Author and Mad-blog contributor Mark Tungate writes about a brand with a Russian heritage – Fabergé.
When I heard a few months ago that a mining group called Pallinghurst had acquired Fabergé, I wondered what had happened to the brand since the 19th century, when it was associated with fabulous jewelled Easter eggs. The story was even more intriguing than I’d hoped.
Peter Carl Fabergé was born in Saint Petersburg on 30 May 1846. He joined his father’s jewellery business in 1864 and took over the running of the firm eight years later.
The Easter of 1885 was a turning point for Fabergé. Tsar Alexander III wanted a 20th wedding anniversary gift for his wife, the Tsarina Maria Fedorovna, so he commissioned Fabergé to create an exquisite egg. The jeweller delivered it to the palace on Easter morning. At first it appeared to be a simple enamelled egg. Inside, however, there was a golden yoke. In Russian doll style, the yoke yielded a golden hen. And nestling within that was a miniature of the imperial crown, encrusted with diamonds, and an egg-shaped ruby.
Each year, Fabergé was commissioned to create another egg. When Nicholas II ascended to the throne after Alexander’s death, he continued the tradition. The Imperial eggs were exhibited at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, transforming the House of Fabergé into an international brand. The orders poured in for fine jewellery, silverware and tableware.
During the revolution, Fabergé fled with his family on the last train to Riga – and then to Berlin, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Lausanne. He died in 1920 and was buried in Cannes, France. Fabergé’s sons Eugene and Alexander set up shop in Paris, where they ran a small workshop called Fabergé & Company. However, they were forced to take legal action against a businessman named Sam Rubin, who had begun marketing cosmetics and perfumes under the Fabergé name.
Rubin had got the idea for the brand from one of his acquaintances: the oil tycoon Armand Hammer, a collector of Fabergé eggs. Lacking the finances to pursue their legal action, the Fabergé heirs eventually ceded the name to Rubin for US$25,000. He later sold the business to another company, Rayette, for US$26 million.
Renamed Fabergé Inc, the company sold products like the aftershaves Brut (‘Splash it all over’) and Denim (‘For the man who doesn’t have to try too hard’). Another company, McGregor, briefly owned the Fabergé brand before Unilever acquired it for US$1.5 billion in 1989.
Having fallen from intoxicating luxury to mass market, Fabergé was ready to be revived. A lifeline appeared in 2007, when Pallinghurst announced that it had purchased the Fabergé brand name. A new collection of Fabergé jewellery (not including eggs) was unveiled online at the end of 2009. See www.faberge.com
But what happened to the original jewel-encrusted eggs? There were fifty in all. Nine were acquired in 2004 by a Russian energy tycoon from the family of the late publisher Malcolm Forbes. Ten are housed in the Kremlin. Five are at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Queen Elizabeth owns three. Most of the others are divided among collectors around the world. And eight have vanished entirely.
Jean-Marie Dru, the inventor of Disruption and Chairman TBWA Worldwide delivered today a speech at the State Tretyakov Gallery on the occasion of the official housewarming of TBWA Moscow. Here are some sound-bites for all of you who couldn’t attend:
“We are in the grip of a terrible recession. And recessions are always times when we isolate and withdraw into ourselves, when we do not take risks, when we become more cautious.
And yet every day you ask yourself: how to grow, how to create more organic roles at a time when you have less resources.
This is where we can contribute. This is where creativity can contribute. Provided that creativity focuses in the right direction.”
In his first public lecture in Moscow Jean-Marie Dru covered three areas, that he believes are essential for the future of our business: (1) Brand Ideas (2) Brand Initiatives and (3) Brand Content.
“First I will underline the importance of brand ideas, then the fact that brands must take more and more initiatives, and last but not least that brands must create new content.
At his return to the company in 1997, Steve Jobs decided to remind the world of what Apple stood for. You all know the “Think Different” film, it works as well today as it did 10 years ago.
This film has stood the test of time. It works just as effectively at the depths of the worst crisis we have never known. In fact, it may even be more inspirational today
You surely know that the person behind that film is Lee Clow, the creative soul of TBWA. He is at the origin of all our campaigns for Apple. And here is what Lee likes to say on ideas such as Think Different: Brand Ideas Win, Good Ads Don’t.
What he means by this is that we cannot be satisfied merely with advertising ideas. What is needed now are big brand ideas.”
“In fact, communications strategies can sometimes contribute to reinforcing companies’ business strategies. By “reinforce”, I mean that strong communications can create great enthusiasm and more conviction around the companies’ strategic direction. And this happens more often than we think.”
“The old saying « actions speak louder than words » has never been more true. And that’s why we’re not just in the business of telling brands what to say, but also in the business of guiding them in how they should behave. (…) All initiatives that go beyond the mere products and services you brand delivers, initiatives that reinforce what a brand stands for.”
“My last point is that we are going to create more and more brand content. This is a consequence of the end of repetitive advertising.
