In 2008, TBWA\Chiat\Day Los Angeles was tasked to reignite the spark both in the Gatorade brand and in those who drink it. Because of the brand’s tremendous growth over the years, it was starting to lose its core sports relevance as consumers forgot Gatorade’s fundamental reason for being – superior sports hydration that fuels athletic performance. The brand was losing its meaning and in danger of becoming more akin to soda pop than sports drink.

In talking with athletes of all ages, the team found that whatever they do, wherever they go, the best athletes always take their attitude, swagger and passion with them. They may lose a step here or there, gain a few pounds as they age, but the one thing that doesn’t change is their competitive desire and will to win.

They tool inspiration from the fact that rivalries have fueled athletes throughout the history of sport and asked, what if Gatorade used a sporting rivalry as a catalyst to give one-time athletes a second chance?

Two U.S. high schools, Easton High School in Pennsylvania and Phillipsburg High School in New Jersey, have a 100-year-old rivalry and, in 1993, were named by Sports Illustrated as the best high school football rivalry in the country. However, the 1993 meeting between the two teams ended in the worst possible way, a 7-7 deadlock. No true rivalry should ever end in a tie.

Here was the brand’s opportunity. Fuel a grudge match. Provide the original players a second chance to play the ‘93 game and settle the score once and for all…15 years later: Gatorade “REPLAY” was born.

Gatorade REPLAY originated as a five-part online documentary. Cameras captured every part of the 90-day journey, from the physical workouts to the deeply emotional moments and the relationships built on and off the field. Gatorade’s expertise in coaching, hydration and sports performance supported the men as they re-evaluated their health, got back in shape and fine-tuned their skills. Then came the REPLAY.

On Sunday, April 26, 2009, 15,000 fans jammed Fisher Field. Tickets for the REPLAY game sold out in 90 minutes, putting the 15,000-seat stadium at maximum capacity. Demand for the game spilled over into the eBay grey market, with some auctions fetching up to six times the ticket’s face value. Even NFL Gatorade athletes Peyton and Eli Manning took part as assistant coaches for the event. The entire Easton and Phillipsburg towns became participants – and in addition to the teams, the original ’93 cheerleaders and marching band members came out of retirement. Suddenly whole towns were transformed into fans, helping fuel the rivalry and cheer on the teams. The game was broadcast live to local markets with the rest of the country joining in online on www.gatorade.com.

The REPLAY winners were Phillipsburg, but it hardly mattered. Gatorade had made their mark and proved their role as a catalyst for athletic achievement.

Further testament to the size and power of the idea, in November 2009 REPLAY became a documentary television series with a one-hour primetime pilot airing nationally on Fox Sports Net during Thanksgiving weekend. We have received requests to turn the documentary into a feature film from all the major studios and we are currently filming Season II in Detroit, to be broadcast on Fox Sports Net.

We have been talking about branded content for years. And also of brand content. In the first case, the brand participates in pre-existing editorial content, created by others. In the second case, the brand creates its own content.

We have recommended to numerous clients that they play an editorial role, to create content that wouldn’t otherwise have existed. For instance, consider the short Visa Winter Olympics films; or “Replay,” where Gatorade created a re-match between the Easton and Phillipsburg College football teams, 15 years later, with exactly the same players and the same referees. I am also thinking of all those great brand content initiatives from Nissan, Pedigree or Absolut.

The challenge is huge: our competitors are no longer just other brands, but all producers of content, be it TV or press, from journalists to scriptwriters. Our latest productions show that we can meet the challenge.

But often, the question of the legitimacy of brands creating content is raised. There is a preconceived notion that traditional media have more legitimacy than brands as providers of content.

Pascal Somarriba is the former advertising director of Benetton and Color’s magazine, sold for 5.50 euros, with a distribution of 350,000 copies. Here is what he thinks about this “legitimacy issue.”

“People believe that the media are by definition independent. As a consequence, this freedom would guarantee the quality of the content they create. This reasoning is not justified.

In fact, the media are profit-making businesses with commercial constraints that brands don’t have, because brands’ resources come from other activities. The desire to offer different brand experiences leads them to create qualitative content, and pushes them to invest in media projects which are financially inaccessible to traditional media. This is even truer for international companies, able to pay back their content on a worldwide scale.

And on top of it, media must be careful not to upset their reader base, their subscribers in particular, as well as their advertisers (there are numerous cases of advertisers boycotting media following an article or a TV report they didn’t like…).

Brands needn’t be restricted by editorial complexes. It is the level of their editorial ambition that will make the difference. The quality, creativity and innovation of what they do will give brand content the same credibility that the media have gained over time.”

