MediaPost | OMMA Magazine

EdBlog: Evolutionary Score

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 13:37:40 -0500

In the 10 years I've been involved with the annual selection of OMMA's Agency of the Year Awards, I've watched the nature of digital agencies evolve, and these awards along with them. In the early days, digital agencies were defined by the media they influenced - online display advertising, Web sites, search, and increasingly social and mobile platforms.

Agency of the Year, Best Search: Covario

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 13:37:38 -0500

Success means doing better than before or achieving something desired. In business, some call it winning. This year, San Diego-based search agency Covario can boast it won the OMMA Search Agency of The Year title for a third consecutive time, even though it made a long list of changes to the organization.

Agency of the Year, Best Design: Rockfish

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 13:37:33 -0500

To hear most agency heads tell it, firms must be physically present in the lives of their clients. If that means opening a satellite office in East Jabib to accommodate the client recently relocated to the region, well, so be it. Serve the client, at all costs, always. Perpetually be at the ready in the event the client, say, needs some late-night hand-holding, or perhaps needs to borrow some flour.

Agency of the Year, Best Media Planning & Buying: MediaVest

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 13:37:30 -0500

For MediaVest, 2013 was a year of big client wins, big new industry partnerships and a relentless pursuit of new insights that helped the agency and clients better understand the forces driving consumer behavior. For those accomplishments the shop has been named OMMA magazine's Media Planning and Buying Agency of the Year.

Agency of the Year, Best Social: MRY

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 13:37:26 -0500

For Manhattan-based MRY, OMMA's Agency of the Year: Social, 2013 could have been a year of just getting the internal alphabet straight. Earlier this year, the Publicis Groupe shop saw through a merger that was big stakes for a company of only 200 people: swallowing up a bigger, and more corporate, fish - the U.S. operations of LBi. The 300-employee LBi operation, best known for its work in back-end specialties like CRM, might have seemed a laborious fit for the cheeky MRY, an agency that until 2012 had been known as - no one over 30 need apply - Mr. Youth.

Agency of the Year, Best Creative: SapientNitro

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 13:37:21 -0500

If you want to experience firsthand how SapientNitro is different from other agencies, wait until you're thirsty, seek out one of their smile-activated vending machines, stand in front of it, and grin. You will be rewarded by a dispensed can of soda, so you literally drink in the difference.

Agency of the Year, Silver: Digitaria

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 13:37:12 -0500

Always a perennial in the areas of design. creativity and digital technology development, OMMA is recognizing Digitaria as its "Silver" agency of the year for becoming more of a "full-service" shop. While continuing to excel in those best-in-class areas, Digitaria upped its game in two crucial areas for digital agencies - analytics and social - and pulled something off that even some of Madison Avenue's biggest shops haven't figured out quite how to do: transition into the even higher end service industry of management consulting. Sure plenty of Madison Avenue shops have proclaimed themselves "business consultants" in recent years, even going so far as to recruit talent from the big management consulting firms, but while they were zigging Digitaria zagged. Instead of trying to reinvent itself as a consultancy, it struck a strategic partnership with some blue chips, creating a new hybrid model combining the best of Madison Avenue creative, ideation and execution with blue blood business strategists.

Agency of the Year, Gold: 360i

Thu, 09 Jan 2014 13:37:00 -0500

Normally, OMMA bases its annual agency of the year selection on the most innovative things done by an agency during the 12-months leading up to our pick. For this year's winner 360i, the process began at least 24-months ago, when we met with CEO Bryan Wiener and the rest of his top management team, in preparation for our 2012 process. In the end, we didn't select 360i that year, but Wiener planted a seed in our head, asserting. "I don't think agencies, as we know them, will exist in another couple of years."

Agency of the Year: Gold -- Digitas

Fri, 28 Dec 2012 16:43:00 -0500

With its newsroom approach to real-time brand storytelling, Digitas continues to create campaigns with Page-One punch

On Monday, Feb. 27th, when a race car veered off course and crashed into an industrial dryer spilling a couple of hundred gallons of highly flammable jet fuel onto the Daytona International Speedway, it appeared that the 2012 Daytona 500 might be over with 40 laps left to go. But the track crew quickly extinguished the flames, and then a remarkable marketing opportunity occurred: They began pouring boxes of Tide powered detergent on the hazardous spill, demonstrating in a visceral, real-time, real-world situation — before thousands of attendees and millions of tv viewers — that the Procter & Gamble brand isn’t just good at cleaning clothes, but also is the preferred brand of hazmat cleanup crews.

While that kind of product testimonial cannot be planned, it can be amplified if you have the right team in place to capitalize on the news cycle surrounding the event. As it turns out, p&g did, and as spectators at home watched their tv sets agape, a handful of executives sitting in a small control room in Digitas’ Boston headquarters watched along with them. In addition to the live tv feed, they also were watching screens showing a wide range of meta data surrounding the event, including live social media feeds and analytics they could use to monitor the story as it trended. Almost immediately, they began creating and distributing content on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that would amplify it.

As it turned out, the team, headed by Digitas Senior Vice President John Robinson, a former journalist turned agency creative, was already primed for action, coming off a similar real-time storytelling opportunity for Tide the previous day. As one of the sponsors of abc’s telecast of the Academy Awards, the Digitas crew helped craft real-time messages and stories congratulating and playing off of some of the Oscar winners as they were revealed live.

Days later, when extraordinarily violent storms and tornadoes ripped through America’s heartland, the Digitas team were also poised to capitalize on the real-time storytelling opportunity created when p&g sent its “Tide Loads of Hope” mobile laundry facilities to help devastated communities in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio clean-up from the natural disasters.

Bringing journalism to branding

The team was in place thanks to “Brandlive,” an experimental new content lab created by Digitas to see if it could begin to leverage the storytelling opportunities inherent in journalistic news and social media trending story cycles on behalf of a brand. The program was so successful, that p&g has since expanded the program to two of its other brands. And several other, as-yet-undisclosed Digitas clients are also now working with it.

While most big agencies are still trying to develop successful business models to capitalize on the shift toward real-time brand storytelling, the Digitas team turned to a model that has already been doing it successfully — more or less — for centuries: news organizations. But unlike some agency executives who now assert that “brands are journalists too,” Digitas’ Robinson says the goal isn’t to try and pass a brand, or its pitches, off as authentic journalistic news stories, but rather to use journalistic methods — especially the ability to contextualize how a story will play the next day — that editors and news producers do so well.

In fact, in preparation for Brandlive, Robinson and his team set up camp inside usa Today’s newsroom and sat in as flies-on-the-wall of the newspaper’s story meetings, to learn first-hand how top journalists shape the way stories are played. And then he built a “newsroom” to replicate it. And each morning the Brandlive team begins its day the way many newspapers do, with a meeting in which stories are pitched for the next day’s edition. Instead of journalists, the meetings consist of Digitas social media analytics and content creators, their clients’ brand managers, and if need be, their legal teams too.

As it turns out, real-time brand storytelling isn’t without its risks, and the Brandlive team hasn’t been afraid to take some when they believed there was a payoff for the brand. That’s what happened when satirical newspaper The Onion published a fictitious column penned by “Fred Hammond,” the hypothetical “director of digital video and social media ad integration for Tide Detergent,” which more or less made fun of the kind of real-time storytelling p&g was striving to achieve with Brandlive.

The Onion column, titled, “Hey, Everybody! This Cool New Tide Detergent Video Is Blowing Up All Over The Internet!,” lampooned so-called “viral” brand videos, by describing Tide’s as having “these cute, funny talking animals, a cool indie rock song, and kit’s just so hilariously random,” etc.

In response, the Brandlive team did the only logical thing — it created a parody of The Onion parody featuring many of the cliché elements described by The Onion, albeit tongue-in-cheek. The problem, says Digitas’ Robinson, is that after the agency uploaded it to YouTube and posted it on Facebook it realized that many of the Tide detergent fan base simply did not have enough of the backstory to understand where it was coming from, because they hadn’t read the original Onion column.

In other words, it was an inside joke that fell flat with some of the brand’s fans, because they weren’t on the inside of it. So the Brandlive team scrambled to utilize social media to fill in the gaps to provide context for the story behind the story. The best indication that it worked was a tweet from The Onion’s Managing Editor Kyle Ryan: “Well played, Tide, well played.”

Taking risks in the brand newsroom

As much fun as the p&g and Digitas teams seem to be having with Brandlive, it’s not all fun and games, according to the agency’s chief. “It’s a process and a method, but there’s also a lot of technology that we’ve put in place to do it,” says Digitas ceo Colin Kinsella. “A lot of agencies talk about doing something like this, but to actually be able to build the product, and the processes and methods and execute on them, takes a lot.”

And it is because of this fresh, yet highly disciplined and scientific approach to real-time brand storytelling that the editors of omma magazine pick Digitas as its agency of the year — for the third year in a row — not simply for cracking the code on content marketing, but for creating a business model that makes it work.
Kinsella predicts other agencies will follow with similar “brand newsroom” approaches, because it works. He can’t say how well it does, because p&g has asked the agency to keep it confidential, but he says, “on an roi basis, it is proving to be its most effective marketing channel.”

While Digitas won’t say, Cincinnati-based media shop Empower MediaMarketing did an roi analysis in the days following the Daytona 500 incident, which estimated that Brandlive generated more than $8 million worth of free, positive media impressions for the Tide brand. What the long-term return was on Tide’s brand reputation and esteem may be incalculable.
Kinsella says Brandlive is still evolving, but it’s already had a profound impact on Digitas’ clients, and on the agency itself. He says it began as a way to “fill in” gaps between client campaigns, but that the model is beginning to flip, and that the Brandlive approach is starting to become the “de facto place for marketing communications,” and that the traditional “paid media” (ie. advertising campaigns) agencies utilize will simply become a means for “accelerating” those stories.

“It began by filling in gaps. But it is becoming the way brands market,” he asserts. “And it’s not just affecting brands. It will change the agency too. This new, more agile way of working will become the new business model for us going forward.”

New Business: Up 40 percent

While Brandlive was the strongest criteria for selecting Digitas, the agency was firing on all other cylinders, including creative, branded content, analytics, R&D, and the metric many in the industry prize most: new business.

During 2012, the first year Kinsella flew solo as Digitas chief, succeeding former CEO Laura Lang who left to run Time Inc., Digitas racked up 17 major new business wins, including Taco Bell (digital aor), eBay (digital aor), Aetna (e-commerce lead), Sprint (lead), Vevo, Panasonic (global), Uniqlo, Google Mobile, and Victoria’s Secret. Kinsella says it was the agency’s best new business year ever, and that new business grew 40 percent from 2011 and doubled 2010, contributing to net new revenues for the agency of $70 million.

