Search results matching tag 'Branding'

Varied Visual Volume

2651262 — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:22:02 GMT

Brands benefit from stoytelling and there are great learnings from music in making these stories even more memorable. Power Branding at http://tiny.cc/N1HwM

Eat your chips, or you’ll never get big and fat when you grow up!

822535 — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:49:00 GMT

Unlike the UK, which has pretty strict guidelines on advertising junk food to kids, If you ever wondered why so many young Americans are spotty, overweight, and just generally a pain in the arse... Listen up... We are to blame. And no, I'm not talking about us as parents (well, maybe to a certain extent) I'm talking about the "Us" in the ad biz. Did you know that here in the US, food companies spent nearly two billion dollars to market products to children and teens in 2007. Of which nearly half was targeted to children under 12.

Makers of fizzy drinks spent the most on marketing to children and teenagers, followed by fast-food restaurants and producers of breakfast cereals. And the major advertising platform was television. Tons of television, particularly in the cartoon shows aimed at the really young.

McDonalds gives high schools report card holders that offer free burgers and chips to kids who get good grades. And the corridors of virtually every high school are lined with vending machines for everything from Coke to pork rinds.

As I write in the chapter devoted to advertising to kids in my last book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, two years ago, the junk food makers agreed to regulate themselves, which is like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

Since it was was formed in 2006 to fend off government regulation, the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative run by the Council of Better Business Bureaus, has done virtually bugger all, in spite of its pledge either to stop aiming ads at children or to promote only what the council calls “better-for-you products” in ads directed at children.

Still, what can you expect from a country that once claimed (when Reagan was President) that ketchup was one of the essential foods groups necessary in a school lunch, and where in some states nearly half the population is obese… Not overweight… Obese. Although I hear it’s happening over there as well. Bloody advertising!

More on US Health Care!

822535 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:51:00 GMT

One of the comments on my last post implied that people who work in advertising shouldn’t be too fussy when it comes to deciding whether or not they wanted to work on certain kinds of accounts… ‘Cos they pay your wages! This drove to write a comment in reply, which I then decided to turn into a post… Here it is…

@media village...
Does this mean you would like to see the return of cigarette advertising? I mean if it's all about holding down a job and paying the bills you may as well advertise everything with no restrictions. How about porn, snuff films, gladiator fights to the death, booze for tots?

The point is that right now in the US, as I am sure you know, there is a whole flap about reforming health care, which costs lots more than any other civilized country and delivers some of the worse results. In fact for 47 million with no insurance, it delivers no results. Standing right next to the insurance companies in this fiasco are the drug companies. And right next to them are the agencies, who have made hundreds of millions in the last few years.

As ad agencies we are tasked with encouraging consumers to demand very expensive branded products, when generics for a tenth of the price are just as good. And in a great many cases an aspirin would probably do as much good. I go into this in great detail in The Ubiquitous Persuaders. For some reason Amazon isn’t offering this in the UK… But, as it’s available on Kindle, come January, you’ll be able to get it on your iPhone… And because I am a prince. If anyone wants to read more, I’ll see if Gordon wants to run that health care chapter on BrandRepublic.

Hooked on Drugs!

822535 — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 03:05:00 GMT

For many years Madison Avenue pigged out at the trough of tobacco advertising. Back in the Mad Men days, cigarettes, booze and car accounts paid for many a Westchester mansion, country club fees and the odd boat or two. But with the ever tightening restrictions on tobacco and booze advertising things started to get a littel tougher. Then along came drugs… No, not the stuff you shove up your nose, the kinds your doctor prescribes for you.

And the good times were back… With a vengeance. Billions of dollars are now spent on DTC (Direct to Consumer) campaigns in an effort to make American Consumers bug the *** out of their doctors to get them to prescribe outrageously expensive medicines, often for ailments that don’t actually exist, such as “Restless Leg Syndrome” or “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.”

