Hasta La Creative!

The bad news for General Motors: The ongoing recall of 1.6 million vehicles is doing serious damage to the auto-maker’s reputation. The good news: GM’s consumer perception is not falling as far, or as fast, as Toyota’s brand image did after it recalled 3.8 million vehicles from 2009-2010.

That’s the finding of consultancy YouGov BrandIndex, which tracks consumer perception of brands. Over the past six weeks, GM’s so-called Buzz Score dropped to -15 on March 25 from a +8 on Feb. 12. That marked GM’s worst score in three years. It’s even below the -12 in 2012 when the nation’s largest auto-maker’s hovered near bankruptcy.

YouGov’s Buzz scores are measured by asking respondents if they’ve heard anything positive or negative about brands over the last two weeks via advertising, news or word of mouth. A brand’s scores can range from -100 to +100, with a zero score spelling equal positive/negative feedback. Around 180,000 adults were interviewed in the survey with a margin of error of +/- of 3%.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Rebranding Siemens Enterprise Communications as Unify Inc. was a daunting task. The global effort was designed to introduce Unify, a joint venture of 165-year-old Siemens AG and private equity firm The Gores Group, created in 2008.

While the rebrand had been more than two years in the making, it wasn’t until early 2013 that our top management finally opted to pull the trigger on Oct. 15.

The closer it got to the launch date, the more I started to realize that 100,000 things could go wrong.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Team Detroit has released a new spot for Ford that riffs on (some might say parodies) the recent Cadillac “Poolside” commercial from Rogue promoting the myth that hard work makes America superior to other countries who take a month off in August and value quality of life over property, ending with a winking “N’est-ce pas?” aimed at that traditional target of misplaced American ire, France, the country with the best health care system in the world.

Ford’s spot focuses on Pashon Murray, founder of Detroit Dirt, “a compost company working to turn forgotten parcels of land in Detroit into urban farms that not only feed, but revitalize our community.” Murray spends time collecting organic waste from offices, factories, and even manure from the Detroit zoo, to turn into compost. Unlike the smug Neal McDonough in Cadillac’s spot, Murray works hard to try to make her city, and the world, a better place. Team Detroit matches the pacing and imitates the tone of Cadillac’s spot, but with a completely different message. While Rogue’s Cadillac spot attempted to appeal to the kind of self-important conservatives who typically wouldn’t be attracted to an electric vehicle in an attempt to tap into a new market, Team Detroit and Ford take the opposite approach here — appealing to the kinds of environmental evangelists historically drawn to fossil fuel alternatives. Stick around after the jump for a “Poolside” refresher. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Brace yourselves, Twitter tagging is coming. Os apps da rede social para iOS e Android ganharam uma atualização que foca em um maior uso de fotos, e traz duas novidades: a possibilidade de marcar @perfis nas imagens e de subir até 4 arquivos em um mesmo tuíte.

A marcação está limitada a 10 pessoas por imagem, não influenciará na contagem dos 140 caracteres e vai gerar um aviso por email para as pessoas marcadas, igualzinho acontece com as atuais menções.

Na tentativa de evitar uma brecha para spammers, uma opção de privacidade permite limitar quem pode marcar você em tuítes, mas a opção padrão autoriza que qualquer perfil possa taguear você. Ou seja, se você se incomoda com esse tipo de coisa, é bom alterar essa configuração.

Já o upload de múltiplas imagens mostrará um mosaico automático na timeline, e quando o tuíte for “aberto” será possível deslizar com os dedos entre as imagens disponibilizadas.

O interessante da chegada desse tagueamento nas fotografias é que isso combina bastante com os rumores sobre o fim das menções e das hashtags. Além de economizar alguns caracteres na confecção do tuíte, não seria impossível que o Twitter expandisse o sistema de marcações também para as postagens apenas com texto.

Considerando que já é comprovado que tuítes com imagens tem maior engajamento, tanto o tagueamento quando o upload múltiplo podem ser interessantes para quem trabalha com mídias sociais.

Só fica a torcida para que não passem a tuitar aqueles incomodativos flyers de festa em que ‘marcam’ o seu nome para te convidar. De spam, já basta o que chega nos nossos emails todos os dias.

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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(TrendHunter.com) The Ray-Ban Clubmaster sunglasses have been around since the early 1950s. This time around, Ray-Ban is making them more modern by crafting them with aluminium.

This reiteration of the classic…

The statistics show marketing automation is lucrative, so why does adoption hover at 9% for businesses with revenues between $20 million and $500 million?

After all, nearly half (48%) of the technology industry and 36% of enterprises (businesses with more than $500 million in revenue) use it.

Like most new software platforms, the first solutions targeted the technology industry because of its engrained technical expertise and comfort level as early adopters. Next, providers focused on enterprise businesses with large resources.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Tutti Frutti! Play fruit est le nom de cette superbe série de créations réunissant de nombreux fruits de papier. Un rendu très réussi proposé par Mr.Printables, qui invite même à télécharger gratuitement les patterns de ces créations, afin que les petits et les plus grands puissent les faire eux-mêmes.

Newsflash: Advertising is nefarious and manipulative after all.

Earlier this week, we saw the stock-footage realization of the cheeky anti-advertising manifesto "This Is a Generic Brand Video," which brilliantly illustrated how advertising's visual cues are all ham-fisted and transparent, so viewers really don't have anything to worry about except maybe getting bored. By contrast, here's a fun clip from BuzzFeed that digs into the details of how a competent marketer sneaks into your subconscious and tricks you, most subtly, into thinking nice things about it.

Because consumers are just wide-eyed, dumbly smiling, mostly right-handed little piggy banks waddling around waiting to be relieved of our cash.

Actually, that sounds pretty much dead on.

It's hard to imagine ad creatives so pointedly calculating the presentation of products like the dangling of puppet strings, but maybe that's what art directors are really doing when they're hovering. Or maybe the crazy last-minute changes clients always demand are to blame, and agencies should be thanking the gods for plausible deniability.

Just kidding. No one's innocent.

Não importa quem tem a internet mais rápida ou as taxas mais baratas. Com tantas operadoras de celulares por aí, parece que o que realmente importa é a confiabilidade: saber que, quando você precisar, não vai ficar na mão. Pelo menos é o que acredita a Vodafone do Reino Unido, de acordo com a nova campanha criada pela Grey de Londres.

“The Call”, filme produzido pela Academy, é narrado pela esposa de um bombeiro, que enfrenta a tensão a cada emergência atendida pelo marido. Enquanto ela conta sua história, vemos imagens de uma equipe atendendo a uma emergência, um carro em chamas. As pessoas costumam perguntar a ela “Mas você não se preocupa?”, ao que ela responde: “Bem, nao, é apenas o que eles fazem. É o que eles são treinados para fazer. Eles estão acostumados. E você também”.

A mulher segue contando que, após 27 anos, ela ainda espera por um telefonema – ou uma mensagem de texto – depois que a emergência é atendida. “Mas, quando ele liga, nunca é ‘Eu amo você’, ‘Estou bem’ ou ‘Estou seguro’. É apenas ‘O que tem para o jantar?’”.

No final, a Vodafone informa que apóia 77% dos serviços de emergência do Reino Unido – a melhor prova de confiabilidade que uma operadora poderia esperar.

Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
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