HASSONTWINS

This article was first published at IHaveAnIdea where we provide content.

I was fortunate enough to be in New York a couple of weeks ago for a DDB global chinwag. We talked about advertising and DDB’s philosophy towards advertising, which the network has in spades thanks to its founder Bill Bernbach. He revolutionised the industry, he taught us that advertising was about insight, originality and engagement. Everything he said back then is still powerful and true today. One of my favourite Bill Bernbach quotes reads:

“The real giants have always been poets, men who jumped from facts into the realms of imagination and ideas.”

He’s right. You will never find the answer in the brief. Planning will not tell you how to write an ad. You’ll get the facts, an insight, some research – but the rest is up to you, the creative. Always has been, and will be for a while yet.

One of the themes we keep coming back to in this ‘post-digital’, ‘neo-brand-network,’ ‘always-on’ age is, “what does an idea look like? How do you judge an idea?” Bill Bernbach talks about imagination and ideas. Creatives know how to use their imagination, they know how to come up with ideas – but what’s an idea? Do we still need Big Ideas, and if we do, what is a Big Idea? I’m not going to pretend to have the answer, but I can hopefully shed some light on the discussion that took place in New York and takes place in agencies all over world, every day.

Let’s try a bit of philosophy ourselves. What is a Big Idea not? It’s not a TV script. It’s not a key visual. It’s not an iPhone app. It’s not a QR code. It’s not a Facebook app. It’s not a tactic. I could go on…

A Big Idea is a thought that keeps giving. A Big Idea is a world you can occupy and keep drawing on. Let’s jump out of advertising for a moment into the realm of the novel. I don’t know if you’ve read Fatherland by Robert Harris. It’s essentially a gumshoe thriller with a twist: what if WWII had ended with a truce rather than an allied victory? What if Hitler was still alive in 1964? What if the regime had covered up the Holocaust? When Robert Harris had this idea he said he couldn’t sleep because of the possibilities that flowed from this construct. The idea kept giving enough for him to write a novel that sold 3 million copies.

Movies create worlds that the studios can draw on film after film. It used to be all about ‘High Concept’, now it’s about the world – which is why Harry Potter was such a gift. (It has, unfortunately, also led to Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers and the Star Wars prequels.)

The Big Idea gives creatives a world they can occupy. They can almost physically enter it and see the possibilities surrounding them, like the Robert Harris novel. What’s more, once the client has bought your Big Idea and entered into your world, they are with you for a while. There’s no shopping around the back alleys for tactics from any old tin-pot agency, they are your client for as long as you can keep mining your world. And the awards cabinet should also benefit – being able to go back to a well thought-out rounded strategy that keeps giving is never a bad thing.

DDB Amsterdam won endless awards and built the strongest insurance brand in the Netherlands with their world “A for Apeldoorn” – an everyday Dutch town, where unlikely and surprising mishaps happened to its residents. Every ad ended with the name of the insurance company and the line, ‘Just Call Us.’ Whatever happened, the insurance company was only a call away, and whatever happened, creatives could come up with idea after idea within this world.

‘The most interesting man in the world’ by Euro RSCG even has the thought in the title. It’s the Chuck Norris Internet meme taken to a classy place and it’s a world that the creatives and consumers online all enjoy playing inside.

A Big Idea is not a line, but it can be a line, ‘Have a break, have a Kit Kat” (created in 1957 at JWT, made impotent in 2004 by Nestle when they changed it to ‘Make the most of your break’, and now changed back) shows the power of a Big Idea wrapped in a line. But it’s still a world – the world of stress and the need for breaks. Which creative wouldn’t still love to be let loose on that line? …Oh, the ads you could create, the apps you could come up with – it’s a fun world we all want to immerse ourselves in.

W+K have created a world for Old Spice. There isn’t a consistent line that holds it together in the eyes of the consumer – but I bet you any money they have the brand idea written down and stuck on the wall. But these days the consumer is more surprised, more intrigued and more likely to share the work when the work isn’t landing a heavy line every time. Instead they are invited into a world, into a surreal and modern place where men are on horses and bears are in sidecars. The Big Idea doesn’t have to wear its heart and its message on its sleeve – as long as the clients understand it, the creatives can work with it, and the work is consistently great.

