Hasta La Creative!

Finally, with help from WPP-owned 171 Partners, HTC is getting creative. For their new “Here’s to Change” global campaign to promote  the HTC One smartphone, the brand has enlisted Robert Downey Jr. as both the star and purveyor of creative input. Engadget suggests that this is new CMO Ben Ho making good on his promise to make HTC’s voice louder.

So far, we’ve got RDJ as mysterious, self-important “Subversive Thinking,” a man with Terry Richardson glasses and a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. He flies in a helicopter and enjoys high-fives. He wears a puce-colored tie. We meet him in HTC’s first teasers: “Big Things Ahead,” “Prelude to Change,” and “The Arrival.” The entire “Change” campaign should run 24 to 36 months, with the first 2-minute spot debuting Thursday. And with any luck, our main man will be quirkily cooing to that cat.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This column has been pinballing around my head for the past few months. I’m curious about hashtags. I’m under the impression that although everyone knows what a hashtag looks like, not many people pay attention to Twitter statistics beyond Follower counts. And now that every commercial – online or televised – comes with a hashtag, many of which seem perfunctory, I want to make an inexact science a bit more exact by evaluating basic Internet data and applying it to our coverage for the previous week.

Twitter clearly has value. Celebrities of varying degrees get paid silly amounts of money for sponsored tweets (sidebar: did you know that Melissa Joan Hart makes $9,100 for some of her tweets? That’s more obnoxious than silly). With money and brand equity to be had in the Twitter economy, every company can now slap a hashtag onto a visual ad and pretend to know what it’s doing. Remember when Newsweek ran with #MuslimRage? Or McDonald’s unintentionally eviscerating itself with #McDStories? Twitter can be tricky for the lazy and oblivious.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It looks like our tipsters from up north were on to something as sources familiar with the matter confirm that the relationship between Union and Tourism Toronto “has come to a close.” Union of course is the Toronto-based, MDC-backed agency that was formerly known as CP+B Toronto. The now-defunct latter agency’s relationship with Tourism Toronto dates back to 2010 and subsequently resulted in campaigns such as the holiday-themed “Torontoland.”

Those on the Spy line tell us that Tourism Toronto remained one of Union’s biggest accounts, though, as perhaps the tell-tale sign, the brand no longer appears on the agency’s client list, which currently includes notable names such as Best Buy, Kraft and Pfizer. From what sources tell us, Tourism Toronto isn’t going to replace Union as of now, but we’ll let you know if we hear more.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

If you’re not familiar with American motorcycle history, you may never have heard of Indian Motorcycle. Up through World War II, Indian Motorcycle was a popular motorcycle brand. In 1953 it went out of business leaving the just one American bike maker standing, Harley-Davidson.

In 2011, Polaris Industries purchased the dormant brand in 2011 and introduced its first new bike in 50 years with the 2014 Indian Chief.

The brand hired Colle + McVoy to relaunch the brand and the agency reached out to History Channel to create branded content in the form of Bike Week, a multi-media week that would celebrate the history of motorcycling and highlight the new 2014 Indian Chief.

Along with promotional vignettes featuring History Channel’s American Pickers host Mike Wolfe, the agency created a :60 which debuted during the show this past Monday.

Supporting the branded content play and the commercial, is print and collateral.

The :60 is motorcycle porn and features a small group of Indian Chief riders who encounter a larger group of Harley Davidson riders who, after the required stare down, invite them to cross their path. We’re not quite sure this is exactly how it would play out in real life but for a commercial, it suffices.

We live in the social age. Along with the amazing ability to connect to friends and family within seconds, business owners can sometimes feel like they live under constant pressure to be responsive. One bad review blown out of proportion can spiral out of control, leading to a social nightmare with dire consequences for your company’s brand. One way to increase user satisfaction is to be more transparent about who you are and what you offer.

Offer customers methods to contact you, give them a voice on your site and let them speak for your services. Start asking customers for testimonials and looking at what data you can publish to increase your credibility.

Customer Reviews

Google Alerts is a free service you can use to track what other people are saying about your website or your brand across the Web. Have alerts delivered to your email that search for keywords you define so that you can monitor competitors as well. When you find review data, contact the customer and ask if you can publish his or her review. Offer them space on your website and let them know you’ll quote them by name in a special section for customer reviews.

Tools like the Brand.com reviews widget allow customers to leave instant feedback on your site. A five-star ranking system gives visitors a quick view of the quality of services you offer. Testimonials with customer names also grant a little extra clout to professions in which an individual review could be more meaningful.

Asking for feedback is the only way for you to know what your audience wants to see. It’s true that not everyone will respond, but a short survey can teach you a lot about how your customers perceive your website.

Page View Data

Page view data is always a tricky metric because no one is ever sure how much is enough. You don’t need to publish actual page views to show that your content is engaging. There are many ways to judge your traffic: Facebook friends, Alexa rank, search engine rank, and volume of competition being only a few free ways that are simple to find.

What’s better is for you to show the quality of your traffic. If your articles only have a 25% bounce rate, that’s an amazing statistic that you should flaunt everywhere possible. What advertiser does not want the attention of a highly engaged audience? Look at your statistics and figure out what you can publish that will help sell the idea that your page is a peak destination in your niche.

Social Signals

Besides your friend count, a Klout score linked to your Twitter account will help give a better indication of your reach. Look at how many mentions and retweets your stories get, and focus on pushing content out to the most vocal users on Twitter and Facebook.

Facebook Insights also provide extra data to you like your potential reach for a particular post. Look at your most popular posts and try to highlight what makes users want to talk about you so that you can tailor future work accordingly.

