far more interesting than a print ad, far more experiential, far more compelling... and likely delivering the equivalent reach and frequency of a traditional buy. nicely done.
An advertisement by Jung von Matt/Alster for watchmaker IWC. Bus straps have been fashioned from images of IWC’s Big Pilot’s Watch to allow bus travellers near the airport to try before they buy at Berlin, Germany.
Advertising begins and ends with people and behaviour. It's a methodology that is instilled in Burnetters early. Successful clients brief agencies to create advertising that connects with people and changes behaviour.
But it's hard to craft effective advertising when you're talking to people the same way everyone else is.
Media companies maximize the client's budget by securing the largest amount of eyeballs possible. The beauty of media is that you can show exactly how you maximized the spend using client-digestible numbers.
The problem with that strategy is that it is devoid of, a strategy. You won't come across very unique if you run a tv commercial in the same commercial break as all your competitors, or have the same radio buy, or purchase the same newspapers.
What you need to do is gain the attention of your customers when they're willing to listen.
Selling office supplies? Why not hold a office supply/tupperware party at an office building.
Hocking Nikes? Why not have really attractive, fit athletes start at the back of a marathon and pass everyone on their way to the front.
Into cellphones? Why not throw a concert and give only your customers preferential treatment? Make it cool to be a telecom customer again.
Creating buzz for Google Maps? Why not bridge the real world by placing markers at famous people's favourite places to eat? Oh, that's been done.
Source: Flickr
Alternate media. Traditional media. That both marketers and agencies refer to any media that falls outside the realms of TV, print, and outdoor as ‘alternative’ suggests at best an inward looking and dangerous perspective.
Q: Alternative to whom?
Q: Unconventional by whose standards and whose behaviour?
The pressing reality for most brands today is that product differentiation can be erased overnight and brand messaging easily duplicated. But the creation of purpose driven acts that deliver layers of the brand experience may be a last source of differentiation. What many call ‘alternative’ media today - and what I might call a brand act - has in been in play since 2nd century B.C. The circus maximus was buzz marketing, conversation creation and stunt writ large for brand Rome. The first known example of guerrilla marketing is to found in Ephesus (modern day turkey) in the form of graffiti advertising a brothel. Place based media in the form of architecture has at its best, implied much more than mere form as in the case of Beijing: Contemporary Superpower. Alternate media…how about a conversation about context as a media in and of itself.
It's interesting how this industry of ours absorbs new media. Second Life (SL) is a prime example. It started out as a virtual reality chat line that grew too large. That’s when corporate America got a hold of it. Suddenly, everybody was putting it in media plans to seem hip and with it to their clients. As anybody my age knows, any 30-something trying to be cool, isn’t. You hear that, Crayon? Currently, Second Life is over saturated with poorly executed advertising in a world not quite as full as people think. Only a few thousand members actually use the service everyday.
SL is not the first company to try this new medium. There is another virtual chat room just like Second Life that still holds on to its nerdy roots. However, it has unfortunately been passed over by the majority of marketing gurus of today in favour of the greener pastures of SL.
Now that Second Life has fallen by the wayside so to speak, we have a new focus for our advertising dollars, Facebook. The MySpace killer that has been an internet goldmine of late is taking over the PR airwaves of every available ad & marketing blog around the world. Everybody is talking, nobody is understanding. Same old story.
If I had to call it, I'd say the Facebook phenomenon has yet to reach maturity. Marketers still have the opportunity to spend their ad dollars wisely and they can still make a positive impact on the service.
Facebook is all about connecting with people, plain and simple. In my opinion, any advertisement or application that does not improve the connections between people is not working hard enough.
Take this image for example: 120x600.gif)
Why is classmates.com, a site that connects old classmates from highschool, advertising on what is essentially their competition? My friends and I primarily use Facebook for the very same function classmates.com is advertising. Not a smart investment.
The TD Canada Trust FB group, The Money Lounge, is an example of a pretty good promotion in my opinion. Some of their promotions include $40 off at retailers like Best Buy and Zellers for students who join the facebook group and tips on how to live with roommates, something many university students have to struggle with on a daily basis. I tip my hat to you, TD.
So please, take the time to learn about Facebook before you start spending. It will be good practice for the when the next hit website starts attracting the world's youth. Best of Luck. Contributed by: Angus Gastle
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 it’s not the Toronto skyline you’re portraying?
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.
*****************
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.)
