When YouTube was invented, it brought with it waves of user-generated video content that by 2006 had threatened to drown us all in trampolining cats. Predictably, there was much kerfuffle in the advertising industry. When haphazard attempts at ‘viral’ communication were compared with the generally hilarious mishaps, exploding Diet Coke bottles and sleeping pandas that populated the channel, the future of video-based advertising communication on the internet looked bleak. Brands just weren’t that fun….

More than anywhere, it was London that suffered. A corner of the industry that prided itself on big budgets and high production value, a place where, even if we’d never seen it before, we’d seen it all before, London was swiftly overrun with innovative digital hotshops and planner-bloggers proclaiming the death of the traditional agency model. It was here that the user-generated, low-budget, crappy handheld revolution seemed likely to strike hardest.

Thankfully, we’ve all grown up a bit since then. Several recent campaigns have harnessed the power of non-video-based UGC to staggering effect. Walker’s ‘Do Us a Flavour’ campaign through AMV BBDO, for example, attracted 1.2 million suggestions for new crisp flavours – a million more than expected. TBWA\London’s Skittle Skuffle allowed punters to create their own avatars, and pit them against friends and family using social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The game drew 370,000 Facebook fans in a matter of weeks. But the arrogant days of getting consumers to make your commercials for you thankfully seem to be over, with most brands realising that in order to make people care enough you either have to pay them lots of money (Doritos) or recruit semi-professionals and promise them a glittering career (HP).

The Triumphant Return of Film

As the impact of the user-generated commercial quietly declines, the impact of the ‘statusphere’ – the evolution of the web into a short-form, comment-driven mechanism based on the uploading of short status messages to platforms such as Twitter – is making itself felt in Adland.

Despite much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the mainstream media, social networks are unarguably good at one thing – the speedy dissemination of information. Links fly, comments are retweeted and a smart piece of content becomes a global phenomenon in the blink of an eye. However, with a new platform comes a shift in our psychology, and our approaches to sharing. On Twitter, content is like a badge. Sending it on means wearing it for the rest of the day.

We have something of a mantra for judging the criteria of a Contagious campaign, namely – is it useful? Is it relevant? Is it entertaining? Twitter is the ultimate meritocracy, for those who care how they’re judged at least. If you pass something on, it had better be at least one of those three things, or you and your online reputation will be stuck with it.

From an advertising perspective, this has interesting ramifications. Three of the most widely distributed pieces of advertising content of the last few months – as far as video goes, anyway – were high budget, beautifully produced films which took full advantage of online distribution channels to extend the audiovisual format way beyond a traditional commercial.

Nike’s skate wear commercial, ‘Today Was a Perfect Day’, starred Paul Rodriguez and Ice Cube and was released online in a web-only format of 120s to a rapturous reception from the skate and film communities (Brand Kitchen, Johannesburg). Philips’ ‘Carousel’ played with interactive technologies to allow users to investigate an elaborate heist at their own pace, to sell the 21:9 TV (Tribal DDB, Amsterdam). And finally, Diageo’s work for Johnnie Walker, a six-minute, one take narration of the history of the brand by Scottish actor Robert Carlyle as he tramps over the highlands (BBH, London).

All three films are slick, boasting extraordinary production value – and importantly, a strong creative idea. Philips’ clowns are menacing, and the stop frame action enticing. Carlyle’s performance for Johnnie Walker is assured (although that, too, may have been expensive). And Nike’s laid-back examination of a day in the life of an affable skater is the stuff of which slacker dreams are made.

With this in mind – could we see a return to the big budget gosh-that’s-pretty production of yesteryear at which London so excels? Is it time for all those newly rebranded ‘digital’ creatives and ‘viral’ directors to start dusting off their pens, paper and 35mm reels and get out there to show us what they can do? Is London’s creative renaissance about to come from the most unlikely of directions – the resurgence of film?

