Posts tagged ‘advertising’
we need more Chris type people in AdLand
This is Chris, Cornish horseman extraordinaire and thoroughly decent chap.
Thanks to his gentle encouragement and laid backness, I ended up doing all kinds of things last week (like riding a dressage test on a stallion) that I’d never have dared to on my own, while feeling safe, confident and secure.
So I’m thinking that we need more people like him (account directors?) agency side to encourage (NOT bully) clients big and small to be that little bit braver when approving strategy and creative and to feel that they are doing so in as risk-free a way as possible.
I guess even more so in these wobbly times, in the end its all about people.
What are we going to do? Buy Heat magazine!
Its been around for a while, but I love this ad by Quiet Storm. It beautifully positions Heat magazine as the original and best gossip mag in a lovely gentle Smack the Pony type way that speaks directly to women who will stop at nothing to get their weekly gossip fix.
Here it goes again: oh where did you nick that ad?
The latest culprits in the ongoing ‘nick the creative from youtube and hope no-one notices’ saga has got to be whoever at JWT did the latest Berocca ads.
The agency must have assumed that they were the only people in the world who had seen OK Go’s fab video for here it goes again. Just them and the 32 million views so far on youtube then.
Disclosure: I thought twice about posting this as one my clients is part of the Bayer group who own Berocca. Then I thought s*d it, lazy creative is still lazy creative. If the ad was better than the original you could give them a bit of wiggle room, but to my eyes its worse.
digital wins with winds of change
Upon reflection, it strikes me that my ranting about the weather actually leads on to a relevant point.
The web has obviously made responding to change much easier – for example my gardening client has pay per click campaigns queued up on google just waiting for the right weather conditions to arrive.
But its rare to see a DIY shed buying up the nearest 6 sheets as the first flakes of snow begin to fall to point out that they stock rock salt. Or a wet bank holiday weekend 
resulting in the local cinema taking out a more prominent ad in the local paper. Those media options would be ideal, but traditional media is too slow. You just can’t turn offline communications round fast enough. And that’s where online media will always win.
In the right hands, digital media can be truly reactive. Which I suppose begs the next question – will online media have to become a 24-7 operation to service this?
“Matthew, where’s my feckin microwave?”
Genius. Yes, I know cog and tipping point came first, but this is more fun.
if campaigns go Stealth, what are we going to blog about?
There’s been a lot of fuss this week on t’interweb about whether Ad X is a ripoff (or homage) to Ad Y and if Campaign Z is actually any good.
But what are we all going to blog about when all this media fragmentation, CRM and digital malarky gets its act together and means that enormous campaigns could be running and we’d never know about them?
Because if done well, communications will only interact with the precise audience they’re targeted at, rather than anyone who happens to switch on the telly at 9pm.
I suppose its Stealth Marketing. As a brand you could, in theory, be as provocative or offensive as you like because so long as it doesn’t offend your target audience, no-one else is going to experience it…
mad about the Mad Men
I finally got round to watching Mad Men last night on BBC iplayer.
I really enjoyed it and it occurred to me that in AdWorld, some things change (technology, use of insight, number of women in senior positions, amount of admin support available) and others stay the same (blagging your way through last minute client meetings, office politics, drinks after work).
It did make me glad that I was born in a different age – somehow I don’t think I’d have found an agency role taking dictation and making coffee with the long term goal of a good marriage and lots of babies terribly fulfilling.
I did have fun imagining how the Mad Men might react to a modern-day Planner wondering about clad in jeans and trainers, weighed down by laptop, mobile and digital camera and going on about ethnographics, media fragmentation and the Velocity Age….
best advice
I’ve had a couple of instances recently where I’ve had to tell a client that what they are proposing is mind numbingly, completely the wrong thing to do. To explain that I’m giving them our best advice and that we wouldn’t do it if it was our money.
But do they act on my advice? In some cases, no. In some cases, they even adopt a “la la la I can’t hear you” approach.
If clients are paying their agencies significant fees to give them best advice on communications, surely they should be at least listening? I do appreciate that sometimes there are other factors at play that the agency hasn’t been exposed to, but I’m getting quite depressed at the amount of clients (and new business prospects too) who seem to want to employ ‘yes men’.
Maybe its the slightly wobbly state of the economy that is denting client confidence, maybe its a reflection of the changing client/agency power balance.
But I’m way too bloody minded to just take the money and run.
(pic by bullish1974 via Flickr)
when great ads (sometimes) get killed by focus groups
Produced for the New England 2007 Hatch Awards by Arnold, this is a sobering example of why the average focus group stuck in a meeting room and forced to watch an animatic don’t necessarily produce the kind of feedback that leads to great creative.
In fact, there’s a whole other rant here bemoaning the demise of holding groups in recruiter’s homes. I think its something to do with insurance, but certainly round my way its come to an end.
Which is a real shame because the best, most honest groups I’ve moderated or observed have come from a group of women (who might even, shock horror, have met each other before) cosied up in someone’s living room with cups of tea and biscuits chatting about Life – rather than a group of strangers holed up in a meeting room with a flip chart.
