YouTube. These guys, have joined hundreds of thousands of other groups, organizations, companies, and individuals competing for the attention of the elusive millennial.

It’s true, marketing to millennials is getting harder and harder. Traditional mass communication is just not what it used to be – millennials (who are scheduled to be 85 million strong in the U.S. by 2015) are simply not watching commercials, reading newspapers, or listening to the radio. This is why U.S. presidential hopefuls, the Queen of England, and countless others are turning to YouTube to broadcast their messages.

Why YouTube? YouTube exploits some major characteristics that define millennials: customization, networking, community, authenticity, and “on my time.”

It will be interesting to see what happens to this medium as more marketers wise up and “take the leap” – will millennials get turned off due to lack of authenticity or uniqueness?

Who knows, but definitely check out “The Royal Channel” – the Queen’s 1957 Christmas message is quite good and appropriate.

Ok, who’s next? The Pope! Why not?

Labels: advertising, communication, millennials, Obama, YouTube

For years now we have seen ads and product placements in video games. And it makes sense too, gamers spend more time playing games than watching TV. This market space is projected to grow to over a billion by 2010. Sony recognizes the potential and it is opening up a division dedicated solely to selling ads on PlayStation games. This aligns well with Microsoft’s recent affinity towards becoming a media channel.

The latest trend was sparked-off by Burger King last year when they developed and sold a series of Xbox games featuring the BK mascot. They grossed about $14 million on this adventure. Toyota recently got on the “Advertgame” bandwagon and released free Toyota Yaris videogame for download.

The advertising landscape continues to change. This is just another example in many. The three things that remain consistent are repetition, integration, and targeting of message across several channels and outlets. For example, BK ran TV ads in conjunction with the videogame release, and Toyota is showing up to music festivals and comic book conventions to pound and reinforce their messages.

Read the full Washington Post article that sparked this post.

Labels: advertising, marketing, Microsoft, Sony, video games, xbox

Halo 3 is quite a sensation.
I haven't played it yet but I am looking forward to it. But there is a series of three commercials which are really exciting, and well done. These are called the Halo "Believe" campaign.



One of the impressive steps that have been taken with the marketing for this new version of the game is to give a sense of how vast and momentus it is. Microsoft is trying to push the story almost as much as the gameplay. This may seem strange when talking about a first person shooter, but the riveting and still developing Half Life series has shown that a substantive story can really evolve in these games.



Bungie and Microsoft are pinning their hopes on this world of conflict in which the main character, Master Chief, fights and then fights some more.

Here is the best:



These commercials are notable because they do not involve gameplay and are slow paced, quiet and almost reflective. They are excellent because they really do make me want to play the game.

the 90 second spot (less compelling but still powerful):

Labels: advertising, commercials, halo, Microsoft

As it turns out, according to Donald Gunn, the creative director at Leo Burnett advertising agency, there are 12 types of ads.

1. Demo. Example: Apple iPhone commercials
2. Show Need or Problem. Example: Those annoying Cingular ads where the voice drops out making what would have been a normal conversation terribly awkward.
3. Symbol, Analogy, Exaggeration. The product solves a problem. Example: Theraflu ogre ad.
4. Comparison. Example: Charles Schwab posterized ads.
5. Exemplary Story. Example: The VW commercials where the people in the car are just chatting it up and, then out of nowhere, boom! Crash.
6. Benefit Causes Story. Example: the Lynx ad. Probably the funnies ad of the lot, both for men and women – it's so far fetched. It's amazing what one can get away with in the name of comedy. Watch this one if nothing else.
7. Tell it. Example: UPS ad with man who needs a haircut drawing on a whiteboard.
8. On Going Characters and Celebrities. Example: Subway, Mercury, Geico, Energizer Bunny, etc.
9. Symbol, Analogy, Exaggeration. This time, instead of showing how the product solves a problem, the technique demonstrates a benefit of the product. Example: Starbucks, Metamucil, etc.
10. Associated User Imagery. This is all about connecting the product to the type of person the advertiser thinks would be using the product. Hoping for identification. Example: Nike.
11. Unique Personality Property. Example: Dyson Vacuums.
12. Parody of Borrowed Format. I love this format. Basically, make fun of something popular and then stick your logo at the end. Brilliant. Example: Reality TV – Geico.

