All You Need Is Love or No Woman No Cry?
It’s
Valentine’s Day this weekend. Love
it or hate it, it can bring out some strange behaviour in people. Here are some creative
teams that have brilliantly communicated this craziness over the years, and ended up with a Yellow Pencil in the process.
Let's begin with Viral Factory's tale of true love from 2008. The whimsical story is told through
animated body art using stickmen and the small matter of 1622 pictures taken with Samsung's G800 mobile phone.
In 2009 Judges rewarded advertising agency GT Tokyo for their groundbreaking idea for Sagami condoms. Two young lovers ran a 1000 km marathon – the
length of Japan – to be reunited. Only there remained a tiny bit of distance between them…
Have a look at this story of love triumphing over
the most extreme….diversity in a Spike Jonze directed music videofor Björk. It also features the Japanese beatboxer Dokaka and was awarded a Yellow Pencil in 2005.
In
In 2005, agency BBH won 4 Yellow Pencils for their tribute to the crazy ...
Game developers on iPhone outnumber DS and PSP two-to-one
Filed under: Gaming, Multimedia, Apple, iPhone, App Store, SDK, iPod touch
Game Developer Research has published its 2009/10 survey of video game developers, and the results are pretty impressive for the still relatively fledgling iPhone platform: The number of developers who are working on mobile games increased by 12 percent, and there are actually twice as many developers working on iPhone games as are working on the Nintendo DS and Sony’s PSP handheld consoles.
That’s a pretty amazing number, though it’s not quite a surprise when you consider it. First of all, Nintendo DS and PSP publishing takes a much larger investment than Apple’s $100 developer fee and an SDK download. Second, while the DS and the PSP are certainly selling a lot of games, they’re not actually releasing nearly as many as the hundreds of thousands of apps on the App Store. Finally, new DS and PSP games sell for $30 or $40, while new App Store games sell much closer to 99 cents. So the fact that there are lots more people moving to the much ...
A Kind Anonymous Soul Saves Me Writing A Post Today By Leaving A Long, Intelligent, Thoughtful, Well-Written Comment On Yesterday's Post.
Anon writes:
On a serious note…here’s a list of points and ideas why, some obvious, some hopefully not in reply to your post. Sure others might have commented already on some of these but hopefully not all of them. There might be a little repetition in some of points too but they’re all intertwined ideas and hopefully it sparks further debate.
1. It’s about making money not the creativity.
2. It’s obvious from your post that too many layers of bureaucracy in agency model destroys creative idea now.
3. Clients have got agencies by the balls.
4. Clients are uneducated, ignorant and dumb as in anon at 13.04 – this is so true.
5. Many CEOs used to be marketing managers and know what they want and get exactly what they want for as cheap as possible. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.
6. No trust in creativity, clients terrified of losing their jobs. Play safe. Combine this with point 4. It’s always this double whammy.
7. Weak agency creative leadership to stand up to clients. No charming, engaging, persuasive personalities anymore.
8. Controlling account directors, in the layer of bureaucracy point, using the excuse of keeping creative away from client, kills ideas as there’s not a proper relationship between ...
(Headlines) Cybersecurity, Junk Food & Facebook
Cybersecurity, Junk Food & Facebook – here are a selection of news headlines from around the world.
World
CHINESE food has taken over from Indian as the nation's favourite grub, it emerged today.
UN patent filings dropped for 1st time since 1978
Fed to Outline 'Exit Strategy'
Business
Facebook leads rise in mobile web …
Loopt and Mobile Spinach Team Up for Location-Based Deals
Location-based service Loopt is going to offer deals at venues and stores near you thanks to a partnership with Mobile Spinach.
Mobile Spinach has already built up a large database of exclusive deals at venues ranging from sushi restaurants to concert halls to clothing stores. Currently, it serves San Francisco by texting users with deal notifications, but the partnership with Loopt will make the process that much more effective.
Loopt and Mobile Spinach plan to offer deals in New York and Los Angeles “during the coming months,” too.
This advertising model is kind of a no-brainer. A neighborhood business can use a service like Loopt to target someone who lives or works nearby and offer him or her incentives to visit an establishment. These offers can be redeemed by phone or optionally via e-mail or text message.
Foursquare already struck a deal with 8coupons, which does something very similar to what Mobile Spinach does. Yelp offers local deals, too, so this seems to be the model de jour.
We’ll have to wait and see how successful this venture is, but as we noted the other day, there’s ...
Google’s Branding Problem
[Editor's note: This blog post has been given a shamelessly incendiary title in a heavy-handed attempt to provoke a little discussion.]