On the creative front, it was the most recognized digital agency in the industry’s awards shows, winning 30 major awards, including nine Cannes Lions, and four Effies.

If there was any icing on Digitas’ 2012 cake, it was the evolution of its so-called NewFront initiative from an insular Digitas-only effort to kick-start digital content creation to a legit industry platform. The NewFront, which was originally conceived by former ceo Lang as a way to organize client brands with digital platforms and Hollywood content creators on behalf of Digitas, opened its doors to outside suppliers and competitors alike, evolving into a series of NewFronts produced by specific vendors such as aol, Hulu, Google/YouTube, Microsoft and Yahoo, which invited rival agencies and their clients to participate in what is becoming akin to network television’s famous upfronts.

Kinsella says the strategy was intentional, because Digitas realized the concept could never scale without leaving the agency’s doors and becoming a neutral platform for the digital industry to develop new concepts. As proof of its success, even rival agency executives have sung Digitas’ praises for doing it, and at presstime, Digitas announced that the Interactive Advertising Bureau was taking oversight of the NewFronts to ensure its neutrality going forward.

“By opening the doors and shifting it from a Digitas hosted event, we helped organize the industry to come together, pool their resources and communicate the value everyone brings to the marketplace,” Kinsella explains. “We created the stage for which digital video could be seen as the powerful, scaled tool that it is.

Agency of the Year: Bronze, Design -- Digitaria

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:44:00 -0500

What makes Digitaria stand out is that their approach to design is nearly indistinguishable from their approach to any other facet of a campaign. "The definition of great design is making people care and teaching them something. Whatever makes sense to the people is what should matter," says Daiga Atvara. And Digitaria did just that with the campaigns, creating beautiful experiences with which consumers could both identify and interact.

Agency of the Year: Silver -- AKQA

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:42:00 -0500

The reason this company keeps winning, year after year? It’s taken its magic far beyond traditional definitions of advertising, romancing every platform it can find by

Ad agencies haven’t traditionally been in the business of product development. But advertising isn’t traditional anymore. The work AKQA has executed in the last year exemplifies the changing role of ad agencies today. Delivering a media buy is no longer enough, and agencies are finding they need to not only create content, but also to help their clients develop products.

Few are doing so, and that’s just one of the reasons AKQA’s work in 2012 for clients ranging from Gap to Nike to Delta stands out. “Spending eight months for a 360-degree marketing campaign that lasts two weeks is no longer a viable strategy,” says Rei Inamoto, VP and chief creative officer at AKQA. “We need to shift towards building 365 days of connection between brands and consumers. Brands should aim to have a much deeper and more meaningful connection with their audience even through a single channel such as mobile.” That philosophy has framed the work AKQA delivered in 2012, from a Nike training program on Xbox Kinect, to an interactive catalog for Gap.

Also in 2012, AKQA struck new relationships as the lead digital agency for many brands. That includes becoming the global digital agency of record for Gap, as well as the digital agency of record for Verizon Wireless, Google+, Jordan, and Anheuser-Busch, which includes Budweiser, Bud Light and Stella Artois. AKQA opened four new offices in 2012 in Paris, Atlanta, Portland and Tokyo, bringing the agency total to 11 offices around the world.

Also this year, holding company wpp bought AKQA in June in a deal valued at $540 million. AKQA is said to be on track to generate $230 million in revenue. That follows AKQA’s double-digit revenue growth for more than five years.

“Over the years there are a few digital agencies that have, in my opinion, stood as beacons of excellence in the digital advertising space,” says Adam Broitman, chief creative strategist for digital agency Something Massive, adding that AKQA’s work has inspired others in the business to approach campaigns in new ways.

“Exceptional digital advertising must go beyond the one-dimensional nature of advertising in days past,” he says. “True digital creativity must encompass not only great design and copy, it must consider new patterns for user experience and product design/innovation. From Fiat Eco Drive to Heineken Star Player, AKQA has created some of the finest digital thinking in the industry and has inspired the rest of us to go beyond traditional thought.”

Indeed, AKQA has innovated new ways to mix paid and owned media with many of its centerpiece campaigns, rooted in products and “experiences” of brands that are then paired with digital, social or mobile media. Some examples:

The Crowd-Sourced Catalog

In February, Gap launched Styld.by, created by AKQA, in an effort to connect with a younger demographic for its Spring 2012 collection. The digital catalog lets users share styles that inspire them, and new looks are added every few weeks, which can then be purchased through Gap.com. For the project, Gap worked with influential fashion bloggers and let them choose the models and the styling, in a sort of user-generated approach to creating a catalog. Then, consumers could select images of clothes and styles they liked and share them through social media, says Tom Bedecarre, chairman of AKQA. Gap has added new products for two additional catalogs since launch, and also planned to lean on the interactive digital catalog again for the holiday season.

“This is becoming a platform that Gap is using more broadly,” he says. “We tapped into an understanding of how shopping has become such an inherently social activity and how this lets people express their taste and see a broader expression of style from a bunch of different voices and not just a singular voice from Gap.” The campaign relied on social media from stalwarts like Twitter and Facebook as well as Pinterest, making Gap one of the first brands to capitalize on Pinterest early in the year. The digital catalog was also paired with a media buy to drive awareness.

Training, Flying and Storytelling

AKQA worked closely with Nike in the fall to craft a specialized training program for the Xbox Kinect. “We helped create an interface to track those arm and leg movements and to customize your personal training experience using the Kinect technology,” Bedecarre says, “so the system is reading and responding and scoring the individual in real-time in a customized way.”

As part of making these new products, AKQA is also able to tap into the data it has on customers and how they interact with brands and technology. “We have a 100-person team handling media, search and analytics,” he says, “and because we are integrated, and have creative and technology and media strategy under one roof, it’s one of the reasons we can go up to a client and talk about how our understanding of analytics creates a more customized, personalized experience for someone.”

This sort of design work isn’t de rigueur for the industry by any stretch, but the breadth of product development efforts at AKQA underscores how the agency has aimed to separate itself from the pack. The days of only crafting a media plan and buy are long gone, and agencies that thrive must also do more than strategize too. “That’s just another way we are a little bit different,” Bedecarre says. “We have such deep relationships with our clients like Delta, and we’re now an integral part of how they’re designing their mobile experience.”

Bedecarre contends that the confluence of story, platform, software and product design is the foundation of the next phase of advertising. “We are transitioning from being a communications agency to being an agency that can design and develop products for clients. The world is becoming more digital, and understanding how to work and perform on tablets and mobile platforms, and understanding how big data is a part of this equation is essential,” he says. “As you get deeper into these technologies you can’t just have a writer and art director bringing out creative ideas for tv commercials and how to turn them into print ads and then banner ads. Clients are looking for deeper ways to engage with these customers, and you can create these experiences that live across social media and mobile platforms and the Web. Like a training program for Nike, rather than just running an ad for a new pair of shoes. It gives you greater value and makes you a partner with Nike 365 days a year.”

Consumer Experience + Social

The agency has also made some bold moves into experiential marketing paired with social media. For instance, this summer Kraft Foods’ Wheat Thins paired up with Six Flags on a Labor Day promotion for its new flavors. Guests at the theme parks could actually check into their Facebook pages at the top of a roller coaster, and the first 100 riders to do so were able to skip the lines and ride the roller coaster again. The brand passed out samples too, and ran custom video spots on out-of-home tv screens at the theme parks and across the brand’s social media channels. The brand teed up this in-park promo with an Instagram promotion the month before with fans pretending in photos to be on rollercoasters.

Also marrying social media with in-person marketing, AKQA worked with Nissan Leaf to offer discounted rides in electric taxis in London prior to the Olympics with the pitch that an electric car is six times cheaper than a gas-fueled vehicle. Users had to book their rides via Twitter using a Nissan hashtag. The marketer then replied to the tweets.

Other notable work in 2012 includes the launch of Halo 4 for Xbox, the latest installment in the bestselling and mega popular game franchise. AKQA created a so-called “aerial light performance” over London including the Halo 4 Glyph symbol, recognizable to most gamers. AKQA says the lighting show was created with more than 100,000 led lights.

Apps and Books

On the app front, AKQA has pioneered a handful of forward-thinking apps for clients this year including its Nigella Quick Collection for Nigella Lawson that’s voice-controlled, which is helpful for the food-covered fingers that use it while cooking. AKQA also designed apps for Forevermark Diamond showing the steps going into making a diamond, for MTV to deliver its shows on the go, and for Volkswagen with footage and details on the cars for Volkswagen enthusiasts.

Last but not least, AKQA published a best-selling business book in 2012 in collaboration with Nike called “Velocity: The Seven New Laws for a World Gone Digital”, co-authored by Nike VP of Digital Sport Stefan Olander, and AKQA founder Ajaz Ahmed.

With the success AKQA has had so far, the inevitable question is “What’s next?”

“Our goals remain to be able to create big impact and success for our clients through the kind of work we do with storytelling through software and product development,” Bedecarre says. “From an employee perspective, we keep people motivated because they like to work with good people on good brands and do good work.”

Agency of the Year: Bronze, Search -- Covario

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:41:00 -0500

San Diego-based Covario’s commitment to clients results in increases in traffic, conversion rates and sales. But what really sets it apart? Eclectic thinking

The elevator doors open to a white and orange Covario sign painted on the wall. It ties into the company's latest branding campaign sporting an image on its Web site home page of a white-haired Einstein with an orange streak, symbolizing intelligence with a twist.

A few steps into the reception area and the space takes on a high-tech, real-time agency feel: The open ceiling reveals the building’s plumbing, which Covario founder and CEO Russ Mann says represents the inner workings of the Internet. A short walk down the hallway and into his office reveals a standup desk and small round conference table with a few chairs. The Harvard Business School graduate is quick to weave similes and alternate meaning from words.

The name Covario comes from the “covariance” theory, a measure of how random variables change and relate to others. It reflects the company’s focus on paid and organic search, from desktop to mobile.

Mann once described the word — Covario — as the variability of two independent data streams. “It’s sort of like calculus, changing over time,” he says. “If you really want to geek out remember the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principal, which suggests light is both a partical and a wave, but you don’t know which until you look.”

Talk with Mann about the name change and he likens it to the Heisenberg principal, suggesting marketers can assess and understand the worth of a campaign, how it co-varies, but not both simultaneously. By 2008, that ideology had attracted $21.5 million in investments from Dubilier & Company, FT Capital, Voyager Capital and others.

