Another Planning Blog…

YouTube are running an Ad of the year (ads on Youtube, that is). It’s got to be the Nike spectacular, hasn’t it? Although the W+K work for Old Spice is worth considering as well. And now I’ve found dot.mov… damn that’s good. If W+K don’t win it for something, the voting has gone wrong!

It’s not quite the first Christmas ad this year, but we’re proud to see our first ad break in the press today and go on air tomorrow. Look out for the full, 2 minute version in X Factor on Saturday. Or watch it here, right now.

The ad is shot by Jonas Akerlund, stars Derek Jacobi, featuring the music of Chinese concert pianist Lang Lang and a 35-piece orchestra – recorded at Abbey Road.

Director: Jonas Akerlund
ECD/Art Director: Tony McTear
Copy Writer: Charles Dickens
Music: Lang Lang

Evil genius, that is…

Reminiscent of the Chanel No. 5 epic from Baz Luhrmann, but this is a stunning piece of film. I don’t know what extra nuance comes from understanding Italian, but the story has some lovely little touches within it, just at surface level.

Beautifully directed by Jonas Åkerlund – click here if you can’t see the embedded version below.

Not sure the digital lives up to the glory of the film, but it’s got a nicely designed site (albeit rather lacking in content at the moment) and a Twitter feature (that I’m presuming links back to the site).

A couple of months ago, the comedian Reginald D Hunter was on the Jonathan Ross show and he talked about something he called a “strong minute”. Although what I’m about to talk about takes that thought and bastardises it horribly, it struck me as real relevant for what we try to do with marketing and advertising. The job we’re attempting for brands, really. Because his explanation of that “strong minute” was simple. I’m paraphrasing, but he talked about it being a minute that is powerful and impactful. That sticks with you and means more. A minute that really counts.

Which got me thinking: we should be trying to achieve “strong brand minutes” with our audiences.

If we stop thinking about broadcast and digital and experiential as separate things and just consider it in terms of ‘brand minutes’ then we can boil down the cross-media debate to one of the time people spend with a brand. And I don’t think it needs to get a lot more complicated than that.

You could try to argue that we need to add some sort of ‘concentration’ factor to it as well. Or maybe we need to weight that minute by ‘impact’. Either way, we’re just trying to measure like with like. You can’t judge a 30 second commercial as being 1/360th as powerful as spending three hours at a sponsored polo match. So you need a measure of what the brand minute is able to achieve. We could probably build that pretty quickly with the help of a measurements/research agency. For the purposes of this, though, I’m less fussed with exactly how you make those minutes comparable.

Because the point of it being a STRONG brand minute rather than just a comparable brand minute is that we fail to understand the opportunity if we try too hard to make that brand minute comparable… The whole point of a strong brand minute, and this is where I deviate less from the original intent outlined by Reginald D Hunter, is that you’re achieving more. This STRONG brand minute needs to make the very most of the time you’ve got with the audience, so it has to demand more creativity, it has to be more relevant, it has to be more insightful.

In short, a STRONG brand minute demands that we’re all working harder. That we make the very most of an opportunity to connect with people. We’ll use those minutes differently depending on the role of the media, the mindset of the person we’re connecting with, the likely need they’ll have, and so on. But we should be judging ourselves on our ability to take a minute and make it count. However many minutes we’ve got.

Then, we need to start, as an industry, looking for the ability to make cross-media comparisons. Not for the purposes of budget division, although that will still play a role, but also so that we start to aggregate our minutes and see how we are connecting with people at a macro level.

Maybe we can even measure all the media in terms of that brand minute?  

More on this to come… it’s a thought I like, but it feels like it’s just a nascent idea right now. 

This is the Slideshare of the talk I gave at Miami Ad School Europe on Thursday evening. The idea was to talk about great work and some thinking around it. The problem with a title like that is the presentation itself can’t live up to the content. However, the folks at Miami Ad School were really nice and didn’t complain.

So, a huge thank you to Niklas and his team for all their kindness and hospitality. And, for all to comment or steal, here’s the presentation…

You can also download the full Keynote here:

GreatBeatsGood.Keynote

Or grab the Powerpoint version (can’t guarantee formatting on that one) here:

GreatBeatsGood.PowerPoint

(inc. videos and presenter notes), but you’re responsible for all copyright on videos if you choose to download.

Nice take on laptops from 180 LA – here on youtube.

There’s something unassailable about being great. I say that in context of work and I’m obsessing this idea at the moment because I’m writing up a short presentation into a bigger piece for the Miami Ad School Europe, so forgive my one-track mindedness.

