Ah, old times. An era of no-nonsense, straight to the point and PERSUASIVE advertising. Social media, blah, co-creation, blah, democratised information, blah who needs that drivel when you’ve got corkers like these to spread goodness about your brand.
One week on and its been a busy week of argumentation and exposition over England’s doomed journey in South Africa, culminating in our comprehensive spanking from Germany. For a read, check out the Guardian‘s article on the travesty.
Of course, I’m absolutely gutted (as always). I’ve experienced England’s failure for most of my formative years but I find this year to be particularly interesting. Whilst no football statistician, I do know that on paper we have some pretty good players -- but as a team something just didn’t work together. The performance as a whole didn’t tally up with the performance of the individuals and in some sadly perverse way, they played even worse. What we would have wanted was to see some teamwork, some play that was greater than the sum of its parts…in other words, some magic. But magical play isn’t something you can conjure at will unfortunately, it’s somewhat more elusive than that. But some thinking about networks might provide some insight..
Undercurrent strategist Mike Arauz discusses how the success of advertising agencies depends on both their ability to tell stories AND their ability to be create tricks, making a great analogy to magic -- read here. In short, you can be an agency that does great tricks or you could be an agency that is particularly adept at story telling but those elements alone will not precipitate a good (and ultimately successful) advertising agency. I really like this idea that a central outcome can only ever be created by two seperate processes and it’s something we can use as a framework on pretty much everything.
Take music for example. I’m a music producer. I use computers and synthesisers to produce music and it is often a very technical process. But after a while of producing something happens that is kind of hard to describe. After a while I no longer hear the musical elements, I no longer hear the percussion, I no longer hear a vocal line…I hear a song. The elements combined in the right way create something that is both unexpected, quite random and entirely dependant on its component processes - it is in essence, magical. The third element if you’d call it that. And something sadly we didn’t get to see in England’s performance.
I read a great book recently -- Connected : Amazing power of social networks and how they shape our lives. If you find networks interesting then you should definitely have a read. It’s not entirely popular science tripe -- they’ve gone in great depth to scientifically model how networks are structured, how they transfer ‘contagion’ and what the implications are for small groups and larger societies. I need to dig back into it a little more but it’s fascinating -- essentially a large part of who you are is not mutually because of you and your actions, you are who you are because of everyone else in your network. Strikes a very similar chord with a campaign for Orange I worked on a few years ago -- they were quite ahead of the game it seems.
Nicholas Christakis spoke earlier this year at a TED conference -- he covers some of the major points in his book so if you don’t have time to read, have a listen here
I’m often a bit blah with Coca Cola ads but this was pretty..
I was always of the understanding that print media, whilst needing to pack a punch in the smallest amount of time, still needs to have strong branding; surely this is a prerequisite for low attention, low involvement media?
Fiver to anyone that can successfully brand these in less than five seconds – I work in this industry and I couldn’t.
Would this work?
I was a bit ‘meh’, with the Star Wars spot that broke a month or so ago but with a bit of a reworking, Adidas redeem themsleves with this slice of uber coolness. Love the look, love the music love the vibe. Effortlessly cool. I want to know where that warehouse party was. And what the music is too -- someone out there know?
Adidas Originals is launching the first Augmented Reality experience in footwear. The adidas Originals AR Game Pack is a set of 5 shoes, each printed with an AR code on the tongue. When you hold the code in front of your webcam, you’ll gain access to a virtual version of the adidas Originals Neighborhood. Each month between February and April, we’ll launch a new interactive game within the Neighborhood and your shoe will be the game controller. The experience launches on February 10th
Last year they had an augmented reality campaign to support their F50i football boot (‘every team needs a spark’ ) so it’s interesting to see that they’re pushing this approach into lifestyle/fashion footwear. A part of me is screaming gimmick/bandwagon and I have doubts about what this adds to the Adidas ‘experience’ but we’ll have to wait and see I guess. As for the viral -- it would have been nice to see a bit more of the process in action or maybe that would have tempered the novelty factor.?
The ad generator is a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language. Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly. By remixing corporate slogans, I intend to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful, in that it represents real cultural values and desires, and yet utterly meaningless in that these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. In using the Flickr images, the piece explores the relationship between language and image, and how meaning is constructed by the juxtaposition of the two.
http://www.theadgenerator.org/
This is a project from Alexis Lloyd who works at the New York Time as a ‘Creative Technologist’ (a very cool sounding job). It’s a fantastic example of how image, language and meaning don’t always have to work cohesively and strategically in order to create simple emotion.
For me, the essence of creativity is about not having any rules or any preconceived plan, not having any external influence and avoiding the easy choices our brains often tend to make when processing information. Hence, the most creative things are often the most surprising things. The mechanism of this project and its very random nature is a metaphor for this creative process. As such, we find quite quite appealing results.
Here are some of my examples – a minority are very odd but most are something I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see in an advert in some form.
Some are excellent in fact.
Reminiscent of the infamous VW Polo ‘Bomber’ ad a few years ago, now it’s Audi’s turn to get some bootleg treatment in this darkly humoured viral.
Some fun interactive/outdoor work for Mcdonald’s… in prime tourist territory. Lots of cameras + lots of involvement = recipe for success.
UPDATE 31/01/10 – Just found out David Haupt, a friend of mine directed this…I should really read the credits more :/
Advertising Agency: Leo Burnett London, UK Creative Director: Jonathan Burley Copywriters / Art Directors: Garry Munns, Monty Verdi Photographer: Tiff Hunter Agency Producer: Claire Taylor Post Production: The Moving Picture Company Director: David Haupt Producer: Lieanna Campbell
