the fruits of imagination

A mighty wind

Today started off cold-ish in Toronto, and then this morning we had a big rainstorm.  Thunder, lightning, the whole bit.  And with it suddenly came much warmer temperatures.  Within the space of 30 minutes it got 15 degrees warmer and became quite spring-like.

All of which is lovely... unless, say, you find yourself doing a creative presentation in a boardroom which still had the heat turned on.  In which case it's quite oppressive and sticky and not fun at all.  It was like presentation strip poker, everyone peeling off layers of clothes with each new creative set-up.  The only thing that made it vaguely bearable was the excellently named Super Wind.

Thank goodness for you, Super Wind.

Impossible is nothing

I like the new Adidas brand campaign.  It's the first time I can remember Adidas doing something meaty and interesting with their "Impossible is Nothing" idea.  The idea is a few years old, but the work in the past always seemed hollow to me.  It used a lot of digital trickery to show people doing things that were, well, impossible (like this and this and this).  Even their big World Cup ads last year, which lots of people liked, felt flat to me.  At the end of the day, while all the special effects and expensive athletes were fun to look at, what they were showing was impossible.  What I took away was "Impossible is nothing, but only if you have a $2 million production budget and a lot of celebrity athletes to work with."  It was literal and uninspiring, and there was no emotion behind it, no reason to connect with it.  It never made me feel anything.

I like the new campaign (from 180 Amsterdam/TBWA) because they've found a different way to express the idea of doing the impossible.  It uses real personal stories from various athletes (including David Beckham, Gilbert Arenas, Jonah Lomu, and Lionel Messis) talking about challenges they've overcome, about times they've felt they couldn't go on because of their self-doubt, fears, injuries, or critics.  And as the athletes are interviewed, they draw and paint aspects of their story.  It's like watching art therapy.  Some of it even gets quite dark (in the Beckham one he talks about being hated by his entire country, seeing himself burned in effigy, and crying a lot).  But it's really compelling.  It makes you realize how rarely advertising shows actual negative emotions.

If you haven't seen it, here's the launch montage:


And here's the full Beckham video.  And the rest.  The website's quite good too.

Some stories are better than others, but they're all lovely to watch, beautifully filmed and edited, and refreshingly much lower-tech.  And for the first time I feel like Adidas has uncovered the promise of the "Impossible is Nothing" idea.  They've made it personal and human.  At least it finally makes me feel something, unlike all the earlier work.  After watching these I get inspired and I actually get what it means to attempt something that everyone else thinks you can't do.  Not that I've actually, you know, attempted anything myself.

More conference news

There's another interesting conference coming up.  Last year at the Cannes Festival, Contagious Magazine and Leo Burnett gave a keynote seminar called Wildfire: Ideas that Spread on the implications for brands of today's socially-connected world.  Following on the great response we received from that is the upcoming Wildfire: the Conference.  It's in London, April 24-25, at the Truman Brewery in Brick Lane.  It's going to be a great event - the list of speakers is already inspiring.

• Ajaz Ahmed -- Chairman and Co-Founder, AKQA
• Russell Davies -- Founder, Open Intelligence Agency
• Miguel Fluxa Orti -- Vice President, Camper
• Ze Frank -- Designer, Performer, Consultant
• Sarah Gavin -- Communications Director, Bebo
• Jon Kamen -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of @radical.media
• Paul Kemp-Robertson -- Editor of Contagious
• Robert Lowe -- UK Product Manager, Nintendo
• Cameron Saunders -- Head of Marketing, Digital Channels, Channel 4
• Tom Savigar -- Trends Director, The Future Laboratory
• Reuben Steiger -- Chief Executive Officer, Millions of Us
• Rishad Tobaccowala -- Chief Executive Officer of Denuo, Chief Innovations Officer of Publicis Groupe
• Mark Tutssel -- Chief Creative Officer, Leo Burnett Worldwide
• Johnny Vulkan -- Partner, Innovations, Anomaly
• Jordan Weisman -- Chief Creative Officer, 42 Entertainment

It looks to be well worth the flight (and those of you already in London have no excuse).  For more information, or to register, visit the conference website.

Coffee?

It's been far too long, and I'm finally in town on a Friday... anyone up for a Toronto coffee morning this Friday?

I'm thinking 8:30-10:00am at 7 West.  Who's in?

Tempests and teapots

For reasons I can't fathom, a stir has begun over a post over at fellow agency bloggers Wieden +Kennedy London.  It was a post about the global Nokia pitch they're currently involved in.  A few weeks back Neil Christie, the MD and most regular contributor to their blog, posted on the client pitch briefing in Finland.  It was a straightforward post - he mentioned the other agencies present (which has already been reported in the press), how lunch was, and made a few comments about it being a good briefing.  It was neither their best nor worst post, just an update on some interesting goings-on and a little peek behind the scenes.  It was entirely in keeping with the general transparency of their agency, and didn't reveal anything that sounded proprietary or secretive.

