09.29.09
JW’s Fabulous(ly British) T’s
Some sharp direct e-marketing from JW this morning. Aside from the fact the T’s themselves are pretty darn cute, playing on the Fabulously… tag within an array of rainbow shades, the presentation of the message is adorable.
I’ve seen a few creative pitch decks being put together in a similar fashion to the above lately, and execs seem to be taking their cue from fashion houses and graphic designers on whose labours of love the above format seems to be based. The standard Powerpoint text box is dead – laboriously photographing collections of Post-Its on a white board is the new way to express your creative ideas (and it is worth it).
As if a snapshot had been taken directly from the desk of a designer at JW HQ (staples still intact in the corner of the crumpled notepaper), there seems a desire to stamp authenticity on what could have become a standard e-mailout. The hand-drawn augmentation of the well-established ‘Fabulously British’ tag now synonymous with the brand, is a cheeky rebellious twist at once conveying both credibility and a brand personality not afraid to challenge convention. Rather reflective of their student audience I thought.
And one final thing – pretty brave for a fashion brand to launch a whole new range of T’sjust as the air turns crisp and people are starting to dig out scarves, layers and overcoats. But when you’re a JW staple, who cares about bucking the trend? Sling it over a Raubelin Henley with a scarf and a beanie and you’re good to go.
09.28.09
Hiscox insurance calls a spade a spade
Snapshot while waiting for a train this morning – a strong outdoor ad from a potentially dull brand.
CBS Outdoor Advertising did something equally striking when catching the eye of bored tube commuters at Hammersmith station a few months back.
This time, insurance company Hiscox are out to prove that they speak plainly to their customer base, cutting through all the usual jargon spouted by a lot of their financial and insurance competitiors. In this case, literally calling a spade a spade.
If my Blackberry photo resolution isn’t quite up to scratch, the copy reads:
It’s a Spade. Not an earth relocating implement.
At Hiscox, we keep our policies jargon free. After all, what’s wrong with plain English?
In a world where your water-cooler arrives via local ’water-dispensing solution delivery operatives’ and your household trash is collected by ‘refuse waste removal management systems’, it was quite refreshing to see a spade called, well, a spade.
Feeling the love for Dorset Cereals
A re-kindling of my love for Dorset Cereals this morning has led to an unadulterated plug for the brand. Not a product that I can regularly afford to buy (more due to the volume I would consume than the price), it was from coming home to the parental Surrey seat that reminded me how fab they are.
Fortunately for me, parents keep plentiful stock of the World’s Best Cereal™ – so now I am never without. Next time you’re perusing the breakfast aisle, give them a go. You won’t regret it. You know all those healthy cereal brands who claim to be ‘packed with real fruit pieces!’, but you actually find yourself scraping the bottom of the box for five measly freeze-dried anonymous pieces of what could be strawberries/cranberries/raspberries but you’re not quite sure? Well these guys put them all to shame.
They also have quite a cool little website, which you can check out here. In terms of brand-feel, they are slightly Innocent-like in their quirky tone of voice and inherent healthy vibe. Obviously they taste great too (I’m not sure they could cram more fruit in if they tried), but always on the look-out for cool brand images, I’ve been impressed with their noticeable cut-through in an increasingly cluttered market over the last three years or so.
Oh, and if you happen to think this blog is the best thing since sliced bread (or maybe since packet cereal), then you can nominate me in Dorset’s Little Blog Awards too. (shameless plugging over)
09.25.09
Lady Dior: when literature shapes fashion
I had a feeling my Links of London post wouldn’t be the last LFW ad to grace this blog.
Flipping through the FT’s fashion special of its weekly portion of riches, How to Spend It last weekend, I was again savouring all the luxury brand creatives as much as (if not more than) the editorial pieces between. Typical marketer I guess.
In the opening spread, the enviable elegance of the magnifique Marion Cotillard seeped from the Dior pages. But this time it was the choice of prop that caught my eye.
© Dior / FT
Granted, the striking red and black contrast of the composition called for a book jacket of the same – peeping out of Cotillard’s arm candy to add a subtle hint of literary culture to her undeniable beauty. But was Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye the only one the stylist could lay her hands on? Or was there something deeper that informed the choice?