Anyway, on to Mad Men…

I saw today that they’ve done a “job interview” to engage people pre-premiere. Which I just went through. I’m delighted to say they’ve offered me a job as a copywriter (although they’re clear that my “work history isn’t great”). Go here to see it and have a go.

Now, here’s the thing… It’s a series of 7 questions. It’s not very exciting or engaging. The questions aren’t that funny. And the outcome’s fairly mundane. But, with all the heritage and potency that comes from Mad Men, that didn’t end up being that off-putting. And I think this is what greatness gives you – you’ll engage with something that comes with a good dose of “great”. You let it be OK and still enjoy it, even – so long as that’s the exception, not the trend. It’s how Apple survived. It’s how Harley-Davidson survived.

It’s still a shame they didn’t live up to the brand, though. More “great” would have been even better.

Via: Medical Coding Certification

Just 12 days ago, on June 17th, we launched.

As expected, the launch itself was fairly manic. We had a pitch the day before and we’ve been fairly flat out since, but I thought I’d talk about it here briefly because I’m excited about it… It’s a new agency, with new opportunities. And it’s going to be something quite different.

Yes, it’s a start-up. Yes, it’s communications. Probably the easiest thing to call it would be an advertising agency, since we’ll be producing advertising (just not limited to broadcast media or digital media). And, yes, the focus is on great planning, great creative and genuinely innovative ways to connect with consumers. But we’re aiming to create a new model of agency. We’re calling it ‘hybrid’ agency for want of a better word, because there’s a few twists that make us different (or ‘hybrid’)…

Not hybrid just because we’re fusing digital and advertising. We are, but that’s not enough. You’ve got to do things differently if you want to be genuinely relevant to your audience. Today, consumers know more, share more and listen less. We’re leveraging a set of new and unique tools that allow us to get closer to the customer through their digital behaviour. The difference for clients is better insight and less guesswork through understanding what people do, not what they say they do. The difference for a planner is that you’re building insights and strategy on a more solid foundation.

We started this from a clean sheet of paper and struck the right balance of senior people from the outset – uniting the worlds of advertising, digital and technology. We did this because, in our opinion, clients need the ability to connect with their audience without media bias or boundary. There’s got to be an equality of opinion and input if you’re going to get something out that isn’t biased or constrained in some way.

Finally, we should mention WPP. We’re still a start-up, majority owned by the founders, but their support adds resources and scale. That’s a massive helping of “best of both worlds” for clients. And it gives us access to some very knowledgeable individuals and some very deep data stores.

We think communications need to grab an unfair share of attention and sales. And we think this set up can do just that.

It’s early days – there’s a lot to do and a lot to learn. But it’s got purpose.

————

Here’s our press release, with a bit more info on who’s involved and where they came from. It’s the first release – there’s more news to come.

“Miller, Perry, McTear and Law launch hybrid creative agency”

Neil Miller and Chris Perry, the former Joint CEOs of Razorfish London, have teamed up with Tony McTear, the ex-Creative Director of Fallon, and TBWA’s Head of Planning, Simon Law. Together, they’re launching a new hybrid creative agency, called True Worldwide.

The agency sets out to unite the worlds of advertising, digital and technology in equal measure. The technology part is a set of new tools, built by an expert team in Seattle, that provide a unique insight into customer behaviour at every stage of campaign development and measurement.

Chris Perry and Neil Miller originally founded one of the first digital shops in London in 1995, called DNA, which sold to Avenue A/Razorfish in 2005. Following that, they were joint CEOs of Razorfish London, winning numerous digital awards and working on major brands like Audi, O2, NSPCC, Oxfam and McDonald’s. McTear’s pedigree is AMV, BBH, TBWA and Fallon, producing award-winning campaigns like Levi’s Twisted, Sony Playstation Mountain, Orange, Lynx and Club Med. Simon Law was Head of Planning at TBWA and previously spent five years out in San Francisco at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, where he led the planning team on HP globally.

Chris Perry said “We set out with a blank sheet of paper to create an agency that helps clients get closer to their consumers and to deliver an unfair share of attention for their brands.”

McTear observed: “It’s interesting to see how agencies are trying to battle each other for ownership of both advertising and digital spend. The smart money has to be on finding ideas that transcend both channels and the right balance of people from the start to make it all work together.”

Owned by the founders and WPP, the agency launches in London, with plans to create a network for global clients.