No other country in the world allows this kind of advertising, and Madison Avenue laps it up. But perhaps not for much longer. Legislation has been introduced in the US Senate to eliminate the federal tax deduction on advertising for prescription-drugs. This could affect marketing budgets to the tune of millions, and as I say in the chapter devoted to health care advertising in my latest opus… The Ubiquitous Persuaders, US drug companies spend three times as much on marketing as they do on research and development.

I am sure, however, that the legislation will probably go nowhere. When the armies of drug company lobbyists flex their muscles and the senators are reminded that their re-election war chests might not be so full if they even think about voting for this bill, I’m sure in time honored tradition, it will languish in committee and eventually be forgotten.

There’s much more on this in The Ubiquitous Persuaders. Buy it for crying out loud.

Take your Olympics and shove it!

822535 — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 20:06:00 GMT

Everyone over here is shocked that the International Olympic Committee had the unmitigated cheek to award the 2016 Olympics to Rio, rather than Chicago. Rubbing salt in the wound by eliminating Chicago in the very first round of voting. Wankers!

But, I’ll make you a bet right now that most Chicagoans are breathing a great big sigh of relief. ‘Cos based on just about every other host city, the citizens end up paying for it for years after the event has been forgotten. From what I’ve read, the costs for London to host the 2012 Olympics have already tripled, and we’re still three years away from the opening ceremony! Your children’s children will be paying for this long after you’ve gone to that big agency in the sky. Montreal’s 1976 Olympics left the city with $2.7 billion of debt that it finally paid off in 2005. That's almost thirty years.

Why cities want this dubious honor is beyond me. The whole thing has grown into a travesty of the Baron’s original dream. It is now a commercial, nationalist, jingoistic joke, stuffed with all kinds of events that are merely a vehicle to sell more swoosh emblazoned junk to kids who can’t afford it.

Make it all amateur again (are there any left?) And cut out all the sponsors. But, you say, then the host cities wouldn’t be able to afford to build all the different venues… Exactly. So you go back to the original events, running, jumping, throwing a big rock, and naked men wrestling. And you do it on the sports field of the local secondary modern. You make a profit selling tea and renting deck chairs.

Oh, and you can Tweet about it!

Is Purefold pure gold for brands or pure confusion?

2292853 — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 13:14:00 GMT

Coming soon from Free Scott, the new entertainment venture of Ridley Scott and his brother Tony, is a trippy new sci-fi entertainment project called Purefold that plans to let brand’s sponsor the content, and let the audience drive the plot line using social networking platforms.

Produced by Ag8, the concept will see participating brands “…take an alternative route to brand integration than traditional product placement and embrace invention within a narrative framework.” The project explores transmedia entertainment and will launch off of cross-platform channels. What? Purefold just might represent pure gold for brands looking to reach audiences in an extremely interactive format, but as of now, it has a lot of people baffled as to how it will work, what it will be, and if branded content is a good idea or not.

Discussions about Purefold on Friend Feed, the main resource planned to “harvest” story ideas, are already brewing about the question of what it means to be human, the driving theme behind the story that will be loosely based on Blade Runner. Ag8 is getting people to explore the idea of what “transhumanism” is in the Purefold discussion group on Friend Feed, but the project is often met with confusion, with participants trying to understand what is happening, and what role they will play. For insight as to what people think of Purefold, I’ve been asking around.

A few entertainment insiders were willing to go on the record to share what they think of the project and here is what they had to say: Jenifer Hanen, a blogger from Los Angeles, was wary of the idea of brand’s sponsoring content based on projects she has seen fail, but likes the DIY media side of the project and the idea to have the plot line driven by the audience. Listen to a conversation I had with Jen about Purefold here.

Film Production Designer Tema L. Staig, who is based in Los Angeles, first reacted to the idea of Purefold saying “The project sounds almost like virtual mad libs for content and advertising.” She also had this to say: "Universally, people have always needed to create visual and/or verbal stories and have a cathartic experience through those stories, either through the telling or the viewing. This is what makes us human. This is what connects us across the globe. Historically, unrelated cultures share similar myths and stories, suggesting that we all have a desire to explain the natural, unnatural, and supernatural. It’s our most primal of needs.