Maclean's is a national news magazine in Canada. They're not the most cutting edge or insightful publication, but they have a fairly broad mainstream readership. And this week, they've become the latest instance of old media hugely, colossally, missing the point. Here's their cover article:
Now I realize they're probably trying to be contrarian and raise some hackles to sell some magazines, but come on. The internet sucks? Really?
You know, I was originally just going to post the shot of the cover and let it speak for itself, but now I think it deserves a response. Yes, the internet is filled with porn, and spam, and scammers, and misinformation, and bad people doing bad things, and mean people, and selfish people, and boring people, and crazy people, and the whole enterprise is messy and convoluted and confusing. But you know what? That's also what LIFE is like. And that's why Maclean's is missing the point.
The internet is one of the most powerful forces ever created not because it elevates dialogue to a better place or represents us at our best, but because it allows us to see each other exactly as we are. It reflects humanity in all its forms, from every corner of the world. By connecting everyone to everything it allows us to see unfiltered windows onto other people's lives in ways we never have been able to before. And that teaches us important things about the human condition.
Ever since the printing press, media has been centralized and controlled and edited, so the world you're seeing is someone's version of the world. With the internet you really can get an unfiltered view of the world (of course, you can still choose to rely on others to control and edit for you), and have to navigate your way through it, find communities, share ideas, and build your own view of the world. That ability changes the power structures. It changes how information is disseminated. It changes how we see things. And yes, that's messy and nasty sometimes, but that is what life is. Saying the internet sucks is saying life sucks.
Watch this 9-minute video of a random selection of YouTube postings edited together.
Yes some of the people are boring, or silly, or use bad language. But I find it really beautiful and inspiring. And what gives you a better sense of humanity and what regular people are up to... this, or the op/ed page in a news magazine?
The internet sucks? Please.
The most interesting piece of thinking I've seen recently is something Faris over at Naked posted a few weeks ago, and his colleague Ivan presented at the excellent APG Battle of Big Thinking in London (which I thoroughly enjoyed and keep meaning to write about but something always comes up, and now I suspect I've missed my moment - but if you're interested read good summaries here, here and on the event blog here). What interested me is a model they're calling "transmedia planning," informed by some stuff in Henry Jenkins' new book Convergence Culture.
I'd recommend you read Faris' post here first. Go ahead, I'll wait.
OK. I like that they deconstruct the model of "media neutral planning." This is the practice of starting with a brand idea, rather than a particular execution, and expressing it over various media. To steal Faris' diagram: 
This seems to be fairly de rigeur right now, and I think most agencies and marketers are using this model now in some form or another. That, if anything, is a good reason to look for a different model, but there are also a couple of problems with it.
One is that, as Russell has talked about, ideas don't really exist without execution, and in fact with good ideas, execution is often crucial and inseparable from strategy (think about the Bravia stuff - the strategy is the somewhat pedantic "our TV has amazing colour" but the bigness of the idea is in how that's brought to life with coloured balls and paint). Seeing the same thing executed across a bunch of channels isn't really the most interesting use of each medium, and the best ideas are often built to really leverage the strengths of a particular channel (like Bravia's gorgeous use of film, or using the social elements of blogs and Flickr and YouTube to tease the new ad). So talking about ideas as separate from the media they will exist in is a bit silly and can miss out on the most creative opportunities. Media-neutral leads to media-neutered.
But more importantly it's also missing a key factor: social relationships. I've been thinking about social relationships a lot recently, and how we tend to underestimate or miss them altogether. Marketing tends to think of people as individuals. We target individuals, trying to change individual minds and behaviours. Most of our models focus on individuals. And in research, when someone says "I don't like it but my sister would" we discount that. We say "thanks but today I'd just like to hear what you think." We make people write their answers down so they're not biased by what others think. But this is a problem because people don't exist as individuals, we are highly social beings. People form opinions and make decisions informed by what their friends/spouse/family/colleagues think about things. People talk about brands and media and yes, even sometimes ads with other people. Mark Earls has been talking about this for a few years now, that humans have a strong herd instinct, and brand behaviour being one way that is manifested. And in the big engagement research project that we've just done here at Leo Burnett, the social element of brands and communication also came out really strongly.