That was fun, I am sure many of you enjoyed it as much as the next person. I can think of a couple of other types that were missed. Such as the ones that leave you hanging and puzzled with out a concrete message or a call to action. What are those called?

Anyway, what's the overlap between these formats and online advertising?

While we all know that there are many forms of online advertising, such as pay-per-lead, email, search engine keywords, adwords, etc – this next part only includes banner advertising.

Banner Advertising Classification:

1. Irritate the Hell Out of People by Making the Screen Shake. You’ve seen it. Mortgage companies love this tactic. Think right-hand column empire ads in Hotmail.
2. Whack-a-mole. Enough said. The point is to get people to click, right?
3. TV ad on the web. Very popular on sites like Yahoo! and Collegehumor.com. Literally, the ad space looks like a mini made-for-television ad.
4. Background Branding. Where the entire background of the website is leased out to an advertiser. If you want to check this out, go to Pandora.com and keep refreshing the screen until you see it.
5. Traditional. Simple typography, imagery, message, and call to action. An all time classic.
6. "Whoa, did you see that?" rich media. Very amazing, high impact ads that stay contained in their space until the user mousse over them – at which point, the ad "unfolds" on the page overtop the page's content, and a rich media experience is delivered. They are expensive to produce and expensive to run. But effective as hell.
7. Chameleon. The ads that look like content on the site. Trickery!
8. Buttons. These I don’t understand. The space is sold, and people click on them, otherwise they wouldn’t exist, right? Come on!

Ok, that’s all I have time for. I know I am missing some obvious ones, so please help me complete this list.

Labels: advertising, Apple, banner ads, iPhone, Online Advertising, Pandora, search engine optimization

Yeah, Google Street View is cool, but what's the business model? Perhaps Google's endgame is going to be something like the shot above: dynamically-inserted, click-able ads posted into "real-world" billboard (and other) spaces. Maybe not. But it'd be a very interesting idea and would certainly tick off a heck of a lot of folks in the outdoor advertising world.

Labels: advertising, Google, speculation

Labels: advertising, Logo, pepsi sign

This article has some compelling points about the future and the potential of online advertising. The point made in the title of my post, that no one search for toothpaste, was made by the head of Yahoo's UK division, and his argument was that video had opened up a new advertising frontier for those who couldn't gain traction with search-advertising. Is it true, does no one search for toothpaste?

I liked this:

"Unlike their parents, the YouTube generation will not be prepared to sit back and simply consume what they are given. They will expect much more control — to be able to choose when, where and on what device they watch and read about the things that interest them. Their attention will be much harder to win.

“Television companies will tell you that kids are still watching as much TV,” said Morris, “but they’re not. Television does not have the emotional pull. Programmes do, the stuff they see on a screen does.

“But conventional TV — something that’s scheduled, that I sit down and watch at a time someone has decided for me, prepared to watch the ads while it’s on — they don’t get it.”

He continued: “You ask any kids, what would you rather be without: the TV or the internet? They will tell you, we’d rather be without TV.”"

My daughter, 5 yrs old, to use an immediate example, actually DOESN'T understand tv or the radio. She always asks me to rewind, pause, or forward the radio in the car, and when I tell her I can't, she is dumbfounded (presumably with my stubborn inability to do the simplest things). Similarly, when she gets up from watching a show on tv she wants it paused and when it can't - say when she is at Grandma's house, she is speechless. She actually has difficulty imagining media that can't be controlled.

So take this for what it is worth, but when our children grow up, tv is going to be the last thing on their minds.

Labels: advertising, Old Media Deathwatch, Online Advertising

Labels: advertising, hitachi, online video

"Adjudication of the Jury d'Ethique Publicitaire:

Complaint:
The ad is regarded as degrading and shocking, of bad taste, vulgar, disrespectful of human dignity and morals, scandalous with respect to children. The advertiser made the point that the spot was in the form of a satire. It did not harm human dignity but reversed the roles of the traditional sexist stereotypes. The difference with other spots that show naked people is the age and the weight of the actor; the message does not conform to the theories which presume that any human body that does not fit the standards of perfection must be regarded as shocking and thus socially dangerous.