It will be interesting to see how Ag8 takes story telling to humanity’s next level. The idea of us, the greater audience being involved directly in the story is compelling in that it creates (in theory) even more empathy for the characters – those characters are a part of us. It’s our baby, even if just a little bit. How will it effect society? Will it bring us together around a global campfire? What new brainstorms might it spark? The possibilities are endless."

Here in London, I asked Mervyn Lyn, who is Vice President of Strategic Partnerships for Sony Music and often gets involved with branded content for the entertainment company, what he thinks of Purefold. At first reaction, he said it reminds him of MTV’s Dubplate Drama that turned to the audience to drive the story line, a show he enjoyed because it made the viewers feel part of the show. As for letting brand’s sponsor the content, he was cautionary about the idea because so often people are suspicious when a company attempts to sell them something through a new medium. “It depends how it is done and if it is trying to lean on branded content then they will have to strike a balance between the brand and the content so that each side doesn’t feel they are losing out,” he said.

They need to be very careful in making it driven by advertising because people see this as being railroaded and people will be cynically asking ‘what are they trying to sell me?’” The approach Purefold is using will be ground breaking in entertainment, according to producers, and it will be distributed according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, giving both audiences, brands and platforms equal use rights through their participation.

According to Ag8’s Tom Himpe, Purefold will be broadcast across a variety of media platforms and spread virally across the Internet. “Most brands are aware of the fact that social media has changed the dynamics of the conversation, and they can't just spell out their message in the same way as with one-way advertising methods,” he said. “We are giving brands the opportunity to create stories over an extended period of time, in collaboration with their audiences and relying on top industry talent in both writing and directing. That's quite a unique package, especially in view of the fact that they can use the audiovisual assets freely across all their platforms and channels, from retail to mobile, from cinema to television.”

For now Ag8 is not revealing who the brand sponsors will be, but based on Friend Feed discussions the writers are already compiling what the story line will be, all set in the near future. The question many have is how brands will fit into the discussion, and for that, Himpe had this to say:

“There are two ways in which we are "guiding" the conversation. First of all, the brand is setting up the framework of the conversation, by defining one or multiple brand propositions they want to explore and picking a story line through which they want to explore that proposition. This sets up the framework within which we harvest online conversations.

So we're not just harvesting random conversations across the entire web, we set out specific parameters with the participating brands. Secondly, while we're listening to what the audience wants to see within the episodes, the ultimate creative control still resides with our editorial team and the Free Scott Directors, who are making creative sense of the audience's input. So there is another level of control there. However, it's very important for brands to understand that Purefold is about creating top quality entertainment, and not about extended the length of their tv commercials.

There's a different balance here, and sure, that's something they might have to get used to.”

Still confused, but ready to watch Purefold unfold,

-Lisa

Storytelling to Build Brands

2651262 — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 05:31:52 GMT

Is anyone using storytelling to enhance their brand (Product or corporate)? http://newbrandstories.wordpress.com/

Wow… How the mighty have fallen, only to get up, then fall again.

822535 — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:27:00 GMT

When I first worked on the Dell account, back in San Francisco, in the early eighties, they were severely kicking everyone else's arse. Not only did they offer a superior product for a superior price… They overlaid this great sales model with the kind of service which guaranteed, not just that the average punter would keep sniffing around and buying because they were so happy with both the product and the service, but also, Corporate America, which was constantly worried about both the bottom line and the continuity of service and reduced costs, would keep coming back for more.

At the same time Ross Perot was launching an effort to win the Presidency. And he could have won it too, with a combination of his home spun philosophy, and his perceived honesty. Anyway, it didn’t work out for several weird reasons that would take too long to go into.

