Search results matching tag 'Digital'

If the shoe fits, win it! She Says Golden Stiletto Awards

2292853 — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:06:00 GMT

This year’s She Says Golden Stiletto Awards (the second year for the awards honouring women in digital advertising) brought together top talent in London's digital advertising industry to celebrate female achievements in creativity, and showed that there is growing appeal for the organization, and its mission to showcase female talent in the digital sector.

She Says Golden Stiletto Awards is the only award ceremony of its kind that is for women, and judged by women working in the advertising industry, with judges for this year’s nearly 30 entries including:

Johannah Bailey, Programme Director Global Communications - Unilever

Liz Sivell, Creative Director at R/GA

Ida GronBlom, Senior Creative - Wieden + Kennedy

Toni Smith, Managing Director – The Viral Factory

Elspeth Lynn, Executive Creative Director – Profero

Charlotte Mcelany, Senior Writer – Creative Review

At the awards ceremony, held October 29 at the Getty Gallery who are sponsors of the awards, finalists showed a selection of digital advertising projects that demonstrated how the online medium can offer multiple layers of engagement for all types of demographic audiences. Women-led digital projects included an augmented reality campaign for BMW, an online/offline campaign that got 100 participants dancing for 24 hours in a “music phone dance-off” to promote the Samsung Beat DJ music phone, and a charity campaign for British Red Cross to change your online status, that had zero budget and seven days to plan.

The awards event itself attracted women from all aspects of the digital industry, including animator Sarra Hornby who spends hours working with paper and cotton thread to create animated shorts for commercial use. Although her work was not in the finals, she said that the She Says gathering offered her a powerful networking community to increase her professional career.

It seems cities beyond London are hungry for the same level of woman-to-woman professional interaction, as branches of She Says are now springing up in New York, San Francisco, LA, Vienna Paris, Sydney and Brighton, and more than 1,500 women are members. SheSays was launched in March 2007 by two female Creative Directors (Laura Jordan Bambach from Glue and Alessandra Lariu from Agency Republic at the time) who noticed that there weren't many women in top positions in digital agencies. She Says offers women in the creative and digital industries free networking and mentoring opportunities at monthly events held across the world with the aim getting more women into the industry and to the top of it.

This year’s Golden Stiletto Award winners include:

First place: Modern Foreign Languages

Second place: BMW Z4 airbrush

Third place: The Last Call

Commended: Look beyond the label

See photos from the award ceremony here.

Glad to see women winning,

-Lisa

One-to-One Marketing goes 3D

1845437 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:49:00 GMT

Lord Leverhulme famously said that “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, and the problem is I do not know which half”. In a downturn it is vital that none of the marketing pound is wasted and as planning director at Leeds-based direct response agency PCD, I can reveal how to be smarter with your marketing spend.

Whether you call it direct marketing or one-to-one marketing, the all important goal is to promote your message to your customers in a more targeted way. Achieving this goal becomes ever more vital as company boardrooms insist marketing teams justify their budgets and as such decisions, strategies and plans will become more customer data insight driven.

Digital opportunities and channels provide marketers with never before seen levels of interactions with customers and prospects. Integrating in a single process, for example via direct mail, sms, web or email, with levels of personalisation that are no longer restricted to simple variables but include imagery, product messages and copy to fit an individual customer’s particular purchasing habit and lifestyle, help to engage with target audiences.

Yes, this comes at a higher cost, however experience has shown that cost per pack whilst increasing is countered by an overall increase in conversion, lowering overall acquisition costs.”

To reflect this explosion in alternative on and offline media platforms, we at PCD have refocused the business and developed a 3D approach – data, digital and direct.

• Data means knowledge and provides insight, information and understanding which results in targeted planning, segmentation and a well defined strategy.
• Digital means one-to-one dialogue, delivering relevant and personalised comms. This means that the right message is being delivered the right way at the right time, both on and offline.
• Direct means accountable and results in brand building, generating response, measuring, learning and improving.

I believe that we needed to develop this unique 3D approach in order to provide clients with targeted methods to reach their consumers and increase customer value.

What’s different about our 3D approach is that you will realise it’s not just about sending complex mailing packs, building the biggest websites, sending the most emails or developing ‘flashy’ online campaigns. It’s about taking data and using it to understand your customers. It’s about understanding a customer’s journey with your brand, the touchpoints and conversations you’ll have and those you should have. It’s about segmenting data to target creative more effectively and then delivering campaigns that embrace and engage the customers.