The acid test is always Nike+. How does it fit into this theory? Simple, Nike+ opens up the world of running. It still uses the Bernbach powers of persuasion to bring you in – it promises you that if you enter this world you will get more out of running, run more often, be fitter etc. It may be a product, a service and advertising bundled together – but it’s a world the creative can play in, the client can understand and the consumer enjoys being a part of.

A final case for creating worlds, not ads, is that it will change your agency. It will break down the walls between traditional and digital; an app will be as much a part of the world as a TVC. And your clients will keep coming back for more.

It’s a theory you can stick in your David Ogilvy pipe and smoke. We all love Big Ideas, we like to be a part of new worlds and these worlds have the power to unite and ignite.

But I’ll let Bill Bernbach bring me back down to earth:

“Rules are what the artist breaks; the memorable never emerged from a formula.”

Written by Chris Baylis, ECD, Tribal DDB Amsterdam.

Tags: amsterdam Comments: 0

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How the hell do Nike do it again and again! Fresh! Nike rocks!

The Japanese band androp has released a new video for their catchy single "World.Words.Lights." with an interesting commerce component to help them make benjamins in this new digital era. The ten high-tech toys dancing in the video are being auctioned off on ebay. #1/10, the androp WWL rocker, is currently up for bidding at a price of $5,000. Get your checkbook ready. Agency: Party.

I love this because this poster campaign creates an entirely new and novel experience using one of the oldest techniques available - not flying high tech technology involved here - just the age old scratch away system. Watch and enjoy

Brinx is a new URL shortening service that lets you brand your links for only 0.99$ a month. A small price to pay to ad existing face value to your brand. What a simple and wonderful idea.
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I love the idea of creating a fantastic munchies machine that has one purpose only - prove to consumers beyond the shadow of a doubt Lays is nothing but fresh potatoes, a little oil and salt. Nice!

Truth is I love the campaigns created for museums in the last decade. from Tate Tracks to the museum of London's Street Museum, I think they add to the visitors experience and help bring the pieces of art closer to the visitor - enabling a more intimate viewing experience. The campaign developed for Warsaw Sukiennice "Secrets Behind Paintings" is no exception. Borrowing from the Harry Potter popular culture icons of animated talking paintings - the museum brings the story behind each painting to life. Wish they would make this a travelling exhibit. I'd definitely go.

the concept introduced by Virgin airlines is simple.
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Choose the weather you would like and discover 24 hours in advance where you are flying to. Now that makes for new discoveries!

Google #Firestarters 3: Building A New Agency OS

Posted by Mel Exon

For the third event in the Google #Firestarters series its curator extraordinaire, Neil Perkin, chose to tackle the issues of “legacy structures, processes and thinking” head-on with the question: “what might the operating system for the agency of the future look like?“.

It’s a hairy, humbling monster of a question, not least because talk of new agency structures and ways of working so often teeters precariously on the edge of empty buzzword bingo (check out Tim Malbon’s post last year on Agile as a cargo cult).

On Tuesday night, Martin Bailie, James Caig and I were given 20 minutes to share a response. I attempted to avoid painting a picture of an agency built of silicon, and instead set out to describe something rather more prosaic. These days, perhaps more than ever, agencies are almost ALL about culture; their operating system a set of programs designed to encourage creativity and responsive behaviour, not codify inflexible structures and processes. Get the culture right and the rest follows. So the question becomes: what sort of agency culture do you want to create or be a part of? And what about all the contextual stuff we perhaps need to consider first?

A simple take on the impact of technology

We’ve known for years that the opportunities to buy mass attention are shrinking by the day, just as the opportunities to earn and measure attention become ever more enticingly available. If today Google’s Panda algorithm places ever more pressure on businesses to boost the signal not increase the noise and Facebook’s EdgeRank reduces the visibility of brands that send users to sleep, imagine what this will be like in future. At its simplest, it adds up to the same thing: ALL marketing – not just the rare handful of brands that regularly win awards – needs to be *genuinely* useful or entertaining. If  not, marketing will become that thing that marketers and agencies fear the most: unseen and unheard.

