Hasta La Creative!

Slightly bizarre, mildly funny yet completely catchy. I don’t know about anyone else out there, but my office has been singing along to the newest Subway commercials all day. Apparently, for a limited time, Subway is offering $5 foot-long subs. Enter the jingle. The commercials feature a catchy little tune that basically repeats the offer. Effective? Who knows. But I definitely know where to go when I’m craving a foot-long sandwich for a small price. 

Thanks to the two of the latest spots from ESPN (courtesy of Wieden & Kennedy) and the Cleveland Indians (courtesy of Brokaw), Yanks fans nationwide get to relive the horror that was last year’s infamous “Bug Game.” This is the game where my boys (eh hem, the Yanks) lost their cool due to excessive bugs on the field during an away game against the Indians. But hey, ESPN and the Indians have it right. Everything is part of the game – from the fans to the team and all the way to annoying critters. Bravo to making me hate and love baseball, all at the same time. 

 

Technorati Tags: advertising, tv, sports, New York Yankees, Cleveland Indians, ESPN, Baseball Tonight, baseball

 

Advertising is the latest industry to be struck by the old adage “history repeats itself.” Prior to the 70s, seeing Live Ads was nothing unusual. But with pre-recorded TV came recorded ads.  Today, the rise of the TiVo/DVR era has advertisers looking back to the Live Commercial to sell their products. Late night and daytime talk shows (Ellen DeGeneres is above, hawking for Toyota) have started reviving this once popular advertising trend. However, I wonder – how will this affect the commercial? Will we be left with a lack of concepting? Or will this lead way to a new way of creative thinking?

I stumbled across this short clip and found it interesting – if nothing else than from a media perspective. Often, social messages are relegated to the :30 psa via tv or radio, and more critical messages generally require multi-stage campaigns covering the gamut of media. I’m not saying multi-level social messaging/public service campaigns aren’t effective, but it’s refreshing — and an interesting reminder — to see something done like this:

The post-it note campaign was launched by a Dutch group Vandaler Mod Vold (Vandals Against Violence) in response to recent incidents of violence in Copenhagen. The post-it notes placed throughout the city carry handwritten messages along the lines of “only the weak resort to violence.”

While I’m not necessarily advocating a campaign of handwritten notes plastered around a city, it’s important to remember that a few bucks worth of post-it notes and a few sharpies can do a good bit of messaging. Giant (expensive) executions aren’t always a requirement, and there are still ways to execute strong messaging without breaking the bank. more (in Danish) here.

Via ScampBlog comes this spot from Fallon’s UK office for Budweiser. The one thing that jumps out immediately is that it’s a :60 (when was the last time you saw a :60 in the US that wasn’t a launch spot for a major brand.)

The second is that it’s another in a line of UK TV spots that fetishize the rural American South (Levi’s UK advertising did a good job of this.) Not criticizing, but it’s always fascinating to see an outsider’s take on something uniquely American. To the Brits, the rural South is uniquely and authentically American.

Third is there’s no product sell. It’s a nice minute-long movie about a band that uses instruments made of Budweiser bottles. No lovingly lit pour shots, no hot chicks in bikinis and all the other clichés of American beer advertising. Shot by Harmony Korine, a noted avant-garde movie director best know for his debut film Kids, my only question here is what role did the agency actually play? Did they come to Korine with the idea “rural Southern band plays with instruments made from Budweiser bottles. Go.” Or did they have the basic action plotted out and Korine just added detail, tone and style? I sort of hope it’s the former.

For although many creative purists will look down on an agency for engaging a director at that stage, one of the biggest lessons we have to learn from the digital age is that it can’t always be about the copywriter and art director team anymore. That we need to engage and involve other people– be they technologists, user experience experts or film directors– early on and collaborate with them fully. The result can be something as charming as the spot above.

 

One thing you have to consider in the world of advertising and promotions today, you better be open to the consumer acceptance and reaction of the ads you are going to release. This involved consideration towards the areas of cultural, legal, political and social factors which are normally considered in doing business.

Apparently, releasing an ad is one thing but to be forced to pull it out due to bad corporate image and controversies will entirely hurt the brand image. Apparently, this is the issue that hit the company distillers of Sweden’s Absolut Vodka when they released a controversial ad that drew the ire of many Americans who caught up with the ad shown in Mexico.

The billboard ad has the slogan “In an Absolut World” slapped over a pre-1848 map showing California, Arizona and other U.S. states as Mexican territory. Those states were carved out of what had been Mexican lands until that year. 

Although it was not shown in the United States, U.S. media outlets picked up on the ad, and after a barrage of complaints, Absolut’s maker said on Sunday the ad campaign would cease.

