces you know.
Follow me for all things DDB or if you just need to know where a vegetarian can find a decent meal in Cannes: http://twitter.com/cheronis
DDB Italy lets sentimentality, connection and joy speak volumes in these ads for Henkel's Loctite glue. Whether it be your perfect porcelain dance partner, or always reliable robot, or loyal infantryman, Loctite keeps your possessions and treasures intact.
Check out DDB work for various clients including that address the recession. Please send us any other interesting recession-specific communications you have seen and believe to be effective. And share what you think should be the major selling features given our challenging times.
Global downturn. What's the first mistake business make? We live in FINANCIAL TIMES
Just in case you don't follow Ashton, or Kanye West, or any of the thousands of other people who've been raving on Twitter about the new Philips microsite – check it out.
The cinematic experience was created by Tribal DDB Amsterdam and Stink Digital to launch Philips' Cinema 21:9 TV – the world's first, cinematic proportion television.
Believe it or not, you can spend a week in Mayakoba without ever wanting to go to the beach.
Please don't take me wrong. The Riviera Maya is a beautiful place that offers its visitors probably the best beaches in the world. The weather is spectacular, the food is great and the resorts are just amazing. But when you have the chance to spend five days discussing incredibly inspiring ideas, together with a group of some of the most talented creative people in the world, the beach becomes the least important of the reasons to be there.
I knew the Andys was an important festival, but to be honest, I didn't know much about it before judging this year. Compared to other festivals, I'd say the Andys are the toughest, purest, creatively driven I've seen, and also one of the best to enter when you really want to measure the quality of your work compared to others. It is "the first of the season", so that in itself is a good reason to enter because I believe it can be a good thermometer as of how your work will do in other upcoming shows. At the Andys, it is the president of the jury who has the right to decide who takes part of the jury, and it is "by invitation only". It's not about networks, countries or number of submissions. It is about people and about talent, and I think that is reflected in the results.
I was amazed by some of the cases presented. From integrated ideas to launch a new cd for a band, to generating a movement that can change the course of a presidential election or one that can help educational programs improve, the Andys have proven to me that the 30 second spot, while still necessary in some cases, is also becoming old and has gone from being "the soul of an advertising campaign" to just a small component in a much bigger equation.
I came back from the jury motivated and wanting to do better work. Other than the awards, which always end in a shelf somewhere at the office, I believe that is what festivals should do: Motivate people to do better work, to come up with better ideas. When you see the results from this particular festival, what won and why, I'm sure you will be motivated.
There is an interesting debate going on now. It was crystallized for me while judging a recent awards program. In this time of tighter budgets, will the creative product suffer or flourish? Many professionals will tell you that a tight brief and budget can focus ideas and execution while others like to avoid any constraints. What is your opinion?
I feel like the Super Bowl's prominence grows larger year after year. After all, it's getting to be the last "shared American moment" left. In the older, simpler days, we all watched Walter Cronkite for news every night, we all tuned in to Ed Sullivan every Sunday night, etc. But as the years passed, and the amount of options grew, American eyeballs scattered. Today, the Super Bowl stands as that last great, shared moment. Not even the Oscars, the Grammys or major sports championships of other sports comes close to it.
What a bonanza for advertisers. What a great way for an otherwise irrelevant brand to leap into the consideration set so fast. To become an instant "big dog." Think of Dennys' this year. "Time For A Serious Breakfast." The "free breakfast for everyone in America" promotion. It's estimated they paid a total of $5 million to mount that promotion - and that includes the $3 million Super Bowl price tag. The next day, so many people came to Dennys and, as they waited for a table, ordered so many drinks that Dennys believe they may have broken even on the giveaway - and thanks to the Super Bowl reach and buzz - earned over $50 million worth of free media. Wow!
What about GoDaddy. Say what you will about their taste level, they were nobody a few years ago. Now they are the #1 domain name register company.
And then, what about the big boys. The Pepsicos and Budweisers. We've been putting out Bud ads for years and it never gets old. Ya know what often goes through my mind as a spot of ours is airing? All the famous people who are watching and being entertained by our work. Obama, Jack Nicholson, Michael Jordan, George Clooney...they're all watching, and hopefully they're all digging it. That's the power of Super Bowl advertising.
Last week, The Madison Avenue Journal featured a weeklong spotlight on our own of Chairman Emeritus Keith Reinhard called "The Last Mad Man."
Based on a conversation with Keith, it covers everything from his determination to make it into the business and the creation of Omnicom to his current work as President of Business for Diplomatic Action, from the people and the experiences that inspired him along the way to the impact Keith has around the world.
