Hasta La Creative!

Business travel: uuugggggggggghhhhhh, amirite??

Flying all over the place kinda sucks. It reminds us of that story about two creative directors who went all the way out to South Korea to pitch Samsung, then had to come back to the U.S. because some unnamed executives were too hungover to hear their spiel before heading BACK to Seoul the very next day! Good times.

Now, FCB New York is looking to rebrand Amtrak with its new campaign “Break the Travel Quo,” which is really all about arguing that taking the old-school rail is the best option in that classic planes, trains and automobiles threesome.

How so? Let us count the ways. First, you can make calls on your smartPHONE.

And you don’t have to worry about cramming all your stuff into a single carry-on.

On the driving side, the act of taking a train eliminates all traffic.

And it kind of maybe takes care of your annoying-ass kids, too.

“Break the Travel Quo” looks to be a longtime platform for the brand, and this campaign will also include digital and OOH work.

Here’s what FCB CCO Ari Halper had to say:

“By posing the notion, ‘What if there was an airline,’ the teaser ads grab travelers’ attention and create buzz by suggesting there’s an airline that lets you take four bags or use your phone anytime, shaking travelers out of their inertia. Then, everyone who viewed the teaser was retargeted to receive the ad announcing it’s Amtrak.”

OK so, one thing we have to get off our chests: “was” is a past tense verb. But these ads aren’t using it in that context, so the appropriate subjunctive would be “were,” as in “what if there were a plane.” Because, you know, it’s a theoretical—as the following copy makes quite clear.

Yeah yeah, we are not perfect and we make plenty of typos while editing our own work. The anonymous commenter we miss most might be the trusty grammarian who always corrected our fuckups. But this is still a pet peeve, even though we are pretty sure the copywriters on this campaign understand that they used it incorrectly.

Also, while the Amtrak experience may well be preferable to that of a major airline or the hellish cross-country road trip with your family, it can also be significantly more expensive, not to mention slower than flying.

But that’s all kind of irrelevant because these ads were pretty fun. Our favorite part of the whole effort has to be the alien sleep mask that arrived on our desk earlier in the week.

CREDITS
Account Management:
Marketing Integration Leader: Bill Miller
Group Management Director: Suzanne Santiago
Account Director: Melissa Pitts
Account Supervisor: Quinn Schwellinger
Account Executive: Jordan Abramson
Planning:
Group Planning Director: Raig Adolfo
VP Strategic Planning Director: Mark Hall
Integrated Creative Credits (E.G when the campaign is released at
Creativity Online/Adage)
CCO: Ari Halper
ECD: Stu Mair
GCD: Gabriel Schmitt
ACD: Kat Dudkiewicz, Adalberto Santana, Greg Nance
Copywriter: Ken Syme
Art Director: Justin Batten
Production:
Director of Integrated Production: Leelee Groome
Executive Producer: Stacy Flaum
MPC, Visual Effects and Post Production
Big Foote Audio, Sound Design and Original Composition for “Alien”
Sonic Union, Mix (Mike Marinelli, Mixer)
Epoch Films, Production Company
Director: Matthew Swanson
Director of Photography: James Laxton
Spotwelders, Edit Company (Dick Gordon, Editor)
Video (when the specific pieces go to creative outlets):
(Alien)
CCO: Ari Halper
ECD: Stu Mair
GCD: Gabriel Schmitt
ACD: Kat Dudkiewicz
Copywriter: Ken Syme
Art Director: Justin Batten
(Thumbs)
CCO: Ari Halper
ECD: Stu Mair
GCD: Gabriel Schmitt
ACD: Kat Dudkiewicz
(Bobble Family)
CCO: Ari Halper
ECD: Stu Mair
GCD: Gabriel Schmitt
ACD: Kat Dudkiewicz
(Honk)
CCO: Ari Halper
ECD: Stu Mair
GCD: Gabriel Schmitt
ACD: Kat Dudkiewicz
Radio
CCO: Ari Halper
ECD: Stu Mair
GCD: Gabriel Schmitt
ACD: Greg Nance
Executive Producer, Stacy Flaum
Sonic Union, Mix (Fernando Ascani, Mixer)
OOH
CCO: Ari Halper
ECD: Stu Mair
GCD: Gabriel Schmitt
ACD: Adalberto Santana, Greg Nance, Kat Dudkiewicz
Copywriter: Ken Syme
Art Director: Justin Batten

Full disclosure: we had never heard of the Ponderosa Stomp Festival before today.

But it’s an annual event in New Orleans bringing you the “OLD TESTAMENT OF ROCK AND ROLL!” for 15 years. Past participants have included such names as Roky Erickson (playing the songs of the 13th Floor Elevators), Gary US Bonds, the Gories, the Mummies … some pure-T kickass roots rock.

This year, the festival hired a group of Detroit-based creatives led by Tim Mahoney to promote the events, which will go down from October 5-7. They’ve made a couple of spots that draw on some of our favorite footage: retro televangelists.

We’re pretty sure that’s Robert Tilton, but don’t quote us on that. The next spot provides a bit more of that classic rock feeling via a certain snake charmer.

From the email we got about the project:

And lo! The good word shall be delivered to the unenlightened by means of a divinely ordained campaign of online broadcasts, outdoor advertisements, spiritual missives on Facebook and Instagram, and righteous merchandise. Say it loud brothers and sisters, #StompSaves.

