David Beckham gets his kit off for a different kind of Football

This post really needs no introduction. Other than to say H&M are likely to have the most-watched Super Bowl ad this year in terms of female demographics. By a LONG chalk.
 

Catvertising: why more ad agencies need to learn to laugh at themselves

Catvertising is the latest YouTube sensation to ‘go viral’, with creators, Canadian advertising agency John St., undoubtedly now reaping the rewards of global awareness.

How did this little 150 second clip gain nearly 1 million views? And what other agency can claim that from what is essentially a promotional video?

Quite simply because there is something for everyone: People love the cats, brand-side marketers enjoy the mockery of typical agency showreel videos and every other marketing consultancy around the world is wishing they thought of the idea themselves.

In terms of a strategy for new business, this ticks every box:

1. At the centre of their pipeline ‘bulls eye’ will be the brands – potential clients – to whom they need to prove their creativity and ability to deliver against a brief.
2. In order to attract the best people to work in their team, they need to make sure everyone in the industry knows who they are so that if you don’t currently work there you kind of wish you did – or at least that your team was more like them.
3. And finally non-industry folk - who, directly, are of little benefit to John St. in terms of revenue, but they will be the ones their clients look to reach, so proving they can market themselves to this audience is a pretty convincing way to show they can market their clients with the same creative success. Not everyone will get the knowing references to AdLand’s bullsh*t bingo, but that doesn’t matter, because what everyone does know is that cat videos rock.

Having worked in a marketing consultancy for five years (and loved it), creative and innovative though it was, the trappings of the agency showreel are fairly universal. Catvertising is full of these and I love John St. for being so openly willing to poke fun, laughing at themselves and their industry nuances in the process.  As cutting-edge as they may be, too many agencies can take themselves so seriously, that by blinding prospective clients with zingy quotes, mind-boggling stats and mind map flowcharts, they alienate more than they do attract.

What John St. seem to be saying is ‘we know our stuff, but we’re not afraid to have fun. We don’t need whizz-bang strategy documents, Venn diagrams uncovering the ‘sweet spot’ or graphical displays of consumer behaviour to get our message across. We create content that sticks, and by doing so attract the very audience we set out to reach. We entertain, and we deliver. And we love cats.’

Who wouldn’t hire them?

Glee does Fashion’s Night Out

Some inspired promotion from FOX in the US emerged this week. Our favourite Gleeksters are getting their fashion on for a promotional video ahead of the 8th September – the official date for the global Fashion’s Night Out extravaganza. And just 12 days later, the new season of Glee happens to air on the American network.

The skit (above) is too short for my liking (please let there be a full-length music video aired at some point, or at least additional break bumpers with out-takes), but some of the production stills give you an idea of the fun had on set.

Lea Michele looks a-mazing (in Balmain, natch), Heather Morris rocks the currently ubiquitous star print trend and David Bowie‘s Fashion is obviously right on the money.

Glee meets Vogue. Awesome. Inspired.

Angry Birds: LIVE (from T-Mobile)

I have just been sent the best video I have seen from T-Mobile so far – and that includes the phenomenal Royal Wedding dance-off.

Who doesn’t love Angry Birds? So who wouldn’t want to play a giant life-sized version in the middle of Barcelona, complete with catapulting birds and exploding pigs?

Bring it to London, T-Mobile. Stat.

(with thanks to @canary_don for the tip-off)

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold: Movie Trailer

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. There are so many reasons why I love the look of this movie, not least:

• Super Size Me legend, Morgan Spurlock is fronting it. Guaranteed, good honest humour whilst proving a salient, sobering point along the way
• It is completely self-referential – a film proving its own point that we are over-advertised to through the medium of film and television, whilst acknowledging it wouldn’t exist without that very industry. I just love a good old paradox
• By the look of the movie posters, he actually manages to convince Californian-based pomegranate juice-makers POM Wonderful to take the $1m title sponsorship. I cannot wait to see that boardroom table discussion
• The issue of our contemporary over-dosing on product placement is placed front and centre (anyone who doubts the presence of brands in movies needs to check out Brand Channel‘s great database, Brand Cameo)
• Great title (though he will need to be forgiven for borrowing from Frank Rich’s book of the same name)

The premise is a simple one – can you make a movie using only budget acquired from sponsors and advertisers? If you’re wondering how Spurlock came up with the idea in the first place, his director’s statement in the movie’s press pack is worth a read.

