Hasta La Creative!

Now that the elections are over, just think about all the fun craft projects you can do with irrelevant campaign signs—at least, if you live in Brazil.

Civic nonprofit Mobilidade Urbana Sustenável and JWT are out with the Political Furniture project, a campaign in the wake of the country’s elections that shows people how to turn post-ballot sandwich boards into DIY home fixtures.

The project includes instruction sets for how to build coat racks, stools, towel horses, side tables and coffee tables out of discarded campaign materials. You still have to do a fair amount of work—the key element in the designs seems to be thee two-by-fours found in sandwich boards. The wood will need sawing and sanding and screwing, so don’t forget your toolkit.

Alas, campaign paraphernalia in the U.S. doesn’t tend to come with the plywood necessary to spruce up your foyer while you save the plant. If it did, the resulting hat racks would probably prove among the more useful things to come out of recent elections.

More images below. Via Good.

Voters in Berkeley, Calif. approved a tax on soda and other sugary drinks, while a similar proposal aimed at reducing obesity and diabetes in San Francisco fell short of a higher bar for passage.

The Berkeley initiative, which required a simple majority to enact a 1-cent-per-ounce tax, was approved by 75% of voters with 32% of precincts reporting, according to the Associated Press. San Francisco’s measure to impose a 2-cents-per-ounce tax was backed by 55% of voters, but required a two-thirds vote to pass.

“San Franciscans have made it clear that they can decide for themselves what to eat and drink,” Roger Salazar, a spokesman for the campaign to defeat the two measures, said in a statement. “Voters know that a new tax on beverages like juice drinks and soda would have driven up grocery prices.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Upstart girls engineering toys brand GoldieBlox is back, following up its “This Is Your Brain on Engineering” spot from April with a new Orwellian ad introducing an action figure for girls.

The ad (like previous efforts, created in-house) opens with the message “Fashion dolls teach girls to value beauty over brains. One is sold every three seconds.” Then a screen shows a Big Sister figure repeating, “You are beauty, and beauty is perfection,” as identically-dressed girls line up to receive Barbie-like dolls from a conveyor belt. Then one girl, dressed in overalls and Chuck Taylors, breaks from his spot in line and smashes the screen, causing GoldieBlox’s action figure to be produced instead.

“There’s Bob the Builder, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Jimmy Neutron—they’re all boys with IQs off the chart,” Goldieblox creator Debbie Sterling told TIME. “That’s intimidating for all kids, but particularly for girls who suffer from this thing called math anxiety where they have really, really high standards for themselves when it comes to math.”

While it effectively communicates its message, the spot lacks the same staying power as the clever “This Is Your Brain on Engineering” and the video that catapulted the brand onto the scene early last year. Still, the real question is whether it’s enticing enough to get girls to replace Elsa with GoldieBlox’s new offering. Stick around for a “behind the scenes” video after the jump. (more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

TK Maxx, the high-street retailer, has launched a Christmas ad highlighting gifts given as a celebration of people’s special relationships.

Agencies have taken many approaches to creating memorable gun-control ads. Grey Toronto’s latest work for Moms Demand Action, opposing an open-carry gun policy in Kroger supermarkets, is thought-provoking—and notably restrained by category standards.

A pair of minute-long radio spots use actual recorded phone calls in which Kroger employees try to explain why people can openly carry firearms in the store, but pets and kids’ scooters are banned. This approach could easily have veered into mean-spiritedness, but the conversations never make the employees sound foolish. These folks are, after all, not the policy makers.

Print ads effectively illustrate the same theme. They use the headline, “One of them isn’t welcome at Kroger. Guess which one.” A schoolgirl with an ice-cream cone, a teen carrying a skateboard and a big shirtless dude are shown beside men and women toting scary-looking firearms. (The print ads are variations on earlier Moms Demand Action efforts.)

