Search results matching tag 'Dare'

A graph that made me laugh

1368741 — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 16:17:00 GMT

I’m supposed to be having a day off. Fat chance.

You might have noticed a story put out by our cousins at the IAB that claims online advertising has now overtaken TV to become the ‘biggest single advertising medium in the UK’ (by spend). We find the IAB’s story odd because the internet is not a single anything; it is a fantastic technology that is home to many different marketing activities that do different things. It even delivers TV. It is a pretty meaningless statistic but it has garnered plenty of headlines and no small amount of apocalyptic predictions. Journalists expect us to respond, so here I am blogging instead of planting my daffs.

As I have said many times before, I love the internet. I love the way that it complements TV – nothing else works better. I love the way people can respond instantly to TV ads via search and websites; I love the way social media helps make the buzz around TV programmes so visible and so much more fun. I’m happy for online advertising to increase - so long as it is not at TV’s expense. And so far it isn’t. (I can almost hear your eyebrows rising at this point).

That’s the depressing part of this story; the implication that online advertising is taking broadcast TV’s money is just not true. Last year broadcast TV spot advertising declined 2.9% compared to total advertising declines of 4.2% and display declines of 5%. Not the spectacular share growth of online maybe but growth nonetheless and in the horrific ad market that is 2009 the same pattern is emerging; TV and online are increasing their shares, mostly at the expense of print and DM, though print remains the biggest overall advertising medium, not online.

If the IAB can’t resist making comparisons with TV then the fairest would be to compare all forms of online display with all forms of broadcast TV - spot, sponsorship, AFP, Interactive etc. - not an easy number to get hold of because TV has never bothered to lump its own advertising revenues together. TV would never try to compare itself with any form of classified advertising, DM or search because it wouldn’t make any sense.

Anyway, Thinkbox’s thoughts on this are already out there so I won’t repeat them all here.

But I would like to draw your attention to The Guardian’s coverage of the story today. They produced a little graph that made me laugh (it isn't online though). Along the x axis we had a list of advertising sectors, each with a bar representing revenue that got a bit taller as it went along. We had cinema, radio (spot only), business magazines, consumer magazines, directories, outdoor, national newspapers, press classified, direct mail, regional newspapers, press display, television (spot only), and then…internet. Just internet. No more explanation than that.

We think these numbers would be more meaningfully represented in one of two ways, either by technology/platform or by the genuine distinctive advertising sectors . We’ve had a go, based just on the IAB’s figures. Take your pick.

TV goes app

1368741 — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 08:18:00 GMT

Now, here’s a lovely thing that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a while. The brilliant Barclaycard ‘Waterslide’ TV ad propelled its iPhone app spin-off to become the most popular free, branded game in the history of the iTunes App Store. This is a fine example of TV and interactive media cuddling up and making babies.

BBH’s Barclaycard's 'Waterslide Extreme' iPhone app has clocked up 4 million downloads from the iTunes App Store since its launch in mid-July. It became the top free app in 57 countries.

The Barclaycard TV ad was an instant hit and sparked lots of Twitterface activity. I loved it too; given that their previous campaign had featured a heartthrob from an all-time favourite TV series, that’s quite an achievement. Dare (the creative agency behind the app) also created a YouTube channel where people made their own versions of the ad for other to vote on (the excellent tea&cheese’s take on the ad got the most votes).

Apart from actually buying the product, in the ‘olden days’ (like 1998) we could only really show our love for TV ads or programmes by talking about them, imitating them, reading articles about them or buying some related merchandise, like a board game or a mug. We can and do still do all this both on- and offline but, as the existence of the Barclaycard app highlights, we can now do so much more with our TV creative.

We can be inspired to make our own versions, chat in real time about them with people on the other side of the planet, watch extra content, send them to friends, play games based on them or simply watch again. We can even have conversations with the fictional characters that TV ads give birth to, such as the half million Facebook friends and 24,000 Twitter followers of the pre-eminent meerkat of our time.

Of course not every app is as successful as Barclaycard’s but it does demonstrate how potent the TV + online combo can be. T-Mobile’s Life’s for Sharing campaign gets it right too. Nothing gets the party started like telly and interactive media extends the fun.

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Lauren Luke: The Real Deal

1696774 — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 14:35:00 GMT

For the last year I have been working on a fascinating project. Truly creating a brand from scratch and watching it go to market.

On Monday the first make up kits by You Tube sensation Lauren Luke went on sale on the site bylaurenluke.com. The brand was created by Anomaly and the site by Dare.

I know a lot of agencies are trying to go down the same avenue as Anomaly in creating their own products. On the one hand it is definitely worth it. The feeling of creating something and watching it grow is very special. But the idea, the marketing, that's the easy bit. The production / distribution / finance - all these things are where it gets hardcore. If you think you can handle that go for it - but it's not for the feint hearted.

Lauren is a single mum from South Shields who first uploaded a make up tutorial to You Tube in the summer of 2007. Just a smidge under two years later she has hew own brand, a range of products, a book deal, a column in the Guardian and a Nintendo DS game deal inked.

All that has been done without a single penny, and I truly mean not a single penny, being spent on media. I remember not too long ago many industry luminaries saying you could never build a brand online. Try telling Lauren that.

It's very easy for us to chalk the launch down as another day in the office but for Lauren this is a genuinely life changing - and brilliant - experience. You never know it might be one for the industry too.

Who will be the Digital David Ogilvy?

1696774 — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 23:04:00 GMT

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 ;-)