The Proof’s In The Pudding

Covario, an independent standalone agency headquartered in San Diego, Calif., continues to evolve into a truly global search firm. About 79 percent of its customers have campaigns running worldwide. When asked about his role in driving up sales for clients, Mann points to employees and refers to it as a team effort.

Mann leads about 200 employees and another 40 partners in China and around the world. Overall, company experts and technology support more than 70 Fortune 500 and Internet 1000 advertisers, representing about 1,000 brands and Web sites, including ibm, Intel, Nikon, Sony Pictures, T-Mobile, Cabela’s, and Guthy-Renker from offices in Chicago, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, Toronto, and Sao Paulo.

The company generates about $100 million in gross billings, Mann says. Revenue grew 25 percent in 2012, while the advertising industry slowed to 6 percent; and search, 17 percent. The firm not only helps itself, but also clients. Guthy-Renker experienced a 259 percent rise in paid search conversions, and Samsung drew 4.4 million new Web site visitors.

Covario and Guthy-Renker worked closely to restructure and cut costs for the Proactiv paid search program. The campaign drove up Web site visits, adding incremental results beyond what television did. The non-brand campaigns yielded a 15 percent year-over-year increase in traffic, 213 percent increase in conversion rate and 42 percent drop in cost-per-order.

For Samsung, Covario created 4.4 million organic visitors since the campaign launch. Additionally, Samsung and Covario were able to increase total traffic by 43 percent and organic traffic by 227 percent during the holiday season. The company wanted to increase visibility in Google search results for brand and non-branded terms, and improve the experience for site visitors.

Among other strategies, Covario recommended adding 23 branded new sub-category pages that were included in the navigational structure of the site. The company created an evergreen Black Friday page to capture more generic holiday-specific traffic.

The Black Friday page drove more than 400,000 Facebook shares during the 2011 holiday season. The new sub-category pages drove 4.4 million visitors. Site visitors during the 2011 holiday season rose 227 percent, year-over-year.

Samsung isn’t the only company seeing better results. In October 2011, SolarCity had trouble ranking well for non-branded terms, though they had adequate rankings for branded terms. The goal to drive additional Web site traffic, generate higher qualified leads, and become the proximate name on page one rankings for terms like “solar panels” led the company to work with Covario.

Covario drove a 120 percent increase in non-branded organic traffic month-over-month for SolarCity, up 275 percent in non-branded organic traffic year-over-year, 200 percent increase in top-10 rankings, and managed to achieve and maintain position No. 4 for “solar panel” in Google search engine rankings for the past three months, contributing to a more than 8,000 percent increase in traffic.

Proving results for its clients, Covario took the San Diego’s 2010 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the Emerging Business category. The company has also won numerous MediaPost OMMA awards, along with nods from Forrester and many industry publications.

This year, it launched a Creative Services team specializing in the design and multivariate testing of paid and seo campaign landing pages and micro-sites, which has experienced over 500 percent revenue growth.

The team develops intelligent page designs and modular page layouts with testing, optimization and content targeting in mind.

Personas are developed and mapped to specific attribution paths. Along with a/b and multivariate testing (MVT), Covario analysts align campaign ad copy with landing page content to optimize performance and conversions. Campaign conversation rate performance improvements range from 12 percent to more than 60 percent.

Diversity & success

The company’s philosophy continues to attract an eclectic and diverse group of executives. Most recently Claire Long, Covario CFO and COO, from the San Diego Union Tribune, where she was responsible for the publisher’s finance, accounting and treasury.

Diversity also led former iCrossing search experts Jeff Johnson, nascar aficionado and former amateur bull rider, and Mike Gullaksen to join Covario in 2009, becoming co-managing directors and senior VPs. Recently named among the Direct Marketing News “40 Under 40” group of the nation’s top young marketers, Gullaksen muscles up at the gym, keeps a flop-eared bunny at home, and serves on the Board of sempo.

The two started the agency group in Phoenix about four years ago and attracted folks like Chicago-based Matt Kropp, VP of domestic client strategies and solutions, an amateur comedian who trained with Second City TV.

Former Mediacom exec LuRae Lumpkin, vp of global paid media services and certified life coach, and Jeff MacGurn, VP of earned media, also recently joined the agency group.
Under Mann’s direction, Covario continues to attain awards and patents. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded Covario an seo patent for its algorithmic weighting system in December 2011. The Covario SEO Audit Score system analyzes the properties of a Web site to optimize search engine result listings on one or more engines.

Early in 2012, Covario spun out Rio SEO, a business unit focused on technology platforms. The name comes from “rio” in Covario or the “river of content” that supports “SEO” services through automation. Along with the name came an emerging vocabulary SEO Lo Mo So, or search engine optimization for local mobile social campaigns.

Rio seo focuses on seo, social and content marketing automation tools. About 40 percent of the retail traffic from the clients comes from mobile.

Covario acquired Madison, Wis.–based Netconcepts, founded by Stephan Spencer and Nigel Varcoe, in January 2010 to strengthen its seo offerings, followed by San Diego-based Top Local Search (TIS) in June 2012. The company hired three of five TLS employees, including founder and CEO Bill Connard.

Chris Reid joined as senior vice president and the first operating head of the Rio seo software tools business. Around the same time, Forrester Research named Rio seo “The Only Leader” in its Forrester Wave: seo Platforms, Q4 2012.

Agency of the Year: Bronze, Mobile -- PHD

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:41:00 -0500

To reach the fast-growing audience of smartphone owners, Omnicom's PHD isn't afraid to pump up the noise.

For five days in October, Omnicom media agency PHD staged an experimental theatre production called Mobility Week in its midtown Manhattan offices.

Cast and crew included most of its staffers, more than 20 of its client companies, and 40 industry thought leaders representing all things mobile: technology, inventory, analytics, audience, and apps. On each day of this mini-conference, PHD presented panel discussions and hands-on demonstrations on a different mobile theme. The purpose was to do in one place what the agency had done all over the place last year — explaining, promoting, and inspiring the growth of mobile advertising.

Agency chief Monica Karo is on a mission to redefine the medium. The word “mobile” refers to phones; “mobility” describes what consumers do with their phones. “It’s about all the ways your content goes with you, everywhere you want,” says Karo. “The behavior is to be mobile all the time.” She’s not kidding. A 2012 study by the Pew Research Center shows that “connected viewers” can’t part with their smartphones for anything — including watching TV. According to the research, 38 percent of cell owners used their phones to amuse themselves during commercials, and 23 percent texted friends who were watching the same show — while it was on.

Karo, like many other industry prognosticators, believes 2013 will be the year that mobile explodes — and she’s determined to ensure that PHD and its clients are front and center when it does. “We’ve been talking about mobile for a few years, but mobile wasn’t ready for us,” says Karo, who joined PHD from Omnicom sister agency omd in March. “Consumers weren’t ready for what the industry has to offer, but in the last six months, a lot of things have been coming together.”

As smartphone users got into the technology, marketers increasingly embraced the idea of allocating dollars to an unproven and complex medium that’s literally in the hands of 50 percent of American consumers. From the user side, the numbers look great. Research firm eMarketer expects total mobile penetration to hit 77 percent this year, with nearly half of those consumers using smartphones. That equals 120 million people who can receive ad messages anywhere and everywhere they go.

Ad support is gaining, too. Mobile spending is expected to rise 80 percent in 2012 to $2.6 billion, according to eMarketer. But the numbers are still out of whack. Mobile only accounts for 7 percent of the marketing pie, even though smartphone users drive more than 12 percent of Internet traffic, according to data firm StatCounter. Clearly, a sizable gap remains between opportunity and investment, and PHD has been out there trying to close it as fast as possible.

Between August 2011 and July 2012, the agency hit the road to meet with 15 clients in categories where mobile was, or would soon be, disrupting their business. It made detailed mobile landscape presentations to each one, outlining marketing opportunities, competitor initiatives, and immediate testing recommendations. The deep-dive approach worked; all but one of those clients boosted their mobile budgets.

“We don’t have any feet-draggers,” Karo says of the agency’s clients. “They just don’t know where to start. They don’t have the expertise.”

Guiding clients through the mobile maze

For PHD, that’s been a key part of the lesson plan this year — helping clients figure out the skill set and organizational structure they need to have internally in order to navigate and own the mobile space. “Hearing from us about what we look at, and the conservations we’re having with mobile vendors, gives them a sense of what they should have on their side,” says Karo.
By the time clients are talking about in-house competencies, however, they’re already in the space to some extent. Many marketers aren’t even close, according to Alexis Rask, Vice President and General Manager of Brand Partnerships at Shopkick, an app that dispenses offers and rewards to shoppers, and a Mobility Week participant. “Ten percent of marketers we talk to are really making mobile a huge priority, and 25 percent are acknowledging that it’s an important channel,” she says. The rest, it seems, are waiting to see how it goes.

What they are most likely waiting for is someone to come up with a standard measure for ROI — an issue that plagues most digital media. “Next year I think the desire is there to really make it game changing,” says Karo, “but one of things that may hold mobile back is having a common currency by which we measure. The money’s coming from somewhere, and clients are asking, ‘what am I losing over here and gaining over there?'”

To try and answer some of those questions, PHD and Omnicom Media Group’s Data Policy and Privacy Group commissioned an audit of more than 75 mobile technology companies to determine the best mobile measurement and tracking solutions. It examined everything: technology, scalability, customer service, business analysis, data security and privacy. The audit led to at least one piece of new business: The Economist hired PHD to acquire app downloads and to drive subscriptions. During the year, PHD has helped launch more than 15 other apps in various app stores, with nearly all making it into the top 25 in its category.

If PHD’s mobile clients are more evolved than most, it’s partly because their agency is, according to Rask. “We see a huge appetite among clients to better understand what to do in mobile, and how to measure. Some agencies are proactive, some less so. There are a few players in the space that really get it, and PHD is one of the ones I put on that short list.”

Not only does the agency regularly head to Silicon Valley to meet with technology providers, it brings clients there to have very specific dialogues surrounding their business — a critical move, as far as Rask is concerned. “There isn’t a one size fits all approach to mobile. Each consumer is so connected to their device, but that means there are so many ways for marketers to engage,” she says. “There needs to be a robust dialogue between agency, client, and technology.”