For those who know Keith Reinhard, here are the stories everyone asks him to tell again and again. If you've never been lucky enough to Keith speak, check it out and see why he continues to inspire us all.
Steven Marrs, CEO of Branded Pictures said it eloquently in his comments posted on The Madison Avenue Journal:
"If the current industry is built on jargon and handles, Keith is one of the truly extraordinary individuals who not only had a clear vision of what he thought the advertising world should look like, but a determined and disciplined way of inspiring other to join in his cause. He lives what he preaches and leads by example. His constant quest for knowledge and always wanting to understand what's next is a refreshing departure from a business that is more interested in its past than its future.
My favorite inspiration for how I conducted business at Tribal, and truthfully apply it in my current capacity, is Keith's Four Freedoms. But in particular, the Freedom to Fail stands out. In a creative business, failure is a given but providing a framework for risk taking is nothing short of genius. It is his unique insights, yearning for knowledge and firm grasp of the creative dynamic that makes Keith special. It is also his compassion and passion that is inspirational. He has had a profound impact on me both personally and professionally and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to apprentice in his shadow for a short period of time."
It's a shame that few people know how easy it is to protect themselves from the potentially deadly pandemic flu - simply wash your hands. So Mark Monteiro, Rick Bursky and Christianne Brooks at the LA office created a memorable poster for the LA Health Coalition that drives home that point. The fun and dramatic poster will be given to schools and posted in public venues throughout the area. Los Angeles based photographer Tony Garcia did all of the photography pro-bono. We're thrilled with the poster, but will be even happier if just a handful of people heed its advice.
I was having breakfast with a friend from another agency recently when he reminded me of a Bill Bernbach story he admired. I had probably told him this story. I really don't know if it's true or if it's one of those "urban legends" that surround great people like Bill Bernbach and grow with time.
All I know is that I was told this story by Keith Reinhard and I'm going to believe it's true!
As the story goes, apparently Bill kept a small piece of paper in his jacket pocket. When he was in the middle of a meeting with a client who had an opposite point of view to his, he would pull out this piece of paper and read it to himself. On the piece of paper were three words: "Maybe he's right."
Those three words always stop me in my tracks. They are certainly worth remembering.....if only to remind ourselves of the importance of the great, and too often lost, art of "listening."
I find that sometimes, in our passion to sell our ideas to clients, we lose sight of the fact that often our clients are our greatest source of inspiration and clarity. So today, as we spend more time co-creating with our clients, partners and even customers, it's good to keep that phrase tucked in the back of our minds:
Earlier this year, we set out to launch a new brand called Green Works -- a line of 99% plant based natural cleaning products. The launch plan consisted of national TV, print and a dedicated website, but in our minds, this new brand deserved more -- something that would generate buzz and create influence. Something that would cause people to sit up, take notice, and look at cleaning products in a whole new light.
Our plan was to create something we knew our client would love - a larger than life product demo. We would find a dirty building or wall and clean it with Green Works. But we would clean it in a manner that would garner attention. Since Green Works are plant-based, we would use it to reverse out a mural of plants and trees. Although the client was excited about the idea, there was one big problem - no budget. The National launch plan was in place and the money was already committed. But that didn't stop the team. Through savings on the mainline television production and a little creative problem solving, we found a way to make it happen.
We enticed Paul "Moose" Curtis, the pioneer of an art form called "clean tagging" to help realize our vision. We identified a high-traffic, disgustingly dirty spot in San Francisco - The Broadway Tunnel - to become the canvas for Moose's art and ultimately, a live 140-foot Green Works billboard. The Reverse Graffiti Project was born.
In an effort to allow as many people as possible to witness the event, we enlisted the help of Doug Pray, an award-winning documentarian, to shoot the entire process and create a short film. Local news stations caught wind of the event and sent crews to cover it resulting in free PR.
Our Design Group created a website to house stills of "the making of" the project and the documentary. The Reverse Graffiti Project film debuted on YouTube and in just 2 days, became the #1 Featured Video. In only 10 days it had received over 400,000 views. It was also seeded in popular social and environmental blogs. More and more blogs picked up on the project and it was posted in over 13 countries around the world.
A few months ago, the film was selected to premier at the LA Shorts Fest and the Center of Contemporary Culture of Barcelona's NOW event. It was also featured on Discovery Channel's Planet Green and is scheduled to appear on Al Gore's Current TV.
The Reverse Graffiti Project has truly been a labor of love. It has inspired people around the world to look at cleaning products differently. It has inspired people within our own four walls to think differently about how they approach every project they work on and to believe that with a little persistent, a great idea can be realized.
