It’s kind of surprising, we suppose, that Organic has never had a chief marketing officer up to this point, but the Omnicom-owned agency has now filled the newly created role with the promotion of Tracy Richards, who works out of the New York office. The 13-year Organic vet most recently served as group director/global business development. Richards’ CMO appointment comes as part of a “restructuring” of Organic’s biz dev efforts that’s being led by the agency’s CEO, David Shulman.
Along with the Richards promotion, sources familiar with the matter tell us that Organic has also won Kohler, KC Professional (adding to the agency’s portfolio of KC brands), and another, yet-to-be disclosed new business win on the West Coast that the agency just won in “a competitive pitch” with Razorfish. We’ll keep you posted when we find out what the new biz actually is.
The rise of Bitcoin, the ballyhooed virtual currency that has lately exploded onto the world scene, reflects the answer to a question that has historically vexed brands such as Burger King, Pepsi and Microsoft’s Bing: “If we build a better mousetrap, why do we struggle to attract customers?”
By any measure of a “better mousetrap” Bitcoin certainly leaves a lot to be desired. Its extreme volatility, with prices swinging between $110 and $1,100 in the last six months alone, limits its use for buying and selling expensive, durable goods.
Its narrow acceptance also hampers its ability to meet day-to-day purchasing needs, and a lack of banking infrastructure exposes those who do use it to considerable risk.
Mainstream American media sees Iran as a perpetrator. Whenever Iran is mentioned on CNN, FOX, NBC, CBS or even in the pages of The New York Times, you’ll get an image-orgy of the 1979–1981 hostage crisis.
You’ll see the American embassy in Tehran ransacked by revolutionaries and 52 of its staff held hostage for 444 days, and you’ll learn how humiliating this was for President Carter and the American people.
What you won’t be told is why the Iranian revolutionaries were so livid with anger.
For most of the 20th century, Iran was pillaged by the West, first by Britain, and then by the United States. These two empires did whatever was necessary to keep cheap Persian oil flowing. Murder. Torture prisons. Death Squads. Puppet tyrants. Thousands killed for resisting. Since the 1920’s Britain controlled Iran’s resources with underhanded politics and military might.
Then in 1951 a secular leader named Mohammad Mosaddegh became the first democratically elected leader of the country and he set out to nationalize Iran’s oil industry . . . to bring the resources back.
This idea was so popular, so powerful, that Britain needed help. They called the CIA.
Within a few months, America and Britain agreed on a plan . . .
Mosaddegh was taken out in a CIA-led coup and left under permanent house arrest. The dictator – the Shah – was put back into power, this time with renewed Western arms deals and American assurances the he’d be given a carte blanche to use the terrifying SAVAK secret police network however he saw fit.
What would Iran look like today had the fledging democracy’s head not been chopped off, its resources ransacked, its sovereignty stolen and its people demonized for daring to fight back?
Quatre ans seulement et incroyablement douée pour la mode. La petite Mayhem conçoit des robes avec sa maman à l’aide d’un seul matériau : le papier. L’artiste désigne ses robes avec sa maman et a déjà son site dédié à ces créations. Un reportage photo attendrissant d’un petite fille plein d’avenir a découvrir ci-dessous.
Em março do ano passado, a Pepsi chamou Jeff Gordon, piloto da NASCAR, para aplicar uma pegadinha em um vendedor de carros. O vídeo – com o susto monumental do pobre homem – fez muito sucesso e acumulou mais de 40 milhões de visualizações no YouTube. Foi até copiada aqui no Brasil depois.
Como tudo na internet, as acusações de que a brincadeira era armada pipocaram por todos os lados. Um dos que questionaram veementemente a autenticidade do vídeo foi Travis Okulski, jornalista do Jalopnik.
Pois bem. Com a ajuda de “amigos” de Travis, a Pepsi armou uma vingança. Jeff Gordon finge ser um ex-presidiário, agora motorista de táxi, e leva o jornalista para uma corrida que se transforma em fuga da polícia.
Tudo muito bem feito e divertido, mas, é claro, muita gente já diz que essa pegadinha é tão falsa quanto a primeira. De qualquer maneira, melhor não arriscar.
