the fruits of imagination

Happy holidays

A warm happy holidays from everyone here at Leo Burnett Toronto.  Thanks for choosing to spend some time with us this year.  All the best for the new year. 

There will be no silly videos or other self-promoting shenanigans from us, instead here are a few of our favourite holiday treats to put you in a festive mood...

Bad research

I need an anecdote for a magazine article.  Any help is appreciated.

What's the dumbest question you've ever seen a marketer ask (or asked yourself) in a focus group or on a survey?

Summing people up

I have a cousin who has three teenage daughters (which makes them my second cousins? first cousins once removed? I can never remember how that works).  I spent some time with them the other night, and the 15-year old was stumped for a Christmas present for her boyfriend.  When asked what he was into, she replied, quite seriously, "Van Halen, rugby, and crocheting."

That may be the best answer ever.  Try fitting that into your marketing targetting or a creative brief.  There's a lesson in there somewhere about how people are more complex and interesting than marketing tends to make them out to be.

Tagged

I'm off work this week so I haven't been at my computer in a few days.  But there's this tag thing going through all the advertising/marketing blogs right now like it's cholera or something.  The idea is to share five things others probably wouldn't know about you.  And then pass it on to five more people.

It seems I've been tagged three times this week by the worthy trio of Leland (the mad scientist of McKinney & Silver), Oakie (all the way from Bangkok), and Dan (in Miami, but whom I worked with way back in web 1.0 days at Chiat/Day).

When I get chain things like this over email from friends and relatives, I usually ignore them.  But for some reason, I really like it in this context.  I think it's because with blogs, I read so many people's daily thoughts on brands and marketing, and yet don't know much about their actual lives beyond their web writings.  There's something lovely about finding out a bit more about the people behind the ideas.

1. I was in a national youth orchestra for a while, and almost pursued a professional music career.  I played the tuba.
2. I have a degree in clinical biomedical ethics, with a specialization reproductive health issues.  I have yet to find a way in which this will be useful in advertising.
3. After years as a card-carrying cynic, I've become a bit new-agey recently.  I've been reading lots of stuff about meditation, intention, and energy, and I secretly love it.  Although now I'm afraid you'll all start mocking me.
4. My fantasy job is conducting a big band.  With powder blue tuxedos.  And horn shots.
5. When I sneeze, it smells like honey. Not processed honey, but the hard waxy natural kind, right up inside my nose.  Doctors have never been able to explain this to me.  But thanks to Google I now know that I'm not alone.

Wow, that was strangely cathartic.

As for passing it on, I think every other blog I read has done this already, so I'm not sure who I could pass it on to.  I feel like the person at the bottom rung of a pyramid scheme who gets screwed.  So I'll just open it up to my co-workers and everyone else who reads this: share 5 things about yourself in the comments or with a trackback.  It's quite enjoyable. I highly recommend it.

Image courtesy PEEJ0E

Now We've Done It

Uh oh. We’ve gone and made torontoist.com mad at us. It seems they think the line drawings in one of our Johnnie Walker Union Station posters bears a little too much resemblance to their logo.

 

* In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention I’m an avid reader of Torontoist (it’s top-left on the main tab of my netvibes feed) and a member of their flickr group. 

   

I wasn’t part of the team that worked on the poster, though, and I wanted to get their side of the story, so I sat down with Matt Prokaziuk, the copywriter for the poster.

*****************

Mike: What was your first reaction when I forwarded this to you?

Matt: I was amused, actually. I sent the link to my Mom. In the end, I’d rather have people say something about my ads than nothing, even if it isn’t entirely positive.

Mike: And the accusations that you and Simon [Simon Au, the art director] might have, uh, borrowed the design from their website?

Matt: [Laughs] You can’t own a silhouette! We actually went to the CN tower, laid it on its side, traced it, and then reduced it on a photocopier. So technically they’re ripping us off!

Mike: No really. How did you do the artwork? Did you have an illustrator?

Matt: No. Simon did them. He took photos of his own, traced them and then smoothed out some of the rough edges and messed around with the perspective on some of them.

Mike: And it’s not the Toronto skyline you’re portraying?

Matt: Totally not the Toronto skyline. The Johnnie Walker global campaign is all about progressing and moving forward and evolving. Hence the whole “Keep Walking” tagline. Our idea was to pay tribute to some of the most noteworthy architecture of the past few decades, so we put them in the order in which they were built.

Mike: So, I ask you, Matt, once and for all, did either you or Simon copy the logo from the Torontoist?

Matt: [Laughs] Unequivocally no. I hadn’t even been there until you sent me the link and Simon, though he hides it well, can neither read nor operate a computer.

Mike: Ha! I’m sure he appreciates you telling everyone.

*****************

Just to put Matt’s assertions to the test, I downloaded some photos of city hall and traced them. I got pretty much the same as the ad, the Torontoist logo, and, incidentally, the City of Toronto logo.