But today there's an article about it in AdWeek, which quotes several people from other agencies in the pitch, and random selection of agency executives with no connection to the story.  All are fairly negative about W+K's post (the client hasn't offered comment).  And I'm flummoxed as to what the fuss is about.

We've occasionally blogged about pitch stuff, and even solicited help from you for pitches.  But just to be safe we've avoided mentioning specifics about the client or the assignment while it's still going on.  So I'm not sure we'd have gone quite as far as W+K chose to.  But that said, I really can't see what they've done that's objectionable.  I mean, honestly, it's no Subway pitch video.

I have to say W+K's got a fantastic blog. They set a good example for openness and transparency - one of the best facets of that agency - and I hope they don't change that because of something silly like this.

The limitations of research

Being a research geek, I collect examples of how asking people their opinions doesn't always work: those times when what people say they like and what they actually like are completely different.  Of course this happens all the time, which makes it scary how many decisions are still based on researching people's opinions. 

There was a good example of this from an article on whether US voters value experience in the New York Times this weekend.

"In surveys, voters profess to value experience. For instance, the Pew Research Center reported last month that... one of the most important traits a candidate can possess is that he or she “has been an elected official in Washington for many years.” Only being Christian or having military service was more highly regarded...

But the picture becomes vastly more complicated when voters are asked about specific politicians. For instance, of the six major Democratic candidates, those with the most experience have the least appeal to voters... Experienced Washington Republicans face the same problem.

Dig deeper into the numbers, and experience seems to be even less important to voters, at least at this very early stage of the campaign. Pew asked poll respondents for snap impressions of the top six candidates (Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama, Mr. Edwards, Mr. Giuliani, Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney).

For five of those candidates, the overwhelming majority of impressions clustered around personal qualities rather than experience or ideology. The divide was particularly wide for Mr. Obama: 65 percent of the respondents talked about his personal traits (“good,” “intelligent,” “honest,” etc.) while only 14 percent were about his experience (mostly his lack of it). The spread was a whopping 75 percent to 8 percent for Mrs. Clinton and 39 percent to 17 percent for Mr. McCain. Voters consistently mentioned only one candidate’s experience — Mr. Giuliani’s."

It's also worth mentioning that "having military service," the claimed highest value in a candidate, didn't fare well in practice either.  Out of the top six candidates, only John McCain has served in the military.

In case you're interested, the full Pew report is here.

Sign of the times

A 19-year old university student, on what she uses television for:

"sometimes a prof will ask you to watch a program for school and it's not something you'd be able to track down on YouTube."

- The Globe and Mail, March 17, 2007

Hungry Dogs and Chocolate Wrappers

For our Canadian readers: Strategy Magazine and Leo Burnett are partnering to create a series of events called Hungry Dogs and Chocolate Wrappers.  In case you're wondering what the heck that means, it's subtitled Science Meets Engagement: A four-part series (and as for why the weird name, well, you'll just have to attend the event to find out).

This comes out of the research into communications engagement that we began last fall with CanWest Media and Ideas Research Group.  I originally presented some of the results to the Media in Canada conference, which seemed to provoke some good response.  Given engagement is the topic du jour in the industry, Strategy thought it was worth turning into a broader series.  So over the next few months, we're organizing 4 half-day events in Toronto around different themes.

Now we don't usually enjoy marketing conferences, especially sitting through the same case studies over and over again.  So we're building these events around non-marketing (but important to marketing) subjects that we want to learn more about, and trying to avoid speakers from the marketing industry, or at least keep them to a bare minimum.  Instead we're bringing in experts from other disciplines and industries that we think we can learn something from.

The first event will be about The Mind, the second about Storytelling, the third about Aesthetics and Beauty, and the fourth about Social Behaviour.  So thanks to Strategy for indulging our curiosity and creating this great opportunity.

The first event, The Mind, is April 13th at The Design Exchange.  It will be about brain science, behaviour, and how people process information.  Speakers include Tor Wager, Professor of Pyschology at Columbia University, talking about emotions and mapping the brain; and Michel Ferrari, Head of the Centre for Applied Cognitive Science at University of Toronto, talking about consciousness and personal identity.

You can register through Strategy Magazine - I don't have the exact link but I'll find it and post it tomorrow.

Agency survival

Alain Thys over at FutureLab posts a great piece today on seven rules for agency survival. It's well-written, thought-provoking, and essential reading for anyone in the agency world.

The preamble

In creative presentations, I feel sometimes that our preamble set-up bit goes on too long.  Or as the work is presented, we over-explain everything, rushing to fill in any silence when people just need time to process what they're seeing (I'm particularly guilty of that one).  We used to have a client say "don't give me any of your planning/client service explanations - in the real world there isn't any."

Which is true. But, you know, it would be funny if there were.

via Diablog