No wonder our industry is in such a funk. A while back I stumbled upon the redesign of Tropicana in a store over here. I thought it looked cheap and nasty and so did a few other people after I posted a comment about it on my tumblr. After barely a few months PepsiCo are reverting to the old design. That's a monumental f**k up.
The same branding company - Arnell - that is currently embroiled in the $1m or is it $10m Pepsi redesign farce is behind the Tropicana work. As I said in my original post I could probably write something very lengthy about the complexities of design and meta language and loads of artsy fartsy nonsense (which it seems Peter Arnell is something of a God at) but fundamentally anyone with a brain can surely see that the old design worked well and the new design looks pale by
comparison.
I suppose marketing departments and agencies exist (and make money) through doing things like this but Tropicana is such a strong brand - why fix something that ain't broke? If they felt like they needed to freshen the brand up a little why not pour all that money into New Product Development, CSR or do something cool in the digital space?
I don't get it. Can anyone enlighten me?
2 comment(s)
On the back of Adweek giving R/GA digital Agency of the Year Mark Wnek wrote a drug like rant about the whole awards system and it being bullshit.
I have to say I know a lot of people don't like him (don't really know why, or care, little before my time) but I think he's spot on. I have cut and pasted the full text from Brian Morrissey's blog, which is very good for those of you wanting to know what's going on in the US digital scene. I haven't changed the formatting at all. I think a good narcesque fueled peice of prose should just come as it is...
"I have flu and am bored so here's a feverish rant for you: there is a big problem with the (Anglo-?) American/capitalist need for winners and losers. Somewhere along the line advertising got ensnared in the Oscars/Hall of Fame mentality of ostentatiously awarding skin-deep flashiness as opposed to true, largely unsung fundamental business-affecting performance. Most of the conversations I have with anybody connected to the so-called creative community in ad agencies come around to awards or award-winning work at some point. It has come to the point where agencies at the very least equally develop work for the consideration of advertising juries as for clients and consumers.
"There are creative people in the ad industry who are famous. Are there any famous people in other trades like building or plumbing? The digital community hasn't grown out of this utter bullshit. The digital community has grown up via solving genuine business problems and has an undiluted dedication to creating concrete, game-changing and lasting platforms and connections. Frankly, the medium is irrelevant. The only thing that is relevant is coming up with the right solution at the right time in the right way while being beholden to nothing - BUT NOTHING - but the business/communications/consumer/reputational challenge the paying client is struggling with.
"Such solutions are most often unglamorous. Particularly in the short term - which is why all the best digital people use the word 'lasting' a lot. The great thing about Bob G and R/GA is not Nike Plus. Nike Plus is just a natural outcome of a company that has been thinking deeply and unostentatiously about helping clients with their business for years rather than playing to the crowd (something which, by the way, Crispin were also doing for years before anybody was even talking about them). As a grown-up I would LOVE to see agencies honored for genuinely thinking about (if not feeling for) their clients and their problems rather than being good at promoting themselves via awards junkets.
"Olive Garden (yes, Olive Garden) has a positioning which, as you know, is 'when you're here, you're family'. I don't see anyone jumping up and down and claiming credit for that. It's not Nike, of course. But Olive Garden has had 54 uninterrupted quarters of growth. 54. Clearly there's a business situation at work and a whole collection of supplier (yep, that's what we are, suppliers, not superstars) relationships that is well and truly working. So what I would dearly like to see someone have the balls to do is to have one Agency of the Year and reveal the whole range of complex, unsung, lasting, bottom-line affecting ideas and behaviors - strategic, technological or otherwise - that it brought to bear. Man these antibiotics are weird."
You go Mark. I'll try to remember that while I judge some awards this week.
It's been a while since i posted here, been busy in NY helping Dare set up and all that jazz. Anyway, there is an interestng debate going on over these parts about whether digital creativity is up to scratch or not. Randy Rothenberg, president of the IAB no less, has weighed in saying he thinks we are all sub par and will never reach the level of David Ogilvy or Bill Bernbach. Is he right?
Course he's not. Randy's notion that digital creativity sucks is a pretty weak argument. Who is to say who will be the Bernbachs or the Ogilvy's of digital? It's pretty unlikely that there will be *no one* - the odds just don't stack up.
Someone will become that famous, at the time DO and BB were not gods, merely people running their own agencies. They became gods in history. It's so much easier to look back and say there was all this great work but for every 'Lemon' there were a million real lemons - bad press ads, bad commercials, that no one ever talks about.
I should imagine the percentage of 'good' versus 'bad' digital work is identical to the percentage of 'good' versus 'bad' work in every other media in every other era. It just so happens that we are in the middle of a new era so it's easier to scrutinize / criticize.
We can have a sensible debate (if talking about meaningless stuff that sells meaningless products could ever be described as sensible!) in 10, maybe 20 years time.
In the meantime it's always fun to guess though isn't it? So who would you think is the person most likely to be remembered as the digital daddy? At the moment my money would be either on the artist Jonathan Harris or Ben Palmer from Barbarian, with an each way bet on me and Flo ;-)
17 comment(s)
James Cooper
Blogging for:
Member since: 03 Jun 2008
Last login: 17 Nov 2009
Total Posts: 210