A word to the wise, however. As digital production techniques are further democratised, the cogs will begin to turn. Making something look big budget will no longer cost big budget. And so the cycle of user-generated content will begin again, perhaps marking a return to the scratty, off-the-cuff production of 2006. Crank up the Gnarls Barkley….

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please email Jess Greenwood, Deputy Editor of Contagious Magazine.

www.contagiousmagazine.com

Click here for the Contagious round-up of the year featuring TBWA\London’s Little Big Planet.

Nike are doing something at the moment Lance Armstrong for the Tour De France.  It is based on the current livestrong campaign “Its about …”, as well as inspirational 30” and 60” spots and web films, people also get the chance to send a message of support beginning with the words “Its about…” and a robot will write the message in chalk somewhere along the course of the Tour de France.  If your message is chosen, you are sent the google maps reference showing where on the course your message is.

A great way for consumers to engage with the brand in the real world and digital world.

Thanks.

Indy

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Indy Saha from TBWA\London.

Please also check out the Media Arts Monday on: Words beyond paper and pixel.

The Swiss ace passed Pete Sampras’s 14 titles from 1990-2002 after beating Andy Roddick in an epic men’s final at Wimbledon, 5-7, 7-6, 7-6, 3-6, 16-14 last sunday.

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.

Bread & Butter’s new venue is a key reason behind its return to Berlin from Barcelona, where it relocated for a couple of years. The city’s mayor promised that the organizers would be able to use Tempelhof, the historic former airport built in the 1920s, as the site for their event for the next 10 years.

But the site is only part of the story – the city counts too. Inspired and inspiring creativity is all around us in Berlin, on the backs of local design students or in small boutiques where young designers benefit from Berlin’s famously affordable rents. Leading brands like adidas discovered these phenomena years ago.

On Münzstrasse in Berlin Mitte, the epicentre of urban fashion, adidas opened it very first adidas Originals shop in 2001. A truly international audience comes together in the three central neighborhoods – Prenzlauer Berg, Mitte and Friedrichshain. This is where industry trends are  set and where brands initiate a conversation with their audience. See what adidas has done recently for its original tribe:

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.

In the first conversation Spike Lee explains how he came into advertising and what it would take to bring Mars Black back o screen.

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Rob Schwartz.

AUDIENCE BEHAVIOR – In today’s dynamic media landscape, people are living their lives at the speed of real time. News is expected to be up to the second, friends keep up with each others’ lives online, step by step and hour by hour, and the latest and greatest can change every time you “refresh the page.” It has created a culture where there is a lot of cache in knowing and being part of what’s current, and anything slightly out-of-date can feel awkwardly out of synch. And it’s not just newsrooms and networking sites that need to keep up; it’s an expectation that audiences are applying to every part of their lives, including the brands they invite to become a part of them. When the context of culture changes on a real-time basis, brands that allow a little spontaneity in their strategy can be the ones that stay most consistently relevant.

BRAND BEHAVIOR – Marketers have optimized processes and tools to plan their marketing initiatives meticulously. Detailed annual plans are standard, treating the world like a predictable 12-month cycle with little room for the unplanned. While companies have learned to switch to crisis-management mode in real time when facing a negative situation, it appears that fewer brands are prepared to embrace the unpredictable positive opportunities. Brands need to leave some room for the unplanned and be spontaneous, to make decisions in real time to be in synch with the pace of culture.

MARK LIVES IN IKEA

Comedian/filmmaker Mark Malkoff was looking for a temporary residence while his NYC apartment was being fumigated, when he asked IKEA for permission to stay for free in the local store. Without letting bureaucracy get in the way, IKEA capitalized on this real-time marketing opportunity by allowing him to move in for an entire week. Documenting his experience 24/7 on MarkLivesInIkea. com generated not only a million hits daily—with plenty of product demonstrations— but it also reinforced a good-natured image for the Swedish company.