Position of the Jury:
After examination and taking into account many negative reactions received, the Jury decided that the images undermine human dignity, in particular by showing inappropriate sexual behaviour in a workplace, which is against article 2 of the code of the CCI. It also concluded that the commercial was not in conformity with the recommendations of the code of ethics in advertising concerning the representation of the human person in publicity. The Jury consequently recommended the cessation of the commercial. "

http://www.bestrejectedadvertising.com/html/?page=tv&type=banned&id=27

Basically, this site is a wonderful window into the worries broadcasters and governments have about advertising. Some of the worries are about accuracy, some are prudish, some are mysterious even to one as inaccurate and prudish as me. The accompanying reasons and their explication is a textbook on, to misconstrue Bloom, the anxiety of influence. These ads are being rejected because they will inappropriately influence people or expose them to something they shoould be safe from.

This whole site had me asking the same question over and over: how powerful do these people think advertising is? Or will these ads, unchained, actually do what it is claimed?

Labels: advertising, censorship, eu

So you have all heard of careerbuilder, you know, the monkeys & whatnot.

What is interesting is that several years ago you may NOT have heard of careerbuilder. About three years ago careerbuilder hired chicago-based Crammer-Krasselt, who basically took careerbuilder from third/forth place in the placements industry to number 1 in quite a few different ways of measurement. (#1 in visits, #1 in share, #1 in listings, revenue up from $100 million to $700 million)

Many levels of strategy were involved with this success. Certainly we have all seen and enjoyed the monkeys, but the core message those simians were trying to get across was DIFFERENT from the messages of monster and the other placement giants. Careerbuilder was targeting people who were dissatisfied with their current job, not just people who were looking for a new one. This is clearly a much larger market that has the benefit of also targeting the traditional job-seekers. It has worked out fabulously for Careerbuilder, and their brand has benefited enormously.

So amidst all this apparent success, Cramer-Krasselt was recently dealt a somewhat humiliating slap in the face. Their superbowl ads for Careerbuilder did not make the top 10 in the USA today poll following the superbowl. Now I don't know how much stock to place in the USA today poll, but it sounds like useless poll too me. But Careerbuilder took it seriously. Careerbuilder responded to it by saying they needed to do a total creative review. Now my opinion is that clients can and should ask for creative reviews whenever it suits them. But there is also something called strategy and tact, and it could be that Careerbuilder failed to employ those attributes when it accosted C-K about not making the top 10 in a, well, silly poll.

Whether appropriately or inappropriately, the CEO Peter Krivkovich QUIT the Careerbuilder account when he found out about the creative review. And then he sent out a very pointed and at times scathing internal memo which was subsequently leaked to the Chicago Tribune and lo and behold, here we are.

The full memo is well worth reading and digesting but here is a tidbit first:

"To our amazement, to our total astonishment, all that astounding business success was less important than one poll. They wanted us to make them famous; we did that in spades (brand awareness up by 64% - even Millward Brown, the venerable research firm said their brand building model couldn't explain such incredible growth.) But the TV ads did not make the top 10 in the USA Today poll – a poll that everyone knows doesn't mirror results (see the continuing Bud sales decline for one!) - they just told us they will do a creative review.

Wait a minute we said, what about the incredible growth that is going on, the shares, the revenue, the awareness, the two best internet sites ever, the massive buzz, etc, etc.

What about all of that? That's huge.

"Yes," they responded, "but you (C-K) didn't get the top ten in the USA Today poll." Hold on… we crushed every possible business metrics/barometer for success. Out of all the metrics and polls, it's all about this one? You have to be (explative) kidding, right!? "No, that's it. It's because of the poll." That was about the extent of the conversation."

The full text is below.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-070223careermemo,1,2814628.story?coll=chi-news-hed

And here is the agency site.

http://www.c-k.com/ck_site.html

Labels: advertising, advertising agencies, placement

Children of Men is a futuristic dystopian film which recently came out. I didn't see it, but I was entertained to find out that all of the advertising in the movie was done by an actual advertising agency.

http://www.foreignoffice.com/projekts/movies/movie_com.htm

The British agency was Foreign Office:
http://www.foreignoffice.com/

I think it would be thrilling to create the advertising mediascape of a fictional world. Apparently the agency worked in concert with the director, who explained what kind of impression he was aiming for down to the pieces of litter on the streets.

