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29 August 2009

Proximity BBDO announces it's Best Of Class - Strategist Nicolas Moerman - The Farm edition 2009 We have appointed Strategist Nicolas Moerman for the Best Of Class scholarship.

Nicolas will soon be send to The Mothership in London. After 3 weeks of learning, sharing, interacting and creating we had to elect 1 chosen one. Our first edition of The Farm ended yesterday. A series of interviews and observation sessions stacked elaborate files on each participant, which led us to a long and tiring meeting. I guess I mustn't tell you that all participants contributed the strength of the Team. But, as we promised, only one of them could be granted that €1500 lot and seat in the London office. To select the Best Of Class we considered a broad range of criteria.

Nicolas proved his strengths as a Strategist being able to shape Client input to a tight Creative Brief, he proved to be a premium Digital Native because of his thorough knowledge of technological possibilities and Social Media. He knows who to talk to. He was responsible for one third — 4950 people have visited The Farm blog since August 7 — of the platform's traffic and about one fifth of the content. One might argue that he is a noisy bastard — and he is — but luckily he has learned to keep quiet when needed. We don't blame him for his youthful enthusiasm of course. He is able to jump-start the creative process and mostly assesses good ideas correctly. Overall he is fascinated by marketing, technology and advertising which, we believe, is a good mix. Nicolas has a natural appetite for selling products and services the new media way.

He considers himself to have weird sense of humor and is without any doubt a major a geek. A marketing addict, bitten by the interactive advertising bug. No doubt he'll blend into the British Empire squad in no time. We wish him all the luck, and Godspeed. tags > Best Of Class, Nicolas Moerman, ProximityBBDO, Strategist, TheFarm

10 rules of advertising engagement

• If it doesn't sell, it's not creative.

• Media should be planned in order to benefit the impact of the idea, and not because of the profit or fee it generates to the agency booking the media (they'll benefit in the long run).

• Ideas were and will always be the core of good advertising. BUt it mustn't be forgotten that execution is as important.

• Advertising is all about creating good content. If that content is really good, a conversation will emerge. If conversations continue, they grow a community. Communities tend to grow their own content collaborating with the existing ideas and message thus creating new content that can be enhanced by new Big Ideas. Generating more sales in the end.

• Blow the line: Big Ideas come from above. Below makes those ideas really work.

• Sell products not advertising. Be business minded and never create for the sake of creation.

• Will online replace others soon? Never. Online will amplify advertising to become attractive, and effective, again. It is the very core of the future, the backbone of all communication and thus the most important traffic driver to the product or service advertised. Online pushes advertising to fuse with editorial, which is a good thing. Advertising was nothing but editorial back in the days (1875 > 1950's)

• Focus more on the importance of customer services. Because a better service helps create a better product. Customer services will not only tighten the relationship between brands and their customers but will allow agencies to grow closer to the customers.

• Ideas are, and will always be, what differentiates the agencies from what customers do for brands. The power of what keeps agencies alive are those Big Ideas.
Sure, a good product tends to sell itself but the true profit for the manufactures really comes from advertising their products, of course. Yes, I believe in advertising. Advertising is giving information. Products still need to be explained and clarified, their strenghts communicated to it’s possible buyers. A message needs to be send telling why it is a good product.

• To me advertising is a story that sticks. tags > advertising, believe, creative, engagement, grapplica, idea, marketing, personal

28 August 2009

Stop Motion Retro Tribute hits the fan, blows traffic and kills bandwidth

Swedish duo Rymdreglage combines the two in their video ‘8 Bit trip’. The video is a tribute to all your favorite games of the 80’s: Tetris, Mario, PacMan and they’re all compiled of Lego! The music in the video is by Daniel Larsson and the animation was done by Tomas Redigh, the two members of Rumdreglage, who spend 1,500 hours in creating this amazing video.

Tomas Redigh spend December 2008 to July 2009 in his studio moving Lego bricks around and taking pictures. It seems like all the effort the duo put in is already paying off. They placed the video online just 5 days ago and already got over 1.7 million views. Apparently, the duo wasn’t expecting this sudden abundance of attention. Their official website couldn’t handle the traffic and now reads: ‘Well after five years you people out there found us, at last, and start to visit this page. This site was obviously not made for that and reached the maximum limit of bit flow in one hour or something’.

Here's what there website says:

8-bit trip on iTunes

Hello, this Is Rymdreglages new fancy website. But why this extraordinary with text and everything? Well after five years you people out there found us, at last, and start to visit this page. This site was obviously not made for that and reached the maximum limit of bit flow in one hour or something.

But it wasn´t much to see anyway. If you want to listen to the rest of our 44 songs and not only 8-bit trip (well 2 of the 44 is on youtube) you just have to be a little patient. Hopefully they will be on Spotify and iTunes and other modern places on what we call ajnternejt in a few days.

So thank you very much for visit our youtube channel and keep on enjoying this site. If you stare at this text with crossed eyes for an hour or two you might be able to reach a higher level but I am not sure.
2009-08-24 (just four month left to Christmas) /Rymdreglage.
 tags > 8-bit, lego, music, retro, Rymdreglage, video, viral

27 August 2009

RKCR/Y&R Opens Doors For Local Businesses 

Source: ViralBlog 

Compared to What? - An exhibition about subculture. 