NIKE: WORLD-RECORD CELEBRATION

When Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang broke the 110-meterhurdle world record with a time of 12.88 seconds, Nike didn’t waste a minute churning out an instant ad campaign to celebrate the track star’s achievement in record time. Just 13 hours after Xiang broke the world record, Nike had created and placed an ad at the prominent electronic billboard on the side of the Aurora skyscraper, and online ads were up and running. When the hero arrived home the same afternoon, his Nike-branded “12.88” T-shirt gave the brand national press coverage.

CREST: LIQUID BAN RESPONSE

In the wake of banning liquid products in carry-on bags on airplanes, Crest approached Avis quickly to partner up on a relief program of their own. At a time when not many travelers had a lot to smile about, 25,000 free Crest “smile packs” were placed on the seats of all Avis preferred renters’ cars in 25 of the top U.S. airports. The highly appreciated sampling packs included a full-sized Crest toothpaste, mouthwash and dental floss, helping Avis’ frequent costumers to start their vacations or business trips with healthy, bright smiles and fresh breath.

Download your Media Arts Monday.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please email either Frank Striefler (frank@mediaartslab.com) or Erik Hanson (erik@mediaartslab.com).

AUDIENCE BEHAVIOR – Audiences don’t live above or below-the-line, and it has taken our industry too long to truly embrace a through-the-line approach. But with the explosive growth of the Internet and the need for a specialized craft, we were quick to draw another line to differentiate on- and off-line advertising. But today’s audiences don’t live in an on- or off-line world either – they live in a “nonline” world. The more people and technology advance, the less separated these two places become in our daily lives. People can hardly tell the difference anymore between when they are “on” and when they are “off”; when they’re connected and when they’re not. People now lead seamless lives existing somewhere between the digital and the physical world with an endless number of connections linking them together.

BRAND BEHAVIOR – Online campaigns tend to be limited to screens and often times don’t affect people’s off-line lives. Brands that stop drawing the line have the opportunity to create entirely new connections that seamlessly and simultaneously impact people’s nonline lives. Marketers need to tear down the self-imposed walls between on- and offline and break through the tyranny of click-through based online advertising. Instead of using separate on- and off-line performance tools, marketers need to look at nonline success metrics to evaluate their initiatives holistically. 

NIKE+: THE HUMAN RACE

 Nike+ is the world’s largest running club, connecting runners from ever corner of the Web, where anyone can be challenged to a virtual race. On Aug. 31, 2008, Nike took this initiative to the next level and to the streets with the world’s largest running event: The Human Race. The charity race brought the online community together with 700,000+ runners competing in 25 cities across the globe. Nike rounded up this unprecedented experience with exclusive post-race concerts as part of the grand finale in each city.

POD HOTEL: PODCULTURE

 The Pod Hotel combines high style with high tech, offering hostel-style, discount accommodations for spendthrifty and Web-savvy travelers. To compete with trendy boutique hotels, the hotel lets visitors make advanced connections with other guests via its closed social network PodCulture. Improving the real-world customer experience, guests connect online in specific forums to meet up in real life to drink, dine, shop or go out. Sales and traffic have increased 40% since PodCulture has been introduced. 

TWITTER: TWESTIVAL

On Feb. 12, Tweeters in 202 cities around the world came together for Twestival under the mantra of “tweet.meet.give.” The volunteer-organized Tweetup with a social conscience was a fundraiser for charity:water offering entertainment, food and drinks while building awareness for the global water crisis. The call-to-action was Tweeted and in less than a month the event attracted 10,000+ attendees. The live gathering is a testament to Twitter’s ability to mobilize Internet activity into real-world action.

Download your Media Arts Monday.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions please email either Frank Striefler (frank@mediaartslab.com) or Erik Hanson (erik@mediaartslab.com).

The classic example is Pedigree. We convinced Pedigree that it should not regard itself as a dog food company – but a company that loves dogs. 