Breaking ground with technology

When PHD wasn’t wearing its tutor hat last year, it produced innovative award-winning campaigns for such clients as Foot Locker and GlaxoSmithKline. For Foot Looker, PHD created a summer campaign called #kickstagram, which used the social media site Instagram to drive consumers to the retailer’s page. By uploading photos of their favorite kicks, and tagging them with #kickstagram and @footlocker, users had the chance of having their photos showcased on Foot Locker’s page and website, and in store windows. The creative was fun, the social media platform was new, but it was the technology behind the mobile banner ads that really broke ground.

“Foot Locker asked us to do something with Instagram, and we knew we needed to simplify the 'following' process,” says Sal Candela, PHD’s Director of Mobile. “We knew if we made it more efficient, we’d increase the following.”

The agency, along with one of its technology partners, came up with a procedure that shrank a time-sucking five-step process into two quick clicks. Tapping the banner once opened the Instagram app and directed users right to the Foot Locker page. A second click on the “follow” banner, and users were in. That technological advance “increased the number of Instagram followers six-fold in two-to three weeks,” says Candela.

Pioneering, yes. Surprising, no. Not to Foot Locker, at least. “PHD constantly thinks outside the box and excites us to introduce integrated and innovative programs to support our Foot Locker brands,” says evp of marketing Stacy Cunningham. “They take the time to deliver opportunities that engage our customers in relevant and meaningful ways. Our customers were excited to upload pictures of their sneakers for all to see.”

Leveraging geo-location for Tums

For GlaxoSmithKline, the agency’s mission was to support the launch of the Tums Freshers by driving shoppers to the shelf. The antacid/breath freshener comes in a small portable container that’s hard to find on the shelf, so PHD turned to Shopkick come up with a mobile geo-targeting program aimed at people already in the store. “When consumers walked into one of our selected retailers, we served a full-screen ad, and also prompted them to pick up the product and scan it to learn more about what made Tums Freshers unique,” says Candela. “On paper the idea made sense, but the proof was in the results.” Three months after the launch, the purchase intent among Freshers scanners was almost equal to that of the 82-year-old standard Tums brand.

“From my end, PHD and GlaxoSmithKline both recognized the power of mobile to drive engagement…physical engagement between a person and a product,” says Rask.

The need for both clients and agency staffers to understand that power prompted Candela to develop and moderate a panel discussion called “Using Location and Proximity to Drive Commerce” on day four of “Mobility Week.” For Rask, one of the panelists, the event cemented her view of PHD as a true industry leader. “I was struck by how invested they are in making mobile work for their clients across the board — doubling down on making sure that they’re as educated and cutting edge as they can be. It was awesome to see the engagement level in the audience.”

To Karo, Candela, and agency cdo Craig Atkinson, the small, informal conference that clogged PHD’s hallways for a week was as critical to the education of agency staffers as it was for clients. “The main buzz for the teams internally was, ‘How can you use mobility in a way that’s outside what you’re doing,’” says Candela. “Five or six teams scheduled time to meet with me to talk about they could do. It was not theory any longer.”

The daily hive of activity, as 50 to 100 people moved from the common space where the panel discussions took place to the boardroom where experiential labs were set up, created a buzz for clients, too, according to Candela. “To hear questions being asked by clients in other categories, and talk about best practices and what others are doing in other categories — it was just really interesting. And the partners that came to the panels were more candid than at general industry events.

One partner-panelist came away from the session with a very vivid and long-lasting image. “The audience was using their phones while we were talking, and I don’t think they were answering email,” says Rask. “They were looking at what we were discussing right there, checking out the technology. It was really, really cool. And it speaks to the importance of the medium.”

If the mark of a great show is the number of people who mill around after it’s over, hashing and rehashing what they’ve seen and heard, Mobility Week was a runaway hit. After the last presentation, PHDhosted a cocktail party. The audience stuck around for two hours.

Agency of the Year: Bronze, Media Planning -- mediahub/Mullen

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:40:00 -0500

For its strategic breakthroughs, mediahub/Mullen goes beyond asking what to buy. Instead, it creates an enduring love story between the traditional and digital realms. Think of it as Media with a capital M.

Even before winning National Geographic and hitting a homerun campaign for JetBlue, John Moore knew 2012 was going to be a big year for mediahub.

Sure, Moore and his team had seen success since he joined Mullen’s media-planning and -buying shop in 2009. They quickly won the JetBlue account, set up a enviable mobile division, and launched a media-insights tool named Nexus designed to help clients better navigate media channels.

But, as Moore explains, it took time for mediahub to “build its own identity within the Mullen framework.”

“First, we proved that we could win media-only new business against the strongest and biggest unbundled shops in the country,” says mediahub/Mullen’s Chief Media Officer. “As mediahub started to build its own identity within the Mullen framework, it was critical to break through in this area.”

The payoff? “In 2012, we beat notable shops like Universal McCann, Spark, mpg and Mindshare.”

Along with winning the National Geographic Channels business — worth an estimated $40 million — the group retained the Timberland account, while picking up new media assignments from Ask.com, Olympus, ’47 Brand and CenturyLink.

Existing and new, clients sense that Moore and company are operating at a higher level. “mediahub is distinct from other agencies in that they take pride in experimenting and taking calculated risks with media investments,” says Lisa Borromeo, Director of Advertising & Brand at JetBlue.

“Every mediahub plan is infused with a dose of ‘What can we try that has never been done before?’’ Borromeo says. “Mediahub is not shy about asking publisher partners to create new units for us to test. In fact, they foster relationships that allow for beta and first-to-market opportunities.”

JetBlue’s game face

That approach was clearly on display in “Get Away With It,” an ambitious JetBlue campaign that gave mediahub the opportunity to rethink the use of original content.
“We landed on a breakthrough content idea by unearthing a powerful insight about how consumers think about packaged, inclusive vacations,” says Keith Lusby, SVP and Group Media Director at mediahub.

“The insight was that people think about all-inclusive, packaged vacations in the context of game shows. Particularly iconic, venerable shows like The Price is Right and Wheel of Fortune,” Lusby explains. “Rather than flood travel content channels with standard banners and :30 tv spots, we mapped out a different consumer journey based on research that told us consumers were looking to be inspired by where to go.”

Mediahub marketed “Get Away With It” as a TV show and promoted it on entertainment sites like TVGuide.com and People.com. It also provided access to the content by streaming the live shows — 25 over a five-day period — in banners, as well as installing “storefront” type interactive units in high pedestrian traffic areas in Boston and New York.

Finally, the shop provided real utility by partnering with social sites like Viggle — where visitors earned points for watching content — while pushing mobile promotions, including add-to-calendar functionality to remind people about show times.

The content-led strategy helped mediahub solve JetBlue’s issues with both brand familiarity, which went up 117 percent, and online linkage to JetBlue. (That soared 243 percent as a result of mediahub’s efforts.)

Better yet, on average consumers watched over nine minutes of each 12-minute episode, while they were live-streaming in banners on third-party Web sites.

“We went into this thinking maybe 1,500 people would sign up to be contestants,” he says. “After all, we ran relatively moderate media support in less than 10 percent of the country, and the sign-up process was 10 to 15 minutes long and required a Skype account … We had over 13,000 sign up in the first week.”

This was that type of work that, in March, convinced National Geographic to team up with Mullen’s media shop.

Making Doomsday relevant

“Mediahub gave us the rationale and courage to move away from a media strategy that had gone stale,” says Courteney Monroe, Chief Marketing Officer at the National Geographic Channel and Nat Geo Wild.

“The strategic thinking [mediahub] brought to the campaign for the second season of … Doomsday Preppers, was a great example of how it integrated our brand into unexpected arenas to create meaningful buzz that would translate to ratings.”

To launch season two of the Armageddon-obsessed series, mediahub set out to bring to life the realities of prepping for the apocalypse, says Sean Corcoran, svp and Director of Digital and Social Media at the unit.

Food trucks in metropolitan areas like New York and Los Angeles were equipped with “survival elements” to hand out along with tune-in information. Print publications asked readers to volunteer their “must-have” essentials for the end of the world, including playlists in Rolling Stone, recipes in O, The Oprah Magazine, purse essentials in Us Weekly and recordings of the greatest games of all time in espn.

“In digital, we created original content, including a video featuring the popular YouTube star fps Russia, educating viewers on the best weaponry to have on hand for the end of the world,” Corcoran explains.

A tongue-in-cheek video on AccuWeather outlined potential weather disasters with a fictional weather forecast, urging users to tune in to the show for more info.

To accelerate social sharing, the popular Web site BuzzFeed showcased recipes for the end of the world, and five sponsored cards on Someecards offered a way for users to wish their friends a happy end of the world with an electronic greeting.

“Finally, to capitalize on co-viewing trends,” Corcoran adds, ”we leveraged the IntoNow social tv app to capture a photo of the content viewers were currently seeing in the show and add a caption, turning it into a shareable meme.”

More broadly, says Monroe: “Mediahub really pushes our thinking and it’s not sheepish about telling us the hard stuff, whether we want to hear it or not. As a champion of challenger brands who are outspent by their competitors, mediahub relishes the challenge to help us punch above our weight.”

For every one of its clients, mediahub’s approach to new media has three components, according to Corcoran.

First, the team looks for that key insight which, in a rapidly changing digital landscape, requires it to dig deeper than the typical standard set of media tools.

Seeing media with a capital M

The next step for mediahub is to define what impact really means to its clients, because the goal is not to provide a great flowchart but a great plan, Corcoran insists.

“Finally, and most importantly, we practice what we call ‘capital M media,” he adds. “In other words, we look at digital media holistically rather than in silos of paid, earned and owned.
To do this, mediahub bring its social influence, creative and analytics teams in to develop a communications and optimization plan that outlines its approach to media across content, influencers, social platforms, and devices, as well as the client’s Web site and mobile applications.

Beyond new media, “There are many facets to being a successful media company,” says Moore. “As consumers become more skilled at throwing out, tuning out and screening out unwanted messages, it takes a different skill set and mindset to succeed. However, it still fundamentally comes down to three dynamics: talent, intelligence and innovation.”

“From a strategic and operational standpoint, we did two things,” Moore says. “First, we hired a full-time media research person from a competing holding company. It is her job to ensure that we have the best tools and resources, and to also act as our internal expert in extracting intelligence from this data. She is also authoring thought pieces around hot topics like the state of magazines on tablets and tv addressability.”

Second, says Moore, mediahub became an official partner with Mediabrands — IPG’s parent media company. The affiliation enabled the shop to tap into all of the ipg media resources and tools and also IPG media resources.

As a result, mediahub now manages over 100 campaigns on an annual basis from more than 20 clients.

For example, mediahub helped JetBlue overcome technological limitations with tagging its Web site in order to more effectively measure media campaigns, while minimizing load time disruptions on the site.