If we can just wake up to this fact, this is a show-stoppingly great moment in time for our industry. There simply isn’t room for me-too, clutter-up-your-life, half-baked ideas, or one way messages dumped on the web dressed up to look “interactive”. However, there is lots of room for marketing done with skill and purpose, that people want to share, remix and make their own.

I’m calling this Marketing Singularity – an absurd title, which I’ll explain it in a second. For now, I just want to restate how it feels that we’re at a tipping point in our industry’s life cycle. If we can just set ourselves straight, it’s going to be epic. Let me explain why and how…

Is the pace of change exponential or logarithmic?

Let’s start with a question that’s at the root of why we’re having this conversation in the first place: the oft-discussed pace of change. Jeremy pointed me to a speech made earlier this month by Ben Hammersley, who spoke with provocative eloquence about an incumbent generation of leaders losing ground on a ‘Internet era’ revolution racing away from them. Around the same time, Matt Edgar wrote a spirited rebuttal to the common assumption that the pace of change is accelerating.. It feels important to decide where you sit on this debate, because if the pace of change is exponential, then it follows we need to have systems in place that encourage us to plan a lot further ahead – or react more nimbly – than we have currently. Or perhaps that isn’t the point. The pace of change may or may not be accelerating, but the pace of life is de facto faster than it was, say, five years ago. And whilst Matt questions whether technology’s exponential rate of change actually impacts on our lives to the same degree, I find that a peculiar assumption. Technology doesn’t sit on the sidelines of our lives these days: it’s embedded, root and branch. What’s more, the technology companies themselves regard speed as a competitive advantage (“Better products, faster” – Larry Page, Google shareholders’ meeting, 2011). Last week’s avalanche of tech news (again) is a case in point.

Marketing Singularity?

In fact you could argue we’re approaching Marketing Singularity: the point at which marketing is forced to become exponentially better, until it is so useful or entertaining it ceases to be a separate, stand-alone, one-way message and instead becomes indistinguishable from the product or service it promotes.

It might be content, it might be a framework or a game that invites participation; or even participation that gets displayed as a game. Platforms are brand operating systems, campaigns are applications. As Ben pointed out earlier this year, these are not binary.

Marketing as a profit centre, not a cost

Taking this to its logical conclusion, shouldn’t we aim to create marketing products and services that are so good, people are prepared to pay for them? Even if this approach isn’t what’s required (perhaps a Freemium model is the way to begin), I like the responsibility it places upon our shoulders: make marketing valuable to people. Looking further out, we may look back on the days we spent millions of dollars just paying for the privilege to reach people as a little odd. Brands like Audi and Red Bull are early experimenters in the guise of brands as committed media owners / publishers.

The kind of agency OS this demands

A few programs for starters:

Reductive thinking everywhere

At Labs, we admire the ruthless economy, flex and energy of a great start up as much as the next person. Kickstarter and Instagram are two of the better known examples of Minimum Viable Product thinking. For any agency worth their salt, the fundamental principles of MVP should not feel new. Great brand strategy and creative have *always* been about the art of sacrifice. The task now is to apply that mindset throughout agency departments: reduce to MVP, then listen (data) and pivot as required. This becomes all the more important when we look at shifts in business stability: from long periods of stability and short periods of disruption, to the reverse. This is a model for marketing too – let’s get comfortable with an environment that needs to flex and morph.

Silicon vs carbon

As Rishad Tobaccowala said a few days ago, ‘the world may be digital, but people are analog.” Any agency OS needs to be built around people, not technology.

‘Big is a collection of smalls’

People habitually join agencies like BBH from colleges and smaller agencies because they want to do something at SCALE. Accordingly, the very last thing we need to do is shy away from growth. Instead, the best agencies are increasingly breaking into nimbler, cross-functional teams, often with hybrid skills and collaborative in mindset. As Nigel Bogle puts it, ‘big is a collection of smalls’. Teams with autonomy, but access to shared services.

Whilst we should cast for the client or task in question (don’t take the team structure I sketched too literally), it’s worth drawing attention to the ‘broker’ role. If you’re interested in non-traditional media partnerships and thinking, you need a deal maker in your team.

Networked, versus in a network

We cannot do everything ourselves. With every layer of complexity, comes a deeper requirement to nurture and build strong external partnerships. Labs is a product of its network, plain and simple.