In the end, it sounds like Torontoist is flattered that there is a coincidental resemblance between the two pieces and Matt and Simon are happy that someone noticed they make ads. Win-win.

(As a side note, since the Torontoist has been unrelentingly critical of the Toronto Unlimited campaign and we’re the new agency for Toronto Tourism, I’m sure they’ll have a thing or two to say about our work once it starts to appear. I’m just happy we didn’t do any work on the Westside Lofts or they'd never leave us alone.)

You.

Good for Time Magazine.  In case you haven't seen it yet, it's quite a well written piece. Read the whole thing here (and Influx has a typically smart take on the story here).

Although ironically, for a piece about how ordinary people are changing the face of media and the old rules no longer apply, Time's website made me sit through a really crappy and intrusive Chrysler ad in order to get to the article.  I guess old habits die hard.

More product demos

Found another few new Nike ads, again from Wieden, this time in support of their new Juice line of golf balls.  They're tougher and engineered to go farther or something (I'm not a golfer so it's lost on me).  But instead of going on about the technology or how it will improve your game, they've just shot some beautiful film of them being shot at high velocity through various things like a cantaloupe, a lava lamp, a ceramic rabbit, and jello.  Which, needless to say, is infinitely more interesting.

With the lab setting, smiling engineers, and the "what else can we destroy?" attitude, it's very similar to BlendTec.  Although these Nike ads have even less of an overt product message.  And they're much more gorgeous to watch.

As we've noted before, there really seems to be a product-demo renaissance going on, but with a web 2.0 twist.  It's about finding a way of demonstrating your product that is not as much persuasive as it is contagious, so that you get the "ohmygodyouneedtoseethis" reaction.  And those people who want to know more will find out more. 

Leland has given some thought to a few more examples of other interesting product demos.  I especially like this Mercedes website which finds some very clever ways to simulate various sensory experiences over the web.

Nike + iPod

New ad from Wieden. We likey. Nice work.

Scientific proof, and a confession

I'll let you in on a secret: aside from being tired & hung-over, there's another reason for the lack of posts recently.  I also don't feel like I have anything to say of late.  Perhaps it's just pre-Christmas blahs but I'm feeling a bit crap.  What's interesting is that I'm more aware of it because of all of you.  I've found that trying to maintain a regular blog makes me notice my moods more, because what might in the past have just been a few blah days, or a few meetings in which I don't say much, all of a sudden becomes a week without any posts.  It's more tangible and quantifiable all of a sudden, which makes it feel more real.  It's odd that it takes something so public to make me more in tune with something so private.  I guess it's an interesting a side effect of the fact that a blog intermingles the personal with the professional.  I wasn't going to share any of this, but in the spirit of openness and all... well, there it is.

But despite that, the world keeps turning and there's lots of interesting stuff that's been going on.  One thing that seems to have popped up a few times is that several ideas that have been much discussed have received some solid scientific proof from various corners in ths last little while.  So forthwith, here is some research-y science stuff for your inner (or outer) geek.

Robert Heath, of low-attention processing fame, has published some interesting research in December's Journal of Advertising Research.  It shows, based on a study of 43 TV ads in the UK and the US, that "Creativity and emotion are what make advertising successful, not the message it is trying to get over."  It should be noted that his study is just of TV ads, and I'm not sure it's so simple to apply that to all media.  But it's interesting nonetheless.  The article isn't available online yet, but Jon Howard points to the press release.

Another article worth reading is The Neurology of Aesthetics in Scientific American Mind. It puts some psychological evidence behind the idea that not spelling everything out, leaving some things to the imagination, and creating ambiguities, makes something more interesting.  Again the article isn't freely available, but Kathy Sierra talks more about what they call the "Peekaboo law."

And while not proof of anything, Leland (who's on fire recently) has a good post on some links between biology, technology, and marketing.  He summarizes Wired's Kevin Kelly talking (in a TEDtalk) about the key trends in biology and technology (Complexity, Specialization, Ubiquity, Diversity, and Socialization), and points out that they're also very true of marketing.

Sharing success

I was working with a client a while ago who was leaving their brand after a hugely successful run.  They were very smart, had turned this brand from nothing into something, and had made it famous and profitable.  But having decided to move on to better things, they had no interest in helping the people who were left to run the business to continue to be successful.  They seemed to assume that whoever took over next could never be as successful as they'd been, and that they would mess it up.

Sure, it was arrogant, but it also made me think about what constitutes success.  And I realized that in my book, the true measure of success isn't just being smart and having great ideas.  For me the true measure of success is the ability to make everyone else around you smart and to help everyone have great ideas.

It's often said about Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky or Zidane that they were great not just because of individual talent but because they could elevate the level of an entire team.  But I'm also reminded of a (possibly apocryphal) anecdote about the great British Prime Ministers and political rivals William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.  The story goes that a woman who had eaten dinner with both men was asked what her impression of them had been, and she replied, "When I left the dining room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone, I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr. Disraeli, I thought I was the cleverest woman in England."