(and no fewer than 12 pages of the 23-page press pack are dedicated to ‘A word from our sponsors’. So it’s a fair that bet he accomplished what he set out to…)

I think my favourite exchange in the trailer below, is from Spurlock’s conversation with politician Ralph Nader:

Spurlock: Where should I be able to go where I don’t see one bit of advertising?

[beat]

Nader: To sleep.

Not currently slated for a UK theatrical release this year, this might be one for festival screenings and a smaller-scale art-house release. But for the time being watch the trailer and enjoy:

 

Innocent Knit Big this winter

In terms of brands, there are a few things for me that mark the onset of Christmas. Pret’s Christmas sandwiches, Starbucks’ red cups, and Hellman’s’ sing-along Christmas TV ad to name a few. But not forgetting Innocent smoothies’ adorable bobble hats.

I first saw these a couple of years ago and thought it was an inspired (if fairly expensive) piece of product marketing. Completely fitting with the brand personality and creating stand-out on the shelf.

This year those happy chaps at Innocent have taken it to a whole new level. Enter, The Big Knit.

Some pretty heavy advertising spend must have been placed behind this (thank you Coca-Cola) due to the double-page skyscraper ads in The Times earlier this week, but it made me take note. It seems that Innocent were made aware of how the public embraced the woolly hat novelty of years gone by and this year have created a whole campaign around it.

Together with Age UK (a charity ethos that tend to tug at the heartstrings at this time of year), Innocent asked the great British public to knit their very own Innocent bobble hats of their own design. Sadly, we’re now too late to offer knitting expertise to the smoothie bottles because, as the site helpfully told me today, all the hats have been dispatched to stores.

However, you can still contribute – by buying Innocent smoothies, natch. In Boots and Sainsbury’s up and down the cournty. 25p from every purchase goes straight to Age UK. And while I seem to remember this little woolly numbers from only a couple of years back, Innocent have been working with these guys for much longer than that:

“We first got our needles out back in 2003 when we knitted 20,000 hats to raise £10,000 money for Age Concern [now Age UK]. Since then The Big Knit has grown every single year – and 2010 will be the year we smash the £1 million mark of total money raised over the campaign’s history as we aim to put 800,000 hats on our bottles.”

Impressive.

So keep a look out for the bottles, and the hats on bikes coming to a town near you. Post a comedy be-hatted picture to the Facebook group, and if you’re quite the knitter, you can still learn how to make your very own Innocent hat with videos on the site. Or perhaps put your needles to better use and create something for your local Age UK outlet.

Happy Christmas Innocent.

(and just for the hell-mans of it, have a sing-along)

The M&S Tortoise

Being the brand geek that I am, this blog is no stranger to featuring my favourite print ads (and I’ve recently started a TV ad playlist on my YouTube channel to capture my broadcast favourites too).

So here’s a little charmer from this morning’s press (this particular execution sat in the Daily Express).

He’s cute. It’s a tortoise. In a woolly bobble hat. Heating his home. What’s not to love?

But largely, it is all about timing. And that is the beauty of tactical advertising. Over the last 10 days, London has become considerably colder, with those annual domestic arguments over when to turn on the heating beginning in earnest. Why the arguments? Because energy isn’t cheap – but wouldn’t it be great if you could heat your home, knowing you were saving money too…? Enter the M&S Tortoise.

 

Mercedes-Benz on the runway

Thoughts welcome on the LFW advertising offering from Mercedes-Benz:

I’ve been meaning to post this ad for a while but, if I’m honest I haven’t quite figured out if I think it is freshingly and strikingly simple, or just plain dull.