In other words, there is no content that would “naturally” be of quality and for which we could say “in advance” that it is worth being consulted. It always comes back to the audience to judge the quality of the content. As such, brands and media are more and more on the same equal footing.

]]> http://www.mad-blog.com/2010/04/13/jean-marie-dru-brand-content/feed/ 0 http://www.mad-blog.com/2010/03/15/adage-jim-stengel-rewrites-marketing-textbook/ http://www.mad-blog.com/2010/03/15/adage-jim-stengel-rewrites-marketing-textbook/#comments Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:13:54 +0000 admin http://www.mad-blog.com/?p=5251 Last week in during a public lecture in Moscow Jean-Marie Dru, Chairman of TBWA Worldwide, covered three critical areas for the future success of brands: (1) big brand ideas, (2) brand content and (3) brand initiatives. Now P&G’s former CMO Jim Stengel rewrites the marketing textbook, as Advertising Age puts it. Stengel is leading a revolution already well under way toward purpose-driven marketing.

Mr. Stengel is looking to reinvent marketing education along the way, scrapping most historical case studies for live ones presented by top creatives from BBDO and TBWA/Chiat/Day and executives from Dell, Procter & Gamble Co. and PepsiCo. He and Sanjay Sood, UCLA marketing professor and collaborator on the class, plan to pitch it as a model to the Harvard Business Review.

Part two in Mr. Stengel’s plan is his long-awaited book, set to be published by Crown Books next year, for which he’s enlisted a platoon of UCLA students, WPP’s Millward Brown and TBWA/Chiat/Day executives to help quantify and dissect the 50 brands that have added the most brand and financial value in the past decade and the purpose that drives them (hint: the top two are Google and Apple). The book’s working title is “Grow: How the World’s Best Businesses Use the Power of Ideals to Outshine the Competition.”

“When his book comes out, it’s going to be one of those touchstone books, and not just because we’re working on it,” said Rob Schwartz, executive creative director of TBWA. TBWA CMO Laurie Coots is the primary agency executive working on the book.

(Source: AdAge.com)

“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.”

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.

Otherwise said, in this digital era, traditional agencies will only succeed if they adopt the rhythm of the pure players. And as for these, they will need to learn, or rather to understand, how brands are built. These two symmetrical challenges are vital for the agencies concerned. The challenge for so-called conventional agencies is immense. The challenge for the pure players appears to me even more formidable.

Agencies need to repatriate part of the media thinking process. We can no longer think of media as numbers on a spreadsheet or a list of options for places to buy our audiences’ attention. We can no longer think of media as just a means for brands to talk at consumers, but rather as all the places, spaces and experiences where people live their lives. “Media” does not have to be paid for, and it does not have to be measurable to matter to our audiences. In essence, media is any space between an idea and the audience.

It is time for advertising agencies not to be media neutral anymore, but to be media passionate. It is time to grow ideas that turn brands into media themselves.

The industry adopted “Communications Planning” as a way of describing this. A new discipline, at the crossroads of audience planning and connection planning. We do not talk to “consumers” anymore, we talk to audiences who are marketing savvy, who know the brands, who respect them and who program their own media lives. Today, each of us plans his own daily itinerary through all these “media” solicitations. We need to understand the members of our audiences, how they connect with the world, how they digest media and all the technology that surrounds them…

If we treat people like “consumers,” we are interrupting what they are interested in to talk to them about our brand. If we treat people like an “audience,” we become what they are interested in, and become an integral part of them.

As for Connections Planning, it is much more than just a tool for allocation of resources. It is about understanding the interaction between all the different points of contact, rather than just the impact of these individual contact points.

This is why, as an illustration of this, we often discuss the magic triangle formed by advertising/event/digital.

Each of these three elements rebounds off the two others. Like a kind of ricochet. Back and forth between the real and virtual worlds. An event created in the street is picked up and circulated on the net and nourishes the brand idea developed in the advertising. Or the other way around, a community receives a text message on its mobile that provokes a reaction in real life. Or another case, where an event can become content for both offline and online advertising. The virtual decouples the effects of the real, and the real gives substance, life to the virtual. Brand conversations are organized around these exchanges. And the role of agencies is to organize and feed these conversations. To enrich the brand story, on a daily basis.

In other words, the way media is used has become a creative issue. And from now on, every advertising agency presentation should start with media.

At TBWA, we regroup all these thoughts and practices under one expression. We call it Media Arts. Because we believe each point of contact must tell the brand story gracefully, artfully.

Whatever they choose to call it, however they approach this new discipline, traditional agencies, the big networks, cannot ignore this new reality. There is only one way to define brand behavior, and that is to integrate everything, and do this in a creative way.

