As dictators around the world muzzle the media and newspapers confront an uncertain future, the freedom of the press has become one of the hottest topics of 2009. Advertising agency TBWA joined the debate with a disruptive campaign that scooped no less than nine top prizes at the industry’s annual festival in Cannes: a record. It centers on a crusading newspaper, a dictatorship and messages printed on trillion dollar banknotes.

“The story reads like something out of a movie, but it’s painfully real,” says John Hunt, Worldwide Creative Director of TBWA. “The setting is Zimbabwe, where one of the only sources of reliable information is a newspaper called The Zimbabwean, whose journalists are forced to live and work in exile. On top of that, the Mugabe government has slapped a 70 percent import duty on the paper, so very few Zimbabweans can afford to buy it. Needless to say, it has almost no advertising budget.”

TBWA’s South African agency, TBWA\Hunt Lascaris, wanted to publicize the plight of the newspaper while simultaneously criticizing Robert Mugabe’s dysfunctional regime. “Thanks to runaway inflation, Zimbabwean currency literally isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on. So we decided that it would be cheaper to print ads on Zimbabwean bills than on regular paper.”

The insight was a perfect fit with TBWA’s “disruption” theory, conceived by its chairman Jean-Marie Dru. Disruption is about overturning conventions to come up with original ideas. In this case, TBWA ignored conventional news channels and turned money into a medium – the symbol of a failed state. After record-breaking inflation Zimbabwe had recently issued the 100 trillion dollar note, whose 14 zeros did not even add up to the price of a loaf of bread.

“Our team found themselves in a seedy part of Johannesburg exchanging a handful of US dollars for trillions of dollars of Zimbabwean cash. At another point we had Zimbabwean friends turning up at the border with refuse bags stuffed with banknotes. One bag was worth about two US dollars.”

Real money is hard to ignore. During the campaign, agency staffers handed out hundreds of high denomination Zimbabwean banknotes in the street. Printed on them was the message: “Fight the regime that has crippled a country”, accompanied by the newspaper’s website address.

TBWA also created the world’s first advertising posters made from genuine banknotes. Giant billboards fluttering with real money made the message dramatically clear. Smaller posters, often located near places that sold The Zimbabwean, allowed people to peel off the bills and show their friends. The agency sent envelopes stuffed with Zimbabwean money to radio DJs, TV presenters, journalists, politicians and other influential figures. Pretty soon, the media was abuzz with the story.

“While a wrinkled dollar bill with a message on it is a simple idea, digital media is incredibly sophisticated and swift,” says Hunt. “People would pass the billboards with their cell phone and take a picture. Then they’d send it out via Twitter or upload it onto their blog. You can guess what happened next: within about 24 hours the story was in newspapers and on websites across the globe. Today, when you have something interesting to say, people will share it.”

The campaign cost less than US$3000, but it was highly effective: a week after it had launched, hits on The Zimbabwean’s website rose from 2,000 a day to more than two million.

The campaign deservedly won the agency’s in-house Disruption Award Grand Prix. More public accolades came at the Cannes Lions 2009 International Advertising Festival, which ended on June 27. The “trillion dollar” campaign won no less than 9 top prizes, including a Grand Prix in the outdoor advertising category and a Gold in the prestigious Titanium category, which recognizes game-changing ideas. It’s the first time in the festival’s 56 years that a single campaign has scooped so many awards.

“The Cannes festival was a recognition that the TBWA method works,” notes Hunt. “What you need in advertising today is a single visceral idea that touches many people, expressed in an intelligent way across different media. At our agency, we call this Disruption supported by the use of Media Arts.”

In the midst of the recession, the campaign also showed that advertising techniques could be used for other purposes than pushing product. “Taken in context with brutal press restrictions in places like Iran and Myanmar, it’s incredibly resonant,” Hunt agrees. “Advertising is the most effective way of supporting a free press, so perhaps this is a timely reminder that our industry doesn’t just exist to create hype.”

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.