Making Valuable Commitments

Commitments to user protection during the payment process phase is not a feature, it’s more like a foundation for trust. Commitment to use personal data responsibly, or listing ways in which you will use user data shows you care about the people that visit your page. Look into commitments you can make, like “Do Not Track,” or “Non-Intrusive Ads” that respect the time your users invest with your business.

One of the best things you can do is to give users more control over their data. Don’t bury unsubscribe options, but try to look at why users leave your email list. Ask for feedback, display reviews both negative and positive. Invite the kind of discussion that makes your product better onto your website.

The post Being Transparent with Your Customers appeared first on AdPulp.

BBDO New York and Foot Locker know that Clippers forward/dunker Blake Griffin is a commercial machine – Subway, Kia, Jordan Brand to rattle off a few quickly. So for their latest joint venture, “The Endorser,” the creatives decided to physically hook up Griffin to a machine called The Endorser as if he were programmed to place products. For some Lob City support, Clippers point guard/whiner Chris Paul steps in as a foil to turn off the machine and show us the difference between Real Blake and Robot Blake.

The spot is another smart and self-aware sports bit that takes advantage of an athlete’s public persona through subversion. Griffin is usually stone-faced or arrogantly posturing on the court after huge dunks, but he’s built up a quiet niche as a funnyman on television. Just see this Grantland piece from March that discusses why Blake’s comedy is more complex than you might think. The only issue with Blake is overexposure, like, when his sponsorship brands debut separate commercials within the same week. His Jordan “Blake and Drain” spot, which alludes to MJ and Spike Lee ads from twenty years ago, is even better than the Footlocker commercial. And for that reason, “The Endorser” might get lost in the ever-expanding Blake Griffin commercial merry-go-round. Credits after the jump.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Kiefer Sutherland’s voice is somehow simultaneously soothing and forceful. His gravelly intonation, coupled with his beautifully weathered face, is completely convincing regardless of the words involved. In this Jose Cuervo spot created by McCann Erickson New York, Sutherland’s ultimate message is, “Have a Story.” He pushes a shot across the bar to us and then we follow him for an impromptu concert, a spontaneous tattoo, a brief lover’s brawl, and some bonsai clipping.

It’s not the first time Sutherland’s channeled his 24 character, Jack Bauer, though Cuervo’s spot is a subtle representation. For Acer of course, he got jazzed about a new Dynamite Cupcakes business, obviously involving explosions and suspense.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“What would you do, if you were stranded on a tropical island with only a smartphone?” Les Stroud, survival expert and reality TV star, asks in Samsung’s new spot. #SOS? Daily selfies? Think of your answer and get it put to the test with Samsung’s promo for the Galaxy S4 Zoom. Sixteen chosen contestants will be flown to the Caribbean where they’ll learn survival skills from Mr. Stroud. The best eight will move to a secret island, where they will compete in survival challenges, accompanied by their Galaxy gadgets. Viewers of the show then vote on the contestants in real time via their social media posts. The winner gets an island (or $100,000, so an “island experience,” whatever that means).

“It’s an ambitious project but one that will surely not be forgotten,” said Craig Borders, the producer and director behind series like Laguna Beach and Ink Master and SOS Island‘s executive producer. “People crave new entertainment experiences and this series is sure to deliver, while tapping into the social media realm in an unprecedented way.”

It’ll be interesting to see how Samsung avoids a clusterfuck when they’re dealing with a cadre of stranded people, all documenting their experiences in real time. The solution, of course, is for nothing to be in real time, and no one to be really stranded. In that case, we’ll be watching another piece of canned TV. There’s nothing enticing about that, social media streamed or not.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Adidas and Sid Lee are framing the new “Unite All Originals” as Run DMC vs. DJ A-Trak, but the versus bit comes on too strong. The campaign is much more affable than combative, think of it as a buddy cop combo where there are three buddies instead of two and the buddies like to wear black felt hats.

Run DMC’s famed history with Adidas dates back to the 1980s, and they’ve been lending their benign street cred to the three stripes ever since. A-Trak may not be comparable as a household name, but he’s a worthy spokesman for the next generation, as you can see in some coverage from early March. For this new campaign, the two acts are combining for a fan-controlled music video that will be dictated user voice commands. A true embodiment of “My Adidas.”

Credits after the jump.

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We always welcome new writer to the fold and now we bring in the first in a series of of posts Maude Standish,
co-founder of Tarot, a Millennial trend and insight company, who will look at Millennial trends and their implications for brands. Now, on with the show.

We get it.  You don’t like us. And by us, I mean the roughly 82 million Millennials living in the US.  You think we are all living in our parents’ basement, eating organic food we bought with food stamps, posting selfies, and counting down the day not by what we did, but how many “Likes” the internet bestowed on us.

You think we are idiots. No matter that we are on our way to being the most educated generation in the history of America, you think we aren’t going to understand you unless you talk to us in internet speak. OMG. LOL. ?WTF?

You think it’s our fault that we aren’t listening to you. That we are too ADHD to pay attention to what’s important. (And OBVI what you are saying is TOTES more important than anything else we could possibly be doing. I’ll put this iPhone down now and watch your ad.) But guess what?   It’s not our fault that we’re not listening to you–it’s yours.

Yeah, yours. Because you Boomers and Gen Xers are all so busy describing us that you have forgotten to listen to us. Even if we are all those things that you think we are, that’s not how we see ourselves. And until you see us as we see ourselves you are not going to connect with us.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.