Hasta La Creative!

Radiating gorgeous beauty and steamy sexuality all at once, Anne Hathaway stormed the scene a few years ago in a little movie called The Princess Diaries which turned ouut to be not so little after all spawning a sequel….

Wired have reported on the top downloads on P2P networks for 2007. See the full article here.

Now I’ve never heard of Akon or half the rappers in the top 10 of music I do know a little bit more about the film side of things. And looking at the report it makes me wonder.

The top then movies downloaded in 2007 according to Wired are:

1. Resident Evil: Extinction
2. Pirates of The Caribbean: At World’s End
3. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
4. Ratatouille
5. Superbad
6. Beowulf
7. Transformers
8. American Gangster
9. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
10. Stardust

I’m not 100% sure the data is accurate though (these networks don’t exactly provide logs) as “I now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” being the #3 movie. C’mon. The Simpson’s movie was everywhere on the networks and had a greater global appeal than some B grade comedy. And Stardust? That’s certainly not the film for the “P2P crowd, which is made up largely of younger males.”

This also shows that while music seems to be suffering because of P2P, all the films in the top download list did pretty good in the box office. Yep even Chuck and Larry pulled in $120 million.

So film distributors needn’t be worried about P2P downloads, Box Office earnings were the biggest yet $9.68 billion with ticket sales staying steady from 2006.

29 sequels in 2007 brought in 22% of the earnings, or $2 Billion dollars. Compared to the 346 original screen plats that brought in $3.3 Billion.

I look forward to “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry 2” coming to theaters soon.

Anyone else interested in Box Office earnings on films should check out The Number’s 2007 Summery or read Open Wide.

So, Superman—or, at any rate, an actor who portrays the Man of Steel—is backing Barack Obama for president. This made me wonder which candidates other comic-book heroes are endorsing this campaign season. So I called the Justice League and asked. (They’re in the book, people!) The Incredible Hulk supports Rudy Giuliani because “we both seem like normal guys but transform into violent mutants when the going gets rough.” Mr. Fantastic is backing Mitt Romney because “we have the same hair.” Spider-Man’s trying to decide between John Edwards and Hillary Clinton. The webslinger identifies with the former’s boyish good looks and aw-shucks positive outlook, but respects the tangled political webs the latter has been known to weave. Sgt. Rock is learning toward John McCain, but finds him “a little soft” on defense. Lex Luthor likes Ron Paul because “we’re both supervillains.” The Tick also supports Paul: “Like me, he’s basically a joke.” Batman and Mike Huckabee have never been seen together in public, which seems awfully suspicious in an election year.

—Posted by David Gianatasio

LONDON – A number of brands are planning to ignore England’s exit from Euro 2008 and devising marketing activity around the summer tournament.

SHANGHAI – Iris Lo has resigned from her position as executive creative director at Wieden & Kennedy Shanghai, having only held the job for half a year.

I thought this was a fitting first post since it’s the idea that really launched my blog. It does a good job of laying out my take on the current state of the ad business and some of the mistakes people are making. My hope is that this, and the two or three articles to follow will provide a good framework for my future commentary and ad reviews.

When I was 23, a site like Facebook would have been my second home. Keeping track of the daily comings and goings of my 100 closest friends? Check. Comparing our tastes in music, movies, books, photos, and travel destinations? Check. And when I wasn’t on Facebook, I’d have been Twittering everyone that knew that I was going to the store. And then leaving it. With a middle Twitter to let them know that the cashier was being way too slow.

And while I was busy Facebooking and Twittering, the absolute last person I’d have wanted to hear from is an advertiser. I mean when you think of it, it’s kind of creepy. Facebook is the 21st century diner or malt shop. It’s where teens and young adults go to hang out. And the last thing they want is some salesperson trying to have a “conversation” with them while they’re figuring out what movie they’re going to see. They don’t want to talk to you. They want to talk to their friends.