That vision changed everything: the company’s employees began bringing their dogs to work. The Tokyo branch moved its headquarters to a building where dogs were allowed. And the company got behind pet adoption schemes. It was no longer a company that made products for dogs. It was The Dog Company.

This was change that went far beyond advertising.

And what about Adidas? There was a time when the brand was barely visible. Poor management and a succession of owners had left it floundering, handing Nike a virtual monopoly.

Then came a new vision: “Impossible is nothing.” New product lines and new stylists aided the change, but the vision provided an architecture. CEO Erich Stamminger described it as: “Our legacy, our mission and our challenge.”

 More recently, TBWA proved definitively that it was willing to propose risky changes to its clients. For many years, our strategy for Absolut vodka had been based around the unique – and disruptive – design of the bottle. Print advertising featuring that iconic shape had established the Absolut brand and won accolades all around the world. Some people collected the ads as if they were works of art – which very often they were.

Last year, we abandoned the strategy. With the bottle shape now clearly linked to Absolut in the minds of our consumers, it was time to try something new. So instead of focusing on the bottle or the packaging, we took the radical step of positioning Absolut as a symbol of perfection in an imperfect world.

This was a brave move, but it worked. The headline in Advertising Age read: “Breaking With Bottle Fires Up Absolut Sales.”

Not only that, but the new strategy is spot on for these uncertain times. Change pays off. 

Jean-Marie Dru once wrote that great brands are powerful only if they take action. “Great brands are not nouns but verbs. Apple liberates, IBM solves, Nike exhorts, Virgin challenges, Sony dreams.”

I find myself thinking again of the barman at the Sanderson Hotel in London, with his T-shirt reading RECESS IS ON. Shortly after meeting him, I discovered that the hotel group had set up a website explaining its attitude to the economic downturn (recessison.com). 

The home page was very simple. It said: FUCK THE RECESSION

This alone will not make the crisis go away. But it is a statement of defiance. The next step is to take action. It’s time to change.

Nick Baum is Vice President Europe at TBWA. In this series of four posts, he explains why CHANGE is the right way to tackle the recession. If you have any comments or suggestions please email Nick Baum.

 1.  It’s More Important To Have A Point Of View Than A Line. 

Activities thrive better than ads in the new media landscape.  So the most useful Big Idea is a point of view than can inspire activities.  John Grant refers to this as a Marketing Enthusiasm: a point of view on the world that is bigger than the brand or the product.  Persil’s ‘Dirt Is Good’ is more than an eye-catching line.   It is a marvelously rich point of view about how children develop through play.  For example, its website currently promotes a list of 33 things to do before you’re ten.  Contrast this with Samsung’s alleged Big Idea: ‘Imagine’.  There’s no point of view there, nothing to engage with. So ‘Imagine’ ends up shoehorned in as the opening to its line of copy.  Russell Davies nicely mocked what happens to meaningless Big Ideas online:   “It was OK when a Big Idea had to support three TV scripts and some posters, but its flatness shows when the poor digital agency has to turn it into an immersive, online experience, not just a silly game of whack-a-mole with the brand mascot.”  

2.  A Big Idea Cannot Depend On A Line

This seals the deal for me.  The real growth media of recent years – music festivals, mobile phones and Facebook applications – don’t have room for them.  The fragmentation of media and the shift to global marketing means that Translation, whether in to different channels or different languages, is the priority. 

3. One Big Idea Doesn’t Mean One Big Execution.  

Historically Big Ideas came in the form of big executions. I first encountered The Future’s Bright, The Future’s Orange through an epic cinema commercial.  I thought it was dazzling at the time; I suspect I would find it indulgent today.  The best way to manifest a Big Idea today is through a whole bunch of activity.  The same positioning could inspire a series of ‘marketing molecules’ that make the most of the media and the audience.  No one molecule is the high point of the brand; all contribute to it.  Nike is the brand of Joga Bonito, 10K and Supersonic.  Top Shop is the brand of personal shopping, vintage and the Kate Moss range.  To steal a quote from Ben Malbon of BBH: media fragments, ideas don’t.

