There are the fragrances you know, which usually have the names of familiar designer brands: Gucci by Gucci, Armani Code and so on. And then there is Etat Libre d’Orange. Yes, you read that correctly: the Orange Free State, named after a 19^th century Boer republic in South Africa, now half-forgotten by history.

Today you’ll find this strange state in the Marais district of Paris. It’s a small store that sells perfumes for men and women. The fragrances all have unusual names and even odder packaging.

For instance, Je Suis Un Homme (“I Am a Man”) features an image of an uncompromisingly phallic pistol. Putain de Palaces (“Hotel Slut”) shows a key inserted into a pink keyhole. And I think you can guess what Vraie Blonde (“Real Blonde”) depicts. Our favourite is Jasmine & Cigarette, whose logo is a smoking flower. Other names include Incense & Bubblegum, Virgins & Toreadors and Dark Sleepless Night. One is literally called “Nothing”.

Despite their teasing names, these fragrances have been created by some of the best perfumers in France. And behind them all is Etienne de Swardt, a young man born – surprise, surprise – in South Africa. Arriving in Paris, he got a job at Givenchy. Later he created a perfume for pets called Oh My Dog. 

Now he’s the creator of this funky little brand, which relies for marketing on word of mouth, a great website, a store that’s also a billboard – and a growing band of cult followers. By the way, the store is also a bookshop where you can buy Taschen tomes or collections of erotic pinups. On the window is the brand’s slogan: Perfume is dead. Long live perfume!

Etat Libre d’Orange, 69 Rue de Archives, 3^rd arrondissement, Paris. www.etatlibredorange.com

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Ulrich Proeschel

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.

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).

Let the books uplift us and move us!

Technology will never be sharp enough!

The first poster featured her lying on her side, wrapped in a gleaming toga and holding a lyra, a modern and impressive Euterpe, muse of Music, with the caption: “The biggest record store in France, 52-60 Champs Elysées, Paris. Virgin Megastore. We will never make enough room for music.”

The Champs-Elysées Megastore had opened two years before and Virgin was in France a new brand, and certainly a provocative one, with the image of R.Branson, ballooning rock’n’roll mogul, in everybody’s mind.

But an obese woman in a white toga to promote a trendy record store? Now that’s disruption – all the more in 1990, in the height of the supermodels era. Compared to skinny fashion icons, with the convention being “to be hip you have to be slender”, the voluptuous curves of Virgin’s muse gave the brand a fun and generous appeal. “She has the opulence of an opera”, “an allegro fortissimo” wrote Pierre Combescot, Goncourt Prize laureate writer. 

She embodied all the music, and she made a bang.

If you have any comments or suggestions please email Xavier Maldant (xavier.maldant@tbwa-france.com).

Lee Clow – Worldwide Director of Media Arts

We are at the beginning of the most exciting time the advertising” business has ever seen. While lots of people are talking about the challenge of the multi-media future, I believe it is the biggest opportunity for creative minds since the ‘60’s.

New technology hasn’t simply made our media options broader, it’s actually changed the model that brands have to operate in. Our talent is still about storytelling but using new delivery systems, formats, screens and experiences that have become opportunities for brands.

First, we have to re-think what we call media. Media used to be simply a way for brands to target consumers, but today, media is the way that people are engaging with the world around them. Really, media is just any space between a brand and the audience. And in fact, I believe the best brands will become media themselves: the places, spaces, experiences people choose to spend time with. Already, the Apple stores are a media experience, and iTunes is serving millions of songs, podcasts and playlists – all media of the brand. And others like Nike, adidas and Virgin are shaping their brands to make themselves a medium through which people experience their lives.

And as brands become media, agencies will have to become passionate across complete brand experiences, not just the media we are currently comfortable in. And we have to stop striving to be media neutral, we have to be media passionate. Media agnostic has been a big buzz word, but I think that‘s the wrong idea. We need a POV to bring expertise to treating media as creative. Tailoring creative ideas to the strengths and relevance of each media. We must stop talking about above the line/below the line, media as traditional or non-traditional and instead talk passionately about ideas that invite people into our brands, wherever that may be.

I also believe that we can’t treat people as consumers anymore. They have alread become audiences. They expect to be surprised and entertained. They mesh, mash, tune in or ignore what they want. So brands first need to capture people’s attention – today’s generations grew up with off and skip buttons. We must understand this entire shift – as both an art and a science. I’m challenging TBWA\ to understand, brand by brand, how people are using media across their lives. It changes the opportunities we serve up to clients. It changes the ways brands should behave in culture. It means we match audience behaviors to media opportunities and make media ideas the creative ideas themselves.

I may be one of the oldest art directors still working but I see the future more optimistically than I did 30 years ago. Our job, our responsibility to the brands we work for, is to do more than a good ad. It’s about becoming artists in all media. It’s about finding the idea that can orchestrate a brand. It’s about telling a brand’s story using the world as our medium.