Another Planning Blog…

I worked on the Sneakerpedia idea with the guys and girls at Nitro back at the beginning of 2010. And it was one of those ideas that’s good enough to remember. I’ve been looking out for it to launch for a while now and I just found something…

Look forward to seeing it in full glory. This, I’m hoping, will be truly great.

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Beautiful “Sound Sculptures” from Canon Pixma… courtesy of Dentsu.

There’s no brand like Apple for a good announcement!

Here’s the result…

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.