“This is a common problem among brands that heavily rely on e-commerce, so being able to jump that hurdle has been a huge leap forward for our advertising initiatives,” says JetBlue’s Borromeo.

And, as if all that weren’t enough, Mullen’s unit devotes significant time and energy to planning for the future.

“One of our biggest [challenges] is predicting the factors that affect our clients’ businesses,” says Lusby. “We do have a core philosophy engrained into the entire department: Mediahub is a place where ideas are created and nurtured to life.

There’s also the matter of attracting, and hanging on to, the best team in the business. “In a business where a very small percentage of media professionals are truly great, finding and holding on to this small faction becomes every manager’s number one priority,” Moore says, adding that the agency looks for people “who exhibit so much enthusiasm that they would do this job for free. It’s someone who lights up a room and is thinking about the business 24/7.”

Cultivating competitive intelligence

The agency’s success, Lusby says, rests on the “right intel.” And Moore believes creating depth around media research continues to be the biggest hurdle. “Intelligence based on the consumer’s relationship with media is vital from both a client perspective and in creating standout media programs.”

“Understanding how consumers make purchase decisions and how they use media during the process is an age-old problem,” he says. “Less than a decade ago, we had three or four dominant media types and a trusty purchase funnel to guide investment decisions.”

Big changes in technology (such as smartphones now outnumbering feature phones) have given consumers so much control, as have social and other portable real-time channels, “we have essentially eliminated purchase funnels in favor of decision loops,” he says.

On the digital front, mediahub is piloting several new technologies, including one with Adobe that will allow the shop to dynamically serve creative messages based upon historical consumer behavior. It also has an in-house dsp representative from Cadreon, to help mediahub manage its performance-related digital media.

Finally, the shop is investing in a video agnostic investment team, which has provided thought leadership on the new television landscape, which includes everything from Xbox to addressability issues.

Adds Borromeo: “Anyone can build a custom media plan, but mediahub actually builds custom platforms and finds one-of-a-kind media placements that naturally become a part of the consumption habits and interests of the audience. It doesn’t just take a perfunctory approach of looking at reach and frequency numbers. It blends the mathematics with relevance and content in order to find an optimal fit for our advertising campaigns.”

Agency of the Year: Bronze, Creative -- Wieden + Kennedy

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:39:00 -0500

From making moms the star of the Olympics to its Southern Comfort everyman, Wieden + Kennedy continues to solve the industry’s problems, creating breakthrough + formulas

Can an agency institutionalize creativity? The consistent success of Wieden + Kennedy, the quirky Portland-based network that was long known as the “Just Do It” guys, certainly makes it seem possible, if not easy. To the agency’s long list of creative awards and acknowledgments, including its fourth straight Emmy for a Procter & Gamble commercial won earlier this year, the still-independent shop can now add MediaPost’s Creative Agency of 2012.

The work, as they say, speaks for itself. In 2012, Wieden found fresh angles for old clients (Nike, espn) and old brands (Southern Comfort, OldSpice), furthered the resuscitation of an American icon (Chrysler), forced a comfort food out of its comfort zone (Velveeta Mac and Cheese), and, perhaps most impressively, found the humanity in a once-faceless consumer packaged goods giant (Procter & Gamble).

So how do you enforce such a high level of creativity across eight offices in seven countries? One way is to work from a driving sense of insecurity, says Mark Fitzloff, partner and executive creative director.

“One way of summarizing the last 10 years of the Wieden + Kennedy story has been about diversifying our client base and moving beyond being known as the creative boutique in Portland that works with Nike,” he says.

“A lot of agencies will talk about spreading their financial risk and dependency by not having one client that pays the bills,” he continues, “we try to push that strategy onto our creative work.” Rather than let one or two clients serve as the agency’s creative showcases, Fitzloff strives to make them all award winners.

Of course, a need to prove yourself will only get you so far. Dave Luhr, partner and global chief operating officer, says Wieden’s network-wide creativity owes a lot to its business strategy, particularly its dedication to strictly organic growth. “What we’ve done in each of our markets is start from scratch, hire the very best people – people who reflect the values and cultures of this agency – and they help us start from scratch,” he says.

To seed the unique Wieden ingenuity, the agency places veteran creatives from established offices like Portland and New York in its new offices for long stretches of time. “We invest a lot of money to make sure we’re sending people to those offices, I don’t just mean for the week but I mean six months or a year,” Luhr says.

P&G’s Moms: A defining moment

Whether it’s insecurity or business strategy or just something in the water coolers, Wieden remains one of the most consistently inventive agency networks in the business today. Never was this clearer than in 2012.

As the feel-good global event of the year, the 2012 London Summer Olympics provided a powerful platform for some of Wieden’s most effecting work. An Olympics commercial it made for Procter & Gamble — not a particular brand like Tide or Pampers, but the parent company itself — once again proved Wieden’s knack for coming up with the proverbial Big Idea.

When P&G decided it wanted to do some advertising around the games, it came to Wieden (with whom it already had a relationship thanks to Old Spice) “because we have a ton of sports marketing experience,” says Fitzloff. But sports and p&g aren’t exactly a natural fit. “Our initial reaction was, you’ve got a problem in that you have no authentic connection to sports or to the performance of top international athletes,” Fitzloff says. “There’s nothing in your portfolio that would make me believe you’re somehow empowering these athletes.”

But while athletes aren’t a core target for P&G, moms are. “Every Olympic athlete has a mom, and P&G empowers moms to do their jobs,” Fitzloff says. “And can you imagine what an Olympian job it must be to raise an Olympian athlete?”

The resulting commercial from Wieden’s Portland office, “Best Job,” was a globe-spanning, tear-jerking tribute to moms of all cultures who make their children breakfast before dawn, drive them to swim practice, wash soiled uniforms, bandage sore feet, and, of course, cry when their kids triumph. The two-minute spot culminates in black copy against a white background: “The hardest best job in the world, is the best job in the world. Thank you, mom.” The logos for Tide, Pampers, Gillette and Duracell flash briefly on screen, followed by “P&G, proud sponsor of moms.” The commercial won Wieden its fourth straight Emmy. “Sometimes the simplest ideas can be the biggest ideas,” says Luhr of the insight that bolstered the commercial, “and that was a very big idea.”

Of course, Wieden’s signature client, Nike, is a more natural fit for the Olympics. But the Portland office was eager to find a fresh angle, which this year meant a focus not on elite athletes, but on amateurs. Nike has been doing a lot of advertising “that’s super aspirational — high testosterone stuff — about the larger-than-life, super athlete,” says Fitzloff. “We wanted to do the opposite. That meant celebrating not just the unsung amateur athlete, but even just redefining what this idea is of an aspirational athlete, or somebody that we should give hero worship to.”

The lead spot, “Find your greatness,” features action shots of athletes from other “Londons” (in Ohio, Nigeria and Jamaica), under a British voiceover: “Greatness is not in one special place, and it is not in one special person. Greatness is wherever somebody is trying to find it.”

Another effecting spot that got a lot of attention features the same voiceover over a single shot of an overweight teenage boy running along an empty country road at dawn.

Stretching its definition of social

While they haven’t been working together all that long, Old Spice is another client with which Wieden is now inexorably linked. And in 2012, the agency’s work for that brand continued to be weird and wonderful.

Having retired (for now) the actor Isaiah Mustafa, who won fame as Old Spice Guy for his subtle comedic touch and chiseled physique, Wieden focused instead on actor and muscleman Terry Crews. Furthering the brand’s reputation for bizarre but entertaining digital work, Wieden made a Web video called Muscle Music: A barely clothed Crews sits in a room full of ramshackle instruments, from a washtub drum to saxophones rigged with flamethrowers, with sensors attached to his muscles. With each muscle he flexes, another instrument plays. But the real attraction comes at the end, when Crews yells, “Now you try!” By pressing any key on his keyboard, the user can manipulate Crews’ muscles, and hence the music. The video captures the users’ creation, which he can then share on Vimeo.

And in one of the more impressive stunts in advertising this year, Wieden released an unusual help wanted ad for a social media strategist for the Old Spice account. In order to get the job, applicants had to complete one of 10 challenges: Get the most people to friend your mother or your father on Facebook in a single week; create the most reviewed recipe on allrecipes.com in a single week using cottage cheese; upload the most pictures of your armpit(s) to Instagram during the course of the challenge.

The stunt — which is, technically, not a stunt, since Fitzloff says they are in the process of actually hiring someone — not only won Wieden (and Old Spice) reams of publicity, but sparked controversy among social media “experts.”

“A lot of people on that side of the industry were really pissed off and said it demonstrated our utter lack of understanding of the category,” says Fitzloff. “But other people were saying, ‘Hold on, take a look at these challenges and think about what it would take to win them. If those aren’t the skill sets required of a really savvy manipulator of social media, then what is?’”
But perhaps no Wieden work was more controversial this past year than its commercial for Facebook, the first one ever made for the social media site. The 90-second spot that compared Facebook to tools that help people gather together — a chair, a doorbell, an airplane — was alternately hailed as genius and inscrutable. Gizmodo said, “Facebook’s first ad is its worst ad,’’ and Mashable turned out a spoof that mockingly compared Facebook to a cheese pizza and dinosaurs.

Fitzloff stands by the spot. “You’re not explaining what Facebook is,” he says, shooting down one of the more common explanations for the ad. “You’re trying to reframe what people are already doing.” Because Facebook is free, “the risk is that it becomes trivial, like it’s a time waste.” The commercial was intended to reframe the Facebook experience in grander, philosophical terms. “If it sounded a little heavy and self-important, “Fitzloff says, “all that was fully intended.”

Both Amsterdam and Sao Paulo this year produced work that helped provide a global voice for Heineken, which had been lacking one. “Heineken was a very decentralized client in the past, so it was hard to build a disciplined voice for it,” Luhr says. Commercials from Amsterdam used an exuberant, cheesy lounge singer to portray the brand as fun and off-beat, characteristics that were reinforced by a Facebook campaign from Sao Paulo in which a Heineken employee blew up a balloon for every like his post received (grand total: 12,632 balloons).

The London office took the global Web-fueled obsession with cats that act like humans and turned it into a cinematic potboiler. In a 60-second spot for milk brand Cravendale, a regime of evil felines kidnaps and brainwashes milkmen. “Not on our watch, pussies,” says the voiceover. An accompanying hashtag, #catswiththumbs, continues to generate scores of daily tweets.