This is all before a creative concept is hatched and means that clients fully understand their customers, allowing them to embrace and engage with them in a way they have not been able to do before.

I believe that our approach begins by understanding our clients data, the segments they form, the impact these segments can have on your business and then the creative message we can deliver, ultimately ensuring the right customer receives the right message by the right channel.

For more information visit www.pcdagency.com or telephone 01943 872505

Nine Top Digital Trends for 2010

2672735 — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:50:00 GMT

1: Facebook replaces personal email Question: Google has it, Hoover has it (in the UK anyway), TiVo had it, lost it and has somewhat got it back. Xerox had it, but nobody really cares anymore. So what is it? It’s when a brand name becomes the verb associated with its use. So rather than searching, you Google, or TiVo when digital recording a television show.

Arguably an even more powerful synonym is when a brand becomes a noun, such as Polaroid, for instant developed photograph, although that didn’t end so well. The newest one would seem to Facebook, although it has too meanings. ‘I Facebooked you’ could mean that you the person has added you as a Facebook friend or they sent you a private message though Facebook. The latter would seem to be of more interest as no-one has really owned this type of communication before. No brand ever became synonymous with email. To Hotmail or Gmail someone just never happened.

So the interesting and overlooked disruption of Facebook is its displacement of personal email as a communication tool. Completely permission based, no SPAM (yet), and no address book required - your friends are already on Facebook.

2: Open source software starts making proper money, thanks to the cloud There’s something starting to happen within the open source software world. Projects that were typically for the purview of programmers, or at least technophiles, are now available to the masses. An example is Beanstalk www.beanstalkapp.com a fully hosted, version controlled code repository that uses the Subversion open source project. The big deal is that to set up and maintain a Subversion repository can be a pain - plus you need a server if you want to give access to anyone. Beanstalk has created a subscription based service that, for a small fee, removes the hassle.

Services like this can only really exist with cloud computing infrastructure - so companies such as Beanstalk don’t have the huge upfront capital outlay for servers, they only pay for what their customers use. With the right skills any open source project can be commercialized in this manner.

3: Mobile Commerce - the promise that has never delivered, yet. As annoyingly tantalizing yet esoteric as the word ‘convergence’ has been over the last 10 years, mobile commerce has promised much but never delivered.

Mobile phones have delivered real benefits to societies world wide and in developing nations are used commonplace as devices for the transfer of money. However, until only very recently in the nations that invented and first adopted mobile technologies, has use of your most precious device been extended to payment for goods and services.

With the advanced browsers of iPhone and the Android platforms one could pay for goods through full e-commerce sites, but who really wants to fiddle around with a phone in one hand and a credit card in another? The game changer is the iPhone / iTunes platform. In-app purchases on the iPhone can tempt users to buy small items, upgrades, updates, etc, while iTunes holds their precious credit card information.

All, of course, is done in seamless fashion, enough to promote impulse purchases. Would seem like an easy task for this to be extended to other platforms with PayPal or Google Checkout. But we have been here before haven’t we?

4: Fewer registrations - one sign-in fits all I use a great application on the Mac platform that securely holds my login details for upwards of 50 different sites. It means that I don’t have to use the same password for each site and that I don’t have to search around for post-it notes (my 1998 method) to log into the site I joined a week ago. However, I’m starting to resent having to register for anything ever again. I don’t see why, to leave a particularly pithy comment on a blog or news site, I have to register all over again. I’m sure I’m not the only one and that’s why services like Facebook Connect and OpenID are particularly useful and will continue to be adopted at great speed through 2010.

Who knows where these might go? Perhaps next year I’ll be able to pay for something using my Facebook login.

5: Disruption vs. Continuity - Alternatives to the “Big Idea” As the significance of social networks continues to grow, businesses are investing more in community building as a marketing driver. According to the recent Tribalization of Business study released by Deloitte, 94% of businesses will continue or increase their investment in online communities and social media and, for the majority of these companies, their marketing function will drive this investment.

At the same time, as evidenced by Google’s recent release of “free floating” social tools, such as Google Waves and Sidewiki, there is an increasing shift towards online identity and social activity being an integrated part of the network as a whole, rather than concentrated within discrete platforms such as Facebook.

With the increasing emphasis on marketing and advertising through social networks and the increasing pervasiveness of social tools, marketing objectives come into conflict with advertising techniques.

While advertising has often sought to distinguish itself and stop the consumer in their tracks with a disruptive “big idea,” the emphasis is shifting toward persuasion through fitting organically into the consumer’s social sphere. It will always be the objective of marketing to provide creativity and novelty, but the way in will increasingly be one of persistence and continuity.