Sergio was a member of the Titanium and Integrated Lions jury at the 2008 Cannes International Advertising Festival. His office, DDB Brazil has won 74 Lions and 2 Grand Prix, has been twice named the Festival's Agency of the Year and was also awarded the Festival's first Interactive Agency of the Year.
I have the feeling that, every year, we're invited to go on a safari. And when you go on this safari, you enter a car, and the driver turns toward you and says, " There's a bunch of lions over there."
So you ride in the car with your shotgun - some tranquilizing gas not to kill the lion because it's not politically correct to kill lions. And then you go to the lions, and the lions go running. The younger lions run swiftly forward. They go faster than the car. And the older lions, which are tired and are going to die in 15, 20 days, they plod on tiredly.
And you, inside the car, all sure of yourself, pick up your gun and kill those old, tired lions, which would soon be dying soon anyway. And then you take those lions to a taxidermist, who will comb its mane, shine its teeth, add some more color to its eyes, and will make you a fantastically beautiful trophy out of it. And you will be enormously proud of that lion.
But the younger lions, folks, are running far ahead. And you are not even looking in which direction they're going.
In short, what I'm trying to tell everybody here is, aim at the young lions. Aim at the young lions. Try to reinvent your profession. I'm not saying that you shouldn't kill the old lions. But when aiming at the young lions, you won't need to fire a single shot to kill the old lions. The speed at which your car is going will, by itself, throw the running lion off balance because it is so old. And when you fire a shot to kill the younger lion, the older lion will die of fright. All you have to do then is to pick up the young lion you have just killed and go back and collect the thousands of old lions you have killed along the way.
For 80 years work in our industry has continued to operate based on the same method: An advertising idea finds its way to the consumer through many different media channels. It's not just our instinct that tells us it's not working that way anymore - the facts that define our client's success and thus our success show us it's not working anymore. But what happened exactly?
The world changed, faster and more radically than anyone suspected. The consumer changed more fundamentally than any market research has indicated. Media, as we understand it, changed completely, more than publishers and media houses could have ever foreseen. And technologies have changed with a speed that challenges even the fastest super computers and insane future scenarios.
All this is nothing new. It is common knowledge among every junior accountant executive and product manager. Every informed creative director notices it and every intelligent-minded agency uses it as introduction to their presentations. The novelty is the consequence and it is more basic, fundamental and revolutionary than all other changes in our industry combined. But let's start at the beginning.
An agency, advertising a product or brand always works towards the same objectives, regardless of creative, media, market or discipline - and that is to find a statement, a position or a benefit for the advertised product/service. And in its role, the agency is acting as an extension to the client's marketing department, which is itself an extension of the client's product development department.
Furthermore, agencies translate the statement, position or benefit into an advertising idea that - no matter how exceptional the format and execution may be - in the end it always states the same -- and that is: "Look how cool I am and what great things I can do." How many people do you know who talk like this and are regarded as cool or interesting? An advertising message is presented to a target group. Old world. Old thinking. Old format, or as I call it: Creativity of first dimension. But is that really creative?
I sat down with a young guy recently to review his book. He'd gone to a good, graduate level creative school. I liked him. Turns out we had some commonalities in our life and background.
But nothing about his portfolio of work excited me. It looked like so many others I see. There were spec print ads that used quirky visual solutions – but not in a very sophisticated way. There were the out-of-home guerilla-ish ideas. Books these days are often so formulaic, it's unbelievable.
So, as nicely as I could, I asked him if he ever did digital work – anything on the Web. "Oh, yeah, I love that stuff. But I've been told to keep that stuff out of my book because it will just typecast me. I'll get stuck just being a Web guy." Typecast? The fastest way to be typecast is to show work that's not reflective of our current reality and where the world is headed. This guy should get a refund on his tuition because his professors gave him such profoundly bad advice.
A creative book is, after all, simply a means of showing a prospective employer how you think. How you solve problems. What kind of intelligence and insight you bring to a creative challenge. I suppose it does level the playing field to some degree when all books have essentially the same kinds of work. Then it's all about the quality of the ideas – the creative thought – rather than how it's delivered.
Except that's presuming that how and where you tell a story – and in what combinations – isn't nearly as important as what you say. I know there are agencies out there whose go-to media continues to be TV, print and radio. At DDB, our world is very different. And we need to see candidates who reflect a new way of tackling the world. How do they think about sight, sound and motion in a digital age? What about social media? What about surrounding your audience rather than using a single media in hopes of snagging them? Imagination in the delivery of ideas is a lot about what creativity is these days. It's what makes campaigns greater than the sum of the individual executions.
