Hasta La Creative!

LONDON – Friends Reunited, the social networking site owned by ITV, is set to undergo a name change as part of a strategic overhaul in response to growing pressure from rivals.

GUANGZHOU – Nurun China has hired former Y&R regional account director Premprapa Bankes-Milner as its national client services director for China.

This is the second introductory post, and a follow-up to Your Brand Is Not My Friendâ„¢.

The real digital revolution has nothing to do with advertising or marketing. In fact, it’s the mortal enemy of advertising and marketing.

Because the real digital revolution is about consumer empowerment, the ability to research and learn about products and services and make decisions independently from, and in spite of, any sort of marketing and advertising messages.

That’s what’s really changing the way we market. It’s not about our inability to control the conversation. It’s about our inability to even get in on it. “They” are talking about us and we can’t butt in. I mean Word of Mouth is wonderful and all, but it ain’t got nothing on a glowing review from CNET.

The car companies are actually the ones who are hardest hit by this development. Given that a car is the second most expensive purchase you’ll make in your life (your home being the first), sophisticated consumers are flocking to review sites, message boards and the like to get the real deal on the car they plan to buy. And even to find out what kind of car someone like them should buy. A pretty shocking development in a market that was shrouded in mystery and misinformation for years.

Sure there was Consumer Reports and the car magazines. But CR attracted a very specific, Naderesque demographic and the car magazines were rarely concerned about the sorts of things the average car buyer was concerned about, especially if the average car buyer had kids or mostly used the car for commuting.

Now what all this information does is destroy the power of image-based brand advertising. I might see some “this car is cool” VW ads and think VW is great, so great that I decide I want to buy a Jetta for my next car. But, if I go online and read about how much the Jetta sucks and how much better the Nissan Sentra is, I’m buying the Sentra. No matter how much Marc Horowitz (the guy who lived in his Sentra for 10 days) bugs me. Brand advertising can’t stretch the truth anymore or try and gild the lilly. Because if it does, we’re going to find out about it and it’s not going to be pretty.

The informed digital consumer isn’t just a threat to the auto business: S/he’s a threat to any business where there are objective standards for judging the product. So while something like food may be immune (you either like Oreos or you don’t, there’s not much objectivity there) even packaged goods like laundry detergent can fall vicitm, since there’s an objective standard for how clean your clothes are getting.

All the noise you hear from the 2.0-niks about “conversations” is often just a fancy term for people sharing objective opinions of products on review sites, blogs and other digital media. The “conversation” is when the marketer responds to criticism with a pledge to try harder or some such. Which, while it’s not practiced as much as it should be, is just common sense. But enough “conversations” about how bad your product is, no amount of clever advertising or radical media placement is going to save it.

Now people are people and of course we’re always going to need some sort of brand advertising to help us distinguish between the cool brand and the not-cool brand. But, especially on high ticket items, the ability to research, to learn all the details and facts that were previously unavailable to us— that is what is ultimately going to drive our purchase decision.

And that, my friends, is the real digital revolution.

The very lazy (we meet up once a year) but nevertheless always exciting dorkbot berlin is having another gig on January 28, 2008 at c-base. It’s one night before the opening of the Transmediale festival. If you live in Berlin or just hit the town for Transmediale and if you want to show off your projects, do let us know by droping an email to sedlag at snafu dot de.

Somewhat unrelated but it feels so weird now to write a post which will have less than 1290 lines that i’m cramming another piece of information here. The paper mecca of design addicts, ICON magazine, had the bad idea to invite me to be their guest editor. I invaded the pages at my disposals and gave them a theme: activism. After that everything went smoothly, i asked the 3 persons i admire the most to contribute to the issue with a text that explains readers how they can recreate at home one of their activist projects: there’s guerrilla architect Santiago Cirugeda, fashion renegade Otto von Busch and finally Head of the Environmental Health Clinic Natalie Jeremijenko who teamed up with Debra Solomon to give you an exclusive page of their (hopefully upcoming) InterSpecies Cookbook. I haven’t seen the magazine yet but i’m hoping that their ideas will shake up a bit the glossy surface of the design world.

Image: Otto von Busch. Photo by Jens Klevje

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — TNS Media Intelligence's forecast for advertising spending in 2008 comes with a giant asterisk. Although the group predicts overall U.S. spending to increase 4.2% over 2007, the writers strike gave Jon Swallen, senior VP-research at TNS, much reason to pause in predicting spending for the individual media sectors.

YORK, Pa. (AdAge.com) — Brother Dominic wouldn't recognize his time savior anymore. Centenarian technology company Xerox, famed for a Super Bowl campaign showing a monk, the aforementioned Brother Dominic, copying — rather than transcribing — sacred manuscripts, is undergoing a facelift to reflect the modern digital-software and services brand it has become.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Interpublic Group of Cos.' Initiative has won media duties for Hyundai Motor America's Hyundai and Kia brands following a review, according to executives familiar with the matter.

“This is a business that is changing like crazy, but Sullivan’s advice is timeless.” –Mike Hughes, President, Creative Director, The Martin Agency

This updated third edition of Hey Whipple, Squeeze This by Luke Sullivan presents a real-world look inside the big agencies and examines the industry’s best and worst work – from the hilarious to the horrid. New chapters cover online, guerilla, and direct marketing as well as new case studies and tons of cool new examples of great work.

It’s available in stores first week of February or so, and “it’s a much better book than it used to be,” according to Sullivan. I remember the first edition being a good read, but I’ll take his word for it.

Amazon is accepting pre-orders now.

Almost too rare to wear.

Advertising Agency: Leo Burnett Frankfurt, Germany
Creative Director: Andreas Pauli
Art Director: Matthias Fickinger
Copywriter: Christoph Tratberger
Illustrator: Christian Frech
Photographer: Marcus Caviola
Published: December 2007

The language of marketing has been borrowed from the military. We talk about defensive marketing, offensive marketing, guerrilla marketing. Often overlooked, however, is "flanking," one of the most powerful military strategies.