Set the VRC - The Gruen Transfer returns Wednesday, 9pm, ABC1

The Gruen Transfer http://www.abc.net.au/tv/gruentransfer/ - the show that has almost made advertising an acceptable profession to the public - makes a welcome return on Wednesday, with an in-depth discussion of the Tourism Australia strategy. Another winner from the show is Foxtel (OMD, Sydney), with a price-based ad for the subscription TV company generating approval from the panel for its strategy and execution.

Also from Aunty is The Making of Modern Australia where people from all around Australia are being invited to tell their personal stories online in a vibrant history project that will also become a documentary series on ABC TV.As both a broadband project and TV series, The Making of Modern Australia will be an unofficial people’s history, with individuals and families sharing their stories of life in Australia since 1945.By logging onto http://www.makingaustralia.com.au/, people can upload their stories through photos, home movies, live webcams, sound recordings and text.To help people tell their stories, The Making of Modern Australia site is user-friendly with plenty of tips on storytelling and uploading material, as well as inspiring examples.
We will keep an eye on this project as it could be a great way to uncover insights into Australians.

The Future’s Looking Inventful

Prospection: The act of looking forward in time is quintessentially human nature. We are by definition, the only living animal that looks into the future, thus making evolution dominant in our existence.

Our quest for advancement and innovation is an integral part of human behaviour, and thus pushes us to think more creatively and place emphasis on idea generation.

Alan Key was quoted to say “the best way to predict the future is too invent it” and if Google has any prediction status it seems the ad industry is evolving online.

As I’m sure many of you are aware Google has extended the Adwords platform to TV [it also does print and radio].

TV ads allow you to plan and buy a TV schedule based on station and daypart. Alternatively it will create an optimised TV schedule for you based on your desired demographic.

You can buy TV like you buy Adwords, setting daily impression and budget targets, and monitor your delivery, getting results the next day.

If you don't have an ad, it connects you to the Google Ad Creation Marketplace, which connects advertisers directly to production companies.

Check out: http://www.google.com/adwords/tvads/#

The generation gap is extending daily. Kid’s experiences with media are far more removed from our days of cartoons and cubby houses. Rupert Murdoch refers to us as Digital Migrants, our younger counterparts however, are Digital Natives. They have never known a life without broadband internet access, interactive online entertainment activities and social networking opportunities. For the first time ever a generation is in control of how it experiences ideas and ultimately is creating their own media landscape.

As the media industry continues to evolve and grow new channels of delivery and execution, we must ensure we are on the forefront of ideas. As Digital Migrants we must not make the mistake of our predecessors and try to impose our culture, experiences and knowledge, we must keep up with the pace, monitor, learn and embrace this new race. The future is open to ideas, so grab your visa and let’s get inventing!

A history lesson?

I decided to check out what I could learn from the history of advertising in order to apply it to a thorny issue: how to incorporate marketing within social media. This is an important issue as social media will not survive forever in the current format unless they begin to realise some of their potential for earning a real share of marketing spend. I'm not sure what other people think, but I personally think there is every chance that Facebook will be extinct in 5 years, just as MySpace and SecondLife have never lived up to their promise, or managed to maintain their growth rate.

Anyway, I went onto Wikipedia and found an interesting article about the history of advertising here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising#History.

This is what I think might be relevant:

TV advertising started out as single sponsors for each show, each of whom could control a lot of the content, right down to their ad agency writing the entire show. Then one channel, who was not securing enough sponsors, decided to flog off small bits of airtime to different companies. Could it be that we are returning the other way, with digital media leading the push into single sponsors, branded content and away from having several different companies with their banner ads on the same page? Interesting symmetry there.

The birth of the "modern" 30 second TV commercial lies right there in the move from sponsoring and content creation into having to tell your story in 30 secs - which meant the importance of being creative, cutting through, and having a consistent USP. Again, as we reverse this and look at transmedia planning and content strategies, we can see the idea of having a single minded USP is no longer as relevant - brands have stories to tell. And brands don't always have to have exactly the same message in every medium.