Labels: advertising, movies

It is a bit surprising, but it should't be, that someone is targeting the internet as the next place a soulful brand resonance for women could develop. And while it seems at times, when nearly all magazines and the solid majority of books are directed at women, that the female mediaspere is crowded, all it takes is one fresh, sincere and really really opinionated voice to shatter through the clutter and create something new to make something happen.

Atoosa says, she “wasn’t the smartest girl in high school . . . or even in college,” she did have lots of opinions: “I had opinions about life. I had opinions about guys. I had opinions about jobs. I had opinions about everything.” Through magazines, she believed she could “make those opinions heard.” Now she is on the internet and if the traffic on her myspace blog is any indication, there might be a new big momma in town.

Labels: advertising, demographics: women, martha stewart, oprah

I've been tinkering with Pandora for a while now, over the course of a year at least. For those unfamiliar, it's a smart radio station that takes your initial input, and based on your continued feedback, creates a customized stream of music based on your preferences. While doing this, it also introduces you to new music by similar artists or based on similar traits of the music you've favored. Give the songs a thumbs up or thumbs down and your stream becomes more refined.

It's the result of something called the Music Genome Project which essentially decodes the "musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony."

It's free. From time to time I come back to listen when I am bored with my playlist, or not digging what's on my favorite streams, or when Pandora efficiently reminds me via personalized emails.

Today when I returned I saw something new. The surrounding borders of the main Pandora page were "skinned" by sponsors (Chase, Nike+ and a reality show called Nashville Star). They take over the appearance of the page with the exception of the body, and there is a large format ad as well - a skyscraper or a large box. I don't mind this at all. If intrusive advertising is what keeps a cool thing alive, and free, so be it. Free content surrounded by advertising is not new, but this was the first time I have seen an entire page actually be skinned by a sponsor, let alone done tastefully. If I were there to read content, I would have found it objectionable, but in this case the user experience is to listen, and occasionally react to give the player additional feedback. I thought it was effective.

As I was introducing a co-worker to this, I demonstrated how the player window can be minimized. Once doing that, a large dynamic banner from Amazon appeared over the player featuring products I have either recently purchased or expressed interested in at the Amazon site. This was amazing to me. Perhaps there are few sites I interact with this much on a personal (consumer) level. However, the fact that these two sites are capturing enough data about me to offer up products they know I like, or think I will like, on an ongoing basis is amazing to see happen for real today. The things we talk about and read about the future; highly targeted advertising, highly personalized emails, and dynamic ads generated at such a granular and personal level are happening now.

Oh, did I mention that one of the products Amazon offered me was music that Pandora thought I'd like?

Labels: advertising, Music, Online Advertising, Pandora

Google’s revenue model is largely tied to the sales of ads. Newspaper’s revenue model is also mainly tied to selling ads.

It works quite simple: the more people either attract, the more money they might make.

The Wall Street Journal printed a very interesting story today, “Google This: U.K. Papers Vie to Buy Search Terms” by Aaron O. Patrick.

This story reveals the tactics followed by some newspapers to get more readers: Google Adwords.

At first, the idea of advertising to increase “circulation” to generate more income from advertising seemed a little silly. But at the end of the day, if their ventures are net positive, then they should keep at it.

More and more I thought about it, the more sense it made. After all, I have seen ads on one TV network for shows in another TV network. How is the newspapers’ strategy any different?

Anyway, the real issue here is Google. It is becoming so large and powerful, that other companies with similar revenue models have to purchase space in order to stay in business.

Google has about 50% of the search market. And most people start their web experiences with a search. Over 90% of the people searching don’t make it past the first page of search results, so it makes good sense for advertisers to purchase space on that first page.

So, it seems, Google has wedged itself between eyeballs and content. I wonder if there is a way to wedge another revenue source between eyeballs and Google. Start thinking!