Proving that creativity is still relevant

And although Wieden lost Target in the u.s. this year – in spite of a fun, highly lauded commercial from the New York office that featured brightly dressed acrobats and dancers emerging from a hot air balloon to magically redecorate a city – it quickly erased the deficit by picking up superstore Tesco in the uk. “The best work of the year from London hasn’t been seen yet,” says Luhr. “Wait till you see the holiday campaign for Tesco.”

Of course, in an age of metrics and limited budgets, it’s worth asking whether creativity still matters, at least as much as it used to. Are clients still interested in agencies that win industry creative awards? Is creativity, for lack of a better term, out of fashion?

Fitzloff even concedes that Wieden’s focus on creativity is why it doesn’t have much in the way of mobile work to brag about. “Of all the media choices you can make, mobile is the one that seems the most aligned with utility rather than storytelling,” he says, “and we’re a storytelling agency. So we’re probably slightly hamstrung there.” (Though to be fair, “When will we see creativity in mobile” is a perennial question in the advertising business).

Nonetheless, Luhr believes that “creativity is still the Holy Grail in our business,” he says. “Clients want work that resonates, and our work has been really good at doing that.”

The proof, he says, is that during the economic downturn, Wieden’s business has actually added business every year.

“When everything is good, it’s hard to make a change because, hey, who’s arguing?” he says. “Well, everything hasn’t been up the past few years, and I think we’ve benefited from clients looking at their bottom line and saying, ‘Hey, I think we can do better.’”

Ed:Blog

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:38:00 -0500

While choosing OMMA Agency of the Year winners is never easy, making the final cuts this year had us on the edge of our seats. In part, we can blame that on the way the interdisciplinary lines in digital marketing continue to fade away. Almost every agency we considered in one category could also have been a candidate in every other category, whether in social, mobile, design or creative; every one of them could make an argument for all-around greatness.

But in part, it’s because we’re star struck. We’ve come — and I mean all of us, not just us industry trolls but consumers as well — to expect something spectacular. The days when an agency’s impact could be measured primarily by its rise in billings or the number of creative awards it won, of course, are long gone. We now expect digital performances that bring us to our feet, and draw standing ovations.

In theory, we judge agencies by three (admittedly subjective) criteria: We’re looking for companies that stood out from the crowd because of their strategic vision, innovation and industry leadership.

But as we dissected each of those, we realized that this year, star power often came down to truly creative casting and unexpected mashups. Was it the ability to seize a real-life event, take it into an ad agency “newsroom,” and transform it into a branding moment, as Digitas, (our Gold Agency of the Year winner, page 8) did for Tide? Or the ever-more-clever mediahub/Mullen (which took the prize for Media Planning and Buying, p. 38) reimagining JetBlue as a game show, or offering fans an Armageddon wardrobe and menu, to support Doomsday Preppers?
Some of our awardees had ideas that are vast and life-saving, as in Digitaria’s (winner of our award for design, p. 45) creation of kony 2012, the most viral video in history. But some ideas are just small and perfect, like phd’s (our choice for Mobile, p. 27) use of geo-targeting to steer supermarket shoppers to the Tums aisle.

In short, we tried to select agencies devoted to bringing down the house, finding new ways to connect brands with audiences, and audiences with each other. “Every great idea is social by nature,” P.J. Pereira, cofounder of Pereira & O’Dell, our winner for social agency, tells reporter David Gianatasio. “If it’s not social, it’s not great. If the work we do is not worth sharing, it’s not worth doing.”

Of course, this pursuit of greatness has produced more than its share of stinkers, too, and our Larry Dobrow doesn’t hold back in “Ten Worst Videos of 2012.” (See p. 58)

We’d love to hear what you think of our winners. Email us at sarah@mediapost.com.

Agency of the Year: Bronze, Small Agency -- 72andSunny

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:36:00 -0500

With 300 people, the eight-year-old agency may not be as large as jwt or Havas. But trust us -- you've seen plenty of 72andSunny's work. And you've probably liked it.

Agency of the Year: Bronze, Social -- Pereira & O'Dell

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:35:00 -0500

Thinking far beyond Facebook and branded content, Pereira & O’Dell knows how to put on a show that the world can’t wait to share

Pereira & O’Dell had two defining moments in 2012.

One arrived early, in January, when the San Francisco–based agency bid farewell to its largest client, the University of Phoenix, declining to participate in a review for the business.

“We knew it was going to change the agency, alter our course forever,” says CEO Andrew O’Dell.

Though the account had helped put pod on the map and generated considerable revenue, senior management changes on the client side convinced agency execs that it was time to move on — and O’Dell doesn’t regret it.

pod doubled down on new-business efforts, adding assignments from BevMo, Burger King, Fiat, Henkel and Mattel. By year’s end, the agency had increased its staff from 90 to 120 across offices in San Francisco, New York and Sao Paulo, and boosted revenue nearly 40 percent to approximately $20 million.

O’Dell believes 2012 “on all levels has easily been the best year” for pod since he and chief creative officer P.J. Pereira left i-shop AKQA nearly five years ago to found their own agency.

O’Dell’s assessment includes the quality and scope of pod’s creative output. So it’s no surprise that the agency’s other defining moment — perhaps even more important for POD’s identity and future than rebounding from U of Phoenix’s exit — was all about the work.

This summer, POD launched “The Beauty Inside,” a groundbreaking social film for Intel and Toshiba. The work “was a defining moment not only in 2012, but in the entire life of the agency,” says Pereira. “It was proof that it is possible to combine great stories and technology and make people love it. The kind of response we got from the audience was the most touching we have ever seen. It changed the agency.”

As a creatively driven enterprise, POD lives and dies by the quality of its work and the level of innovation it generates to drive buzz for clients. The product adheres to O’Dell’s mantra, “What if advertising were invented today?” Campaigns for several clients in 2012 strove to push the envelope and take branded social content beyond where it had been before.

Every great idea is social

“Every great idea is social by nature,” Pereira says. “If it’s not social, it’s not great. If the work we do is not worth sharing, it’s not worth doing.”

Indeed, the agency seems social from the top down. Pereira, 39, born in Rio de Janeiro, and O’Dell, 42, from Tennessee, project a serious but approachable management style. They’re dedicated to growing their business but plugged into what’s going on outside adland. That trait is typified by the agency’s BarrelHouse space in San Francisco, where it hosts community gatherings and performances to raise funds for causes like the Special Olympics and the sf aids Foundation.

The notion of an increasingly social, interconnected world — and advertising’s role in it — came up at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity in June, when Pereira interviewed former U.S. President Bill Clinton at an event hosted by POD’s Brazilian parent Grupo ABC.

On stage in France, Clinton told Pereira, “We are living in the most interdependent era in history,” and the ability to work together “to solve common challenges” is paramount.
That spirit informs POD’s creative, which, at its best, exudes good humor, an awareness of community and extreme sociability.

The shop defines “social” as more than endless trawling for Facebook “likes” or posting client updates on Twitter consisting of logos, inane quizzes and pleas to “Please RT.” Likewise, “branded content” has moved beyond awkward product placements or ham-fisted efforts to weave client wares into the storylines.

POD’s efforts are more organic, its approach intrinsically tied to the personality of the client’s product or service. This philosophy helped lure those new accounts in 2012 and continues, perhaps, to push the agency — and, by extension, the dubious art of advertising — to the next level.

In adland’s recent past, bbdo blurred the line between entertainment and promotions with its BMW Films series, and Crispin Porter + Bogusky made arguably the first “must-share” interactive splash with Burger King’s Subservient Chicken.

POD is the latest link in the chain, fusing traditional storytelling with social tools to produce content that offers multiple layers of consumer engagement.

It’s what’s inside that counts

“The Beauty Inside” for Intel and Toshiba exemplifies work that straddles the line between old and new media. What’s more, it brings pod’s penchant for creating evocative and engaging social campaigns into sharp focus.

The six-part online series, with each segment running less than 10 minutes, followed “The Inside Experience,” the agency’s 2011 social film for Intel and Toshiba. That first effort told the noir tale of a woman trapped inside a room, with fans helping to guide the story via Facebook and Twitter.

“The Inside Experience” was well received, but “The Beauty Inside” refined the concept and proved more subtle and resonant. Its focus on the universal desire to be loved and valued for who we are, regardless of outward appearances, was inherently social to start with. Such themes are a natural fit for shareable media — and dovetail with the broader branding mission to play off Intel’s iconic “Inside” positioning for its processors.

The story follows Alex, who wakes up each morning as an entirely new person. Young, old, short, tall, black, white, male, female — Alex never knows what the new day will bring, and he has no control over the transformations. In his strange world, feelings of loneliness and dislocation are constants, driving Alex to a series of one-night stands. (To protect his secret, Alex never takes anyone back to his place, and always leaves before that evening’s partner wakes up. There are some logic gaps, naturally — such a plan would be unworkable in real life — but the concept works well in the metaphorical context of the film.)

Alex’s routine is interrupted when he meets Leah, an antiques dealer he immediately falls for and takes out on a date. (The idea of antiques having “shared” the lives of many different people is a nice touch.)

Alex decides he can’t live without Leah. Given his “Twilight Zone” existence, he struggles with what to do next. “They say love conquers all. It also ruins everything,” he laments.
Ultimately, our hero takes a chance and tells Leah the truth. “Outside, I’m different,” he explains, having taken the form of a thirty-something woman. “But inside, it’s Alex.”
There’s a happy ending — this is advertising, after all — though the denouement is legitimately moving despite its basic predictability.

Leah accepts Alex for the person he is inside, and his shape-shifting days are over. Alex’s final line: “I used to wonder if she was the reason why it all stopped. Because maybe she could see who I was.”

Sure, it’s convenient that he finishes as a handsome adult heterosexual male, rather than a colicky six-month-old with explosive diaper rash. Still, the film was brave enough to show Alex as a woman of various ages interacting with Leah — and his settling into one form they both appreciate feels less like a cop-out than a logical conclusion.

Veteran ad critic Barbara Lippert, who writes MediaPost’s Mad Blog, calls the work “a genius insight into our schizophrenic culture. It really does go Kafka and Rod Serling one better.”

As a piece of dramatic storytelling, “The Beauty Inside” follows the traditional TV series episodic arc, mixing in social elements and brand message in ways that don’t detract from the overall effect.

The appearance of Toshiba laptops, powered by Intel processors, seems unforced, as Alex keeps a daily video diary showing all the different people he has become. (He closes each entry with the melancholy, ironic catchphrase: “That’s it for me.”) Fans who auditioned via Webcam for the film portrayed the versions of Alex shown on the laptop screen, and those following his travails could interact with the campaign through the usual social channels.