So fortunately Faris and Ivan suggest a new model, which they call transmedia planning. The gist of it is that rather than using different media channels to communicate the same idea, you can use each channel to communicate different things. Everything is still tied together by the same brand strategy or narrative, but each channel does what it does best, rather than bending to fit an idea that's not really built with any particular channel in mind. Each channel is strong and self-contained enough to live on its own, but can then be pulled together into a greater brand narrative. The most interesting part is that this pulling together doesn't necessarily have to be done by one person - social relationships can help forge those connections, forming a brand community that shares and builds on each others' experiences with the brand. I've seen the advertising, you've been to an event, she's tried the product, he's had a good experience with an employee, and we all compare notes. So the model looks like this (again stolen from Faris):
Faris mentions Jenkins' example of the media franchise spawned by The Matrix - the three films, the Animatrix series of short films, the video games, the comics. Each has different (but overlapping) parts of the story, different pieces of the puzzle, and each stands on its own, but you can put them all together to understand the whole Matrix universe better. Another media franchise that's done this well is the TV show Lost, and the various websites, wikis, conspiracy theories, and books that it has generated. In the world of brands, Faris mentions the example of Audi's Art of the Heist campaign, but I think the big brands like Axe/Lynx, Nike, Dove, Apple, etc all work this way. They put lots of things out there, not necessarily expecting every person to see every piece, but creating enough interestingness that people will talk and eventually hear about pieces they haven't seen from someone else. And of course, social media means that these discussions are easier, are amplified, and do not necessarily have to occur face-to-face or even in the same part of the world.
I really like the transmedia planning model, because I think it addresses those two weaknesses of media-neutral planning: ignoring that different media are better at different things, and that people are social beings. And by putting a brand community in the middle, it also forces us to think about whether we are in fact making brands and communications which are interesting enough for a community to form, and for people to want to talk about our communications.
But I think there's another potential level to this model, if you'll allow me to build on it - we can also apply this model to single pieces of communication. We sometimes talk about how a good piece of communication needs to have multiple levels so that it rewards more time spent, or repeated viewing. This might be small details, things going on in the background, music, metaphors, or references. And we, Russell, and others have talked about the power of complexity in communication - that people generally find complex, nuanced, layered things more interesting than simple straightforward things. But when we talk about this stuff, we still usually talk about people processing it individually - so each one person is rewarded for spending more time or if they see it again. But what if we looked at it through the lens of a brand community? Each different layer or detail could appeal to a different group of people, who could compare stories, and thus continually be getting new perspectives on the same thing.
If this sounds horribly complicated let me give a few examples to show it doesn't have to be. This Burger King ad by Crispin Porter is one of my favourites:
On the surface, it's a jingle about the new Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch chicken sandwich. But you might also notice that the guy singing the song is Darius Rucker from 90's band (and pop culture trivia item) Hootie & the Blowfish. Or that the jingle itself is based on the old hobo ballad and Burl Ives classic "Big Rock Candy Mountain." Or that it was directed by iconic photographer David LaChapelle with all kinds of sexual imagery, both hetero and homo. Or that model and TV host Brooke Burke makes a cameo at the end (she's often used in BK ads). But you probably wouldn't notice all of those things, and in fact I'd be surprised if the same people who know who David LaChapelle is are also into turn-of-the century hobo ballads (I'm guessing those circles don't tend to overlap much). But more to the point, not getting some or all of the references doesn't detract from the main brand message (there's a new chicken sandwich), because each bit also stands on its own. By having lots of detail, though, it gives fans of the brand something to notice and talk about and deconstruct. So you might have missed some of the details but someone else can point them out, and this gives you a deeper appreciation of it, and completes your picture of the whole a bit more.
For one piece of communication, then, the model could look like this (apologies to Faris for bastardising his diagram):
This definitely happened with Honda's "Cog" ad - while you could just see it and say "there's a new Accord" or maybe "wow, that's cool," people also talked about how many hundreds of takes it took to shoot, how many days it took to set up, whether it was actually all one take, the reference to Rube Goldberg, or that the voice-over is done by author and radio personality Garrison Keillor.
Looking at a TV show like Lost, a single episode can also get analysed like this. I might just follow the main story, but someone else might notice a parallel structure to a previous episode, a flash of a Dharma Initiative logo on something, a character's name that is an anagram, or a reference to philosophy. And some people do watch the show frame by frame, poring over it for clues, and comparing notes the next day. No one person figures out every clue and reference, it's a collective effort, and that's part of the fun.
Or consider the M&Ms Dark website puzzle that I recently wrote about: it's very hard to find all of the 50 film references needed to solve it, so communities have sprung up to share answers and observations (a google search for "m&m dark answers" returns 188,000 hits). And the fact that the painting contains other references unrelated to the puzzle, like being based on the Renaissance style of Hieronymus Bosch, is yet another layer of meaning which some people won't get but which might add to your overall appreciation of the brand. But you could not get any of this, and still understand that there's a new dark chocolate M&M.