6: Self-Sufficiency – The Continuing Evolution of Web-Driven,Open Source DIY Culture Much has been said about the power and potential of collective intelligence. From solving complex problems through crowd-sourcing, to reconfiguring industries to be leaner and more innovative by harnessing the expertise of a network of independent suppliers, many of the breakthrough solutions of tomorrow appear to lie in more effectively pooling the resources and intelligence of our increasingly networked world.

On the other side of the equation, the power of pooled intelligence and networked resources have empowered individuals to take on more and more complex undertakings themselves. From drawing on the collective intelligence of blogs and university open courseware to educate themselves, to services like ponoko, spoonflower and cafe press that facilitate small-scale production, to offline resource pooling like pop-up retail and collective office spaces, individuals are discovering that it has never been easier to try doing it themselves.

While we find new ways to thrive in a still struggling economy, expect to see lasting changes coming from empowering individuals to work together to become more ever more self-sufficient.

7: Info-Art Where we once had pop-psychologists and pop-philosophers, we now appear to have pop-statisticians and pop-economists. The growing wealth of data and the access to rich and diverse data sources that are significant byproducts of information networks have made the art of data analysis a defining skill of our time. By the same token, the skill of elegantly visualizing that data has become a defining art of our time. The art of the infographic is becoming increasingly pervasive as people look more and more to the growing amount of data at our disposal for insight, and more refined as the interactions of that data becomes more complex.

With an ever increasing need for real-time analysis of a growing torrent of raw data, expect to see greater innovation spurred by more elegant ways of capturing and visualizing information by a growing number of info-artists.

8: Crowd Sourcing Across many industries and organizations, crowd sourcing will become a growing tool as part of elance outsourcing strategies. Organizations will mobilize the passionate special interest groups to not only carry a message but, even more importantly perhaps, to lead and take part in activities on their behalf.

Predictions for 2010 are not as rosy as we all hoped and budgets for just about everything continue to be cut, encouraging ‘creative’ thinking regarding getting things done and done well. From political canvassing to software development, from people journalism to environmental activism, we will see huge growth in crowd sourcing models provoked and led, largely, by digital social media strategies.

9: More Flash, Not Less Outside of the obvious brand sites, micro-sites and media sites (video, games, etc.) Flash has often been looked down upon if not completely discounted by techies and search engine optimizers alike. It seemed to face an uncertain future as a viable tool for serious websites and applications such as eCommerce tools and corporate websites.

As it is, Adobe’s rich media tool has enjoyed the grit and determination of its advocates and external development community. Several tricks, authoring tools and server side scripting workarounds have meant that Flash built websites no longer serve up a single, impenetrable page. They offer deep, searchable, indexable sites that will allow acute, detailed traffic and behavioral analytics and search engine optimization. As websites continue to increase in their importance as a company’s storefront, the demand for rich, brand-extending experiences will also increase. Further proliferation of (lightning speed) broadband will reduce download issues while the adoption of Flash on mobile devices will dramatically increase and fuel reach and the desire/need for highly usable, brand transporting, conversion oriented experiences

A light at the end of the tunnel at last

317324 — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 14:53:10 GMT

There are many different ways of measuring the state of the economy and the rate at which it is improving. If recent reports from the Bank of England are to be believed then we should all feel that we are a million miles from anything resembling a steady pace of recovery but I’m happy to say that in the creative industries we seem to be bucking the trend.

We have noticed a number of significant indicators to suggest that confidence is growing, not least because the permanent recruitment market, which suffered the most earlier this year, is back with a vengeance. The freelance market has continued to show steady growth but it is the change in the permanent market which we are taking heart from. We were finding, up until the past three months, that clients were taking far longer than normal to make decisions but things are moving along much more quickly now. Also, in our experience there is now competition between employers for the best candidates on the market and we haven’t seen that for a while. We recently appointed a Project Manager who was in the fortunate position of being able to choose which job to accept from three different offers made to her.

Talented individuals are in demand again across the board and the best developers, project managers and designers are enjoying higher levels of interest from clients. Those people who have been hanging on to the security of their existing jobs are seeing this as a good time to begin browsing the market again.

Although no-one can say for certain that the recession is over, all the companies that we deal with (in the advertising, design and marketing sectors) are still cautious but definitely more optimistic. We’re aware of design agencies which belong to the bigger networks, now being allowed sign off to spend money on recruitment in 2010.