Wikipedia's history of advertising also analyses the launch of MTV as a channel where people tuned in for the advertising itself - advertising of the music song. But I see that as a bit of a blurred line. Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge that there was a time before music videos, a time when the top 40 countdown had millions of teens glued to their radio. All takes me back to the singles I used to buy in the 80s - Adam and the Ants, the Eurythmics and Madonna all graced my record player back then. Could we say that websites for brands serve some of this purpose? Are they windows to the brand? For most brands I'd say not, they are mainly corporate. But for some brands their website does or can play this role of building interest, liking, and getting you to go out and buy it. The main difference of course is that the music is an end unto itself, rather than a brand having to make up something additional to be interesting. But maybe this is the real challenge for brands: to provide a total brand experience that is more than a physical product plus a marketing program - the brand experience would then be the sum of a number of parts, only one of which was the actual product experience. Cadbury Gorilla has a written case study which purports to this: the strategy was to create "A Glass and a Half Full productions" where Dairy Milk became not just a chcoloate bar, but also a producer of entertainment.

Lastly, we can see how google and ebay brought the "long tail" to life and have monetized it in a revolutionary way, so in one sense, the progress of advertising over the years has been one straight line from it being an activity undertaken by only the biggest companies, through a plethora of brands (and the advertising clutter issue) and now into the realm of every individual. If I want to sell my second hand fridge, I can very easily advertise it and get hundreds of people to view my ad. Whilst this has been available for years through Trading Post etc., ebay brought it up several notches.

Google is attempting to combine the long tail of content with the long tail of advertising by its Adsense program of putting ads into any piece of online content, but to me they still haven't got it right as far as user experience counts. It looks ugly and is rarely truly relevant. Ebay have the long tail of advertising right, although not as right as they used to think, but their efforts to expand up the tail to more corporate activity, e.g. auctioning advertising space, appear to have got little traction (certainly I am not aware of it in Australia).

So, perhaps the future of social media is to try and monetise the long tail rather than (or as well as) the large corporates? Perhaps big brands need to redefine themselves and evolve into more multi-dimensional experiences? And perhaps Adam and the Ants made the best song about highway robbery EVER.

Recession Marketing - Seen on the Streets of London & on the TV screens of USA

We are all aware of the 'global credit cruch' so it is no surprise that across the US and the UK families have seen their income reduce in value.

In fact in the UK people were £14 a week poorer this September thanks to high inflation and limited wage increases.

So with governments in Britain & America talking about the coming of the dreaded R word, advertisiers are responding with value messages.

This ad from KFC captures the moment perfectly

In the US, Target is running TVC's under a new day - new ways to save tag line.

Coles is the Australian advertisier that comes to my mind when thinking of those that have jumped on the penny pinching banwagon here, with meal ideas under a price point. E.g. Feed 6 for under $35.

It is likely only a mater of time before we see more of this type of messaging....

The Curio - Celebrating Media Creativity

With Think Fresh ‘08 upon us, we thought we’d look back at the life of media creativity and celebrate 10 of our favourite examples of great creativity and bravery from around the globe that you may not have seen before.

San Fran Zoo - Bringing out the animal in you….grrrrrr

The San Francisco Zoo have produced a beautiful campaign using a series of local bus shelters adorned with horns, butterfly wings and oversized ears representing all the animals at the zoo. The idea is, you get your photo taken in front of the sites to upload onto the Zoo’s website. The best pictures will be chosen for the Zoo’s advertising campaign. This is a new campaign but already hundreds of people have uploaded their photos. We love this idea quite simply because its fun, it has people interacting with it, and it hits the mark with sending people to the website. Check them out here: http://www.oursfzoo.org/


Making TV Advertising Event Viewing
Honda made TV history this year with 2.2M people tuning in to watch their TV ad in the UK. The 3 minute stunt took up an entire ad break in peak time on Channel 4 and saw sky divers jump from a plane to form, one letter at a time, the word Honda. The amazing thing about this is it was all done live. The media and creative agencies along with Channel 4 worked closely together to bring this great example of bravery to life. It could have been done as a pre-recorded ad, but they took the tag line, Difficult Is Worth Doing literally and did it the hard way. Garnering huge amounts of PR and discussion, before and after the airing, Honda’s UK media agency said: "It is the biggest, smallest campaign ever, just one spot but look at the impact.”


Dialing Up Creativity
When the 118 118 directory service launched in the UK, the brand was up against the category behemoth British Telecom. With two hirsute 70’s styled runners as the brand heroes, the campaign was truly brought to life through the unconventional comms: -Tens of 1000’s of 118 118 singlets were hung on washing lines in key cities for people to steal and wear -The runners travelled around the country for 8 weeks in a retro ice cream van entertaining consumers & giving away the 118 118 singlets -To make the shirts an icon in their own right, they were framed and hung in private health clubs throughout London. Within the year, 118 118’s prompted awareness was at 95% and the brand stole and has maintained the leadership position in the category.