So we have to come with unexpected or entertaining ways of communicating. All the stunts we are doing for adidas are good examples.
The first one is a billboard campaign in New Zealand for the All Blacks. A drop of blood taken from each player on the team – thirty of them in all – was mixed into the ink used to print the posters.
You can imagine the impact in a country where each citizen sees himself as an All Black. Rather than just being a slogan, “Impossible is Nothing” is actually a declaration that you’re ready for anything. Like playing vertical football: Slide One CNN journalist called it “Sky soccer”.
“For the soccer World Cup in Germany, Slide the Cologne train station ceiling was painted in the style of a Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, featuring the world’s greatest players. And we also built this huge bridge with Germany’s famous goalkeeper, Oliver Kahn, at the exit of the Munich airport. This gives you an idea of the scale of the installation.
Then, at the last European football cup, we imagined this spectacular representation of the Czech goalkeeper, on the giant wheel in Vienna made famous by Orson Welles. The goalkeeper was able to stop all the shots thanks to his numerous arms.”
“We should not underestimate the importance of ideas like these. They accelerate the penetration of the central idea. More than that – they bring it to life. And they make it bigger. And the bigger the idea, the stronger the brand.”
Donald Gunn asked Jean-Marie Dru to contribute an essay to the latest edition of the Gunn Report, the only independent report on creativity for the advertising world. Enjoy Jean-Marie Dru’s thoughts on mad-blog.com:
The economic crisis on the one hand, the digital revolution on the other…
Our profession has never been so shaken. These two circumstances create multiple effects. And we are all wondering what tomorrow will look like.
Concerning digital, communications groups are developing varied, often opposing strategies. Some, through a series of acquisitions, attempt to create a technological barrier between them and their competitors. Others, like our Agency, are putting digital at the very center of their conventional activities. Neither strategy is, by definition, the winner. There are different ways to succeed. What makes a strategy effective is the quality of its implementation, and the commitment to it.
To ensure that everything starts with digital, the 180 agency in Amsterdam totally reinvented itself. The result of their actions was even more radical than they had imagined, and the price they paid was heavy, with no fewer than 55 out of their total 120 staff changing. This is a dramatic illustration of the size of the task. The path ahead is narrow, and it is difficult.
Too often, we are more comfortable talking about digital ideas than making the inherent changes that are necessary to provoke the right solutions in the digital world. As Colleen DeCourcy, our Chief Digital Officer, said to me recently: “Everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die.”
In an industry faced with such challenges, the relevance of award shows, and even The Gunn Report itself, comes under scrutiny. It is a recurring subject. I remember back in the ‘70s, industry colleagues who announced the imminent demise of the Cannes Festival. We know what it has since become. Its turnover increased tenfold, because today more than ever, the celebration of creativity is essential despite of the difficult environment in which we are operating, or rather, because of it. And it’s why, although they avoided awards shows for over 50 years, the world’s leading advertisers now participate actively in them, and celebrate when their own campaigns are recognized.
In a speech I gave in Cannes last year, I underlined that “Big can be beautiful too.” In 2007, both Procter & Gamble and Unilever were awarded a Grand Prix at this festival. Today, a lot of great work comes from large companies. They have internalized the fact that audiences are not captive anymore. If you don’t entertain and engage people, they will simply ignore you. “Safe advertising“ is becoming invisible. At last.
There’s no getting away from that fact that, today, creativity is no longer optional. It is vital to every product category and to every communications discipline.
In fact, there are two factors that are contributing to put creativity in the center. On the one hand, the imminent demise of repetitive advertising, and on the other, the understanding that each and every touchpoint between a brand and its audiences must be creative.
Advertising is part of how brands behave, but brands are judged on everything they do, not just how they appear in advertising.
We need to embrace all the ways to tell a brand’s story: its packaging, its retail presence, the content of its website, its PR programs, the products themselves. And to ensure that everything is creative. This is why, even when an agency is not directly in charge of one of these elements, it must nevertheless feel a sense of responsibility. There can be no room for compromise or mediocrity if you have the ambition to be a brand leader. Advertising agencies will rediscover their original reason for being; they will again become true generalists.
But contrary to the past, they will only achieve this if they learn how to change rhythm. The problem is no longer just to ensure the coherence between the different elements of a brand’s communication, which some continue to refer to as 360°. But rather, to feed a constant conversation with our audiences, 365 days a year. From 360 to 365…it is the very rhythm of communications that digital has shaken up. Agencies need to move from a quarterly to a daily cadence.
We have to organize ourselves to deliver constant communications. A fleet of small initiatives coming together to create an ongoing communication program, generating more frequent conversation points. We need to own these conversations, not just the creative work.
Great brands are mad. They are mad in both senses of the word. On the one hand they break conventions, ignoring the conventional wisdom of their industry. Some might call this insane.
On the other hand, great brands have to be angry sometimes. Angry about the status quo. Angry that their products may still not be good enough. Angry that they’re not providing their audience with enough entertainment.