The idea of brand communities solves one issue that we sometimes run into when attempting to create complex and layered communications - the pushback that we shouldn't put details that everyone (or at least most people) won't or can't get. This is often combined with research findings that indeed, "most people didn't get this reference you were trying to make." This kind of thinking dumbs down communication into the lowest common denominator. But with the brand community model, that ceases to apply - as long as someone, somewhere will get it, then lots of details and references can work. Whoever notices it will likely tell others about it, because the fact that they figured something out reinforces their ego, status and self-image, and because the tools to widely spread that knowledge are now readily available. So instead of talking down to everybody, we can talk up to everybody, by giving many different groups something that makes them feel intelligent for getting a subtle reference. And we give them a reason to have multiple conversations about the brand.
Still, the challenge for brands is to not just put in detail for detail's sake, but to use it to truly make the brand more interesting, to give brand users something they will enjoy noticing and talking about. So maybe that is a new starting point we should set out on our briefs: does a brand community already exist, or will this communication do something interesting enough to create and support one?
As promised I wanted to share some more thoughts on the Engagement conference I was at this week. There was some good stuff, but I won't try to summarize any of the other speakers because I took crap notes and wouldn't do them justice anyway. But here are some general observations: 1. Unintentionally, Leo Burnett & Starcom kind of took over the day. The event was chaired by Lauren Richards, CEO of Starcom. Steve Meraska, our SVP Connections Planning was on the first panel, and Judy John our CCO was on the second one. In the afternoon, I presented twice, and Eleni and Steve from Starcom were on two other panels. 3. Panel discussions tend to suck. It's rare to see one that actually works, even when the particpants are interesting on paper. It often devolves into a battle of egos, self-serving comments ("Well, at MY company we do it differently..."), or five separate conversations that don't really have anything to do with each other. I think it's because, frankly, the moderators are usually not very good - it's usually a senior industry person who is nice and smart, but not skilled in panel moderating. Like research moderating, panel moderating is a skill that is both delicate and tough, and it can't be done by just anyone. 4. There still doesn't seem to be any agreement on how to define engagement, or any shared understanding of what we're talking about. The majority of the speakers used lots of examples and case studies - this ad was engaging, that campaign was not - but this made it all very subjective. And most followed the usual script of how the world is changing, consumers are in control, advertising isn't a one-way conversation, we need to try new things or collaborate more, etc. Which is fine (and true), but the frustrating thing is no one (that I saw) actually took the trouble to try to really define engagement, or lay out meaningful steps for getting there. I had a feeling the day would be like that (the UK conference on engagement I attended a few months ago was similarly vague) so in our presentation we tried to get more specific and put an opinion out there, right or wrong. 5. Which brings me to my bit. We're going to be rolling this out on a much larger scale so I don't quite want to give away the farm. But the gist of it was that to get past the subjectivity and fuzzy definitions, we designed and invested in some research of our own, in partnership with a major broadcaster (CanWest MediaWorks) and a great research company (Ideas Research Group). We did some qual, some quant, and some ethnography. And found some interesting things. The major thing was that what drives engagement is personal stuff, human stuff, not marketing stuff. People become engaged in a communication when it (not the product/brand, but the communication) fulfills basic human needs like providing something useful, being entertaining, provoking thought, reinforcing ego and status, making the person feel more clever or better about themself in some way, and so on. What doesn't drive engagement is being sold to. Clarity, branding, message take-away, new information: none of these correlates with engagement. It's not that those things aren't important in some way, it's just that they're insufficient. If engagement isn't there, then it doesn't matter how brilliant the strategy or message is, people won't spend time with it. If the engagement is there, we can rhapsodize about our products and people won't mind. Getting to that engagement comes from treating people as people and figuring out how to fulfill their needs as people, not as consumers. We lose that as soon as we treat them as targets or users or segments. There's no room for interestingness in the standard marketing "brand-consumer relationship." And that affects everything from our communications to our research to how we plan media. We weren't really saying anything new, but we were able to finally put some data around a lot of the stuff we all know intuitively, which makes it all the more powerful. If we can nudge the discussion forward a few inches, I'll be happy. And the response seems to have been good so far, lots of supportive messages and comments coming back over the last few days.
2. Why do conference venues almost always look like this? 
We're in a creative industry. We should have interesting venues. I don't buy the argument that bland hotel ballrooms are the only places that can handle large conferences. Earlier this year I spoke at an event held at the MaRS building, a new innovation center for interdisciplinary scientific work that's airy, high-tech, funky and inspiring. These places exist, we just need to find them.
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