I noticed it because Catcher happens to be one of my top three books of all time. The intensely human centre of the narrative has made it one the preeminent novels of the twentieth century. Perhaps the implication is that, like the book, Lady Dior and her purse of choice are truly iconic. So was it chance that the Penguin cover design happened to fit so sharply into Dior’s latest creative?
© Dior / FT
Either which way, the choice was interesting. While high fashion houses like Dior spend hundreds of thousands on advertising creatives inventing a luxury world which its audience buys into (the classic, ‘buy the lifestyle not just the product’), essentially they do need to shift sales. When said product is included in shot, you can bank on every effort having been made to draw your attention to it.
Does the bag have the same presence of focus in the image with the book removed?
Thus, arguably, in this particular composition, Catcher has a greater starring role than Cotillard.
But for those more interested in the bag than its contents, you can snap up the ‘Le 30′ black lambskin leather number with ‘Cannage’ embroidery for a mere £1,550 from Dior.com now. Random fact? The Le 30 range owes its name to the number 30 in Christian Dior’s Avenue de Montaigne address.
My favourite? Well, it has to be the pink really doesn’t it. And just a snip at £1,290:
© Dior.com
09.23.09
Friends of Friends flock to Carnaby Street
… or at least they will, from tomorrow.
In a classic example of inspired experiential marketing, the promoters of the shiny new DVD box-set of every Friends episode *ever*, have opened an actual Central Perk cafe this week in the heart of London’s funky Carnaby Street shopping zone. And all hooked around the 15th anniversary of the hit TV show.
Taking out half page adverts in today’s Metro, thereby guaranteeing almost every Londoner’s attention, WarnerTV advertised the grand opening along with two calls to action: buy the DVD box-set and get yourself a free cup of coffee in the meantime.
Because, not content with the novelty value alone drawing in the crowds, the promoters have also posted a free-cup voucher online for Friends fans to download and spend offline.
Love it. Launch party was tonight – looking forward to seeing the stories of round-the-block queues that are bound to dominate Friday’s London press after the first day of opening.
When headphones became jewellery
I’ve been loving the flurry of luxury brand advertising dominating the glossy pages of all national newspaper supplements from last weekend onwards, marking the onset of London Fashion Week – or #LFW as Twitter users have re-named it in a hashtag frenzy of fashionista gossip.
No doubt a few more highlights might make the pages of this blog before the week is out, but one particular Links of London ad caught my eye in the Sunday Telegraph’s brilliant ST Fashion. As preposterously be-jewelled neckpieces provided ostentatious frosting to the sharp tailored lines of the suited collections strutting down the runway, Links seemed to be offering something a little different.
So ubiquitous have the dangling ear pieces of ipod headphones become – on school kids and cityworkers alike – that Links has decided to cast them in silver and hang them from a pretty chain. Thus creating a funky of-the-moment statement piece that fuses modern pop culture lifestyle with the striking bold style that we have come to expect from Links’ unique design.
© Links of London/Telegraph Media Group
It took a second look, but in the end it charmed me.
09.09.09
Jack Wills Freshers’ Tour, sponsored by… Jack Wills
Just yesterday at Synergy towers, there was some collective musing going on around how the face of sponsorship could change in the next few decades. And that got me thinking about that ever-elusive demographic – the 16-24 year olds – to see how they might be running businesses and consuming media in 25 years’ time.
One area of interest is how immune (or not) youth of today have become to brand presence in their everyday lives. Do they reject it (oft-quoted myth)? Do they embrace it (when it suits them)? Do they challenge it to give them added value before giving it their valuable attention (‘what’s in it for me’)? Or do they ignore it altogether?
Or, have they come to expect it as par for the course of being entertained? I wondered if the ’such and such, brought to you by…’ had become such a ubiquitous tag to music concerts / sporting fixtures / televised events, that people in 10 or 20 years might actually notice an absence of brand more than its presence. After all, I was hearing this mandatory credit line before I could even read, from the loveable muppets of Sesame Street (‘Sesame Street was brought to you by the number 8 and letters D and M…’ etc.)
