Thursday, May 28, 2009

One Rule To Save Advertising

Safe adventure, investment marketing, risk marketing, measureable innovation. Call it what you will but the more I talk to agencies and clients the more I am convinced that to survive, the first/only rule we reallly need to adhere to is McKinsey's 80/20.  

Spend 80% on stuff you know works and 20% on measureable innovation.

As the environment continues to be challenging clients are stripping back budgets and expecting those budgets to work hard. They and their agencies are shying away from doing anything that can't be very closely related to sales or is out of the ordinary. No real issue there but this willover time deliver dimishing returns, sacked clients and bored agencies. 

To survive we all need to try new things and develop new ways of reaching our audiences. But it needs to be measurable. If the ideas work they are rolled in to the 80% if not we learn and move on. Rather than try and sell those in on an adhoc basis, fighting for budgets in the weeds, we need to all buy into this at a high level. 

It keeps work interesting but most importantly keeps us moving, keeps us evolving...



Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Lux Missing The Entertainment Mark?

Take two bottles into the shower? 



Why do an ad and branded entertainment when you can cram them both together and do a weird/rubbish hybrid. 

Sort of like bractical (brand and tactical) ads of the past this advertainment travesty is for Lux.

Decide what it is you want to do and stick to it.

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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

4 Reasons @Ogilvy Got 10k Twitter Followers

@ogilvy just reached 10,000 followers. Here's how:

Like many digital marketing people I have numerous sources for information on the market place and often struggle to both keep upto date with the news but also separate the trusted posts from the rubbish. 

So I started to follow all Ogilvy bloggers.  This gave a great point of view from all disciplines, all countries and all levels within the company. Importantly I knew they fundamentally thought like me and their posts always came with some Ogilvy attitude.

But soon they started to take over my Google home page so I decided to amalgamate all the feeds into a single RSS using something else I had been playing around with; Yahoo Pipes. I spat this into various different vehicles including social widgets and netvibes apps. 

Around the same time I was also looking at Twitter and I opened the @ogilvy account to secure the name and thought nothing more of it.  After a while more and more people followed so I decided to auto update by passing the Ogilvy blog RSS through twitterfeed. I also started selectively posting directly about Ogilvy job openings, reports and work...and after the occasional beer, a rant or two. Ahem.

My follwers steadily increased but I never followed back, unsure of what I would say or what it would imply. One follower was pretty vocal about the fact I never did, complaining that it was hardly marketing best practise, so at the 5th time of him mentioning it I decided to follow everyone of the thousand or so followers I had.  That was a fun RSI inducing 2 hours.

I am glad I did, the great insights, examples and points of views that everyone tweets has been nothing short of eye opening. 

People have contacted me about jobs, journalists about stories, headhunters about people they could place, people who just wanted to chat or have a point of view.  Some people complain about the frequency of posts (it is on a refresh every half hour so they often come in batches) others about the automated nature, some comment on the fact that the posts are not optimised for twitter and a bunch of other stuff. But generally the feedback is all positive.  

Central office have been in touch about taking over the feed but I think that wouldn't be true to the followers who seem to like the content as it is and the 5%  block rate seems to bear this out. I am pretty sure @ogilvy would have had a huge number of followers no matter what anyone did but here are my top tips:

1. Be interesting
Ogilvy bloggers search out the latest interesting communications work out there and always normally have a point of about it or how our audiences or the industry is changing. It always has an ogilvy attitude and this is not neutered by any corporate speak or just standard press releases

2. Be authentic
@ogilvy reflects to views of the people within Ogilvy not necessarily corporate Ogilvy - it is a fine but important line. We are a company of people.

3. Engage
Follow back and for every @ogilvy or DM I have endevoured to reply to honestly, even the negative stuff.

4. David
Search twitter for Ogilvy and you will see numerous quotes flying around. His nuggets of wisdome are made for this medium and reading them everyday is a great reminder of why he would have loved the marketing evironment today. His global reputation and the agency he built is the real reason people gravitate to @ogilvy.

Thanks all.

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Monday, May 18, 2009

Money Love



Origami bank note sex?! Great ad that's not bad for a supposedly staid financial services sector.

Makes a change from them screwing us.

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Advertising Evolution 2

A couple of years ago I wrote about the evolution of the marketing agency. With their collobaorative, partnership and sharing model Anomaly were the leaders at the time, and I am still a big fan.  

However things are moving on so I am cooking up a new plan:

Take a couple of elements from last year's 7 models for agency survival, roll in some crowdsourced creative. Don't bother baking but serve immediately and heat as you go. 

People like blur marketing & addictlab are essentially starting a distributed agency. They claim ultimate flexibility, responsiveness and best of breed. 

I can't help but feel this is fine for quick projects but something with more depth, something that requires an indepth understanding of the brand and the audience. Something international and ongoing. Can the new breed offer this,  at any scale on and ongoing basis. A big network agency.

Happy to be proved wrong but I feel we need a combination of both. It looks like this. Maybe.

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Monday, May 11, 2009

Is Advertising Going Backwards?

The 30 Second TV/Internet ad?!

"This summer ShortTail Media will initiate a beta test of what it’s calling the Digital 30 (D30), a full-screen, deliberately intrusive placement built to showcase traditional 15- and 30-second TV spots. But unlike most Web video ads, the D30 loads between Web pages much like an interstitial."

Er...it's a TV ad online. 

I particularly like the use of the word intrusive.

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Sweet Hula Dancer



I love these from the Oglvy boys and girls in Paris. This is my fvourite. I am sure there is, or could be an interactive thingamy and a digital whatnot but who cares. These make me think and smile.

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Friday, May 08, 2009

When Is Prime Time Online?


new chart on UK online ad attention from e consultancy today:

combined with one on UK device access  from orange

in a chart mash-up madness

anyone got any other attention/response details for any other media that we can chuck in there too and get really crazy...

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Wednesday, May 06, 2009

The Best/Worst Ad Ever?



Hide behind the office chair bad/good...

Hat tip copy matt.

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“Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them”

Great article in the New York Times on the value of ludicrous thinking.  

Via BBH labs who muses: In a world of frenetic recycling, mash-ups, re-tweeting and outright imitation I wonder how we can find more left-field thinkers and, as importantly, allow them to flourish when we find them? Does the sharing of everything, all the time, with everyone, combined with the sheer volume of stimulus that assaults us, result in the lobotomizing of the renegades, the free spirits, the natural geniuses? The natural evolution of average. Not survival of the fittest so much as survival of the most popular.

There is increasingly a need for advertising to find a way to pay for people to zag whilst others merely zig...


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Monday, May 04, 2009

Campaigning With Social Media


View more presentations from madebymany.
Agency, Made by Many and Amnesty International UK have published their findings on a social media campaign they ran for their Campaign to Stop Violence Against Women. It makes for interesting reading for NGOs, campaigning organisations and companies alike. Tim Malbon from Made by Many gives background to their work and explains more here.

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