Labels: advertising, Google, Online Advertising

John Dodds over at "make marketing history" has written a several-paragraphs-long response to the cluetrain, called the j-train, that is worth praise for both is brevity and in its seriousness. My favorite of his points is below:

"Marketing Is Not A Department.
Marketing is a combination of elements that creates the environment in which it is possible to meet a customer need (starting right back at product development). It operates online and off and should inform and occupy every aspect and department of an organisation. More than ever before, it is everybody's job."

http://makemarketinghistory.blogspot.com/2006/11/j-train-marketing-20-minifesto.html

Labels: advertising

What do women want?
Well, to start, what women want are power tools, dishwashers, digital cameras, automobiles and houses. Not surprising to those who are counting, women make 80% of household buying decisions in the United States.

This quote from corante's Total Experience sums it up nicely: "women [are] better informed, more inquisitive, and ultimately the people who made the buying decision. Males in couples often stood on the sidelines while their female partners did the bargaining -- hard. The show host speculated that men don't want to be one-upped by salespeople, which is how they feel if they have to ask for advice. The same is true, it might be observed, for couples on the road or traveling overseas: who wanders endlessly, and who asks the questions that gets the couple where they're going? You got it: the gal. "

And why the hell do so many marketers focus on the 18-35 male market? Probably because those consumers watch tv, play video games and go to movies, and are the benficiaries of everything advertisied, but is the acutal purchaser of less than 20% of it. If you are selling beer and pizza, you might want to appeal to men - well scratch that, apparently most men prefer women to call and order pizza. Why is anyone worried that men arne't watching as much tv?

Some facts:
Women bring home 55% of income, so they are more than empowered enough to make purchasing decisions on their own.

1 out of 4 households in the United States are headed by a single woman.

83% of US households have 1 checkbook that is handled by the woman.

22% of homes are owned by single women (cmpared to 12% of single men).

The prognosis is on the upswing: Women for the last five-ten years have brought home the majority of business, law and overall degrees. (57% of bachelors degrees go to women, and an ASTONISHING 46% of medical degrees go to women.)

The 80% number is more conventional wisdom than hard number's but the 80% figure originates from some serious stats on female purchasing decisions. For instance, women make:
92% of grocery decisions
62% of new car decisions (40% of trucks!)
55% of consumer electronics

The Total Experience blog gleaned three points worth repeating here:

• Experiences are almost certainly different for men and women, categorically, outweighing individual differences. Designed experiences must be tested for these differences.

• Any experience design for a mixed audience must be designed with the assumption that the women's experiences will be decisive, if the point of the experience is a subsequent action on the part of the “experiencers.”

• Teams of experience designers will benefit by including women who see things in a context that men may not share -- and by taking their advice.

and here are my additions:

• Women are fantastic reasearchers. Don't over simplify for your female audience or inadvertantly condescend, they want know all the facts and want to know why each fact is relevant.

• If a woman has a bad experience, she will tell 20 of her friends for the next 20 years. Learn this and leanr it well: While a positive experience for women can be pretty good for your brand, a bad experience for women can be horrific.

• Women want to be respected, particularly in historically male-dominated areas such as financial services and automobile purchasing.

• Women pride themselves on SAVING money as well as spending it wisely. An intelligent promotional point might be to highlight what can be saved as well as why the purchase is otherwise prudent.

To hear the full show:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6423213

Labels: advertising

What? Seriously, “The Kids’ Market in the U.S.,” a study by market research firm, Packaged Facts, concluded that kids between 3 and 11 years old had a total of $18 billion dollars of spending power in 2005 – and growing… they say the number will reach $21.4 billion by 2010.

As kiddies gain more consumer power (read Porter’s “Five Forces”), they will be able to collectively (and probably unknowingly) negotiate better prices.

There are websites springing up all over the place designed to pocket some of this cash. The most interesting ones are the social networking sites for kids.

Sites such as ClubPenguin.com, NeoPets.com , and imbee are all jockeying to capture their share of the action.

As you would imagine, parents are concerned about the hazards of web. Privacy, sexual predators, social development, carpal tunnel, and lack of physical exercise are the things have parents bugging out the most. And since kids in this age group still listen to their parents, these social networking sites face some significant hurdles.

