Alternative marketing thinking

CPB recently won the Microsoft account. And the biggest challenge that the agency is facing is to convert a bunch of Mac heads to start seeing the genius that’s Microsoft. “Crispin sort of exists because of the revolution in desktop publishing that the Mac brought about. You could be a small shop and compete against Madison Avenue for the first time because all the tools were in your computer.”, Alex Bogusky in Fast Company. So how will the iconic agency help Microsoft be seen as cool? Read this story . Meanwhile Nike and CPB decided to part ways from their association on the Nike + running account.

Not a day passes when you don’t come across an item in the papers that paints a doomsday scenario about the world plunging into a recession. Many in the ad world are talking about layoffs and cutdowns in the months ahead. But Wired reports the contrary. No recession is the verdict from this premier magazine. Read more.

The Dutch financial services company is rolling out a new campaign crafted by BBDO saying that it knows your number, refering to the amount of money one might need after retirement. The entire campaign is made keeping in mind ING’s orange and “optimistic approach” to things. Orange numbers float everywhere, when people go about their daily lives. The campaign is aimed at making retirement look less intimidating and is done in a chirpy and happy commercial. Watch the commercials here. And here.

David Knox, Brand Manager Walmart team at P&G is a specialist in marketing to teens. Speaking at the IEG annual sponsorship conference, David presented a picture of Youth in the US and what smart marketers are doing to connect with this increasingly elusive demographic. The slides of his presentation are up on Slideshare.

Like our philosophy that urges brands to grow young, Dave and P&G have come to realize that Youth is not a demographic anymore, but a mindset. He believes that Generation Y is not an isolated demographic, but a group that can give marketers and advertisers a glimpse of how others will behave in the future.

Youth in America believe that stress is a way of life today. But they are optimistic about the future. Most believe that they can personally achieve the American Dream, of being simply happy, no matter what they do.
There is a we-volution taking place at the moment. With places like services like Kiva and Prosper leading the social lending change. Other examples of this phenomenon are Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers and UK based MyFootballclub, where 50,000 fans have come together to create a football club. Another example of this revolution is the community centred online apparel store Threadless, where anyone can submit a design or an idea, which is voted for by visitors of the site. Creators of the selected design then get a share of the sales.
For most young people lives have become completely digital. Their computer is the No 1 item they cannot live without. And they live a connected life, either through their computer or their mobile phone.
Being socially conscious is on the rise among the young. And brands like Product(Red) and
Innocent are examples of brands that operate in this space.Media for the young mindset is everything around them. With community, self expression and personalisation being the key.

Marketing to youth according to Dave is all about entertainment, authenticity, giving up control, recalibrating marketers tolerance to risk and using the power of networks.

Jones Soda is a good example of a brand that has given up control, by letting users create their own bottle labels.

One of the biggest shifts that’s part of Dave’s presentation is the role of companies that own and manage these brands. He says companies need to think like Venture Capitalists, who bet on many ideas and are willing to have a blockbuster or two and many failures.

Of the other examples he quotes are P&Gs own, BeingGirl portal that’s now operational in 27 countries. Youth travel site STA Travel . Tween Fiction series MacKenzie Blue, that was created by a buzz marketing group for Harper Collins. Nike’s work with graffiti artists and their ID store.

Nau takes a new route to retailing their high-performance outdoor apparel. They do everything backward. They designed their Web site before building a single store; they encourage customers to buy less; and they market themselves by not talking about themselves. An interesting aspect of their stores is that while customers can walk into stores to touch and feel products, they can’t buy the stuff right away. They go online using computers available in the stores, just like they would do from home. Read their story on the HBR site.

Two interesting stories that have started a lot of buzz this week. Esther Dyson’s op-ed piece in Wall Street Journal on new thinking about online ads and how this could change the pecking order of many online companies.

He writes: “While the big news in the online world focuses on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, a more profound revolution is taking place on the online social networks: The discussion about privacy is changing as users take control over their own online data.

The current online-advertising model will become less effective, even as it gets increasingly sophisticated. New players are emer-ging to devalue the spaces that the ad giants are currently fighting over. Companies like NebuAd, Project Rialto (Funded by Alcatel & Lucent), Phorm, Frontporch and Adzilla are pitching tools directly to Internet service providers, that will enable them to track users and show them relevant ads”.

One of the key predictions in Esther Dyson piece is the involvement of uses in the whole thing. A good example of which he feels is travel site Dopplr, where users get together “and list their trips, and see how they intersect with their friends’ itineraries. “Oh, we’ll both be in London April 4? Let’s get together!” Or, “Juan and Alice will be in town next Tuesday. Let’s hold a dinner!” You can imagine or visit equivalent approaches for books (a hypothetical Amazon 2.0, new and more persona-lized), clothes (Glam.com and Stardoll.com), and even money management”

“So what’s the business model? I’ll “friend” British Airways, which will say, “We see you’re going to Moscow next month. Why not fly through London and we’ll give you 10,000 extra miles?” I’m no longer in a bucket of frequent travelers, my privacy protected. I’m an individual with specific travel plans, which I intentionally make visible to preferred vendors. British Airways, of course, will pay Dopplr a handsome sponsorship fee to be eligible to be my “friend”

If friending is what Dyson is talking about Umair Haque is writing in HBR blogs about the need for brands to do less to become relevant.

One of the examples he quotes is of Nike, who are beginning to rethink communications as a set of services that listen to and benefit consumers, instead of impose costs on them.

Like this story in NY Times “…Behind the shift is a fundamental change in Nike’s view of the role of advertising. No longer are ads primarily meant to grab a person’s attention while they’re trying to do something else - like reading an article. Nike executives say that much of the company’s future advertising spending will take the form of services for consumers, like workout advice, online communities and local sports competitions.”

