It's Fun When Creativity Comes Alive

Concepting creative is the lonely side of creativity. It's just you and a partner sweating out new ideas. But once you get your client's approval, it's suddenly a team sport. You hire a production company to be your partners in bring your ideas to life, and while production is terrifying at times, it's also a whole lot of fun.

Here's a case in point, a photo shoot for Volvo (by Morawski & Company - posted on LinkedIn) that got me remembering just how much fun it was.

Since we were talking about this on Monday...

Here's some research on Twitter and other social media.

How to Find 50K Customers by Spending $0 on Paid Media

I'm more than a little skeptical about this.

My wife and I were "Potential Customers" for a Prius after going to a drive-o-fair which included test drives (for each of us) and a truck trailer full of games, etc, that showed us all the reasons to buy a Prius.

Even our dog, Grace, jumped in the back of one and seemed happy with the space.

Nonetheless, after combing the alternatives, we bought a Ford Escape hybrid.

Read this and tell me what you think!

Agency of the Future?

While we know that the business of advertising agencies is rapidly changing, we still don't know what it will look like. Probably there will be several different "new looks."

I hope one will be Mother.

P&G Never Misses a Marketing Opportunity

Here's a pretty good example, an article in yesterday's New York Times by Andrew Adam Newman that shows how thorough the marketing process is at Proctor & Gamble when presented with an opportunity.

Dawn dish washing liquid has become the "soap of choice" by people who rescue sea birds after an oil spill. The article illustrates a case study in P&G Integrated Marketing Communications and show how each touchpoint works to re-enforce the others - the TV spot, the Facebook page, and the donation campaign.

Links all over the place. I especially liked the quack at the end of the TV spot.

It Must Be Gadget Day: this is pretty cool, too.

Google is rolling out Sidewiki, "that allows people to post notes alongside Web sites that others using the same application can read."

Here it is via Online Media Daily, by Laurie Sullivan.

While We're Talking About Starbucks...

... you might soon be able to pay for you're Soy Latte with your iphone.

Here's the story by Mary Walsh on Online Media Daily.

P&G: Marketing Needs to Work in the Store.

When I was at Ketchum Advertising in the late 70s, and working on Safeway, we came up with a great idea and took it to our client, certain that it was a winner.

We suggested a "Paper Sale." A lot of people stock up on paper towels, toilet tissue, facial tissue and the like - we opined - and why not cut prices so that all of them could stock up while shooping at Safeway? We even pushed the envelope by suggesting that stationary, magazines anf books be included.

When the "pitch" was over, while they were very kind about it, they let us know how bad an idea it was. "That'd mean we'd have to stock a lot of paper to back the sale," said somebody.

"And all of it comes in big, huge boxes," said somebody else.

"And our backrooms don't have the space to handle all those big boxes and still be in business," said a third somebody.

"But thanks for thinking outside the box," said the boss - and everyone laughed. I think with us, not at us.

An article in today's AdAge Online begins, "If it doesn't work at the store, it's no longer a good marketing idea for Procter & Gamble Co., which increasingly is driving home this concept, known as "store back," with all its agencies, not just its so-called shopper-marketing shops."

And while it about more than store operations (per our Safeway fumble) the truth is that the shopping experience is crucial to brand performance. Here's the whole story.

Coca-Cola Still #1 Valued Brand. But...

As the story says, "Consumers lost trust in brands this year as the recession deepened."

Here it is as reported by Associated Press/USA Today.

btw: Consumer trust didn't go down everywhere. Google takes the #7 spot in the order, up 25% over last year.

Starbucks: another perspective

We talked about Starbucks in class on Wednesday. Here's another point of view: author Kevin Maney thinks Starbucks big mistake was when it tried to be both a special experience (the music, purple chairs, the Italian cup sizes, etc.) and convenient (one on every corner) at the same time.

A pretty interesting thesis. Get the story here.

Leno Show Backed by $10MM Campaign

We talked - last week - about NBC and its desperation to save production money by "stripping" a Monday through Friday show from 10 to 11 pm starring Jay Leno.

Looks like the network is as serious as a heart attack.

NY Times advertising columnist, Stuart Elliott, explains NBC's predicament and the "off channel marketing" strategy that the network hopes will make this balloon rise.

nytimes.com may require a free registration to see this article.