4.  Align Your Big Idea To Your Business

Big Idea marketing is most powerful when it brings people along with the business. A truly robust Big Idea should be rooted in how the business generates value, where the business is going, or in the culture of the brand.  Apple’s ‘Think Different’ works on all these levels.  It’s difficult getting an organisation to buy in to a Big Idea if the accountants and engineers suspect that it’s just sugar sculpture from the marketing department.  It’s easier to get alignment and results out of something that is commercially true.  I’ll bet that Orange’s new ‘I Am’ idea has more trouble taking root in the company than See What You Can Do had at 02.  

5.  Match Your Brand Behaviour With Audience Behaviour

A traditional Big Idea didn’t care who you were or where you were.  But today channels make such a difference to how people deal with ideas: quick, useful interpretations of the brand idea for mobile phones; rich, interactive ones for the Internet, visual spectacles in-store.  Brand strategists used to understand consumers as consumers of the brand.  I wasted my early days in advertising like a Victorian botanist trying to establish whether buyers of Felix cat food were a different species from people who bought Whiskas.  Now brand strategists need to understand their audiences as consumers of media.  The most useful channel-planning tool today is probably a Venn diagram of how the brand behaves and how the audience behaves.  The overlap should always inspire something interesting.

There is a truism that an old medium doesn’t become obsolete, it just takes on a narrower role.  Letters become the medium for communicating something important; radio becomes our daytime companion.  And for a while it looked as though Big Ideas would take on such a narrower role; the hallmark of old brands that prized certainty and uniformity more highly than the opportunities of a more interactive age.   But if we realise what Big Ideas can do for business and understand how they work in new media, they can continue to be a compass for brands. And, like a compass, they might just enable us to go somewhere interesting.

Read Part One.

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Tom Morton, Executive Planning Director at TBWA\ London (tom.morton@tbwa-london.com).

Britain’s great marketing effectiveness stories of the 1990s were Orange’s ‘The Future’s Bright’ and Tesco’s ‘Every Little Helps’.  They didn’t rely on product USPs or lovable gag-filled campaigns. Instead they made big statements about their brands’ positions in the world. David Brooks caught the mood in Bobos In Paradise, describing an era in which ice cream companies possessed their own foreign policies.   

But while this heroic style of marketing went on to great heights, along came a bunch of branding success stories that challenged the big idea approach.

Innocent Smoothies became a £70million business without having its own election manifesto.  Nike revitalized its brand through a series of 10K runs, instead of bringing ‘Just Do It’ out of retirement.   Virgin Mobile picked up more customers than any other network by acting fun and irreverent, rather than lecturing people about the future of human interaction.  These brands weren’t concerned with communicating their agenda.  They were more concerned with connecting with people.  They connected through stuff they did, not through claims they made.  And they chimed with an increasingly interactive culture where people expected conversations instead of lectures from brands.  No wonder that some of the most interesting writers on brand culture – notably John Grant and Russell Davies – were dismissive of Big Idea marketing. 

All of which could make Big Ideas feel rather dated: a lumbering approach to a nimble world.

Yet we still need Big Ideas.  They remain useful to so many of the constituencies of marketing.  Looking at where and why they are useful gives us clues as to how big ideas can be as relevant in today’s new media as they were in their 90s heyday.

The argument that brands and consumers need big ideas is well-trodden.  Brands need them in order to stand out from the competition, and to glue together their marketing efforts.  Consumers need Big Ideas to catch their interest and to guide their choices.  This isn’t a sinister suggestion, just an honest admission that people are more likely to warm to interesting brands than to weigh up every consumer choice like a chess computer. 

Marketing businesses need them too. Working on a brand that doesn’t have a Big Idea can be like sailing without a compass.  You have no idea or control over where you’re going. You start from zero on every project.    You have to sell ideas to brand owners who may have nothing more to guide them than their own imperfect instinct.