(Source) Yahoo News

As far as Google is concerned, chances are you will be thinking of revenue generated from clicked ads which you usually place whenever you put up a site and get a Google Adsense account. Now for some people who discovered this earlier, the opportunity may have been rewarding. But today with the growing number of people trying to get their hand on online advertising and pay-per-click ads, it seems that it has been a case of:

1. Congestion
2. Wiser Internet Consumers
3. Advertising Competition

Whichever of the three is the reason for this is anyone’s guess. But one thing that is for sure, Google is slowly aging and may have to pull some more strings if they really want to retain their current market positioning.

Google’s “paid clicks” had decreased by 7% during January, and were flat compared with the same month a year earlier. In other words, surfers who searched the web via Google itself, or who visited websites that belong to Google’s advertising network, clicked slightly less frequently on the little text advertisements that Google often places on these pages.

(Source) Economist.com

The following Taco Bell commercial from last fall has had a recent inexplicable resurgence on broadcast TV over the past few weeks, and it’s got me thinking a bit about tv spots and the music chosen to accompany them.

Aside from the bizarre appearance of the grim reaper and a few other oddities, the most bizarre (or at least thought provoking) thing about the commercial is the use of Modern English’s “I melt with you.” While the song has a special place in my heart, I’m not sure that the connection with Taco Bell really works for me. New Wave and Cheesy Beefy Melt don’t really go hand in hand in my mind, and I’m left thinking about Modern English – not ye old Bell.

It’s really no different than a few other fast food commercials over the past year, most notably the Wendy’s spot that used the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun” on TV and radio. There was also the Nintendo DS commercial with all the kids singing “Santeria” by Sublime. Not necessarily horrible, but peculiar choices, and ones that I don’t think i would have consciously made.

Does dumping a cult classic or one-hit wonder song into a commercial always make sense? Is it always the best idea? Does the grim reaper really eat at Taco Bell? Just a few questions that have been mulling around in my head lately.

It never ceases to amaze me what runs through my mind right before I have to give a presentation or demo. One of the most vivid and entertaining saunters down this twisted psychological path happened a couple years ago and provided a good rule of thumb when presenting.

I was in charge of a major ad campaign for a new dot com company. It was an ambiguous initiative: major web presence, flashy ad copy and all sorts of hip new techno bells and whistles that I was hoping would role into not only printed copy but also streaming content.

About twenty minutes before the start of the presentation, I was going through my roller coaster rides of emotions, “I’m not smart enough, they’re so much better than me, what if I fail, this is cool, trust yourself, I’m number one, etc…” For me, a certified neurotic spaz, this was business as usual. Then, I flashed back to an old Merv Griffin talk show that Neil Sedaka had appeared on. He told the story of how Calendar Girl was created on a whim right before he was going to demo another song. He and his writing partner were informed that they needed a second song (the “flip side”). They wrote out the catchy but simple song in about 10 minutes. Needless to say, the record executives loved Calendar Girl and it became a big hit in 1960.

Thus, I scrambled to create something of a back up plan. I found some old black and white stock photos of young professionals working in an office environment. I threw them into an MS PowerPoint file, not even bothering to adjust the skewing that PowerPoint had caused. I wrote some simple captions, and printed them out.

As the meeting started and I was going through my presentation I noticed that the CEO had picked up the PowerPoint slides and started leafing through them. About half way through my demo, he stopped me and started querying me about the pictures. He loved them, saying that this style combined a new hip cutting edge look (skewed and all) with established business processes and principles. Me, never one to not cease an opportunity, changed my song and dance and focused on the slides and how we could cultivate the idea into a major marketing initiative. It became one of the most successful campaigns of the year.

The moral of the story — always have a back up. It does not have to be elaborate, just something unique. Just ask Neil, he’s really good at the “song and dance”.

As I was attempting to be the quintessential creative mind yesterday, sitting in a coffee shop with my apple laptop & black sketchbook, i carelessly gazed around the coffee shop only to notice something I hadn’t given much thought to: advertising was everywhere. The Coffee sleeves had ads for an upcoming movie, courtesy of BriteVision. There were table toppers for local events and restaurants. There were even ads under the table glass. And then the dozens of concert, performance, festival, etc. flyers in the window. It was as if when I wasn’t looking, someone bombed the coffee shop with advertising. And then I realized maybe I just haven’t been paying attention.

It’s one thing to see one “new media channel” evolve or to discover a new medium, like human skin, corneas, the ocean, or on an escalator, but as a consumer (and a human), it’s only good up to a certain point. Ad after ad after ad, in the same environment, certainly changes the effectiveness. As new technology evolves and allows us to place messages in new and often unheard of locations, the question has to be asked “is it necessary?” Just because we can, does that mean we should?

On the subject of the coffee shop, where branding never seems to cease: we now have ads on the top of the cup. Yes. the top. (or we could, potentially). Inventor Oleksiy Pokalo has created a fairly simple device that can “print” a logo on top of your cup of coffee.

Just on the off chance that your coffee shop doesn’t have enough logos floating around as is. What’s next?