You could put the creative brief in the same category as old age. No one looks forward to it, but it’s better than the alternative. Creative briefs have been the fuel for great campaigns from “Got Milk” to Volkswagen’s “Drivers Wanted.” They also have been the whipping boy for unhappy creative teams desperate for inspiration. Account people defensively cling to them when clients trash brilliant concepts. And clients may sign them like free checks, forgetting that they’re launching teams of people on weeks of late nights and bad takeout meals.
To get any creative job done, you absolutely need a set of directions, and the brief fills in a lot of the basic information, but it can hardly guarantee success. The problem is that even the best brief leaves a huge uncharted void between the single compelling insight and the final work. At its worst, it can send a group of teams off in a hundred different directions.
I’m curious to discover how the creative brief can evolve and keep pace with all the other rapid innovations in the advertising industry. Why would we expect that a tool designed to create a pure advertising campaign would also work for more complex marketing campaigns that include social components, native advertising, a multitude of content types, and be distributed across paid, earned and owned media on a variety of devices?
Depois de fazer Amaury Jr. cantar rap, a campanha de Negresco continua a colocar celebridades folclóricas em situações fora de seu habitat natural.
Dessa vez, aproveitando o carnaval, o locutor Silvio Luiz canta um samba e repete o slogan #Desenrola, apresentado no início do mês.
O vídeo com Amaury Jr. está perto dos 3 milhões de views. Difícil que repita o sucesso, mas se a campanha continuar nessa linha, mal posso esperar pra ver o que mais vai aparecer. Roberto Carlos comendo carne, por exemplo. Oh! wait…
It might seem strange that PepsiMAX based its second "Test Drive" prank video with Jeff Gordon around doubts some people had about the first one. But it turned out to be a creatively fruitful approach.
First, it was a way to draft off the success of the earlier megahit. It also gave the second video a strong narrative. (Gordon, again in disguise, takes one of the big doubters—Travis Okulski of auto blog Jalopnik—on a very real, hair-raising ride of his own.) And finally, in many ways it used Gordon's pride as an accelerator. This isn't a guy, after all, who would want you to think he couldn't do these stunts himself.
Following the release of "Test Drive 2" on Thursday morning, we spoke with Marc Gilbar, creative director at Omnicom's Davie Brown Entertainment/The Marketing Arm in Los Angeles, which concepted and handled creative execution on the new video. (Like the first one, this one was directed by Peter Atencio of Gifted Youth.)
Below, Gilbar tells us all about the production, from the genesis of the idea to the safety issues to the moment when Okulski almost kicks out the camera inside the taxi.
AdFreak: The first "Test Drive" video did so well. I suppose a sequel is a no-brainer. Marc Gilbar: The first one was a huge hit. But as with any sequel, the difficulty is to do something fresh and original.
For every Godfather II, there's a Godfather III. Exactly. It's tough. We did [PepsiMAX's] Uncle Drew, and that's one where we just tried to expand the narrative and create a story people would like. But that's harder to do with "Test Drive," because of the character.
Pepsi, to their credit, wanted to address the haters. Haters is a general term, because I don't think that characterizes Travis, the guy we actually used. But the Internet audience is a conspiracy-driven audience that will literally break down every moment of your video. We always got a lot of amusement out of that, but we thought a lot of people could relate to it, too—and if we could incorporate or reference it in some way, it would be fun for people.
There happened to be this incredible article following the release of the first video. I had noticed it at the time. And when we got the brief and started thinking about it, we went back and looked at it, and realized how great Travis was and his whole breakdown of the first video—everything from the sound of a V8 engine versus a V6 to the cup holders on this model of Camaro. It was pretty funny. We thought he would make a great mark for the second one.
You weren't involved in the first video, though. No, [TBWA\Chiat\Day] did the first one. Pepsi will give a jump ball on a lot of these projects. The "Zero-Calorie Cola in Disguise" came out of Uncle Drew and sort of expanded into the world of racing. Chiat did that first one, which was great and a huge success. The second one was more of a jump ball, and we had this particular idea.
It's interesting to focus on claims that last year's ad was faked. Is that just a hook to get people in—to draw off the success of the last one? Yeah, I think it was a way to take a new angle. Anything else would have felt like you were doing the same thing over again. I think the honesty of it is what makes it great. With a lot of these pranks, if the setup is earned and done right, it makes the prank that much more enjoyable. If you just saw Jeff take a random person on a crazy cab ride, it may be funny, I guess, but the fact that this one had a specific purpose makes the drive that much more fun for the audience.
