Obama the star in Brewster’s Millions.

The credit freeze is for suckers. Obama’s marketing budget is now so humongous that he may not actually be able to spend all his millions by Election Day on November 4th.

 
Unlike Richard Prior in Brewster’s Millions though Obama has executed a flawless spend of his dosh, something that has rightly earned him Advertiser of the Year over here. There are a few things that are interesting about this. The first one being that the general consensus is that had a ‘big agency’ been in charge of his marketing campaign they more than likely would have made a pig’s ear of it. That’s not particularly encouraging for the state of the mainstream industry. But I don’t think that’s really news is it? What’s more interesting is how Obama got to rack up another $150 million just last month.

 
We all know about the great things that Obama has done. He’s on Twitter, Flickr, Facebook etc. and just appeared in a few X-Box games. All boxes ticked - and all with serious budgets. This is a digital or social media planner’s wet dream. It’s easy to experiment when you have so much cash though. I wonder if Obama didn’t have so much money would he have played it more safe with all the normal TV boll*cks? I guess we will never know, but I have to think that he would have still done a good proportion of the neat stuff.

The other story was of course the Shepard Fairey poster. This has become the image of the campaign. It’s perfect in every way. It effortlessly makes Obama cool, yet statesmanlike and introduces a whole new generation into politics. What ad agency wouldn’t be proud of a piece of creative like that? Take the coolest street artist around and get him to create content for your client. And if I had a dollar for every brainstorm I had sat in since the poster came where someone has said, “And we could get Shepard Fairey to do X,” then I would be joining Richard Prior on the Brewster’s silliness. But of course no agency came up with the idea. No one from the Obama campaign contacted Shepard. He did it on his own accord. And that’s the killer.

Consumers are tired of being told what to do. There is enough information out there these days on your product, service or cause for people to make up their own minds. They will then act accordingly. So Shepard Fairey created the poster way back in the primaries, stuck it up over LA and charged nothing. He thought it was a good idea, his way of helping a cause he believed in. And all these people that are giving Obama money by the sackloads every day (about $5m a day, every day) are also doing it because they believe in Obama the brand.

So the question is how do you behave as a brand in such a way that people can’t help but want to at the very simplest level, purchase your brand, but go beyond that. Way beyond, so that come the time when you have to slice up your media spend you actually have too much money to spend in too little time. Nice problem to have.

I have a theory that Burton Snowbaords may have achieved this marketing nirvana but that’s another post for another time.

PS. Thanks to Paul Daligan for the Brewster analogy.
 

Flash on the Beach.

If you said flash on the beach to most advertising folk they would probably think about Cannes and a black Amex card, this is not a post about that sort of thing - although I think Florian and I did once see Martin Brooks flash on the beach at five in the morning a few years back in Cannes. No, no. Flash on the Beach was a conference in Brighton (England - see some cool things do still happen in England) where all the top flash bods got together to talk about Flash. There has been a mini sh*tstorm coming out of it that anyone seriously interested in the future of creative communication would do well to take half an hour to read.

For starters, as I know the Brand Republic audience varies wildly from digital know-it-alls to, well, advertising people, Flash is a piece of software, it's really the main bit of software that allows digital practitioners to work their magic. It makes things move and can incorporate video, stills, data etc. It makes thing look flash! I have absolutely no idea how it works.  

The Keynote speaker at FOTB was a chap called Jonathan Harris. He's very clever, he's won lots of awards. He wrapped up the conference by basically saying, it's all well and good what we are doing but it's a bit sh*t and we need to do better. This has rather put some people's noses out of joint. If you follow this link you will see a really interesting snapshot of where future creativity is going. The two main protagonists are Jonathan himself and Joshua Davis (another very clever, awarded chap). Seeing a no-holds-barred debate between them (and a few others) is the modern equivalent of something like Francis Ford Coppola squaring up to Martin Scorcese or Monet having a pop at Van Gogh.

Before you accuse me of wildly exaggerating the importance of these people, this is really the crux of the debate. Both Harris and Davis have had their work shown in art museums, very credible museums, but Harris wonders aloud about his best work:

It doesn't matter what discipline you are in if you want to produce remarkable work these are the questions you must ask yourself.
Digital art, or 'creative' if you work in advertising, is only in it's very infancy but it's fascinating to see this debate unfurl and see the next generation of gifted artists document their feelings for future generations.