But one interesting application of the sponsorship concept was brought to me today by Britain’s favourite University Outfitter, Jack Wills.
Having just returned from a summer of fun in New England, the brand’s bright young marketing things are about to embark on another grand tour of the UK’s trendiest universities. JW will be at a Freshers’ Week near you in the next few weeks, combining their fabulously British fashion with cutting edge, fresh new music – via the brand’s evolving unofficial music label, JWUnsigned.
But what caught my eye in the creative flyer for the Tour, was the sponsorship line. Bearing in mind that this is a Jack-Wills event, delivered as a music tour produced by a Jack Wills sub-brand, it is ’sponsored by’ – wait for it – a Jack Wills denim range. This year’s JWUnsigned Freshers Tour is brought to you by No.350-4-842 – the brand’s denim clothing line.
This I feel points to some interesting signs about the presence that sponsorship has in the lives of youth culture today. Sponsorship in its basic sense – brand-pays-rights-holder – cannot apply here given that both the sponsor and property are from the same stable. So one assumes that JW is using the Tour platform to leverage awareness of its 350-4-842 denim as almost a stand-alone brand, instantly recognizable in and of itself but crucially as part of the Jack Wills family.
But I sense that there must be an implicit acceptance here by the Tour’s marketeers that their target consumers are so expectant of a live event being sponsored, it has become a necessary element of the Tour name. ‘Sponsored by…’ acts in this case as a ready-made stamp of officialdom: all big music events are sponsored so the JWUnsigned Tour needs to be too, in order to gain stature and acceptance within the youth marketplace.
St. Andrew’s, Leeds, Edinburgh, London, Bristol, Nottingham, Guildford and Brighton all appear to be on the list of host cities for the Tour events, and I’m intrigued to see what these will look like. How will JW use the opportunity to engage with their fans? Will they be actively spreading the word of their ‘Worn in but not Worn Out’ denim range to a captive audience of indie music fans? Will the bands be wearing the jeans during all their sets? Or is that ’sponsored by…’ tag ultimately just that – a tagline?
And most interesting of all – will the legions of JW-loving Freshers either notice or, perhaps more importantly, care?
09.07.09
On the search for England’s ‘lost’ Ashes season
Following England’s recent victory at the Oval to reclaim Ashes glory, reflections have been made far and wide on the scale of achievement accomplished.
Amidst all the celebratory guff, Martin Johnson’s salient points in the Sunday Times last weekend rang particularly true to me.
His piece mainly focused on the commendable decision not to repeat 2005’s ‘bacchanalian bender’ (to use his glorious phrase) in light of the relative triumph this time around. In Johnno’s words, it must be remembered that we are celebrating within the context of one average team beating another average team, and not the toppling of a cricketing giant, ending nearly two decades of humiliation.
© The News of the World
But his reasoned argument touched on the subject of a fairly lively debate I found myself in during a car journey back from the Cotswolds the previous weekend. Why exactly is it that England cricket fans – the media and civilians alike – seem so ready to forget the 2006-7 debacle that was in fact the previous Ashes series?
Said car-debate was triggered by some frustration with Sky Sports who, throughout this latest series, chose to dominate their match-break inserts with highlights from 2005. Sky, seeming to choose patriotic victory over recency, barely acknowledged what little encouragement might have been drawn from the albeit few inspiring individual performances in the previous series. Instead preferring to instill – or rather reiterate – the blind English belief of, ‘well, we did it four years ago so we can do it again.’
I found myself arguing that this was a symptom of our English optimism preferring to gain strength from previous victories, in order to support our current campaign, rather than dwelling on lessons learnt from past failures. The counter was that while ‘optimism’ might be admirable and reflections on previous success understandable, this should not be at the cost of total denial that an intermittent (disastrous) series ever even happened.
As Johnno himself slipped in one point:
‘…many half expected England to win and retaining the Ashes did not come as a total surprise’.
And what’s wrong with that?