While the North of England has seen a slower rate of recovery than other parts of the country, our Leeds office is also now enjoying more movement.

All of the above are reasons why we believe that 2010 is going to be a better year for candidates, agencies and hopefully for us too. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. http://www.purple-consultancy.com

Real People

2116546 — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:33:00 GMT

I often wonder how many 'virals' have been viewed by real people.

I'm not talking about those figures that may have been faked by bots and all that underhandedness, but people outside of the industry we all have the privilege of working in. Ok, I know we are real people that consume so our viewing figures do count but if I had a quid for the amount of friends I've mentioned 'famous' viral campaigns to and they've never heard of them I'd probably have about £20.

Part of our job is viewing work being produced by our competitors so sometimes (well, most of the time) I'd love to be able to reclaim a YouTube view so as not to add to the clip's figures, or at least mark myself as "work in the industry, just checking out the promotion, not actually interested in the product".

Who needs Ad Agencies

2116546 — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 12:10:00 GMT

After spending a couple of days digesting this news I'm still not entirely sure what I think about it so excuse the brain dump.

I do think it fits into the viral subject however as Ideas Bounty is surely a viral exercise in itself but can this really work as a sustainable model across a brand's advertising. I'm not a huge fan of over-inflated ad agency models myself but there's more to creative than just shitting out a one-off idea. Isn't the Peperami brief (which is a tactical element of the overall 'Animal' creative concept) essentially another lazy UGC campaign in the same vein as Doriotos, Confused.com and quite a few others? It's great news if a client is taking more responsibility for the creative output of their brand, but it's not like Creative Agencies have been doing absolutely nothing for the past 50 years; is it?

Ok, I'll eat my face (on face)

2116546 — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:32:00 GMT

As I've previously mentioned I'm not a big fan of face-on-face. This is perhaps just me, I don't get it, why would I bother. I don't like things not making much sense within their own world - however much fantasy is involved; I also still doubt how many people have direct to camera images of themselves.

However, if you get a chance to sniper a friend and the technology is the best implementation yet seen I can be proved wrong so check it out here.

Oh, and here's a kind of face-in-video that Ralph have just produced (www.jigsawsgame.com), but that's only one small part of the entire experience so I think we got away with it!

I'm wrong aren't I; people love seeing their own picture in anything?

#worldview - deconstructing the silo mentality

2544553 — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 08:38:00 GMT

Even with the perceived turnaround in the global economy, we are all aware that the global recession has caused, and continues to cause, seismic shifts in the advertising and marketing industry, precipitating the need for rapid change. One area being impacted by the combined forces of recessionary pressures and technological progression is organisational structure.

One of the macro trends that we are starting to see is the deconstruction of the silo mentality that has been the status quo within client organisations, and which is mirrored by agencies in the major holding groups.

Discipline-specific fiefdoms exist around silos, with individuals and agencies behaving territorially to protect their specific areas of competence, guarding revenue streams or marketing budgets fiercely, and having accountability solely for delivery in the channel for which they have been responsible.

“My hope is that the recession will have been a huge wake-up call to clients with regard to that siloed mentality,” explained Bob Jeffrey, Chairman and Worldwide CEO, JWT. “It’s not only inefficient from a cost-savings perspective, but the more you collapse the silos, the more integration you drive, ultimately leading to a more effective environment in which to deliver better ideas and stronger creative output.”

Bob Jeffrey

Chris Colborn, Executive Vice President & Chief Experience Officer, R/GA, sees the silo mentality as a fundamental problem in developing effective creative work: “Many clients operate traditional structures where leads sit within verticals, each in charge of a discipline-specific agency and responsible for maximising effectiveness in a single channel. This model creates an artificial disincentive for collaboration, and therefore doesn’t engender an approach in which holistic synergies naturally form.”

Chris Colborn

“It’s a huge challenge for clients to evolve that model,” says Colborn, “to be leaner, more dynamic, cut costs and develop a more holistic structure, whilst still getting the best out of their agencies.”

The siloed organisational structure not only proves detrimental in terms of developing exceptional creative work, but actually creates natural disharmony and tension within the holding group verticals.

“I’m constantly saying that agencies need to work smarter,” Jeffrey continues. “They need to know when to compete and when to collaborate. Agencies are inherently territorial, tribal and competitive, but it’s critical to take an agnostic, less ego-centric approach to collaboration, and to have a bigger view of the world and the direction in which the world is heading if agencies are to achieve the ultimate goal of making their clients successful.”