Many of these sites have instituted some sort of “parental permission” mechanism – but none of them (as far as I can tell) have offered what parents really want: a time limit. If one of these sites had compelling content and activities, account activation that is strictly created and controlled by a parent, and an option for a parent to specify the length of time the kid can use the site each day, then I’d bet parents would be more inclined to allow their kids to “play.” As it stands now, parents are “forced” to be the “bad guy” by policing the time their kids spend behind the computer. Under this scenario, kiddy social networking sites would sacrifice session length for increase subscriptions. Not to mention support-equity from parents.

Take a look at the activity around Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites… they are advertising gold mines. If they knew what was good for them, they would invest some cash and develop some vertical stratification.

In the meantime, we, the designers of communicators – the marketers, need to start thinking about what methods we will use to capture the attention of this demography on the web.

Labels: advertising, Old Media Deathwatch

Take a look at this:



This is before and after shots of the same model. In the video on the front of the Campaign for Real Beauty, you'll see that she is given better lighting, makeup, hair, etc., and then she's been photoshopped extensively to perfection. Finally, the camera zooms out and we have this billboard, and we see two young women walk by and look at her.

http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/

The campaign seems to be specifically asking us to consider that there is a destructive and negative aspect to generating this kind of fake beauty. a) the campaign says, it isn't necessary and b) it hurts women and girls.

My profession is design and advertising. I am employed, in effect, to communciate the best in people and products - to make them look good. My argument is that little retouching is necessary if we can just get the subjects at the right time in the right mood and with the proper expression. That isn't always possible, and inevitably, we are asked by our clients to make them "look good." But what is good?

The dove self-esteem campaign asks us all reconsider the fact that our definition of beauty might be quite damaging to women. This is hardly a new claim, and it has been rattled around for decades in academic circles and among fashion photographers and the like. It has been generally understood that the sociological and psychological effect of these images can be quite traumatizing. But it hasn't been popularized in quite this way before, so Dove should get credit for striking a nerve.

Moreover, Dove seems to be taking the due-diligence side of this issue quite seriously. That is, how much of an issue is this, is it severe, in what ways? A sampling of their poll is displayed on their site below, and it reveals that it is indeed a serious issue:


I spent some time reading the voluminous posts on the campaign's site, and believe me, this is something that everyone has a comment about. While there are many posts from women who seems to be just sighing with relief that anyone will honestly address this topic, a candid question from the southern-spelling poster "not-an-asshole" (a man, I presume) said, "ya'll be wearing makeup tomorrow, hows that different?" Links in the posts to the size zero model who dieed recently, numerous blogs and posts elsewhere show this is a vital issue to many people.

Some other things to see:

A rather well done and disturbing commercial with cute little girls alongside what they think of themselves.
http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/commercial.asp?src=InsideCampaign_commercial
youtube version - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1731400614466797113

slideshow with some data points, some unsurprising, others, quite intriguing.
http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.com/flat4.asp?id=6128

a fine photo exhibit:
http://www.campaignforrealbeauty.ca/realbeauty/main2.cfm

The idea that a home, food and personal care products company - unilever - can attempt to redefine what looking "good" is, is wonderfully and terrifically ambitious and - I think - admirable. But the more cynical side of me is simply awe-struck with the strategic side of this campaign.

I imagine sitting in a room and coming up with this campaign.
First, someone says, lets refashion our advertising into some sort of virtuous cause. Causes travel better than ads, and we can probably sell more if we are associated with something good. Second, after discarding "cleanliness is next to Godliness" and "clean is the new black" someone points out that poor self-esteem is a good issue, or at least no one else seems to have claimed it. Someone sheepishly mentions that dove has been on the wrong side of this issue for a millenia. Then as the ideas evolve they realize they have a goldmine of advertising riches on their hands. The models are cheaper. The point is crystal clear. Other ads side-by-side with theirs make their point for them. The message can travel along their entire product line. It will get them free PR placements, a community of associated products can be developed.

So I have a great regard for this campaign and this effort. I think it is worthwhile and - at times - beautiful and impressive.

But lets not forget this company still has some soap to sell. There is no amount of sarcasm in the world to help contextualize this promo that popped up as I visited the site:

Get a FREE* Dove Beauty Tote filled with product samples and help improve young girls’ self-esteem! Click now to order.

Labels: advertising, Design

Why can’t traditional agencies make online advertising work?