Haique sums up by saying that “Like Google, the Nike guys have come to the conclusion that new sources of advantage must be built on finding ways to invest in consumers – on communications that benefit consumers, not impose costs on them. In turn, these new modes of communication will let Nike talk less – and listen more”

Car company Porsche is to mount a legal challenge over the decision by London Mayor Ken Livingstone to raise the capital’s congestion charge from £8 to £25 for the highest-polluting vehicles. Beginning October 27 this year, the new charging regime will see the £25 charge apply to vehicles emitting more than 225 grams of carbon dioxide per one kilometre, as well as those registered before March 2001 which have engines larger than 3,000cc. By getting active about a cause that people care about, Porsche UK is getting a lot of visibility. Is this a viral idea in the making?

Campaign Magazine’s annual roundup of agencies show that most network agencies have seen a decline in revenues. AMV BBDO is down 7%, JWT is down 25%, Publicis down 24.4%, DDB down 10.7%, Ogilvy down 11.9%, Lowe down 14.76%, McCann down 5.5%, and Grey down 2.6%. Only two network shops bucked the trend: Euro RSCG up 32% and TBWA up 19%. Meanwhile, big growth came from Fallon, up an impressive 150% (on a much smaller base that the biggies), WCRS up 87%, DLKW up 20%, VCCP up 17.9%, Miles Calcraft up 24%, BBH up by 13% and Wieden + Kennedy up by 12%. The WK London blog has a write up.

When a repentant Cannes Advertising Festival awarded BMW Films a Titanium Lion a year after it was originally entered, something changed. The award shifted the center of gravity of the advertising industry from the creative department and put it into the hands of media visionaries.

Now it is easy to confuse the statement above and think that it is media planners who are calling the shots just now. Media is not about which channel, what time and the likes, but about the distribution (across an extremely fragmented world of touch points), relevance and timing of a marketing message, as it is about the creative idea and execution.

In the case of BMW Films, while the execution, idea and everything “typically creative” about the work was superlative, the fact that the idea put branded entertainment at the centre stage and gambled with the web as a no cost distribution model that makes any new piece of web enabled, long format film making a BMW Films clone.

Media as creative has spawned a new breed of advertising thinker, the communications or transmedia planner. His job is not to take the existing creative idea and find ways to put them out in as many places as possible. But to help the creative and the client find new expressions of the brand’s POV and spread these views.

One of the most interesting examples of media as creative thinking came from Adidas in the form of the Adicolor sneaker. Even the product was conceived to tell a story. The all white shoe originally released in 1983 was re-released in 2006 in a kit that included the original plain white shoes, paints, brushes and a wooden palette. The ensuing campaign was a masterpiece in new age storytelling. Simple interactive billboards that had a white sheet pasted it, inviting scrawlers and graffiti artists. A few days later a layer would be added to the board to reveal the shoe with custom created graffiti under each one of them. The idea was taken into film where film makers explored different colours, with little or no reference to the product and its benefits.

One of the problems with using a media idea as the creative itself is that once a brand uses a format successfully, it becomes very difficult for some other brand to use a similar format and do it well. While there are many examples of using YouTube as a TV channel to create a miniseries, LonelyGirl15 will always be the benchmark that will be difficult to beat.

At a time when consumer attention to advertising is flagging and technology is spawning new ideas there is a need for a bunch of thinkers who can understand the possibilities of science and the needs of brands to help create ideas that will solve marketing problems.

Anyone who had been looking at web banners as intensely as us, (yes, some of us out here have no work at all ;-)) would have noticed a quiet and slow revolution happening in the space.

While most Indian websites don’t really support new generation, full motion banners, those on many of the highly visited international sites have gone the way of the 30 second slots, known to be traditional to TVCs. Sound (with a mute button of course), motion, action, and with the added dimension of interactivity.

Bannerblog is a good place to look up the latest in banners. This Australian site has been showcasing the very best banners from around the world.

The recent StowieStories banner is a good example of how much the banner has evolved - it is a microsite disguised in a banner. One, on mouseover, reveals itself in its full glory. Advergaming is growing exponentially and one of the places where we are beginning to see glimpses of advergaming is on banners. Simple participatory ideas that lure online users to spend a few extra seconds with banners. Like this one from Dixie that invites you to a simple shoot out game, that carries their kill germs concept forward.

Newer executions of banners show us how we don’t have to get boxed into the small spaces that traditional banners are stuck in. By this we don’t mean having irritating shoshkeles that interrupt the visitor, a legacy of traditional thinking. This wonderful Apple banner is a testimonial, a commercial, a banner, and a whole lot more.

One of the things that new age banners do very well is to reach out to the elusive young person, who has moved away from TV and print. This banner does a wonderful job of enticing the young Swede who is reluctant to join the Army. Not only is it a wonderful piece of creative, the agency, DDB Sweden has built in a social component on the banner making the interaction even more engaging.

Technology and gaming companies are at the forefront of the banner revolution as most of their customers are online anyway. Apart from the Apple example, that are a lot of examples on Bannerblog that showcase new age banners that push the envelope.

While many of the best banners come from digital agencies where flash artists and software writers come together to invent the next idea, one old school agency has a wonderful showcase if not some of the most advanced banners seen anywhere. Visit the Goodby, Silverstein site and look up some very cool work they have done mostly for HP. In fact the Oneshow Interactive jury is headed by Goodby’s Will McGiness.

Just how important banner ads have become can be judged by the fact that award shows have started recognizing banner ads with lions and pencils.

So is the banner ad the next 30? Well if television had an interactive element, and if TV ads could be targeted and measured so precisely, banners could have taken over the mantle easily.