The Beatles: Still the Strongest Brand in Music

The recent success of the game "The Beatles: Rock Band" has cast new light on the legendary quartet which seems to be as profitable as ever.

How do they do it? By managing the brand very deliberately and carefully.

Here's a column in today's AdAge online by Beth Snyder Bulik that tells the story.

Chaos? Or creative destruction?

As a follow-up to yesterday's post:

Why is it that whatever things are like, good or bad, we seem to think that's the way things will be from now on. Jimmy Carter talked of a national "malaise." And recently we experienced an "illogical exuberance" that was the lemming's cliff that failed to warn us about the coming crash.

Stephan Jay Gould once wrote an essay about why Joe DiMaggio's 56 consecutive game hitting streak would (probably) never be broken. The numbers, he wrote, are always chaotic near the beginning of any undertaking - which is where Joe was in 1941 - and then they flatten out.*

So along comes Jeff Goodby and in an AdAge (maybe OpEd?) column, he says pretty much the same thing about Bob Garfield's book.

Whistling past the graveyard? Or insightful thinking.

What do you say?

*(In checking these numbers I discovered that DiMaggio, when playing with the San Francisco Seals, had a 61 game streak.)

Whining About Advertising

Every once in a while somebody starts the whining again. Advertising is bad. Bad, bad , bad. Badder than bad. It's, well, pretty darn terrible.

Bob Garfield, advertising critic for AdAge, quotes Samuel Johnson who, in 1759, wrote "Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic" foreshadowing Howard Gossage's "Is Advertising Worth Saving?"

Karl Marx gave the ad business a colorful spin when he wrote "Advertising is a bloated maggot feeding on the decaying corpse of capitalism."

Vance Packard hammered pretty hard on both advertising and consumerism in the 50s with "The Hidden Persuaders," and Wired magazine asked, on the cover of its February 1994 issue, "Is Advertising Finally Dead?"

And, of course, Adbusters is always with us.

Now it's Bob Garfield himself is winge-ing, of a sort, in a new book, The Chaos Scenario.

This morning's commentary on OnlineMediaDaily's "Over the Line" feature by George Simpson decides advertising is "Unloved. But Effective."

Here's a video that promotes The Chaos Scenario:






An interesting rant.

I HATE Ads That Try to Scare Me

Here's an ad by Cramer-Krassalt for National Preparedness Month "which encourages people to be ready for any kind of disaster the universe might throw our way. Even the inexplicable, gravity-defying kind." Watch this:



What cultural crap!

Read what AdFreak says about our "government's emphasis on U.S. citizens' self-preparedness seems to confirm what most Americans already know: We'd better not rely on our government for help in times of disaster." Or not.

You're in College, Who Do You Trust?

The the 2009 edition of Alloy Media + Marketing's College Explorer survey says Johnson & Johnson, Sony and Apple are at the top of your "who do you trust" list.

Here's the whole story on Media Daily News.

Sound about right to you? Or not?

Why Not Merge TV and Internet?

"Michael Kokernak, a 20-year television industry veteran, has spent the past 13 years researching and inventing monetization technologies for the digital spectrum."

And Mr. Kokernak also suggests the modest proposition in the above headline.

Read his rationale here.

What do you think?

PC Strikes Back!

We talked in class last week about the great Mac vs. PC campaign from TBWA\Chiat\Day for Apple.

Here's a big archive of the spots starting in 2006 to today.

The New York Times this morning featured a really interesting article by Devin Leonard about Microsoft's own I'm a PC campaign (via Crispin, Porter & Bogusky), headlined "Hey, PC, Who Taught You to Fight Back?"

Note: nytimes offers free access when you register.

Yawning in class? Ouch!

McDonald's, not one of my favorites, humbles me this morning with an example of how truth makes advertising work.

Here's the story in this morning's Boston Globe.

btw: when you get to the bottom of the story, the "media and advertising professor at BU" suggests that this spot may be mistaken for programming. Do you agree?

Advertising Works.

Go figure.

Unilever's new CEO, Paul Polman, banks on increased advertising and marketing - and comes out smelling sweet as, if not a rose, at least like AXE Revitalizing Shower Gel.

Here's the story on this morning's adage.com.