Over the past few months I have been watching my clients struggle conceptually with the online advertising model. But they all seem to be coming around to the idea that it’s the direction they need to head. Many of these clients are seasoned marketing professionals with years of marketing communications experience, and often they are working with traditional agencies on other endeavors.

But their agencies, by and large, cannot seem to guide them at all.

Having come from a traditional agency background, I know what the problems are on the agency side. Nothing about a traditional agency setup—their campaign development process, their billing models, their org charts—makes it possible to effectively execute an online campaign. Furthermore, until these agencies drastically restructure themselves, they won’t ever be able to make it happen.

On the media planning side, unless they’re doing a lot of it, the agencies have little buying power online and little knowledge about what constitutes a good price. Furthermore, they’re trained to think of online as a supplement to the “real” campaign, which limits their creativity in developing the program. If they’re used to B2B or brand/awareness advertising, the direct response model is alien to them—and they have a hard time understanding how to adapt it to increase awareness. They don’t understand the role of search engine marketing in the mix and how to integrate it effectively, and they don’t understand how response ought to be measured.

On the creative side, fat-cat creative directors have zero motivation to move towards online, and this may be the biggest problem. Flying to shoots, long post-productions and the attendant expense account, plus the glamour of seeing your work on TV (“Mom! Turn on ABC, my commercial’s running!”) are irresistible. Making 120x600 skyscrapers is just not as exciting.

Many agency creatives think of themselves as artists. The traditional agency culture obscures the true nature of advertising: it is sales!! The collective fiction of Nielsen and Arbitron ratings allows agency folks to gloss over the unmeasurable nature of the campaign with faux-scientific “metrics.”

Online allows no such gray areas—the creative either works or it doesn’t. This is not about making a beautiful, music-video-like commercial: this is about selling widgets. Exposing the commercial nature of our enterprise is unpalatable to most agency creatives, because it undermines their whole identity as inspired aesthetes who can’t possibly be held to measurable standards.

Finally, agencies will have to reduce their staffing bloat and change their processes in order to play in a world where turnaround times are incredibly fast and metrics happen in real time. The slow-as-molasses branding/campaign brief/heavy account management model weighs the process down. Pitches and client meetings don’t need to have 15 people. Online creative doesn’t require a cast of thousands to produce. A solid team composed of a client services person, a media buyer, and a good two-person creative team is sufficient to execute a large campaign. But agencies will be loath to slim down, because to do so will expose the fact that they’ve been too slow and too expensive for years.

So what does the future hold? Some agencies, probably large ones, will (and have begun to) make the transition. But I think many will suffer, because I suspect even now they don’t see the writing on the wall. After the dollars have already moved, the old-school agencies will try and make the shift, but it will be difficult and generally too late. Meanwhile, upstarts who do know how to do this stuff will be hungry and waiting for the business.

The tectonic shift has only just begun.

Labels: advertising

People are watching less and less TV. We all know that the TV industry is struggling big time. And networks are responding by airing more interesting material. I am having a hard time keeping my TV viewing hours down this season.

Also, commercials are down by 20%. So, more content and less interruptions for consumers - and a heftier price tag for advertisers since networks are reducing supply.

Commercials are getting better, too. They are better produced and more entertaining.

As a result, ads are costing more to produce (due to higher production value) and air (due to reduced supply). So much so, that networks are testing some nontraditional advertising options that reduce airing costs. For example, Cadillac and AOL have been running 5 second “blink” ads. The most common commercial length is 30 seconds, but other popular ad lengths are 15 and 60 seconds.

Creating significantly shorter ads is very challenging. Five seconds is a not a lot of time to convey a brand, message and a call to action.

Sounds like producing ads for the web. Only designing ads for the web is harder because the ad shares the viewing real estate with god-only-knows-what-else.

Traditional advertisers should take a long hard look at some of the techniques that we are using to capture people’s attention.

Labels: advertising

Be honest, your girlfriend simply doesn't drink enough beer, does she? This, unlike some her other faults, CAN be corrected! Just go to Poland.