Naturally, the Iranian authorities are keen to crack down on Twitter users. And so worldwide supporters have begun switching their time zones to match Iran’s, with the aim of confusing censors who want to zero in on Iranian Twitter users. It shows what you can achieve once you’ve correctly understood a medium. Other Twitterers are turning their profile pictures green as a gesture of support.

While highly personal, non-objective tweets cannot replace balanced reporting, they provide a compelling alternative. We don’t know whether the election was indeed fraudulent or how the story will end. But just as millions of people followed the Gulf War on CNN, millions are watching Twitter for news of Iran.

If you have any comments please email Ulrich Proeschel.

While companies conventionally buy media and hire PR agencies to tell people about their charitable efforts, recently Adweek reported on a different kind of media tactic to help people discover and disseminate the good deeds of brands. More brands are tapping into people’s do-gooder impulses to spread their charitable messages through P2P endorsement. Giving the supported charity a donation is incentive for people to post about it in their personal feeds—the real-time “stream” of updates on Facebook & co.—creating word of mouth that comes close to a personal recommendation.

This tactic has the potential upside for brands to be more cost-efficient by offering donations vs. buying ad space to build awareness for the supported cause. And it allows them to redirect some of their media budgets to cover part of the costs of the cause initiative. But there is also risk if people see the efforts as promotional tactics and social-media spam vs. believing the brand wants to genuinely solve a problem or effect real change.

TARGET – BULLSEYE GIVE

Target’s Bullseye Gives campaign found the perfect blend of social media and charitable giving. For two weeks in May, users could vote once a day for one of 10 charities on Target’s Facebook page, to determine what percent of Target’s $3 million each charity would receive. Votes were published on news feeds for friends to view and become fans of the brand. The campaign resulted in 167,000 Facebook members who voted over 291,000 times and a 3,000% surge in Target’s wall posts.

KRAFT – SHARE A LITTLE COMFORT

Kraft has teamed up with Feeding America to create the Share a Little Comfort campaign that offers to donate 1,000,000 boxes of Kraft’s Blue Box Mac and Cheese to families in need. With a single click of the mouse, users can donate a free box and share their charitable ways with friends on Facebook and Twitter via Kraft’s helpful links that instantly update news feeds with a convenient prewritten message, informing and encouraging friends to donate. At press, the campaign generated over 73,000 donations.

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

AUDIENCE BEHAVIOR

BRAND BEHAVIOR Colleen DeCourcy, Chief Digital Officer for TBWA\Worldwide, challenges marketers to “advertise at the speed of culture”— making the case for designing constant communications at the intersections of product, culture, news and events. It’s a fleet of micro-initiatives as ongoing communication programs with your audience in response to culture 365 days a year. It’s about being opportunistic and leveraging key moments with brand relevance. It’s about owning the current conversation to generate faster and more frequent communication points. It’s a new form of CRM using a mix of planned, anticipative and reactive micro initiatives. 

PLANNED initiatives are created around identified cultural moments relevant to your brand. By asking “Who do you think is refreshing music?” Pepsi leveraged the cultural conversation around this year’s Coachella Music Fest with their RefreshMusic Twitter feed featuring Thievery Corporation’s Rob Myers as a guest tweeter. By putting a unique spin on the concert for music lovers, Pepsi is not only letting tweeters experience the festival in new ways, but is also bringing the brand idea “refresh everything” to life.

ANTICIPATED is scenario based planning that requires marketers to be smart enough to see the cultural conversation and be ready to act upon it. Visa’s seemingly “real-time” ad, celebrating Michael Phelps’s Olympic record eight gold medals, proved the brand recognized the Game’s most talked about story. The TV spot had footage of Phelps’s previous wins literally moments after his record-breaking performance, helping Visa go beyond being a sponsor and become a part of the conversation surrounding the Games.

REACTIVE is being nimble enough to surprise and delight your audience by your brand tapping into the zeitgeist. In President Obama’s acceptance speech he declared the family’s intention of getting a dog. The next day, Pedigree began crafting a response. A day later an ad in USA Today urged the President to adopt: “We’d love to help you fulfill your first campaign promise.” Pedigree’s quick actions helped place them in the cultural conversation regarding the President’s pet decision.

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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.