So, to read today that Dell is buying Perot systems for a mere $3.9 billion, leaves me wondering what the hell is going on? Is this an indication of the final transmogrification of the increasingly failing current American business model? Who the hell knows, everyone from IBM, to Microsoft, to Oracle is convinced that selling services is the future, rather than selling products. I don’t know. At the end of the day, I have this nagging feeling that if you don’t actually make something… You have *** all to sell. But, then again, what the hell do I know?

It’s a smaller world, but is it blander for it? By Rajnish Razdan, Creative Director, TheAgency

2648097 — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:25:00 GMT

Whilst chatting with my cousin in India via Facebook, it struck me how social media sites are helping to merge cultural boundaries. At the expense of sounding like someone who never switches off, this got me thinking about its effects on marketing and creativity.

Let’s step back 20 years or so. In the 80s, conversations (over the ‘phone) with relatives struggled to progress beyond the general ‘How are you and the family?’ and of course Cricket. Now it’s the Premiership, music, movies – to be honest, it’s not too different to talking with friends in the UK.

Today if you walk through major cities in India you’ll see loads of familiar faces – from Mr. Ronald McDonald to David Beckham; along the way you can take in the likes of Nike, Debenhams and even Marks and Spencer.

Commonality is no bad thing. It helps us feel comfortable and confident enough to explore more diverse aspects of a culture, providing new fuel for our creative minds.

Strategy benefits too. We step further into a very different landscape and see how other people and organisations approach consumers. This provides ready contrasts and comparisons to ponder and incorporate into our own approaches.

In many ways some of the world’s most successful brands have always been cultural sponges, squeezing interesting new flavours into their strategy.

Today, social media sites are fantastic tools for experiencing fresh new perspectives. But how often do we really step away from our ‘safe’ vantage points when using social media? Are we doing enough to find out about other cultures and their dynamics? Or do we simply add neighbours to Farmville, get nostalgic about our school days and watch the same types of films on YouTube?

By limiting our viewing, we run the risk of missing out on genuinely original, entertaining material. And on a professional basis, that’s where the gold really is.

To a certain degree the movement of western brands and the rise of international brand carriers makes it seem like the East is simply moving westward. If it’s coming to us, why bother going to them?

In creative and strategic terms, there’ll be little need to try something different if you know you can do the same thing and get pretty much the same results. But that is a slow painful road that will ultimately deliver diminishing returns, not to mention become really boring. But that’s never stopped our industry in the past.

So go on take a little diversion; hit Youtube and take a look at some of the exciting material that’s coming out of agencies in India and the Asian subcontinent. Yes there’s rubbish - there’s rubbish everywhere - but equally there’s some really exciting and different stuff worth diving into. Have a gander at the art and stunning films being created, for example.

And when you find something that really tickles your fancy, why not pass it on to your friends? It would be the social thing to do.

http://theagencyonline.co.uk

Old celebrities never die, they simply appear in bad TV spots!

822535 — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:24:00 GMT

With the news today in the US that the latest Burger King gross out campaign from the frat boys in Boulder is once again relying on the use of celebrities to push stuff that will probably kill you, only serves to make me once again wonder if this stuff really works.

The new Burger King effort has has NASCAR driver Tony Stewart professing his love for “Whoppers.” No surprise there as the average NASCAR fan is certainly a whopper, if not a gargantuan, and that includes his misses. Apparently the TV features Stewart teaching other celebrities how to endorse products. One of them is Eric Estrada!!! That’s right, the guy with five hundred teeth that used to be in CHIPS five hundred years ago when your box had an eight inch screen, and everything was in green and black.

Still, every time I’m over in the UK, when I put the telly on as I empty the hotel mini-bar, I see people I thought had died in the eighteenth century, and they’re endorsing everything from knickers to knick-knacks. I’ll bet “Our Enery” is still flogging stuff. The only person I know older than him is Sir Cliff. But he’s got that picture in the attic you're not allowed to see!