The whole appeal of social media sites is their independence from corporate advertisers. People like the fact that they can say whatever they want to other people without any interference from anyone or anything that seems “official.” Yes, they’ll tolerate banner ads or search ads on the page, the same way that in the diner they tolerated placemats with ads on them or a Coke sign on the soda machine: that sort of advertising is innocuous and quickly becomes part of the scenery.

So I’m not sure where we’ve developed this conceit that people want to hear from brands. Because they truly don’t. At least not in settings where the primary objective is to talk to and interact with your actual friends. (And your brands, people, are not our friends.)

On a blog or message board dedicated to a particular subject, they’ll listen to someone from a company, especially if that person is someone whose name they all recognize. (In other words, if Steve Jobs himself were to post on a computer message board, people would be thrilled. But a generic post from Apple or from some unknown VP at Apple would be most unwelcome.)

Now there are some brands—I call them Prom King Brands—that people don’t mind “conversing” with, so long as they can do it on the brands own space (as opposed to MySpace.) These are the brands that have somehow managed to build a better mousetrap, but there are no more than a dozen of them and you here on DailyFix can probably name them all by heart (Here, I’ll start: Nike, Apple, Starbucks, Virgin, Whole Foods… ) Sports teams, TV shows, rock bands and movies fall into this category as well.

The rest of you are out of luck on this front. You’re not a Prom King and people aren’t all that thrilled to hang with you. So while Starbucks could probably start a Frappuccino Lovers Group on Facebook (for all I know, they already have), no one’s going to be joining a Maxwell House Lovers group anytime soon.

So if Your Brand Is Not My Friendâ„¢, does that mean you should run screaming from Web 2.0 and Social Media?

Absolutely not.

All it means is that if you’re not a Prom King brand, you need to be smarter about how you use the space. Not to mention more authentic.

Let’s take the Maxwell House example from the previous page. The one thing we know about Maxwell House (other than that it’s “good to the last drop”) is that it’s cheap. Really cheap in comparison to Starbucks. So you go on Facebook and find the Cheapskate Lovers group. And approach them as a salesperson. Not as a friend. So your script goes something like this: “Hey Cheapskates. Maxwell House knows how much you guys love saving money. And while our coffee is cheap enough as it is, if you go to this special Facebook Cheapskates site, we’ve got a dollar off coupon waiting for you.”

There’s a critical difference here: if you’re a Prom King, you define the interaction. People come to you to talk about and be around Starbucks, to get some of the halo effect of a brand they consider very cool. And even though you’re selling them big time, you can pretend it’s all just a fun little “conversation.”

But if you’re a regular brand, you need to find a situation that fits your strengths. So if your strength is you don’t cost a whole lot, you need to find a bunch of Cheapskates and then adapt yourself to their needs. And you have to do it as a salesperson. Because you can’t pretend you’re doing anything but selling them.

And if you do that, they may start to like you for it. To let you hang around more often and maybe, just maybe, they’ll start talking about you. Not to you, but about you.

Which is a lot more valuable than having them talk about your TV commercial.

SINGAPORE – OgilvyOne Singapore has hired Rapp Collins managing director Lucy McCabe (pictured) as the agency’s lead consultant.

The pleasure of testing.

Advertising Agency: Wunderman Y&R, Zurich, Switzerland
Creative Director: Christian Erni
Art Director: Reto Clement
Copywriter: Ivan Madeo
Graphics: Pascal Deville
Photographer: Reinhard Hunger
Other additional credits: Nathalie Busslinger, Thorsten-D. Künnemann
Published: January 2007

The pleasure of testing.

Advertising Agency: Wunderman Y&R, Zurich, Switzerland
Creative Director: Christian Erni
Art Director: Reto Clement
Copywriter: Ivan Madeo
Graphics: Pascal Deville
Photographer: Reinhard Hunger
Other additional credits: Nathalie Busslinger, Thorsten-D. Künnemann
Published: January 2007

Advertising Agency: DDB Germany / Tribal DDB Hamburg
Creative Directors: Martin Drust, Friedrich von Zitzewitz
Art Director: Andrea Schlaffer
Copywriter: Angela Gillmann
MS: Niklas Feuerle
Consulting: Nadja Saländer
Production: Claudio Colussi