Sunday, October 26, 2008

Ogilvy Athens' Tribute Song



OK, OK so I work here but.... ouch.

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Ogilvy's Greenery Launches Blog

The Greenery, Ogilvy's sustainability practice area which helps clients with mission-based branding has launched their blog. nice work chaps.

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The Best South African Digital Work?

I hate identikit presentations, you know the ones exactly the same now matter who you are talking to. So with that in that mind I always like to put in relevant examples and cases from the market. I have a trip to Johanesburg in afew weeks talking about global digital trends. I looking for great examples of digital work in mobile, web or outdoor.

Through the egomunications channel I am reaching out to some of the top south african maketing bloggers below for their thoughts and examples.


Any help approeciated and in return I will post the deck on sideshare and buy you anyone beer if they are around on the 4th or 5th November .

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Thursday, October 23, 2008

Should You Sack The Attitude? That's The Golden Question.

Back in 2000 at Agency Republic I did a segmentation project for O2, now this was before it was O2, before txt messaging had taken off, before all you could eat data plans and before youtube, blogs, wikis and web 2.0. 

We cut the data in so many different ways - time spent talking, age, media habits, disposible income but nothing really usable and valuable over and above the vanilla segments you see on a million and one ad briefs. 

Then we found something, ok an incredibly bright planner who lectured at lse on marketing in her spare time, found something. What she found was that if the first cut was made on "attitude to technology" then the ones in the positive and "enhances my life" group were enormously more valuable than those who were negative as based on the accenture models. 

It seems obvious now, but back then telling O2 that their current business model was not right and that a person who spent hours on the phone chatting was less valuable than the snotty kid who sent a couple of text messages a day was tantamount to telecom treason. 

Afew years later I worked on the rebranding of Smartone in Hong Kong. We defined the brand and not just how it should be communicated through identity, retail and communications but also looked at how the processes and systems of the company needed to change to deliver the 
positioning. 

A large part of the project was looking at the type of people they needed in the organisation. We did a nice little staff 2X2 based on "ability to deliver" and "live the brand" or "Skill & Will" (cheers jmac). Those that had the skill and the will got promoted and well remunerated. Those that had the will but not the skil were retrained, those that didn't have the will, irrespective of their skill, were migrated out of the business. 

So imagine my thought process when I recently met a bunch of planners who suggested that they didn't use web 2.0 tools as technology was complicated, there were too many passwords to remember and they would rather have a chat amoungst themseleves face-to-face, not online and certainly not open to other people like account handlers and creatives.  

Now this surely has a fundamental impact on not only how agencies might use technology to improve their working lives by making it more efficient but much more worrying is the  lack of understanding of the world today and how our audience operate in it. 

Last time I checked a couple of years ago O2 still use the segmentation and are one of the largest telcos out there, Smartone got incredibly favourable analyst reports and a place on the top 20 of best asian brands list later that year and were subsequently bought by by Vodafone. 

Many ad agencies still struggles to deliver decent digital campaigns. 

So my advice to ad agency MDs and CEOs run the matrix on not just your planning department but the whole agency and sack the attitude. 



Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Me In Hollywood Scandal. Elf 2.0









Time Warner CableCreate your ownOddcast Powered


It is a well worn path. The process works so why change it. 

Tell you what though, I hate auto plays.

Disclaimer: this was done by Ogilvy in the US

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Tuesday, October 21, 2008

The Media Centre Goes Social



The bad news: my onyko 605 home cinema amp blew up at the weekend 

The good news: i got accepted as an alpha tester on boxee

boxee is a social media center. with boxee you can play videos, music and pictures from your PC or from the Internet. you can also share with your friends what albums you're listening to, what movies and TV shows you're watching, send recommendations and more.

boxee is designed to work with a remote control (it looks great on a big screen TV), but you ca

n also control it using your keyboard.

once installed boxee will start scanning your local Movies, Music and Pictures folders automatically. boxee will attempt to bring artwork, reviews, cast, etc. for your media, so browsing your library becomes more useful and fun than looking at a list of files.

boxee is based on the best media center on the planet, xbmc.

More to follow once I have played around with it some.

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Sunday, October 19, 2008

Doritos Makes You Shit Yourself



With Halloween looming, Goodby has unveiled a new horror-themed campaign for Doritos promoting the re-launch of the chips brand's Taco and Four Cheese flavors. The site, dubbed "Hotel 626", is only open from 6pm to 6am EST and gives visitors the chance to take on scary challenges in 13 different rooms.

Hotel 626 features a morgue, a dark room and other claustrophobic confines, giving visitors 3D views in darkness, brooding sound design and cell phone directions that lets one react in real-time to the action on the screen. A microphone and a webcam are highly recommended to experience the whole site.

An awesome piece of branded content.

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Friday, October 10, 2008

Replace All Page Ads.... With A Doritos Ad?!



A browser plug in to strip out and replace ads. A full on rip off of Ad Art - makes me feel quite dirty - but I guess I like the fact you can choose what you display.

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Thursday, October 09, 2008

Financial Crisis On A Whiteboard



I am glad the web can make finding this sort of information easy. Still doesn't pay the mortgage but interesting none the less.

Hat tip webjungle.

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Friday, October 03, 2008

In Banner Concerts

Lovely idea.

If they had allowed me to snag the code to post on here it would have been much better.



Thursday, October 02, 2008

Diesel's Dirty 30 Porn Ad



To celebrate's it's 30 year anniversary, Diesel throw's a global Dirty 30 party. To promote the party there is this from theThe Viral Factory.


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