As Google becomes the most well known and most used digital technology brand in the world, their company motto – and probably the closest thing they’ve got to a brand positioning statement – “Don’t be evil” is no longer specific enough to give people a sense of what Google’s brand means in their life.
Among all the hoopla about the big advertising event last night (I think there might have been some kind of sports thing going on too…?), was the news that the most popular website on the internet, Google, decided to spend $5-6 million on a TV ad promoting their already hugely dominant web search service. As much as anyone may have enjoyed the spot itself, I think that a lot of people had the same question that me and the people I was watching it with had: Why does Google need to waste any money on a TV ad during the Super Bowl?
I continue to believe that Google is quickly going to replace Microsoft as the most popular personal computing operating system; they’re ...
Super Bust XLIV
Outside of Indianapolis and New Orleans, most of the U.S. will have forgotten about Super Bowl XLIV by Monday evening. Across the US, most of the ads were forgotten by the time viewers fell asleep Sunday night.
Enough about how bad the ads were in general. [Along with the halftime show.] Many ads deserve their own special recognition and I’d like to highlight some of them here, by category.
The violent:1. Snickers2. The movie/video game trailers 3. Doritos
The sexually suggestive:1. GoDaddy2. CareerBuilder3. Motorola
The heartstrings appeals:1. Google2. Coca-Cola3. Budweiser
The traditional humor approach: 1. Pretty much everything else.
More takeaways and my 2010 Super Bowl ad review:
Consumer generated ads weren’t any better or worse than the “regular” ads. Ad agencies need not fear consumers taking over the world of 30-second spots – but that’s not what social computing is about…
Integrated marketing didn’t show up, again. The only advertiser guaranteed to drive traffic to a web site? GoDaddy.
Guerilla search ads? Non-existent. Lots of cheap keywords out there like “little Kiss”, “mobile shuffle”, or “beer house.”
Here’s the catch about this entire post: I copied it almost exactly from a Super Bowl ad review I wrote in 2007. Because it doesn’t seem like much has changed since then…
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who says the future needs an advertising agency?
the agency of the future can’t be built by just adding tail fins and Goofy’s nose
A quick disclaimer: the views expressed here are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
Apparently there’s a roaring interest in a model for the advertising agency of the future. My aim for this post is to address some of the ideas put forth by others, weigh the usefulness of today’s agency objectively, and make a bit of a prediction myself. There’s little fun in making bold predictions about the future without a debate – so dig in and offer up a point of view in the comments, if you please.
Some smart ideas already presented:
Joseph Jaffe says the future will be made up of two kinds of agencies:
the idea generators and the executors of those ideas.
Bob Greenberg, who has a considerable interest in his own agency, R/GA, looking like the agency of the future, thinks that the agency of the future will
hold court over digital technologies and interactions for the brand.
Ben Malbon, the nice chap who heads up BBH Labs, a sweet future-y morsel nestled inside BBH, believes that crowdsourcing, or
...
The Emasculated Man, Super Bowl Ad Themes & 5 Best Strategic Ads
For several years now, I’ve taken the slightly different approach to doing a recap post of Super Bowl ads and instead of focusing on which ones I thought were the best or most entertaining, I try to break them down from a marketing point of view to share some lessons for anyone in marketing who may not have been able to afford the $2+ million dollar price tag to experiment on the Super Bowl on their own (ie – most of us!). This year, there were lots of examples of what NOT to do, as there usually are. So to start, here are a few major themes across this year’s Super Bowl ads, including a roundup of some of the best strategic ads.
The Emasculated Man - For the first time in many years, the running gag of the subservient man who’s life is controlled by the woman he is with appeared over and over. Flo TV showed him holding bras in a store and described him as “having his spine surgically removed.” Dodge showed a montage of defeated faces with taglines like “I carry your lip balm,” to justify the Dodge Charger as their ...
Why if you miss Siri you’ll miss the future of the Web
Siri is the most useful thing I’ve seen so far this year.
But after playing with it, getting an interview with its CEO (video here on building43) it’s even more important for you to pay attention to.
It is the best example of what the web will be.
Let’s go back.
Web 1994 was the “get me a domain and a page” era.
Web 2000 was the “make my page(s) interactive and put people on it” era.
Web 2010 is the “get rid of pages and glue APIs and people together” era.
Siri is the best example. First, it’s not a website. It’s an application you put on your phone (today iPhone, soon others like Android and Blackberry). Second, it isn’t a search engine, those are so 1998. It’s a system that assists you in your life.
Why is it so different?
Because on the back end they’ve stitched together a sizeable group of APIs from services like Opentable to Flightstats. With more coming soon.
Before it was common only for a couple of APIs to be joined together, here they have dozens. The system figures out which ones need to be used based on what you’re asking for.
That’s the other ...