Shortly after the first one, I spoke to the director, Peter Atencio. He could only say so much. But it's not the point of the second video to really address whether the first one was real or not, correct? I think that's right. What drove it, to a large degree, is that Jeff really wanted to show his stuff. He's a competitor. In the second one, there's no doubt that he's the guy behind the wheel. And obviously he's very capable of taking Travis on a crazy ride. Jeff was very involved early on. To get a Nascar driver to pull something like this off, there would be a lot of hurdles, I think. But the fact that he was so excited about it made it possible.
How do you get a guy like Travis to do this unwittingly without signing a disclaimer? Part of the thing about Travis in particular is that he's such a big auto enthusiast. There was a lot of talking with his friends and his editors and the people around him just to feel out what kind of a guy he was. He's such a great sport. There's always risks involved. But he loves cars, he loves racing, he races cars. And his friends and editors also said he's excitable. He's a guy who gets excited.
Well, that turns out to be very true. Right, it's perfect. There's a lot of unknowns with something like this. We had one shot at it, which was kind of nerve-wracking. But we felt good about the course and the safety of the course. We had designed it and tested it several times the day before, and with Jeff. We made sure it was super safe. And Travis just seemed like the kind of guy who could be taken for a ride, but also kind of enjoy the whole thing. At the end, he even wanted to go and do it again. He wanted to drive. He's a true gearhead.
There's one moment where he kicks the divider. Were you worried he was going to dislodge the camera? There are so many moments in there where we got really lucky, in the way he reacts. That one was totally unexpected. I believe his foot even covers the lens at one point. We tested our cameras. They're pretty durable. And we built that whole divider and reinforced it. At the time we were just sitting back and watching what was happening. We saw the camera was still working, so that was good.
You only have one take to get it right. That's right. And there's really no way to fake this kind of thing. Watching it afterward, we saw that his reactions were pretty big, so we were confident that we got what we needed. And then we had a consumer on set who had won a test drive with Jeff Gordon. So after he had finished the drive with Travis, we put the contest winner in the car, and this teenager got to go around the course once, which was fun.
Was Jalopnik wary of being part of an advertisement? They were very intent on keeping their journalistic integrity. I think they saw the potential for a great story. They were obviously super collaborative and really fun to work with. But they wanted to keep that wall up and make sure Travis wasn't compensated in any way. If you read his article, it doesn't really talk about the product or the campaign—just the experience. And that was the story for them. They got a great story out of it—what it was like for him.
What it was like was terrifying. I read the article this morning, and he really breaks it down, which is his style. Every thought in his head. Afterward we all had the same questions for him: What were you thinking? And he said in those moments, you're not thinking. He's been responding to commenters on Twitter, people saying, "You didn't see the cameras?" And he's like, "No, I was scared for my life!"
I'm sure you're hoping this second video will be just as big as the first. You know, that's a big number. Just the fact that people are sharing it and enjoying it is the goal. It's hard to really predict the numbers, but it seems like that's happening so far. We're excited about it.
You don't have to worry about Jalopnik criticizing it, anyway. Right! We'll leave that to other people. There are plenty of other critics out there, I'm sure. We'll have to go after them some other time.
A new Addy campaign from Rochester RAF Connect folks asks, “What’s Your Spirit Animal?”
They’ve created a 2014 Spirit Animal Generator, inviting advertising professionals to answer a series of questions to summon their inner spirit animal. Once you’ve completed the quiz you can upload a photo to have your spirit animal superimposed over the image, or opt out and just get the details behind your spirit animal. It’s a bit ridiculous and silly but also kind of fun (then again, this is how the ADDYs roll), like most online quizzes of this nature. Give it a try for yourself and share your spirit animal in the comments section if you’d like.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
It’s kind of surprising, we suppose, that Organic has never had a chief marketing officer up to this point, but the Omnicom-owned agency has now filled the newly created role with the promotion of Tracy Richards, who works out of the New York office. The 13-year Organic vet most recently served as group director/global business development. Richards’ CMO appointment comes as part of a “restructuring” of Organic’s biz dev efforts that’s being led by the agency’s CEO, David Shulman.