The Polish company Karmi has released new packaging targeted at women and three tantalizing new beer flavors:

Poema di Caffé (coffee)
Selua (pineapple/piña colada) and
Lamai ( a mix of guava, dragonfruit and mint)

Though this is more properly categorized as a near beer (alcohol content is .1%), the coffee flavor was singled out by the Polish business magazine Handel as Poland's best new FMCG product of 2006.

http://www.karmi.pl

Labels: advertising

Portrait by Primoz Korosec

It is with great sadness that we bid farewell to Alan Fletcher.

I came to know his work only recently with the purchase of his fantastic book The Art of Looking Sideways. The book is a mix of a design explosion, a glimpse into a vast and varied intellect, a superb exposition on what it means to be visually aware and most touchingly, a heartfelt ode to the importance of design both publically and personally.



Stitched together loosely, the book follows the thoughts of the author as the design meanders wildly between expressive, childlike drawings and paintings and hyper-sophisticated typographical treatments. “This book has no thesis, is neither a whodunit nor a how-to-do-it, has no beginning, middle or end,” Mr. Fletcher wrote in his introduction. “It’s a journey without a destination.”


While at Phaidon, he designed numerous books.


A long association with Fortune magazine - and a great amount of mutual trust - allowed him to attempt approaches no other magazine (or designer) could carry off.


The iconic logo for the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Mr. Fletcher is best known for having started Pentagram back in the day and more recently working with Phaidon as a consultant art director. Mr. Fletcher, after reading a book on witchcraft, coined the name Pentagram, meaning a five-pointed star, one for each partner in his firm. The partners adopted it despite some misgivings about the association with witchcraft. He thought it was funny.



He is most often thought of as a conceptual designer. Avoiding ornament and shunning popular visual movements, he was known to strike piercingly at an witty or obscure point… it often wasn’t always the point you thought it was going to be. His designs are almost always striking, or gutsy, as some may call it. He used the word panache to describe it:

“Style is a curious word because it can mean all sorts of things, from mannerism to charisma,” he told English design critic Rick Poynor. “However, as far as I’m concerned, either what you’ve done has panache or it hasn’t. You can’t design panache.”


In the first example of a visual conceit which has since been used and reused, this popular bus advertisment won the heart of London when it appeared.



He is renown in the design world for his eclectic wit, sheer perseverance and a list of accomplished associations with some of the world’s most design-conscious brands: among them the Victoria and Albert Museum, BP, Shell, Cunard, Fortune magazine, Reuters, Time and Life, IBM, furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, Pirelli, Lloyds of London, Olivetti, Domus magazine, Polaroid and Penguin Books.Mr. Fletcher designed everything from corporate identities - logos, literature, advertising, signage, calendars - to toys, books, newspapers and office interiors.


The Reuters logo, retired in 1996, has long been touted as one of the most identifiable, evocative and enduring corporate logos ever. Shame on Reuters for getting rid of it.

Mr. Flether's curioisity was boundless and his allegiance unwavering to the necessity of high art infused into commonplace design. His house is surrounded by an almost illegibly extended tall array of letters, the descenders of which form a fence.

Early Influences on Mr. Fletcher included Alvin Eisenman, Norman Ives, Herbert Matter, Bradbury Thompson, the ex-Bauhaus Joseph Albers ("a bit of a prima donna," according to Fletcher), Saul Bass and of course Paul Rand.



The Kuwaiti Royal Commercial Bank's logo is relatively unknown to the western world, but it was a work of love for Alan Fletcher, who found the necessary Arabic script to be entrancing.



Two fortunate incidents formed Mr. Fletcher's professional life:

In 1957, while still a student at Yale, he was visiting Fortune magazine in New York just as news of the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik came through: a cover was commissioned for first thing Monday morning and he was there, so he got the assignment. It was an incredible coup; no student would ever get a Fortune cover commission. He subsequently worked freelance, encouraged by Saul Bass, Rand and Leo Lionni, eventually working full time for Fortune.



Later, He had planned to set up a studio in Venezuela, but a local revolution helped change his mind. As fortune would have it, the last boat out went to Genoa, and he got a job in the design studio of Pirelli in Milan.

Apparently he was the functional opposite of a grumpy old man, and stayed lighthearted till the end. He died of cancer on september 21st, wearing a T-shirt with handwritten words taken from one of his posters:

“I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.’’

Alan Gerard Fletcher, designer, born September 27 1931; died September 21 2006

Labels: advertising, Design