Big Ideas lift the potential chaos of working with brands up to higher ground.  If you’ve agreed that the brand is going to take a particular position, you start projects from a more interesting place.  Want to get skydivers to perform an ad live on air for Honda?  Fine.  Because we agreed the brand believes in Difficult Is Worth Doing.  They help marketing businesses retain their clients.  You’d think twice before tinning the authors of your success.  And they grow business.  It’s easier for the custodians of the big idea to pick up another assignment from a brand owner because, well, they’re the custodians of the big idea.  Procter & Gamble recently offered to hand over entire marketing budgets to agencies of any discipline if they could demonstrate an understanding of a brand’s Big Idea and had a point of view about how to divvy the budget across different channels.  P&G are both Cannes’ Advertiser of the Year and are the world’s biggest advertiser.  Now there’s an incentive.

Most importantly, brand owners need big ideas.  Not just to hold their campaigns together, but to hold their businesses together.

The biggest big idea in businesses is the strategy: how the business organizes its efforts to create value, where it over-delivers, what it sacrifices. As businesses become more sprawling, running them becomes more about steering through complexity.   Here the big idea plays a profound role:  it’s the strategy articulated in a catchy form.  

Wait for the blue bubbles to disperse and 02′s ‘See What You Can Do’ idea emerges as a statement that 02 will put useful innovations in the hands of its customers. ‘Like No Other’ reinforces Sony’s price premium at a time when every electronics brand offers reasonable quality.  The big idea helps the public to find value in the same place where the business is creating value.  

A big idea is magnetic north for businesses.  It sets a direction for what they should and shouldn’t do.  Long before the idea reaches the public, it should be galvanizing the people within the business.  

Pedigree Manifesto Ad (US)

Pedigree Petfoods used a big idea to redirect its business.  The brand had moved sideways for years as Pedigree came to think of itself as a meat processing business rather than as a dog business.  Then Pedigree realized that its true source of value was empathy: prove you love my dog and I’ll let you feed it.  Their big idea was ‘We’re For Dogs’.  It influenced the organization as much as the public.  Pedigree began running dog adoption schemes, staff put pictures of their dogs on business cards, reps took their dogs on sales visits, it even moved out of a Tokyo office that had a No Pets policy.  No wonder company president Paul Michaels called it a compass for the organization.

So that’s a yes from consumers, brands, marketing businesses and brand owners.  But does media need big ideas?  I’m not so sure.

Ad space is a great place to create images and tell people ideas.  Media itself doesn’t suit Big Ideas. 

Media connects with people through content, not through positionings.  You get a much better idea of what a media brand Channel 4 is like from the programmes it screens and the idents it makes than you would from an abstract Big Idea about provocation or freshness.  It’s instructive that Channel 4 and Google don’t have strap lines, and amusing that the most famous attempt at Big Idea marketing in television, ‘Fox News: Fair And Balanced’, is balls.

And new media is a less fertile soil for classic Big Idea marketing. Big Ideas have tended to be one-way transmissions – here’s what we believe in – which work less well in media where people expect to explore and enquire.  I might be happy to watch an Orange commercial, but why should I bother to find out why the future’s bright?   A brand that goes online to repeatedly shout its endline will sound like a pub bore.  And what if the urge to explore and enquire leads me to look behind your big idea?  It could turn out to be hollow, if it’s no more than an image, or it could turn out to be inauthentic, if the everyday actions of the brand don’t follow the fine sentiment of its Big Idea.  Dove introduced the idea of Real Beauty through press and TV, but got caught retouching its models via the Internet. 

In Part Two the author will propose five guidelines for adapting Big Ideas for the new media landscape. Check with us again tomorrow.

Continue reading…

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Tom Morton, Executive Planning Director at TBWA\ London (tom.morton@tbwa-london.com).