Well, if your book is tradition bound, it's going to be tough to excite us. Some of the people I've been most excited about hiring recently are those people who clearly understand communications in this digital age, but also have the knowledge, desire and skill to ideate in traditional media. They know how to bring it all together. To surround an idea.
Without those skills, a candidate isn't likely to find a job here.
Oh, and don't just assume I'm talking about creatives, either. The same is true if you plan to be a great planner, media strategist, or account person. It's a new day.
"If you're planning for one year, grow rice.
If you're planning for twenty years, grow grain.
If you're planning for one hundred years,
grow people."
Chinese Proverb
For many years, I had that proverb written on a piece of paper tacked up on the wall behind my desk because it always reminded me that our business is a "people" business.
Our lifeblood is talented people: people with ideas, people who think in new ways, people with the ability to look at business problems "upside down" in order to find fresh compelling insights and solutions, people other people like to be with. One of the things I want DDB to be known for is attracting the brightest, most talented and most diverse group of people to our company and to our industry.
I would love to hear from you on what makes a great working environment. Describe your best work experiences and what made them special for you.
Bob Scarpelli, Chairman & Chief Creative Officer, DDB Worldwide
I love this quote from Arthur Koestler, "The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards".
For some reason perhaps because I travel so often, when I think of this quote I conjure the image of luggage on wheels. Robert Plath is credited with this innovation. Remember the days of lifting our luggage? I still have marks on my shoulders from garment bags. And let's face it, early portable computers were hardly "portable".
Plath was in great position to introduce this 'eureka' product as he was a pilot. So he shrank the boxy suitcase, put an extended handle on it and added wheels. He started with 100 bags which he sold to fellow pilots starting in 1989. By the mid 1990s, Plath's Travelpro was a $50 million business. This now obvious innovation has changed the way people travel. We now take more than we need because we are not hefting it.
Too often in creativity and innovation we seek something completely fresh and entirely groundbreaking. Plath did not invent luggage or travel, he disarmingly and cleverly enhanced both. As creatives, we are all on a quest for the new and the bold. But we should not lose sight of obvious, easily introduced solutions that are original discoveries in their own right.
Following the loss of our dear friend and colleague, I'd like to share last Saturday's memo from Chicago agency President Rick Carpenter:
"It is with great sorrow that I write to you this weekend. But I wanted you to hear this difficult news from me first. Last night, Paul Tilley tragically died at age 40. The reality of this news is difficult to comprehend. It is such loss for DDB, but also for our industry, our community, and certainly for his family and all who loved him.
Paul was a mentor to many, a friend to all. His ability to lead, inspire, and yes, entertain will be so greatly missed.
Our thoughts are with his family and with one another during this very difficult time."
AdAge provides an interesting list of trends for 2008. It is worth examining some relevant ones for their potential impact on creativity:
Marketers Hit a Rough Patch
This covers a potential slowdown in the economy. If this is realized we will have to make do with less which will foster more innovation and creativity – a cycle that we have experienced before that weeds out those who are not focused on making creative pay off in the short and long terms.
Innovation and Creativity Rule
AdAge says, "Marketers' ingenuity will continue to expand as the competitive marketplace challenges brands to devise ways to reach their audiences online and via other "out-of-the-box" avenues. Targeting consumers using unconventional methods in creative places will be the gold standard for outstanding creative. Marketers won't run away from traditional media -- but will leverage technology and new media to accentuate message delivery to consumers and customers. There is no turning back -- and creativity will rule." This is all good stuff for our profession and it means we will all be personally challenged in the time ahead.
Get Serious About Accountability
We keep hearing about ROI and metrics (I covered this in an earlier post) and we have heard it for years. Our challenge is how to truly measure creativity without removing the magic.
Digital, Digital, Digital (and Portable Too)
The channel and the technology will force us to adapt and master new creative applications like never before.
The 'Brand Swarm'
Kudos to my colleague and partner, DDB CEO Chuck Brymer whose "swarm theory" has captured the attention it deserves ("the notion that people and their opinions coalesce to form critical forces that massively influence marketplace ideas and concepts"). Chuck will be bringing out more on this in 2008 and its impact on creativity will be huge.
The Power of Strategic Alignment
As Adage states, "Marketers succeed when brand messages are fully integrated and synchronized across all media channels". More than ever creativity is the glue to bring together that alignment.
Any comments on these trends and their impact on creativity?
I have many years in the business and have accumulated a corresponding number of reasons why ideas get shelved.
