I have been extremely fortunate to have met some very smart people.
Not your average, run-of-the-mill cubicle dwellers (they need not
apply) but the kind of people so smart that after 5 minutes you realize
how out of your league you are.
Some people never run into those kinds of people. Some are too
shallow to understand the intellectual goldmine that they just bumped
in to. I like to classify myself under a third umbrella. I have to work
so hard just to keep up with everyone else that when I meet someone who
seems to do it so effortlessly, I stand up and pay attention. Who
knows, maybe I'll learn a thing or two...
Always keep an eye out
for the smartest guy (or gal) in the room. There is a very good reason
why they say, you're only as good as the people you surround yourself
with.
Q: is people’s ability to process laterally increasing or decreasing over time?
If one merely observes how air travelers attempt to forcibly maneuver bovine sized luggage into tiny overhead compartments, then the answer might seem quite obvious. Criticisms of spatial thinking aside! However, I’m eager to hear everyone’s collective thoughts to this question as it applies to the copy testing environment. Time and time again I am startled at how flat footed, linear and obvious many of the ideas need to be in order to score well on comprehension, enjoyment, believability and purchase intent. This becomes especially clear when people have to put pieces of information together - sentences or paragraphs if you will - to form a narrative story about the brand. Surprising? Not if you think that in a world of entertainment - a world increasingly obsessed with the entertaining - each of us are quite obviously directed - what and when, to think and feel. Laugh tracks in TV tell us when to snicker, cinematic music tell us when to become apprehensive or tearful and celebrities separate the mere product from the majestic. In a world of entertainment, advertising must increasingly learn the techniques and rules of entertainment as it forms the dominant form of conversation, creation and consumption.
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.
Creative powerhouse, Boondoggle, just outted the Cannes Film Festival.
You see, these fellows were lucky enough to pull down not 1 but 5 Gold Lions and it seems they were less than impressed with the hardware they spent a few thousand Euros on. So they took them to a few gold specialists who would not even give them 5 Euros for the lot.
Business cards were typeset on cloth and tied in a knot. Clients
would loosen the knot to reveal the name and information of the massage
therapist.
Advertising Agency: Leo Burnett, Toronto
Creative Directors: Judy John, Israel Diaz
Art Director: Paul Giannetta
Copywriter: Sean Barlow
Photographer: Mark Zibert
Whether you love it or hate it, Microsoft Outlook is the ubiquitous email client for millions of cubicled office dwellers. In a great example of the power of social networking, fans of the email client have banded together in the hope of getting the software giant to rethink it's recently announced upgrade.
A quick Whois search revealed that a David Geiner, of Email Standards Project fame, is leading the charge with the recently launched FixOutlook.org. The slick site pulls tweets from the Twittersphere (I think I just coined a new term!) and displays them alongside the person's profile picture. Any tweet with the fixoutlook.org url will be pulled in and displayed on the page in an attempt to get Microsoft's attention. Based on the amount of press the press has received in just 24 hours, I'd say they have it by now.
As of now, the site has over 17,000 tweets which is almost double what it had when I took the screen cap above this morning.
This ingenious little tie in with the well known social network makes giving your input to Microsoft as easy as sending out a tweet. And starting a conversation with their most loyal fans to help improve one of their best selling products should be should be exactly what Microsoft wants to do. For that matter, any company from Audi to Kelloggs could start promote this kind of engagement with their customers.
By launching this site, with its smart integration into a well known social platform, Mr. Geiner and the team at the Email Standards Project could very well change the course of Outlook in 2010.
Here at Leo, we love our fair city of Toronto.So when were asked to help out on a new project aiming to bring diversity to the street food of the city, we were more than thrilled to help out.
The Toronto A La Cart program, run by the City, is meant to bring the diverse ethnic foods of Toronto out of the restaurants and on to our streets, to offer a healthier alternative to the hot dog, for those who want it, and to show that we are a city sophisticated and multicultural enough to present its residents with a kaleidoscope of street food offerings.
With this opportunity in mind, we set out to come up with an identity for the project. The resulting graphic design we developed is grounded by the number four.Four has great significance in terms of food and diversity.The four corners of the world (north, south, east, west), the four taste sensations (sweet, sour, salty, bitter), the four main utensils used when eating (fork, spoon, knife, chopsticks).It uses four circles, symbolizing plates, and grounds the utensils within them to create a graphic representation of the word ‘Cart’.The vibrant colour palette was inspired by actual vegetables and spices to reflect different cultures and ethnicity.
The identity can be found on the actual street carts throughout Toronto. I decided to go sample some down at
Nathan Phillips Square today…my picture doesn’t accurately reflect the crowds.There’s nothing like some good chicken Biryani and a fresh piece of fruit to enjoy out in the sun.I could get used to this.Hopefully some carts will pop up near our offices mid-town!
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.
You're in the room. In a few moments the client will be there. The AV is setup and (thankfully) working after a few failed attempts. Your team is nervously ruffling their notes or mouthing their scripts to the nearest patch of carpet. Yes, it's Pitch Day.
The tension inside the pitch room is palpable. It's a mixture of stress, adrenaline and butterflies. While my role was only a small part of the larger presentation, watching all our hard work come together in a flawless 27 minutes of power point prowess was quite a sight.
While we didn't end up winning the business (therefore making my record 0-1), it was not all a loss. It took Leo Burnett many years of hard work to even get an RFP let alone get in the room. So that on its own was a small success.
In my opinion, the secret to success is to show your potential clients that you not only have the muscle and the foresight to get the job done, but that you work well as a team and could potentially do great things together. Chemistry, in advertising, between clients and agency peeps is of the utmost importance for longterm success - even more so that than the work itself. If McDonald's isn't happy with the work Cossette is creating, they'll ask Cossette to change it or hire a new creative team who can. But they won't fire them.
The full page newspaper ad is the holy grail of newspaper advertising for media buyers. When the client says newspaper, the rest of the room immediately visualizes how to get a full page ad out of it. But, from my side of the keyboard, there couldn't be a worse media buy.
Don't get me wrong, love a good newspaper ad. But people read newspapers for the content, not the advertisements. Watch someone read a newspaper on the subway/train/bus/plane tomorrow morning (preferably a good looking person so you don't get weirded out by it). They read the articles and (at best) skim the ads and not the other way around. If the ad isn't in or near the content, it will be completely ignored.
What do you think? Am I wrong? Are full page newspaper ads generally well read by the consumer?
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