Our mission is to design brand behaviors to serve brand beliefs. Agile brand behaviors, to support brave brand beliefs.

And it is here, digital revolution or not, that nothing has changed. Our business has always been to build brands, to give them more sense and substance. It is up to our agencies to imagine and to formulate what these brand beliefs are.

At TBWA, this is the role of Disruption. Disruption is about brand belief, whereas Media Arts is about brand behavior.

Most often, this brand belief is encapsulated in a few precise words. A few examples I know well are: “Think Different, Shift, Impossible is Nothing, Dogs Rule, In an Absolut World, Go Visa…” Agencies’ true reason for being is to bring to life the meaning that resides in these words. This ability to express in a few words what a brand stands for, what impact it can have, what the brand believes in. In fact, in this ever-changing world of content and clutter, brands with a clear point of view are more valuable than ever.

These few words that “say the brand” will be the starting point for storytelling. They are at the same time the source of creative inspiration and the strategic backbone for all the communications plans. Today, more than ever, in a fragmented world where everyone is seeking signposts, we need big central ideas that serve as lighthouses. As Lee Clow said recently: “Big ideas win, good ads don’t.”

Agencies are experts at distilling a thought into just a few words. To understand the essence of a brand, to give it a larger share of the future, to share the idea with all the brand’s audiences, this is, and will always be, our role.

To achieve this, we have at our disposal today a multitude of means of expression. So many new delivery systems, formats, screens and experiences available to us to deliver the brand story. The consequence is that creative output is increasing exponentially in quantity. Where we used to produce 30-second formats, we now have to think in terms of websites, blogs, e-webs, digital radio, SMS conversations, social media on the web, street events, PR, and a whole array of new communications opportunities.

On the financial side, the implications of all this are critical for the future of our industry. More content produced in more different ways should result in more fees to conceive it all. However, with the crisis as an excuse, the trend is rather the opposite.

The stakes are clear: thanks to the interactions between all the disciplines, to the digital boom, we know that we can achieve levels of effectiveness with partially lower “media” investment. At the same time, we need to increase our creative resources. Depending on the agency, the cost of these represents only about 2% (between 1% and 3%), of the clients’ overall investment: a very few percentage points that can obviously have a huge leverage effect on the value of the total 100% investment. It is vital that our clients understand that a part, albeit minor, of the savings made in media investment should be reinvested in creative resources. This, for them, is where the true creation of value lies.

1 or 2% more…this is the necessary condition for a total transformation of our industry. Because the creative revolution we are embarked upon needs to be funded. There is no other option for our clients than to contribute to making this happen. They will be the first to benefit.

(Part One)

(Part Two)

Hunt was born in Zambia and educated in England and South Africa, he was the Creative Founding Partner of TBWA Hunt Lascaris.

 TBWA Hunt Lascaris has now grown to be South Africa’s premier advertising agency – named Agency of the Year six times in the last seven years. 
In 1993 John was intimately involved in Nelson Mandela’s first ANC election campaign. Three years later, he joined the South African Advertising Hall of Fame – the first working creative to be so honored, and in 1997 he received the Financial Mail’s Long Term Achievement Award.

TBWA has been named by Adweek magazine as the “Global Advertising Agency Network of the Year” in both 2007 and again for 2009. Led by CEO (and Berlin School Board of Governors member) Jean-Marie Dru, the full-service agency has more than 250 offices in 77 countries. Some of its major clients include Adidas, Absolut Vodka, Apple, Henkel, Mars, Nissan, and Sony PlayStation.

Check out reviews of the book on adage.com and mad-blog.com.

More background, click here.

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.

Happy Holidays,

Ulrich

One more thing, if you are still looking for some holiday fun. Read our top five posts of all time:

(1) Insights on the revolution by Michael Zorn (TBWA\BERLIN)

(2) The Age of Media Arts by Lee Clow (TBWA\WORLDWIDE)

(3) Disruption is Liberation by Dr. Sven H. Becker (TBWA\GERMANY)

(4) Disruption in a disrupted World by Jean-Marie Dru (TBWA\WORLDWIDE)

(5) Let’s do things we think we cannot do by John Hunt (TBWA\WORLDWIDE)

The communications industry is considered a bellwether for future business and consumer trends, and is also seen as a lead indicator of boom and bust cycles. Raphael Kahane talked the Chairman of TBWA Worldwide about the need for creativity, Disruption and Media Arts.

Click HERE for the full 12 minutes interview.

We all know that, sadly, a very large number of advertising campaigns are mediocre. And this is what most people outside of our business believe. But they have not realized that good advertising can inspire people, and great advertising, though rare, can impact the world.