Err, hang on a second - England were never in a position to ‘retain’ the Ashes this summer… seeing as we lost them two and a half years ago. Remember that?
Johnno did at least acknowledge this oversight in the same breath; his point being made that the England cricket fan-base has become so accustomed to blanking that mortifying season from our collective psyche that we barely notice we’re doing it.
He went on to offer a brief account of 2006-7 and the errors inherent therein – so astutely that I felt it worth repeating here. I’m not saying this should excuse our national denial of that series’ existence or that it explains Sky’s seemingly delusional exclusion of those highlights from this summer’s coverage – nor does it solely account for our truly shocking performance that winter. But it does touch upon some key lessons that (please God) the ECB will learn from before packing the boys off for the 2010-11 tour – when we really will be aiming to retain that little urn.
‘…but 2006-7 doesn’t count in that the boys went to Australia on holiday rather than to play cricket.
‘‘They didn’t actually start by sitting around the airport departure lounge wearing shell suits, drinking larger at 9am and checking in at the EasyJet counter, though everything thereafter reminded you of a package holiday booked online at lastminute.com.
‘‘There has never been any adequate explanation for a touring party expanding to 95 people for the flight from Syndey to Perth, a population explosion unmatched outside any colony of rabbits, and there were so many pushchairs in the hold it’s a miracle the plane managed to get off the ground.
‘So…it is also incumbent on the powers-that-be to make sure that this time England’s defence of the urn is treated more like a serious sporting mission than a family outing to Mablethorpe.’
Australia 2006/7 - that's not actually an England player. I don't think.
But to end on a positive note - one final counter to all those antipodeans’ protestations that Oz were the better team on paper and thus were the real victors:
‘Let’s hear no more about who, statistically, were the better team. When you’ve got 35 balls to dismiss Monty, and can’t do it, you don’t deserve to win.’
The death of Big Brother: a welcome assisted suicide
During my break in Spain last week (somewhat explaining my lack of posting of late), the biggest news headlines did still manage to reach my permanent relocation to the beach.
Big Brother 8's hopefuls © Channel 4 / Endemol / Guardian.co.uk
One of the best bits was the news of Big Brother’s long overdue demise, and my undisclosed glee seemed to be shared by a nation. I mean, seriously – the flogging of dead horses barely begins to cover it. Notwithstanding the fact I was addicted to season 2 when the novelty was still more or less intact, I feel that it might have been time to call it a day somewhere between a transexual’s gender-political victory and the Jade/Shilpa ‘racism’ row. There seemed no depth to which the producers would not stoop.
Having drafted a few words on the subject in celebration, I was pipped to the post by the Sunday Times’ Rod Liddle, whose own version of the news delivered such barbed wit and wry accuracy that I couldn’t possibly compete. I loved it – so here it is, in its entirety:
‘So, farewell Big Brother. Channel 4 has decided we have seen enough exhibitionist chavs with the collective IQs of a packet of Monster Munch in this particular setting. It will be approaching the production company Endemol, one assumes, to see what alternatives might be dreamt up. The creative director – an oxymoron if ever there was one – of Endemol is Peter Bazalgette, who also devised the reality show The Farm, during which pouting nonentity Rebecca Loos gave manual relief to a pig.
‘Sir Joseph Bazalgette won the gratitude and affection of all Londoners for devising a sewerage system that piped excrement away from every home in the capital. His great-great-grandson Peter has made a lot of money by sort of reversing this process, on a national scale.’
Marina Hyde’s piece in The Guardian was in much the same vein, and began with an equally pithy comment:
‘The demise of Big Brother resembled the funeral of a much-loathed relative, at which no one really knows what to say. At weddings, there’s always “you must be very proud”, but when you simply can’t trust yourself to deliver “he’ll be sorely missed” convincingly, the risk of blunder looms large. And so it was with Channel 4’s rich-but-racist uncle of a show, where the uncertain tribute that occurred with most embarrassing frequency in the obituaries was: “Is this the beginning of the end for reality TV?”‘
While I agree wholeheartedly with her sentiment, I think we have a way to go yet before we see a termination of reality TV as a whole genre. Sadly, not before time.