The festival itself goes by the tagline “3 days of the best music you’ve never heard of,” which is quite great. Here’s another look at the kind of stuff you can expect down there.

Ponderosa Stomp 13. Oct 5-7 in New Orleans. Three days of the best music you’ve never heard https://t.co/2KXeEQYlJ3 #GetStomped pic.twitter.com/ZOBm3q0Hrc

— ponderosastomp (@ponderosastomp) July 28, 2017

The Instagram account also uses that #StompSaves tag, which is very much in keeping with the rock music as religious experience theme. And anyone who grew up in the ’80s will remember the televangelists. If not, you can always consider their modern-day equivalents like “prosperity gospel” bro Joel Osteen and our personal favorite, Creflo Dollar (or Mr. $65 Million Personal Jet).

Tim Mahoney led the project-based assignment with Kerri Mahoney on art, Andi Mahoney and Gregory Lane on copy, Derek Swanson, Michele Swanson, Randall Kupfer handling production/editorial and Dave Graw on the animation.

I vividly remember the look on my finance guy’s face when he saw the invoice. “This food better look f’ing amazing,” he said. It was $1,500 billed to a food stylist, who’d been part of a photoshoot we’d done involving … fortune cookies. I was not, at the time, working at Real Simple. Actually, I was not working at a magazine at all. I ran marketing at a 40-person tech startup selling marketing software.

Like many companies in our space, we had a thriving blog, which generated traffic and sales leads. And yet, we knew that our readers were mainly practitioners — digital strategists, marketing managers, growth hackers — and not the Fortune 500 executive types who had power over purchase decisions.

And so we made the decision to invest in print.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

In the ad-blocking era, marketers are going to great lengths to get their brands in front of skeptical consumers. For Volkswagen, that means sending people on a scavenger hunt through an imaginary city on Instagram that is devoid of paid advertising.

The social media sweepstakes is part of a new campaign for the redesigned 2018 Tiguan crossover that began last month with a TV ad called “The New King.” The spot, by Deutsch L.A., shows an inflatable King Kong chasing down a woman driving a red Tiguan through the city. The vehicle, not the gorilla, is the new “king of the concrete jungle,” declares the spot. The campaign pitches the Tiguan to urban single people, an increasingly important audience for marketers of SUVs and crossovers.

VW on Friday made the TV ad come to life on Instagram via a 21-day scavenger hunt in which viewers are fed daily clues and asked to find hidden Tiguans in a cityscape spread across multiple tiles. There is a catch, of course: To enter a sweepstakes for daily prizes, viewers must take a screenshot of the Tiguan and send a direct message to a VW-run account. The grand prize is a 10-day trip to San Francisco, Miami and New York. This video shows how it works:

Continue reading at AdAge.com

In the next three years, marketing departments will dedicate 22% of their budgets to analytics, yet companies still use less than one-third of their data to drive business decisions. Despite high hopes, analytics have yet to deliver on their promise.

Many marketers cite a lack of expertise as a primary reason why analytics aren’t informing business decisions. While that may be part of the issue, a deeper problem lies in how the analytics industry has divided itself along marketing and product lines, and the way companies have organized around their data in response.

In an effort to differentiate themselves in a crowded market, analytics providers are inadvertently encouraging siloed decision-making. Businesses, in turn, don’t think of data as an opportunity for collaboration — a misstep that’s stunting big data’s massive potential.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

If you’re an actor or producer in Hollywood, it’s hard to miss the flag Netflix has planted in Tinseltown. Its new 14-story tower is visible for miles in sprawling Los Angeles, topped by the company’s red logo. The smell of popcorn greets visitors in the lobby.

Inside, Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos is recruiting some of TV’s most successful producers and writers. Since Netflix streamed its first original series “Lilyhammer” in 2012, the company has built one of the most valuable TV networks by buying shows from others. Now, with a $16 billion budget, Netflix aims to become the world’s largest creator of entertainment, making programs just like current suppliers including CBS Corp.

Sunday’s Emmy awards in Los Angeles offer Netflix a chance to burnish its credentials. The company has five programs nominated for top awards in drama and comedy, including the offbeat hit “Stranger Things,” a low-budget homage to Steven Spielberg and “The Goonies.” The show is the first drama made in-house, Sarandos says in an interview, and a sign of more to come.

Continue reading at AdAge.com

It’s Friday once again, and what an interesting week it has been, with Apple’s new animated emojis, WPP Chief Martin Sorrell joining Twitter and National Cream-Filled Donut Day on Thursday. (Today happens to be National Linguine Day, National Felt Hat Day and National Hug Your Boss Day, among others, in case you’re interested in pseudo holidays.)

Take me out to the ballgame

Minneapolis-based creative shop Carmichael Lynch has been named AOR for Major League Baseball’s Minnesota Twins after a competitive review. The shop will work across brand strategy, creative, and media planning and buying for the Twins, including TV, radio, experiential, website, digital design and collateral design. The Twins previously had worked with Periscope for more than a decade. The relationship ended earlier this year. Carmichael Lynch’s work for the baseball team launches at the start of the 2018 season.

Continue reading at AdAge.com