Hasta La Creative!

To help provide and aid businesses and potential advertisers properly in hitting their target audience, Yahoo has launched three new targeting products for brand and performance marketers.

“As the economy continues to put pressure on advertising budgets, marketers are looking for increased accountability for every dollar they spend. Yahoo!’s new targeting products significantly improve the ability for search and display advertisers to reach their target audience, providing increased efficiency and accountability,” said Michael Walrath, senior vice president, Advertising Marketplaces Group, Yahoo!. “Yahoo! remains incredibly well positioned to meet the growing advertiser demand for performance marketing offerings, and no other company can provide marketers with such scale and expertise across search and display advertising.”

The new products include:

(Source) Press

There is a new kind of advertising service today and it includes the use of HD video signages. express by .advancedMethod prides itself on being a new kind of digital signage system: one that is easy to use, easy to update and easy to access. express includes everything one needs in a system: all the hardware, all the software, industry-related templates, even “live” news feeds. express is designed to dramatically simplify the deployment of digital signage, whether that means to a single sign or a gigantic network.

The principle behind express is that anyone and everyone can be a designer. express gives one the tools they need to create professional content. Now, with the new video feature, one can take their design skills even further.

Video features traditionally offered in digital signage systems only give the option of uploading a finished clip onto a display system. express allows one to take the design process one step further and continue personalizing their material.

Once video is uploaded into express, one can add or remove text, photos and special effects on top of the clip. This gives the user the power to update material as often as they need without having to remove and re-upload video content.

(Source) Press

Une belle déclinaison et des montages d’effets 3D réalisés sur le travail d’illustration d’Otàvio Rios pour l’agence brésilienne Artplan. Le tout avec une baseline efficace “We put anything on paper”.

Credits:
Name: Mac Repair Service
Client: MacHerman
Agency: New Message Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Creative: Chris Sant
Art director: Chris Sant
Copywriter: Chris Sant

In Belgium there’s an unusual war going on between The Delhaize Group and Unilever. Delhaize, being one of the biggest chains of supermarkets in Belgium, refuses to take Unilever’s products into stock at the conditions Unilever provides to the supermarkets. Unilever reacted with buying ad-space in the Belgian newspapers to convince the consumers to switch to other supermarkets, where the Unilever products are still available. Banning Unilever from the shelves has a big impact on the shops because Unilever has a whole lot of leading brands under its umbrella. Brands that the Belgian consumers use on a daily basis: Axe/Lynx, Dove, Rexona, Cif, Sun, Lipton, Becel, Maïzena, Knorr, Bertolli, Calvé , Magnum, Solo, Omo, Sunlight and about 250 other brands. When the current stock runs out you won’t be able to find these products in the Delhaize supermarkets.

While the Belgian media is figuring out who is going to win this war, I think their asking the wrong questions. It’s not about who’s winning this war, it’s about who loses the least.

– Delhaize will lose customers because a lot of the consumers are loyal to the brands, especially when it’s about products you use every day to fulfill basic needs (hygiene, hunger, thirst, …) and we’re not talking about 1 brand but about +250 brands. People who have been eating Zwan sausages for many years want to keep eating Zwan sausages. For products like toothpaste, deodorant of laundry detergent you don’t switch easily when you’re satisfied. People who drink Lipton every day don’t feel like switching over to the Delhaize house brand. When it comes to products you use on a daily basis, you want to use a brand that you know, trust and that you’re satisfied of.

– Unilever will lose customers because some people are loyal to Delhaize, because of its good reputation of high quality and diversity. Or maybe they just shop at Delhaize because it’s closer than other stores. Delhaize offers other brands for all the products they’ve banned from the shelves and in the business of Fast Moving Consumer Goods people who aren’t loyal to the brands will take the chance to try another brand. Simply because it’s not a big risk, it’s not like your buying an expensive car that you hope to drive for 10 years. When you take the risk of switching brands and after you using it you notice that you don’t like it, you only lost a few coins and you can go back to the brand you were using before.

The last few years shopping at two different supermarkets every week has become common: people buy half a shopping cart at Delhaize or Carrefour and continue their spending at Colruyt, Lidl or Aldi supermarkets. I think this is going to become even more common if Delhaize continues to ban the +250 Unilever brands from their stores.

I’m quit curious on how this is going to evolve: which side is going to give in? Delhaize? Unilever? Neither?

I think it was a daring decision of Delhaize, whether it was a smart decision time will tell. One thing I’m sure of is that Unilever’s ads in the newspaper must have stung a bit. In these ads Unilever shows pictures of all their top products and brands and states that Delhaize shoppers can better switch over to other supermarkets if they want to keep buying their favorite brands.

The move by P&G to cut back on ad spending has raised a lot of eyebrows especially since their declaration that they would not budge on modifying their marketing strategy for 2009. But like most companies, it is apparent that these declarations are cover ups to avoid causing a panic and tarnishing their brand image. And while they may look sheepish, the bottom line is corporate survival.

According to one top-tier cable network executive, P&G has begun “canceling all second-quarter options, across the board,” a development that appears to contradict what A.G. Lafley told investors on Jan. 30, when he said the CPG giant would “absolutely not” cut into its ad spend. “We have held our marketing spending and advertising spending,” Lafley said in P&G’s latest earnings call. “In fact, what is really going on is the advertising markets are softening and for the same dollar we are buying more delivery.”

(Source) Media Week

A while ago I wrote about the beer bags and now I found another nice example of Bagvertising.

Magic-i’s floating bags:

With the Beer bags I had some serious doubts about the way they would look in real life. I was sure that the optical illusion looked better in the pictures than the real bags would look. With these floating bags I don’t have any doubts about the way it looks in the streets. As far as I’m concerned this is a great campain. The only point of critisism I can think of is that these bags might not be friendly for the hands when there is a lot of weight in them.

Agency: Grey, Kuala Lumpur.

Graphiste, directrice artistique et enseignante (typographie à l’Esag/Penninghen) voici l’excellent travail de Maryse Khoriaty. Une campagne presse autour de la nouvelle image Cotélac ainsi que des collaborations avec l’artiste hollandaise Ellen Kooi pour la production de visuels originaux.