“We wanted to pick a campaign that would give us the opportunity, frankly, to do more brand damage by running ads,” says Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action. “They may at first sit back and allow the brand damage to occur, and then realize, ‘Oh, wait, we’re alienating most of our customer base, which is women and mothers.’ “

A spokesman for the chain, which operates more than 2,400 stores in 31 states, told the Huffington Post: “Kroger’s policy has been and continues to be to follow state and local laws and to ask customers to be respectful of others while shopping in our stores.” Kroger has also blasted the Michael Bloomberg-backed Everytown for Gun Safety, which is funding the campaign, as “a national political organization that is attempting to use retailers to further their agenda.”

The ads were timed to coincide with Kroger’s investors meeting last week in Cincinnati. (Moms Demand Action claims Kroger pressured local radio stations to pull the spots. Neither Kroger nor iHeartCommunications, formerly Clear Channel, immediately responded to AdFreak’s requests for comment.) The radio spots continue to run in other markets through November.

For me, this campaign strikes the perfect tone, chastising Kroger without going over the top or employing gory scare tactics. The work is designed to make the audience think, to question the status quo—and I believe it succeeds. Even the employee in the “Scooter” radio spot sounds thoughtful in the end. As she struggles for words, you can almost hear her mind working, perhaps mulling the irony—some would say absurdity—of the store’s position.

CREDITS (radio and print)
Campaign Title: Choose One
Agency: Grey Toronto
Chief Creative Officer: Patrick Scissons
Writers: Patrick Scissons, Graeme Campbell
Art Director: Logan Gabel
Agency Producers: Vikki Kuzmich (print), Erica Metcalfe (radio)
Account Team: Laura Rovinescu, Darlene Remlinger
Production Companies: The Field (print) The Eggplant (radio)
Producer: Cherie Sinclair (print) Adam Damelin, Roc Gagliese (radio)
Photography: Eden Robbins, Hardave Grewal (retoucher)
Sound Engineer: Nathan Handy

Data is undoubtedly one of the most buzzed-about topics in marketing. But in most cases, large legacy brands are not structured to process data in order to understand where their sales are coming from, and ultimately are unable to calculate an ROI on their marketing efforts. According to a recent study, CMOs are facing major barriers to delivering on their data and digital objectives, including internal siloes, resistance to change and limited expertise in emerging technology.

For large corporations in particular, their size, structure, outdated models and old-school mentality make it very difficult to seize the opportunities presented by data. While a number of these forces and market dynamics are out of their control, in order to grow CMOs need to change their organizations to ensure success — and this includes creating a new set of processes, metrics and mindsets. So how can CMOs circumvent or break down these barriers to capitalize on data and advance their innovation agendas? Here are three steps:

1. Aim small, miss small. Changing a company’s structure and operating model won’t happen overnight. Implementing subtle changes that you know you can accomplish is a much more pragmatic approach to spark those larger shifts you’re envisioning. Often companies will recognize they have a problem and will want to do a complete global overhaul of their organization, systems and processes, and may even appoint a “czar” to spearhead it. But this type of change takes time and can be disruptive without bearing immediate results.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

Lindsay Pattison talks openly about what it takes to be a 41 year old global chief executive for a media agency network.

Yoann Lemoine vient de réaliser le clip de Black Atlass pour son titre « Jewels », fait d’or, de masques et d’effets 3D. On y voit le chanteur et différents visages de femmes plongés dans des liquides et une imagerie abstraite et psychédélique, jouant avec la symétrie et les reflets. Une production Iconoclast, à voir.

The next time you’re plotting out messaging for a major campaign or announcement, you should probably loop your chief privacy officer in first.

The results of research conducted by the International Association of Privacy Professionals finds that less than a fifth of privacy leaders at Fortune 1000 companies feel they have adequate say in the marketing, advertising and PR decisions made by their companies.

“Marketing departments have become much more savvy, and sometimes aggressive about their data-use strategy,” said Omer Tene, the IAPP’s VP- education and research. “You see privacy officers trying to contain that or adjust the trajectory to be more conservative.”

Continue reading at AdAge.com

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