That’s why they’re constantly striving to improve their brand behavior. Great brands care about what they do – in everything they do.
The concepts of Media Arts and Disruption seem to be the best way to create success for brands. I am sure that some of the most admired brands in the world understand this. Some do it naturally, others have incorporated that way of working after experiencing how their performance in the market has changed after doing so.
Great brands have a clear belief-system, and they have a vision about their future. But they also understand the value of three fundamental thoughts that lead everything they do:
(1) They don‘t hunt for target groups. They entertain an audience.
(2) They know that the HOW and the WHERE are as important as the WHAT for a brand.
(3) They say good-bye to 360 degrees communication and welcome the 365 day approach of constant communication.
This changes dramatically how they behave in the world: these brands are artists in the way they use media.
For one year we have been celebrating big disruptive ideas as well as outstanding examples of brand behavior. More than 7.500 people have signed up to our feed and the incredible number of 4.500 individuals have visited the blog more than 200 times. Thank you all very very much.
TBWA Worldwide has been recognized by Fast Company as an Innovation All-star. As part of the Most Innovative Companies issue, the 59 Innovation All-stars were culled from past Top 50 honorees, as companies that have “fought a dour economy with renewed creativity and bold initiatives.” TBWA Worldwide was first cited in Fast Company’s Top 50 Most Innovative Companies in 2009.
The Innovation All-stars report specifically calls out TBWA for getting “huge props for its work over the past 10 years – Adweek called “Get a Mac” the Campaign of the Decade; and iPod “Silhouettes” the Out-of-Home Ad of the Decade. Ad Age named TBWA the decade’s third-best agency also citing its work for Pedigree and Mars.”
Fast Company’s annual Most Innovative Companies issue honors major brands including Cisco, Disney, and GE along with such rising newcomers as Spotify, Gilt Groupe, HTC, and the Indian Premier League. Facebook leads the annual ranking of the Top 50, after growing its user-base from 150 million to 350 million in just one year.
Overall, Fast Company recognized 250 plus companies, including more than 75 non-U.S. businesses.
To create this year’s Most Innovative Companies issue, Fast Company’s editorial team analyzed information on thousands of businesses across the globe. The result is a package unlike that of any other business media. It’s not just about revenue growth and profit margins; it’s about identifying creative models and progressive cultures – to define the many forms of innovation that exist across the business landscape.
“It was invigorating to engage with so many exciting new ideas and developments,” said Fast Company editor Robert Safian. “Our goal was to offer a snapshot of the creativity at work in the global marketplace, and to inspire the Fast Company audience with illustrations of how powerful and effective business can be.”
Something smells different at Old Spice. P&G is not exactly saying that Old Spice body wash will make your man smell like a romantic millionaire jet fighter pilot, but that’s clearly what we’re meant to infer. It will be interesting to see how this ironic tone will affect the brand behavior of Old Spice. Will it be available in hardware stores and sports outlets?
Actually, we’re afraid that it still will be sold in the good old drugstore around the corner.
At least the brand idea remains the same: Use Old Spice and the girls will love you. In an interview with Reuters, Monica Taylor, a Wieden + Kennedy creative director, said the agency wanted to stay away from the more sexually aggressive advertising of Axe – the rival Unilever brand that has successfully captured the young males Old Spice wants to attract as lifelong customers.
Last week Jeremy Clark from Adobe and I unveiled the first glimpse of the Wired Reader at TED. Below, you’ll see a video, narrated by Jeremy and Wired Creative Director Scott Dadich, who led our tablet team, that shows more. It explains why the tablet is such a groundbreaking opportunity for magazines such as WIRED.
As Chris Anderson continues in his blog EPICENTER on wired.com continues: much is still to be answered about magazines and other media on this emerging class of devices, from the business and distribution models to the consumer response. But what is already clear is that they offer the opportunity to be beautiful, highly engaging and immersive, going beyond what’s available on the web.
Is this the future of magazines? No, I guess it’s a future scenario for media brands.
WIRED’s future is digital and a perfect example that reflects how people today and even more tomorrow will digest media. It will change how content is consumed and it will change how brands have to behave.
But one thing is not changing: The people that edit great content, people that manage to entertain and audience, people that curate content and have great creative ideas are back in power. That is a bright future for our trade.
From Walk-In Fridge to Walking Fridge. Enjoy the complete story how a viral film turned into one of the most successful examples of brilliant brand behavior. Congratulations to Heineken and TBWA\NEBOKO.
If you have any comments or suggestions please email Jeroen Konings.
When I heard a few months ago that a mining group called Pallinghurst had acquired Fabergé, I wondered what had happened to the brand since the 19th century, when it was associated with fabulous jewelled Easter eggs. The story was even more intriguing than I’d hoped.
Then, at the last European football cup, we imagined this spectacular representation of the Czech goalkeeper, on the giant wheel in Vienna made famous by Orson Welles. The goalkeeper was able to stop all the shots thanks to his numerous arms.”