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

The astonishing rise of the Obama brand has become a blueprint for every marketer. His campaign is a case study in marketing excellence that earned him the title “Marketer of the Year” from the trade magazine Advertising Age. 

mad-blog.com presents exclusively the ten key lessons to take away from his campaign:

4. KEEP IT SIMPLE AND STAY POSITIVE:

Obama’s team understood that his message needed to cut through the clutter. “Keep it simple ” is a cliché, but it works. If you ask any Obama supporter to define what Obama stands for, you will always get the same answer: “hope and change“.

While Obama was often attacked for being vague about the details, he made sure that his brand first met the emotional needs of his customers, before providing specifics. He didn’t let the “noise” on the campaign trail interfere with the “signals” he wanted to send. 

Obama understood that politics was about more than just rational argument, it was about emotional connection. People want to be inspired. 

Obama always stayed positive, no matter the twists, turns, and psychodramas from the other candidates or the media. In that way, he stayed above his rivals.

5. THINK AND WORK BOTTOM-UP:

Obama wanted to make sure that his campaign was consistent with his philosophy of “ground up” rather than “top down”. When he was a political organizer, Obama had seen how a grassroots campaign could succeed. The internet allowed him to form an electronic grassroots, or netroots. He reached millions, built a formidable war chest and mobilized a dedicated army of supporters. 

Online communities have become the place where billions of people of every age, social rank, and ethnicity hang out, where decisions are made about what to think, where to go and what to buy. The Obama brand was the creation of the community rather than of media or advertising. 

6. MASTER MEDIA AND EMBRACE TECHNOLOGY:

Obama was the digital candidate while McCain was the analog candidate. 

BarackObama.com beat the 24-hour media cycle with dynamic updates and offered a digital toolbox that allowed users to get involved. But the social media strategy of the Obama camp extended far beyond his site. His image and messages were everywhere on the web. His team not only created content for Web 2.0 sites, they also designed it to suit each individual site and its viewers. 

Email marketing was fully integrated with these tools. “Be the first to know” was the email campaign theme, asking voters to sign up for exclusive email and mobile alerts. Obama‘s iPhone application transformed the phone into a campaign instrument to mobilize and inform supporters. Real time campaign updates on twitter made Obama the most followed person on this ever-growing microblogging service. 

On YouTube, Obama staff constantly put up hundreds of cheaply and rapidly produced videos. Footage of events was edited from multiple cameras and uploaded, often only 20 minutes later. Toward the end of the campaign, they were being uploaded at a rate of 20 or more a day. Obama’s YouTube channel became a controlled media outlet. And he continues to use YouTube for his weekly addresses – a radical departure from Bush’s weekly radio address. 

His message also appeared on billboards in 18 online video games, driving traffic to VoteForChange.com. 

In the end, Obama’s familiarity with the most advanced new media technologies provided a huge advantage over his opponents. 

For the next learnings, please come back tomorrow.

If you want to read lesson one through three, click here.

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

The Twitchiker is a guy who is trying to go around the world in 30 days, propelled and supported by nothing more than the digital goodness of the Twitterati. To aid the ‘hiker Visa gave him a loaded Visa card with $1000. 

Contagious magazine comments: “Excellent leaning into the frame this week from Visa, whose agency Whybin\TBWA in New Zealand spotted a gap in popular culture and plugged it. The ‘Twitchhiker’ experiment sees Twitterer Paul Smith attempting to make his way as far as possible from his England base relying only on the kindness, and suggestions, of the rest of the community.”

Follow the guy on twitter and get an idea for communication at the speed of culture (http://twitter.com/twitchhiker).

More on the Twitchhiker.

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Andy Blood.

Global visitors to Twitter grew almost fivefold to 5.6 million in September from a year ago. With so many people trying to stay connected and living their daily lives out loud, it’s easy to see why brands are intrigued by the opportunities to listen to, learn from, or even communicate directly with their audiences.

Most brands are still quite cautious about how to approach a social network like Twitter where the standard rules of engagement don’t apply, but some brands willing to take the risk are finding a great deal of reward in this new way to help build more personal relationships, 140 letters at a time.

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).