Bill Green, executive vice president of strategy at Noble Mouse, who blogs at AdVerve, believes “The Beauty Inside” represents the next iteration of interactive narrative advertising. “Anyone who thinks of branded content always goes back to BMW Films as the be-all, end-all, and assumes that any agency trying something even close is an automatic fail,” he says. “The difference here is that while bmw Films was a noir, action-focused piece, ‘Beauty’s stories are more poignant and personal — engaging the viewer on a deeper level.”

The client is pleased with the effort, both for its creativity and measurable results.

“It was an opportunity to make an emotional connection and be seen as an essential character by the target 18-to-34 year old audience who typically sees the Toshiba brand as a brand for their Dad,” says Billie Goldman, partner marketing manager at Intel.

Per Goldman, “The Beauty Inside” garnered 69.7 million global views, compared to 50 million for the previous year’s “Inside Experience.” The average viewer age was slightly more than 23, almost evenly split between men and women, which means pod was right on the mark in terms of the target demographic. (The “Inside Experience” audience had been more than 60 percent male.)

Connecting with Skype…teaching Snoop Dogg New Tricks

While “The Beauty Inside” was pod’s biggest creative splash in 2012, other campaigns are worth noting. These include efforts for Skype, the Kingsize Slim Rolling Papers of iconic rapper Snoop Dogg and an animated sci-fi Web series from Tom Hanks.

The products and services being advertised couldn’t be more different — and the media brought to bear are diverse and dissimilar. Yet each campaign in its own way is deeply social and attempts to inspire extended brand engagement.

(Intriguingly, all three focus on modes of communication, which was also true of “The Beauty Inside,” as Alex and Leah struggled for understanding. Consciously or not, this forms a major theme of POD’s creative oeuvre.)

“It’s Time For Skype” uses print, outdoor and Web iterations to position the Internet-based voice and video communications service as a warmer, more human way to connect than alternatives like Twitter and Facebook.

“140 characters doesn’t equal staying in touch,” reads one copy line. “When did it become ok to text mom happy birthday?” asks another. The campaign’s main social thrust consists of an app on Skype’s Facebook page that lets users create and share “Humoticons” — pictures of themselves expressing emotions.

“We launched this at a time when the question (of whether technology has gotten too impersonal) was really becoming part of the zeitgeist, and that helped it get great online media coverage to get people talking,” says pod’s executive creative director Jaime Robinson.

The company credits the campaign with a 20 percent rise in Skype.com feature page views, driving 8.3 million site activities.

“This campaign really got to our roots as a disruptive brand while at the same time playing to what makes our brand great, that we enable people to have experiences together, even when they are apart,” says Francie Strong, Skype’s director of global marketing.

Ask Dabitch Wappling, who follows the ad biz at the Adland blog, says the approach for Skype works perfectly because, at its core, “it’s the truth: Skype is face-time.”

A more traditional mode of communication — a book printed on paper — is central to a pod campaign that surely qualifies as one of the year’s most memorably tongue-in-cheek pieces of intellectual property.

Rolling Words: A Smokable Songbook is a volume of Snoop Dogg’s lyrics printed on his branded rolling papers, bound with hemp and twine. The effort plays off the rapper’s bad-boy toker image and constitutes a rare instance in which form and function are literally rolled into one.

The book itself is a social vehicle, says Pereira, because, despite a limited run, it generated considerable attention in the media and among the public, giving it a longer “shelf life” than the work would’ve had if volumes were mass produced.

Only 100 copies were actually printed. “One-hundred books wouldn’t constitute a real project a while ago. But when you create 100, put them in the right hands and promote them online, it turns into something big,” says Pereira. “Online it had more than 1 million views — that is what counts, because the book is more expensive to produce than the product itself. You have to look at that with fresh eyes. The rules are different now.”

The book won a Gold Lion at Cannes in the Branded Content & Entertainment category.

Another of the agency’s ambitious social efforts in 2012 was its campaign touting “Electric City,” a Tom Hanks–penned animated series set in a post-apocalyptic world. (The show, 10 five- to seven-minute episodes, debuted this summer on Yahoo as the online behemoth’s first scripted original program.)

POD created “Tap Joint” an online venue that focused on a Morse Code–type transmitter known as a Tap Kit. This exercise in alternate-reality gaming challenged users to decipher codes to view show previews and plot clues.

Some users would visit occasionally for general information, while others would drill deep into the game and work hard to decipher clues, sharing the experience online with friends.
“We wanted to turn ‘Electric City’ into a cult before it even launched,” says Pereira.

How big can you get before you suck?

Based on the layered arg approach of “Tap Joint,” and the social thrust of POD’s work overall, Lippert says the agency is inventing advertising’s future by “building infrastructure for everybody else.”

Green concurs. “Agencies like Pereira & O’Dell, that are able to bridge the so-called traditional-digital divide, are what matter now.”

Of course, it’s easy to innovate as a young “hot shop,” but the larger an agency grows the tougher it is to stay on the leading edge. As Pereira and O’Dell enter their 40s, and POD perhaps takes on larger, more conservative clients seeking safe ad solutions, won’t the work become less creative?

“Scale has been making us better,” says Pereira, who points to 2012’s body of work as proof. Adds O’Dell: “I’m not worried about that. We have a long way to go.”

The Worst Videos of 2012

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:34:00 -0500

It was a year of amazing work, and unsurpassed video consumption, with consumers snacking on video via phone, tablet and laptop. Not all are stellar. Here are 10 the universe should spit out.

You'd think that brand mavens and marketers would have realized by now that every piece of content is, or will soon be, viral. With the exception of those who have taken a monastic vow to avoid all online video, most of us are seeing as many brand videos and ads online as we are off.

There are exceptions — those ubiquitous holiday-time auto ads remain more or less native to the tv set — but beyond that, it's all viral, all the time. As a result, brands risk self-inflicting deep wounds if they fail to understand how their content moves through the world.

Fortunately for me — I write MediaPost's twice-weekly Video Critique newsletter, which is everything its name suggests and yet so, so, so much more — most brands continue to drop mockable video turds on our e-doorstep with abandon. Here, then, in no particular order, are my picks for the ten dopiest, dumbest, least coherent and/or most wackadoodle brand and marketing videos of 2012.

Lord knows there wasn't any shortage of candidates.

Gillette
Actual Video Name: “Masters of Style”
Should-be Video Name: ”Masters of Inarticulate Expression of Style”

The ads for the ProGlide styler, Gillette’s up-market electro-shaving doohickey, feature actors Adrien Brody and Gael Garcia Bernal wandering about in some vaguely hipster-urban setting. There, they convene with musician/actor/hyphenate André “André 3000” Benjamin and do their part to raise awareness of… I guess one would call it “matters relating to precision-honed facial hair.”

For the Web, however, Gillette loosed each of the three to weigh in on matters relating to personal style. Actor/entertainer types working without a script? Bad idea.

Brody’s is the most shallow of the monologues, which is no small feat. Answering questions nobody asked (“What does authenticity mean to you?”), he responds with true him-bo vigor, in the process restoring stereotypes about entertainer intelligence erased years ago by cerebral thinkers like Burt Reynolds and Charo. According to Brody, authenticity “really refers to being sincere and honest with yourself… not necessarily being swayed by everyone’s opinion.” In other words, authenticity refers to the state and/or act of being authentic. Who needs a thesaurus when you’ve got a thespian?

Macy's
Actual: "Another Miracle on 34th Street"
Should-be: "Another Bastardization of a Cinematic Touchstone"

You can't blame Macy's for latching itself, barnacle-style, onto Miracle on 34th Street every holiday season. After all these years, the movie remains blithe and as uplifting as a neoprene sports bra, the single most effective retail product placement (unpaid, I presume) in the history of celluloid. Macy's has coasted on its tails for years.

But using the megamagic of supertechnology to turbosplice clips from the flick into a modern-day setting, then cyberramming its Kringle into pithy conversations with overexposed celebrities (Justin Bieber, Martha Stewart and Taylor Swift, among others), is precisely the wrong way to extend its legacy. Also, the clip officially hit the Web in October, a few weeks before one of its not-as-self-aware-as-he-thinks stars, Donald Trump, officially became odious to a significant slice of the population. Lesson learned: four weeks is a long time in the everything-is-somehow-viral era.

Meanwhile, at the clip's denouement, Carlos Santana shows up with a guitar. He does not appear to know where he is or what he's doing there. Somebody should lead him to shelter and fetch him a warm bowl of soup.

Visa
Actual: "Join Our Global Cheer"
Should-be: "Scenes of People Cheering, Accompanied by Narration About How People Like to Cheer and How Cheering Through Social Media Is Like Octuple-Cheering"

Visa's "Global Cheer" Olympics campaign starts with a flawed premise — that enjoyment of the Summer Olympic games will be amplified by simultaneous enjoyment of the social media swirling over, under and around it — and sinks from there. It may have gravitas, courtesy of Morgan Freeman's ever-solemn narration, but the clips designed to familiarize with already familiar athletes (Michael Phelps) reek of desperation, à la "we hitched our wagon to these guys/gals. If we're going down, you're coming with us."

The "Join Our Global Cheer" spot may or may not have been an official Visa production, but its gauzy PR-speak about "harnessing the Olympic spirit into a global movement" makes it feel lighter than air. It takes a full 90 seconds to convey a simple concept that I can get across in eight seconds — hell, time me. "Please go to our Facebook page, please, and create content, so that we don't have to." Meanwhile, to hear the campaign tell it, remotely cyber-cheering for Malaysian track cyclist/dreamy dreamboat Azizul Awang is the next best thing to serving as Best Man at his wedding. Good to know.

Chanel No. 5
Actual: "There You Are"
Should-be: "Brad Pitt Recites Marlon Brando's Apocalypse Now Outtakes"

In his viral-bait spots for Chanel No. 5, Brad Pitt gazes vacantly towards the camera and talks. He talks about journeys and dreams. He talks about fortune and inevitability. Then the camera pulls back and we learn that we're supposed to be buying/feeling good about… perfume? Really? Smart money was on an exotic vacation locale or some kind of celebrity quasi-religion. Perfume. Huh.

The problem with "There You Are" isn't Chanel's approach; the brand has long trafficked in the kind of mumbo jumbo that, according to no focus groups, enhances its allure and mystique. The problem is that by choosing Brad Pitt as its first-ever spokesdude, Chanel calls attention to itself in a way that can't be ignored. But Pitt's presence ensures that we'll all pay attention — in this case, not a desired outcome.