This is why The One Club, the organization that recognizes excellence in advertising in the US, has asked Director Doug Pray to shoot a new documentary feature to promote those ads that are truly innovative and inspiring. It’s called Art & Copy.

The film also celebrates the people who made these ads. It is not only about the craft. It’s about artists. It’s about pioneers. And it’s about people like Lee Clow who come along and change the way people see advertising.

“What’s different and perhaps surprising about this movie, is that it isn’t about bad advertising, that 98% which so often annoys and disrespects its audience,” says Doug Pray. “I didn’t want to make a doc that just trashes trashy advertising. Too easy, too obvious, and why bother? Instead, [I was]granted access to a handful of the greatest advertising minds of the last fifty years. I felt it could be a more powerful statement to focus the film only on those rare few who actually moved and inspired our culture with their work.”

Doug Pray takes an in-depth look into the creative processes involved in some of the most renowned American ad campaigns of the last half century such as “Just Do It,” “I Want My MTV,” “Got Milk?,” and “Think Different.” He delivers this through the eyes of some of the most influential people in the business including George Lois, Mary Wells, Dan Wieden, Hal Riney, and of course, our own Lee Clow.

Here’s what Lee had to say about his involvement with this film:

“Being in a movie was fun. Going to Sundance, hanging out with Robert Redford, signing autographs, what can I say! But seriously, if you see the film it will make you proud to be in this fun creative business. I think it will inspire young people to want a career in ‘Advertising.’”

Art & Copy recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and is currently making its way throughout festivals and cinemas around the world. I encourage everyone to watch the film. Hopefully it will inspire you to do better work. To watch the trailer and find out more about the film, click here.

I’ll end with another quote from Doug Pray:

“Yes, I’ve made a positive film about ads. I’d once believed that our systems of commerce might go away, and with them, all unwanted commercial messaging, but they haven’t yet, and won’t soon. Advertising, in fact, may actually be an innately human act itself. But like all creative endeavors (books, paintings, movies, architecture) most of it is mediocre. Ultimately, I hope ‘ART & COPY’ inspires artists and writers to strive to make more meaningful, more entertaining, or more socially uplifting ads. With so much advertising surrounding us these days, it would be great to get that 2% figure a bit higher.”

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.

Jean-Marie Dru, the inventor of Disruption and Chairman TBWA\ Worldwide delivered today a speech at the TBWA Creative Academy at this years Golden Drum Festival in Portoroz (Slovenia). Here are some sound-bites for all of you who couldn’t attend:

“Disruption has been invented in the mid 80’s. So you could ask: is it still relevant in the current decade? And is it still effective in the middle of the digital revolution?”

“The answer is without any doubt YES, but I will make two observations:

In the last 15 years, the focus of the methodology has moved progressively from convention to vision. Adidas believes that impossible is not a fact, but an opinion. Visa encourages to go and do things, in spite of the tough environment we are in. Nissan explains that “everything they touch, they try to shift”. Pepsi revitalizes the Pepsi generation theme by reminding us that “every generation refreshes the world”. And Absolut makes us discover what would be a perfect world, the world of Absolut.”

“As a summary of this first point concerning Vision, I would say that in this turbulent world, the role of Disruption has pivoted. Today it is more about creating a rallying point for a company or brand, a focal point, and this despite the increasing tribulations of the market – or rather, because of them. We need to create a reference point that we can constantly look back to, whatever unexpected directions the market may have taken us in.”

“The second observation I would like to make about the status of Disruption today is coming from the fact that we are living in a totally new world. In the digital world, we don’t talk to targets anymore, not even to consumers, we talk to audiences. Audiences who are not captive anymore. Audiences who judge brands on everything they do, on all the initiatives they take. Today more than ever, “actions speak louder than words”.

So the way a brand engages the audience in this new media world is key for its success. Therefore Disruption which is about brand belief must be augmented with another discipline, a discipline about brand behaviour. We call it Media Arts.

It starts by repatriating part of the media thinking into the agency. We can no longer think of media as just a means for brands to talk at consumers, but rather as all the places, spaces and experiences where people live their lives. It is time for advertising agencies not to be media neutral anymore, but to be media passionate.

It’s also time to understand that each and every touch point between audiences and a brand must be creative. And this whatever these touch points are: the packaging, the retail presence, the content of the website, the PR programs, the CRM initiatives etc. And we called this Media Arts because we believe each point of contact must tell the brand’s story, gracefully, artfully.

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…”

“Brands are judged in the way they act and in all the initiatives they take. That’s why Media Arts is so important.”

“In a nutshell, Disruption is about brand belief, whereas Media Arts is about brand behaviour.”

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.