On first sight, it struck me as a very straightforward concept, that perfectly conveyed the brand partnership between the luxury car dealer and Fashion Week. The runway as a road, M-B as the only vehicle suitable to transport you down it – or, as a metaphor for life’s runway. Thus the glamorous audience feasting on the fashions falling off the runways of London Fashion Week are perfectly poised to see M-B as the only car to be seen dead in this season (or, hopefully a little longer, considering the investment).

I tore it from Stylist and it has sat on my desk ever since. And during that time, I’ve actually grown to be disappointed with it. The simplicity that had first so impressed me – the thought of how easy it would have been to construct and shoot – suddenly struck me as lacking the luxe I expect from an M-B ad. The lighting was so garish, the chairs so basic, the whole set so uninspired.

That infamous YSL quote of fashion fading and style remaining eternal is an interesting one to ponder in this creative context. I would punt that M-B would far rather associate themselves with style than fashion, but ordinarily their sponsorship of Fashion Weeks around the world does this well. But the ad creative above positions the Fashion Week runway at its most stark, most functional and lacking the lustre and style that we so hope to see from the M-B brand.

That said, maybe I’m reading far too much into it. Ads weren’t designed to be analysed, they were designed for instant impact; to convey a message in the time it takes for the eye to process a concept to the brain, and the brain to draw upon all its reserves of previous experience to interpret a message. My instinct liked it, my inner-annalyst did not.

I’d love to hear what you think.

The Power of Branding

A little lesson in marketing for a Thursday afternoon.

I found this a while ago – I think on some eternal email forward – and I love it.

For anyone that doesn’t understand our crazy world, here’s a bit of a breakdown in terms everyone can understand:

1) You go to a party and you see an attractive girl across the room. You go up to her and say, “Hi, I’m great in bed, how about it?”

- That’s Direct Marketing.

2) You go to a party and you see an attractive girl across the room. You give your friend a fiver. She goes up and says “Hi, my friend over there is great in bed, how about it?”

- That’s Advertising.

3) You go to a party and see an attractive girl across the room. You somehow get her mobile number. You call and chat her up a while and then say “Hi, I am great in bed, how about it?”

- That’s Tele-Marketing.

4) You go to a party and see an attractive girl across the room. You recognize her. You walk up to her, refresh her memory and get her to laugh and giggle and then suggest, “Hi, I am great in bed, how about it?”

- That’s Customer Relationship Management.

5) You go to a party and you see an attractive girl across the room. You stand straight, you talk soft and smooth, you open the door for the ladies, you smile like a dream, you set an aura around you playing the Mr. Gentleman and then you move up to the girl and say, “Hi, I am great in bed, how about it?”

- That’s Hard Selling.

6) You go to a party, you see an attractive girl across the room. SHE COMES OVER and says, “Hi, I hear you’re great in bed, how about it?”

- Now THAT is the power of Branding.

All jokes aside, it does rather sum up the life blood of our industry: relationships.

The iPad – will it blend?

Squeals of excitement yesterday at an Engine Digital Training day provided by the eConsultancy, when trainer James Matthewson revealed his shiney new iPad – fresh out of the box from his trip to the States.

I have long been in love with all things Apple, and finally it seems I have the ultimate toy – a Kindle combined with an iPod Touch. It was just as pretty as expected, and very impressive video/picture quality. Above all it was fun to use. Sadly the app store wasn’t connecting in the UK so no books had been uploaded yet, and I’m still keen to see how well the books read on screen without inducing screen fatigue after long periods. But I’m optimistic.

But in all testable respects it seemed a smashing piece of kit. Web browsing was just as fluid as the iPhone but obviously with much greater visibility, although there remains the issue with a lack of Flash compatilbilty. Even the keyboard had good usability. Though I have read recommendations for the external keyboard when using it for prolonged blogging, I feel this just turns it into a regular Notebook, but with a rather unwieldy piece of extra kit attached. I’d be hoping to blog away using just the iPad interface – that’s the cool factor.

And look who else has jumped onto the iPad bandwagon? Our friend in the white coat at BlendTec. Posted just over a week ago on 5th April, the YouTube video has already received over 5,ooo,ooo views. Wowzers.

But will it blend?