Of course, every situation is just that - situational. And often we find it easier to point the finger somewhere else. Over my time I have seen ideas denied the light of day using the following "explanations":
We tried that before and did not work
I do not understand it so no one will
It is too complicated
It is too simple
It is too expensive
It has not been done before
I think the difference between good ideas and great ideas are that great ideas find their time. Often it is not the idea itself but the timing of their introduction. How about you - what examples or reasons have you experienced where ideas were shot down?
Recent talk has advanced the theory that the internet will actually drive more creativity over time.
This is becoming hot as the technology like image and video search become more common. According to Tim Armstrong, Google's North America president-advertising and commerce, social networks such as MySpace and Facebook "will expand the need for creative." In a talk Mr. Armstrong had with AdAge, he envisions a day with paid-search ads. This will force more creativity in online advertising. My questions are how do we prepare ahead of the technology and isn't a great idea still a great idea regardless of the channel of delivery?
The debate continues on the relevance of Super Bowl.
In fact, we have a survey on our homepage asking your opinion so do that if you get a chance. For this discussion, I am truly interested in what you think of Super Bowl as a venue for advertisers, what worked this year, and what you see happening in future years. Share your thoughts.
I subscribe to the notion that great creative is driven by context.
The definition of "great" being; influential, original, honest, purposeful, and memorable. In this blog we have so far covered where creative inspiration comes from, measuring creative, and the components of a solid brief. In this post, I want to explore context. It was Frank Lloyd Wright who said, "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." And Robert Wieder pushed the notion of context by stating, "Anyone can look for fashion in a boutique or history in a museum. The creative person looks for history in a hardware store and fashion in an airport."
This is really about building an integrated brand experience where all of the touchpoints of the brand are supportive and consistent. A brand only works if the larger context is understood and embraced. Often the most successful brands are credited with having a compelling story. The story provides the context for why the brand is important and why it should matter to the person who may consume it. Apple tells a great story of creative empowerment through its products. Harley-Davidson provides context through freedom of expression. Great brands are supported by great creative that understands and communicates the context.
We had a very interesting series of comments on measuring creativity.
Even by accepting subjectivity as a component of creativity, we still identified some clearly objective metrics (e.g., sales, satisfaction, and originality). As a result of the discussion, a "creative scorecard" encompassing soft and hard metrics with subjective and objective criteria may be the way to go. All of this has to be included in the initial brief and mapped to the business challenge to be solved. Have any of you run across really interesting briefs lately? I am not looking for absolute specifics (keep that confidentiality) but rather parts of a brief that may be instructive for all of us to ensure creativity is best applied.
Great to see the activity and people's different perspectives. I agree that part of our job is to tell interesting stories that are inspiring, moving and uplifting. At the same time, we are in the business of educating and convincing, so it is true we are problem-solvers. Objective, identifiable results in our business and craft are undeniably important with process and measurement being a big part of the debate these days. I wanted to turn our discussion to the thorny topic of measurement. In a business sense, how can we measure creativity? What are some of the metrics and measures you think are fair to use in the assessment of creative product?
Welcome to DDB's blog dedicated to everything creative where you are invited to riff and rant.
Together we will explore our collective abilities to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, the status quo and standard convention to create new and meaningful ideas. At the same time we have to explore the notion that great ideas can be timeless and either remain relevant or can be assured relevance through creative revival.
It will be great to debate the "creative process" - if one truly exists and challenge the thinking that a "creative" is a specific type of person or exists in one department. I will be your host, prompter and facilitator. There aren't many rules to this except to keep it clean, have fun, and visit often to add your thoughts.
To kick it off, I am always looking for sources of creative inspiration. If you want - share with us where or how you get inspired or let us know what you think when you hear the word "creativity". Happy blogging...
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What happened in the interim was not magic. We breathed each other's air, celebrated each other's triumphs and wept over each other's failures. (A triumph meant that Bernbach had OK'd an ad, a failure meant that he hadn't.)
"Everybody talks about change all the time. I think advertising essentially, the persuasion part of advertising, is going to be the same a hundred years from now. Because the man with talent, will be able to persuade and the man without talent won't, no matter how much knowledge you bring to him. No matter what mechanical devices you have... 
See more behind-the-scenes stories on DDB's Idea Makers
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They elaborated on the brand's partnership with Santigold, the brands marketing strategy, how it was the biggest product launch in the history of Anheuser-Busch InBev and they gave credit to Bud Light Lime for playing a part in launching Santigold's career. This article was one of a dozen articles in various industry and non-industry publications to come out since the campaign launched in the summer of 2008. 