Jeffrey understands that, “absolutely each agency needs to develop their own brand and build a reputation for creative excellence, but if client organisations start to evolve to be structured less around verticals, then agencies will be able to collaborate more effectively to deliver better work.”

The recessionary pressures on revenues and costs are forcing every client to analyse in fine detail how effective their marketing department is, and whether they are operating the most efficient ROI structure in a fast-changing environment.

As digital, mobile and social media platforms become more prevalent across all consumer segments, the discipline-specific silo mentality seems increasingly outdated and ineffective.

With CEO’s and CMO’s the world over looking to cut costs and increase the value of their spend, the time for significant and radical structural change is upon us. This will not only impact the client organisations themselves, but by definition the relationships with roster agencies across all disciplines.

Bob Greenberg, the Founder, Chairman, CEO & CCO, R/GA, believes that, “if you’re organised with a client around the consumer, then you’ll be much less affected by the storm than if you’re part of a siloed organisation. If you’re organised in verticals then the impact will be felt much more keenly, as cuts across each silo will need to be made. Nike are a client that have reorganised their internal organisational structure to revolve around the consumer, which is a model that I believe is much more efficient and effective.”

Bob Greenberg

If we look at some of the work that Nike are delivering, through R/GA as well as a number of other roster agencies, it is clearly evident that the reformulation of their organisational structure is paying dividends.

Ideas such as Nike+, the Ballers Network, NikeID, and HEAD2HEAD demonstrate that the company has truly put the consumer at the heart of all its thinking, delivering multi-platform solutions that are implemented more effectively by running a streamlined, de-siloed structure.

Chris Colborn summed up the dilemma facing many clients by describing why digital agencies are increasingly being perceived to offer greater value for money than the traditional agencies: “Initially digital agencies were one of the siloed verticals, but it quickly became apparent that every other silo needed a digital equivalent, in some form or another.”

“If you combine the breadth of experience, therefore, that digital needs to deliver, along with the relatively low spend in comparison to other channels, you can see why digital agencies are able to think more holistically in their approach to marketing, and also to deliver solutions that improve ROI levels.”

Although Colborn and Greenberg are approaching the topic from a different angle to Jeffrey, they are all in agreement that the concept of the traditional silo structure is fundamentally flawed.

The deconstruction of this model, reformulating around a more consumer-centric structure that has engagement and participation through digital platforms at its heart, is one of the major shifts that the recession has precipitated.

As with many of the changes this recession has brought, and will continue to bring, it is not that the shift wouldn’t have happened eventually; it’s just that the economic downturn has forced dramatic change to happen much more quickly.

The problem is that a rapid, fundamental structural revolution within the advertising industry has caused, and will keep causing, a great deal of pain while it happens.

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

Mixed bag of advertising that fails to build relationships

692072 — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:02:00 GMT

After last week’s incredulous blog post about eBay leaping onto Patrick Swayze’s demise, and the general state of advertising (Go Compare anyone?), I’ve actually been paying a little more attention just in case there’s anything good in between the main events.

Barclays seems to have caught a great advertising team – two ads for two different products were clever and eye-catching. I liked the latest ads for some car marque, which seemed to offer three different cars depending on your budget but I can’t remember which brand; likewise the “chasing her metaphors” piggy bank ad again, amusing ad but can’t recall the brand. I loved the army ad detailing a strike on an insurgent gun, but on reflection felt underwhelmed when this turned out to be the chap’s career highlight (the army chap, not the insurgent chap). I really liked the Cadbury’s Fair Trade ad. Actually, it was a mixed bag. I’m very glad I can avoid it all with a PVR’s ffwd button.

None of it however has been designed to develop a relationship. Even the Cadbury’s one, which presumably is part of a series designed to give me a rounded sense of the brand new brand onion, felt stuck on – unrelated to the Gorilla or those other ones that didn’t work. I’d love to see advertising that deliberately led off-screen, not just to the shop but to a place where a relationship can flower.

I can’t remember the last time an ad told me to visit the website in a clear, beneficial way. Oh, apart from all those second-string insurance aggregator sites of course, which do so so risibly it’s more a distraction than marketing (“let’s grab the consumer’s attention, at any cost” we imagine the account guy saying, shortsightedly – smacking of desperation on the part of both client and agency). I’d love to work with an ad agency that had the confidence to work with a digital specialist to create a genuine journey. Meerkats and Army aside, they just don’t cross-refer – and the beauty of the modern customer journey is that it can and should be fluid, media savvy and engaging, not ephemeral, boorish and – in some cases thankfully – entirely negligent of brand recall.