These examples are a couple of our favourite Grand Prix winners from the Cannes Advertising Festival. Yes, one is from our very talented cousins across the Tasman…we’re not being biased…this one is GOOD! If you want to see more great media work that’s won at Cannes, visit the site: http://www.canneslions.com.au/

Biomat Cleaning Religiously
To grow market share, Biomat washing powder specifically targeted the Jewish Orthodox sector in Israel, a market almost unreachable via traditional media as many don’t own TV’s or radios. Orthodox Jews have strong beliefs associated with aiding the weak, so Biomat connected their idea to this belief and developed a way to help the needy. “Bring your unneeded clothes to us, we will wash them with Biomat and distribute them to the needy” A Biomat-branded truck fitted with a giant washing machine was the main feature of the campaign. The details of the truck’s locations were communicated via street posters, at point of sale and in Orthodox press. Biomat's shares in the Orthodox sector, 15% of the Israeli population, grew by 50% after the activity, and the campaign has continued on.

Pago – A License to Print on Money
Pago is a virtual wallet linked to a bank account allowing users to text money to and from mobile phones. A great tool targeted at a young ad avoiding audience keen on innovation and technology. OMD NZ found that innovation and new media was the key to connecting with their target audience.
•The campaign used Hypertag and Bluetooth technology in bus shelters to give away free money vouchers, directly motivating registration.
• With permission from the Reserve Bank they created a media first by stickering $5 notes with the Pago image. The notes were then put into regular circulation, surprising the audience.
• An interactive billboard was made up of 30,000 post it notes for consumers to peel off so they could take the Pago message with them.
The campaign exceeded awareness results by 21% 2 months from launch. With a fresh and creative approach to out of home media as well as a coming up with a media first, this campaign was a great success in delivering a new brand and a complex message to a tech savvy target audience.

We couldn’t call ourselves advertising people if we didn’t showcase some of the brilliance from the OMD network.

Making a Tiny Budget Work
In a bid to increase their share of line rentals in the Dominican Republic, Tricom made the cost of phone calls to the US the same price as local calls, less than 1 peso. With only US$5K to promote this, OMD placed stickers on 1 peso coins delivering the message “Start calling the US for less than this”. They stickered 150,000 pesos and distributed them in busy supermarkets, circulating the coins at rapid pace. The coins spread throughout the country and within 1 year line rentals with Tricom grew by 260% with no other major activity in the period.

Breaking the Mould of Book Marketing

With the Disney’s adaptation of Narnia; The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe about to launch, this was the perfect time to reignite excitement about the book that started it all. OMD UK came up with a campaign to Read it before you see it. Copies of the 1st chapter were sampled extensively in cinemas and on public transport where the audience are looking for a read. Downloadable samples were also available online. This campaign broke the mould of book marketing in the UK and proved a success with the €145,000 budget increasing sales of the book by 800%.

A lot of great creative media work has been done with outdoor and as a channel it has been keen to showcase new technology and methods that deliver on creativity. Here are some great examples that we love showing how the outdoor medium has helped make the message stronger by encompassing the immediate surrounds.

Amnesty Brings Suffering to the Streets
Amnesty ran 200 poster sites throughout Switzerland to illustrate the Human Rights abuses that are taking place each day. Each poster image was matched to the surroundings and gave the impression that the victims were literally sitting on the streets of Switzerland. Orange-clad and hooded Guantanamo prisoners looked as if they were shackled and left on the Zurich pavements.
The campaign was discussed on over 400 blogs, triggered a editorial features about human rights abuse and achieved a twenty-four fold increase in traffic to Amnesty International’s website.




Making the Medium Fit the Message
TBWA in Brazil used one of the most polluted tunnels in one of the world’s most polluted cities to promote World Car Free Day. Instead of pasting a billboard in the tunnel, they scraped the grime caused by car fumes from the walls of the tunnel to write: “Walk. Ride. Bike. Take the bus. Use the subway for less pollution. 9/22 is World Car Free Day”. This idea won on PR by delivering $6M in earned media value and reached 4 million drivers in the city.



Heinz Souper Billboard
A giant 3D soup pot positioned on an outdoor site that faces three lanes of traffic heading out of central London for Heinz has been seen by an estimated 1.2m people each fortnight as they head home for dinner. The live pot is programed to emit steam and look like a boiling cup of soup. A great way to speak to hungry commuters on their trip home on cold winter nights.