Outlandish Photography is a platform for young photography.
Rue des Ursulines 7, 1000 Bruxelles (Recyclart) tags > art, exhibition, outlandish, photography, subculture

26 August 2009

Art & Copy - a powerful new film about advertising and inspiration
 tags > advertising, art, copy, movie

25 August 2009

Get ready for the Angry Whopper - Burger King Angrrometer As part of its reintroduction of the Angry Whopper, Burger King is wondering if Canadians are aggressive enough to eat the spicy sandwich. So, working with Taxi 2 in Toronto, they developed this website that features the "Angrrometer," a tool that measures a person's anger quotient. To see if they've got what it takes, visitors need only turn on their webcam, scream as loud and as angrily as they can into their mic and watch as innovative face-tracking technology shows the physical effects of their anger. If you visit the site without a webcam, a talking Angry Whopper makes fun of you for being stuck in 1997. It happened to us. We'll see who's laughing when we go to a Burger King and take a bite out of it's smug, tasty face.

via DirectDaily tags > Angrrometer, Angry Whopper, Burger King

24 August 2009

I'm currently reading Juicing the Orange by Fallon and Senn. Blown was I, when my eyes hit the third page. The third page shows the opening ad of Fallon McElligott Rice. A manifesto with an almost absurd amount of copy. Certainly because straight down (long)copy ads were long time out of fashion by the time the ad ran, July 20, 1981. They felt it was essential to articulate their vision. Twenty-five years later, the statistics are worse, and globalization and technology have changed the marketing environment, but the solution is the same: applied creativity. I read the tiny typeset ad 4 bloody times in a row. Because it was a nifty crafted piece of copy, but mostly because what the ad said was so "now" even though it ran 28 years ago.

Like so many in our business I find myself a numerous amount of times listening to some self-proclaimed guru who walks the talk and thinks he himself should be awarded a medal for sharing his mastermind visions with you. More often than not scraping pieces from manifesto's of some decades ago. It sickens me to see and hear these gut-shots claim eternal greatness while the same story has been told much better by guys who've shaped the industry years ago. Lots of people waive Ogilvy's rules and bold statements as old fashioned and out of business. But, many seem to have forgotten that he cemented the foundations of the industry, and envisioned the rise and importance of Direct long time ago. He should be studied and praised by everyone who tries to advertise anything at all. As too for this legendary Fallon ad which I've included further down this post. Of course one must note that the ad sings widely from the Bernbach bible but its message and content remains key to what most agencies strife for nowadays.

"I know that only half of my advertising works. The trouble is I don't know which half."
— John Wanamaker

If you're spending money on advertising, you've probably wondered: Is anybody out there listening?
The answer to that question is a shock.
Consider the following facts: American business will spend over $54 billion on advertising this year. According to one estimate cited in The Journal of Advertising Research, that money will buy over 200 thousand messages per person, or approximately 560 messages every day for every man, woman and child in America.
Of those 560 messages, the average person will notice only 76.
Of those 76, only 12 will be remembered.
And of those 12, 3 will be remembered negatively.
From 560 to 76 to 12 to 9 — an attrition rate of more than 98%!
Sobering isn't it?
But the news gets worse before it gets better.

The clutter trap.
In an effort to counteract the dwindling effectiveness of their messages, more and more companies increase their media frequency.
This leads to clutter.
Advertisers like Wisk and Sanka, once content to run their shrill, tedious commercials several times a week, now may run them several times an hour, trying to bore their way into the consumer's consciousness.
Ironically, while the number of messages (and media costs) have doubled in the past several years, consumers pay less attention than ever before.
In fact, a growing body of evidence suggests that increased frequency may actually be self-defeating.
In 1976, The Harvard Business Review warned,
"Heavy media spending can even work against you... repeated exposure to an advertisement may give rise to what psychologists label 'perceptual defense', to irritation, or even outright rejection."

Raising awareness, Not budgets.
It's clear that if you want to be one of the precious few that are remembered — less than 2% — you've got your work cut out for you. Outspending the competition is increasingly expensive and, as we've seen, may even work against you.
Instead of trying to outspend the competition, why not try to out-think them? With messages so interesting that even the most indifferent consumer will stop and look.
According to researcher Daniel Starch, one advertisement can outperform another advertisement for the same product in the same media at the same time by 500%.
Obviously, the preferred way to improve effectiveness is not to increase the spending level of your advertising, but to increase the interest level of your advertising.

Scarcity of imagination.
Unfortunately, raising the interest level of your advertising is easier said than done. The creative imagination to make great advertising — advertising that builds bridges between products and customers — is rare.
As The Harvard Business Review once observed,
"...creativity is like peace. Everybody wants it, everyone seems to have some ideas about it, but nobody seems able to produce it."
Once every several years, however, an advertising agency with the ability to produce truly exciting, original and compelling advertising appears. Fallon McElligott Rice is such an agency.
Although we've just opened our doors, the campaigns we've created at past agencies are famous. They've won market share for our clients, and a lion's share of awards for us. They've been studied in journalism schools, and copied by our competitors. In every case, these campaigns seemed like they had more money behind them than they did.
The ideas weer big; the budgets small.

What we believe.
At Fallon McElligott Rice we believe in advertising the way Ray Rubicam, Leo Burnett, David Ogilvy and Bill Bernbach once practiced it.
We believe that imagination is one of the last remaining legal means you have to gain an unfair advantage over your competition.
We believe you shouldn't have to repeat yourself ten times to be heard once.
We believe there is no such thing as a "me-too" product, only "me-too" advertising.
And we believe that great advertising is, has been, and always will be created in full partnership with great clients.
If you're beginning to have some questions about whether anybody out there is listening to your advertising, perhaps you should talk to us. Soon.
We have a lot of ideas, a lot of energy, and a lot to prove.

This ad is everything I believe in, it is what drives most of us to fight the horror of adverbatims today. Please consider addressing me to talk about the content of this post in depth. Soon. tags > advertising, agency, copywriting, Fallon, Minnesota, strategy, vision