Foster Renaissance (wo)men

We’ve said this before, but we’re living through a Renaissance period. To be successful, we need fearless people who want to collaborate and learn from other industries. Deal makers, entrepreneurs, makers.. The people who never hold back from making the thing they dream of, just because the tools don’t exist today. Because they know they’ll exist tomorrow.

Make real things

You don’t need a 3D printer to make stuff or experience the benefits of making a proto-type of your idea. Making an early version of something – even if it’s rubbish (many years ago, I remember taking a mockup of a Boddingtons Tetra pak to a client meeting, to sell the idea of ‘Fresh Cream’. They hated it) – teaches you stuff you don’t find out if you stay in theory mode. So go buy a soldering iron and make something… There’s also a non-too-subtle shift going on between experiences that live entirely online (potentially interesting) and those that straddle the real world too (potentially fascinating). Check out Russell Davies’ piece for Campaign and the brilliant Marc Owens’ Avatar Machine if you want to read more.

Stay curious

Adopting and encouraging a culture of constant learning sounds exhausting, but it may well be the only way to stay sane. Learn to code, get comfortable in the wild, stay open, stay curious – I’m enjoying playing with my Weavr thanks to @zeroinfluencer – create your own here. A phrase used often at BBH and which turned up on our login screens this summer is perhaps an apt way to close: “Do interesting things and interesting things will happen to you.”

Seems like this was just waiting to happen...Groupon meets Twitter. there is really very little to say except: smart! Via http://michaelbatistich.com

Amazing @jessedee!

Vitamin Water bus-stop ad lets devices juice-up before the commute

By Joe Pollicino posted Jul 17th 2011 3:27AM

Battery running low during the rush-hour commute? Glacéau's Vitamin Water Energy Bus Shelter by Crispin Porter & Bogusky wants to help you get charged while you're waiting to board. The new billboards feature a bottle of the vitamin / caffeine-packing drink, sporting a triple-USB port, which you can plug your devices into for some extra juice. Apparently, you'll be seeing these if your daily public-transit hustle takes you through the fine cities of Boston, New York, Chicago or Los Angeles -- we'd imagine owners of HTC's Thunderbolt will find them very useful.

Titanium work was being done long before new technology and social media. Take The Macy’s Day Parade created in 1924. A brilliant brand-building creative idea. Not an ad but a piece of creative that is still building a brand today. Let’s commandeer the start of the biggest shopping month of the year with the ultimate shopper, Santa Claus, showing up on our doorstep in Herald Square. Now, that's an act.

I worry that if we created The Macy’s Day Parade today, we would do it for one year and then ask, “What will we do next year?” Because repeating an idea certainly doesn’t seem very creative. Not to mention, it has very little chance of being awarded twice. However, if you are trying to build a brand with this idea, you might be inclined to keep investing in it.

It is ironic to me that we are in a business that frequently creates campaigns to encourage recycling and conservation. Yet, we are the first to throw away ideas because they’ve been done before or because we’ve grown tired of them. Interestingly, Malcolm Gladwell’s "better-to-be-number-three-than-number-one" seminar nodded to this very thing. Watch what number one does and then do it better. Perhaps that is why we shouldn’t be in the business of creativity. Because that demands that we start over. I would suggest we are in the business of building brands through creativity. We will make slightly different choices if Cannes awards brand building through creativity versus creativity in a vacuum. Brilliant brand building creates equity, and equity has huge value.

This is an excerpt of an article published in Fast Company by Susan Credle CCO at Leo Burnett USA...I loved Malcom Gladwell's lecture at Cannes and believe Susan's commentary is insightful.
To put it in a nutshell, Yes - it is about innovation. No- it is not about wiping the slate clean and restarting from zero but building on an idea and getting better at remixing - ideas, trends, insights. Building off existing concept and remixing them into an innovative point of view that creates that moment when you say "I never thought about it that way". Just a thought.
For a the full article follow this link http://www.fastcompany.com/1763405/does-the-ad-industry-really-need-a-festiva...

Wendy Clark discusses "Liquid and Linked" approach to cross-media marketing at the Ad Age Digital Conference in New York.

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The strategic vision and thinking behind the Coca Cola Brand marketing.
A must read.