Facebook
Actual: "The Things That Connect Us"
Should-be: "Chairs Are People, Too!"

I don't think anybody had any idea what to expect from Facebook's first-ever superclip, envisioned as yet another front in the Grand Exalted Social-Media Overlord's battle to humanize itself. It could have featured an all-oboe orchestra or animated stop-motion chipmunks or children holding hands and dancing and going la la la. It could have featured Bono talking about technology infrastructure in Africa. Nothing would have surprised me.

And then I heard the following phrase, which prompted me to scroll back to the start of the clip and make sure I'd heard it correctly: "Chairs are for people — and that is why chairs are like Facebook." Apparently the thing that connects us, as much as technology or transportation or yenta relatives, is chairs. Recliners, thrones, fauteuils, beanbags, you name it — only through, on, across or alongside chairs can we find common emotional ground. But, the video adds, dance floors and doorbells are a little like chairs, and thus Facebook, because they too have connective properties.

I hate my job.

Cartier
Actual: "Painted Love"
Should-be: "Tortured Bearded Artist Guy Falls In Love With Girl In His Painting, Who Comes To Life In an Animated-Sprite Kind of Way; and Then, In the World's Most Transparent 'Muse" Metaphor, He Chases Her/It Around Town and, Finally, Back Home, Where-upon He Is Pulled Into the Painting and Goes Smoochy-Swimming With
the Animated-Sprite Painting Girl"

It's a brand video, people. It's not Fellini Satyricon.

The New Yorker
Actual: "Lena Dunham Introduces the New Yorker iPhone App"
Should-be: "Lena Dunham Introduces the New Yorker iPhone App" (nailed it!)

For the most part, brand videos go the big-tent route: all comers are welcome, so long as you've got cash to spend or an itchy "like" trigger finger on Facebook. But Dunham's efforts on behalf of the New Yorker iPhone app, in which she jousts with uninterested talk-show host Jon Hamm and debuts a clip from her "new movie" (which features more straightforward discussion of the New Yorker app than does, say, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen), seems designed to alienate, annoy or otherwise baffle a huge chunk of its potential audience.

It's a strategy that makes no sense in the real world, but even less sense on the everyone-everywhere-everything web. Yes, we get that the clip is a meta-commentary on the type of clips usually employed to introduce such products. But do we really need to bury the wit beneath a heap of smirks and air quotes? Would an easy, airy punchline do profound danger to the brand? Lighten up, missy.

Separately, has anyone told Jon Hamm that he's allowed to say no every so often?

Eight O'Clock Coffee
Actual: "The Cupping Room"
Should-be: "Grandpa Brand Tries to Act Young, Breaks Hip"

I believe in kindness, charity and decency towards my fellow man and woman, especially those in need. That's why I refuse to say anything critical about Eight O'Clock Coffee's attempt to join the 21st century via one of those "Internet videos" its musty brand people had been hearing so much about.

I won't rip the one-note bit drawn out over five minutes (competitive eater visits coffee brand's "cupping room" and — get this — starts drinking all the coffee and eating all the coffee beans!) I won't scold the creators for failing to arm the actors with a script or anything beyond minimalist props. I won't mock the lighting director for keeping his charges in the shadows, literally.

I won't go there. That's not how I roll.

Perrier
Actual: "The Drop"
Should-be: "Lone Bead of Fluid Defies Physics and Saves Universe"

Whenever a brand manager proclaims, "I want something… cinematic! Yes, cinematic!," unintentional hilarity is soon to follow. And so it goes with Perrier's "The Drop," a high-concept nugget o' brand goodness in which Perrier's refreshervescenceness saves the world.

How, you ask? Well, see, there's this supersonic heat wave that's totally melting everybody's wax. So the Powers That Be combat it the only way they know how: By belting a supermodel cosmonaut into a pod and launching her into space, with a Perrier as her only cargo. The idea is that she'll bend the laws of chemistry and not burst into flames upon reaching her destination, then destroy the sun by pouring Perrier on it.

But wait — she's thirsty! And so, as the sweaty denizens of Planet Earth watch aghast (via webcam? This part isn't entirely clear), she chugs the entire bottle. Fortunately for everyone's sake, the model is a drooler, and a single drop of Perrier tumbles off her oh-so-pert lower lip and extinguishes the threat. The end.

Now, what was it that I was supposed to buy, and what are its brand attributes?

H&M/Anna Dello Russo
Actual: "Fashion Shower"
Should-be: "Campy Fashion Lady Makes Me Fear For My Safety and the Safety of Those I Love"

The clips I watch as part of my "Video Critique" duties sometimes delight me. More often, they bemuse or sadden me. But only once did a clip outright terrify me — and that once was when I screened H&M's "Fashion Shower," starring designer Anna Dello Russo as a fashion guru-cum-provocateur-cum-overcaffeinated loon.

In it, she announces that the viewer needs a fashion shower, which is less about hygiene than it is about the donning of/cavorting with accessories like oversized novelty scissors. As she prances, she ticks off her list of fashion lessons, among them that "wearing night clothes in the daytime is unexpected."

I happen to agree, but that's not the point. There are many, many reasons to create a viral-minded clip, among them awareness and brand definition and blah blah. But something this over the top only appeals to true believers. If that happened to be Dello Russo's only goal, mission accomplished. Really, all she did here was affirm her nutjob bona fides. She could've done that without blowing thousands of dollars on that mountain of a straddleable gold shoe.

OMMA Envy

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 16:27:00 -0500

Some campaigns are bound to bring out the green-eyed monster. Seven original thinkers tell OMMA about the year’s ads that made them say, “Wish I’d thought of that.”

Wish I'd thought of…
Nike’s Tweetboard

Alan Siegel
Founder, Siegelvision

In our day consumers have been exposed to many admirable advertising campaigns, including some that sparkle with inventiveness and wit. The challenge for today’s marketers, though, is not to broadcast and entertain but to engage.

To me, the most impressive branding program is Nike’s, which builds on spectacular advertising of years past while moving with authority into the frontiers of consumer engagement.
Nike has shifted out of traditional media into various engagement channels—using such imaginative techniques as design-your-own products.

Nike has steadily emphasized the theme of helping customers become better athletes. The company has used digital relationship tools, supplemented by selected advertising at events like the Olympics and March Madness. Nike spreads their media investment across all channels and forged partnerships with Facebook and Twitter. The company debuts ads that normally would have run on tv on YouTube and Facebook — and recently created a 30-story digital billboard displaying tweets from fans.

What’s the point? Nike gets into conversations with people who care about athletic activity. Its bloggers and Tweeters are not afraid to interject themselves into the conversation.
Best of all — completely in the spirit of the brand — Nike speaks with an assertive point of view.

Wish I’d thought of …
President Barack Obama’s Forward Campaign

Laura Ries
Co-founder, Ries & Ries

Selling Obama in 2012 wasn’t going to be easy. Incumbents can’t run on change or hope, they have to run on their records. And with a still-suffering economy and gridlock in Washington Obama didn’t have a lot of success or jobs to boast about.

But with one brilliant word, Obama made his case. His “Forward” slogan did what most slogans do not. It cut both ways. It said something positive about his brand while also saying something negative about the competition. That’s tough to do. Obama set up the election as a choice between going forward with him or going backwards with Romney. Romney countered with “Believe in America.” That slogan implies that Obama doesn’t believe in America. Obama spent four years as President and doesn’t believe in America? Makes no sense.

The final and not insignificant touch was incorporating Obama’s powerful visual from 2008 right into the slogan itself. He couldn’t say “hope” but that visual did. Pure genius. Wish I had thought of it.

Wish I’d thought of…
Jennifer Aniston for Smartwater

Peter Dixon
Creative Director, Prophet

A little over a year ago, Smartwater did something really fun. Using spokesperson Jennifer Aniston, who had appeared in videos and ads before, it made a viral video “Like A g6 (With Me and Jennifer Aniston) Smartwater Viral.” It kicks off with viral video kid Keenan Cahill lip-synching and then launches into a parody of making a viral video. It received millions of hits and aside from the brilliance of getting her to endorse the product as the perfect spokesperson—wholesome, hot, sophisticated, but cool—it launched through the medium everyone loves seeing her in (video) first in a very cheeky and viral way. It was a big success which they followed up with a few more videos, dedicated online channels/pages, print advertising, etc. I like that it started online and traveled to print. It was very on-brand for them and beautifully executed.

Wish I’d thought of….
Expedia’s Find your Understanding

Theo Fanning
Creative Director, Traction

What we do is very simple: Tell a story. Make a connection. Do it unexpectedly. This Expedia spot does it all. It tells the story of a father traveling to his daughter’s wedding: a lesbian wedding—a wedding that he doesn’t know if he approves of. The spot takes us on his journey, both physically and emotionally. It shares his dreams, his fears, his reality. We travel with him and feel his apprehension and trepidation. We empathize with him. And when he arrives at both his destination and his decision—we share in his relief, satisfaction, and joy.

We, as the viewers, have been allowed to walk a few miles in this man’s shoes. When the words “Find your understanding” appears on the screen we all feel like Expedia is more than just a travel company — it’s a journey company. And It doesn’t feel like a gimmick. This is storytelling at its finest. And I really wish I had done this campaign.

Wish I’d thought of…
Amnesty International’s Independence

Mathew Childs
SVP/Experience and insights, GSD&M

The Amnesty International ad titled “Independence,” done by tbwa France, is one of the most chilling and effective ads I’ve seen. Period. It very graphically depicts the abuses that wealth hides around the world. I don’t think u.s. audiences would ever stomach the realities of it but the sheer visceral reaction to the ad and the message cannot be hidden. The music and serenity of the film direction provide an almost eerie contrast to the violent visuals of one type of torture after another. And of course, implicate the viewer as complicit by simply watching and doing nothing. Very brave campaign.

The shock of it has probably affected those that have seen it and left a weird silence in its wake.

Wish I’d thought of…
Coke Zero’s ‘Unlock the 007 in you’

Joeri Van den Bergh
Founder, InSites Consulting; author of “How Cool Brands Stay Hot. Branding to Generation Y”

Recently an awful lot has been written about gamifying marketing actions. To get the attention of our target groups, we can’t count on merely paying for their attention by buying media space anymore, but should rather get their engagement by making them more involved with our marketing. It’s all about touching their hearts. Adding challenges and gaming techniques seems to be a good way — learned from positive psychology — to get consumers into this positive state of flow. I like Coke Zero’s ”Unlock the 007 in You,” related to the brand’s association with the new James Bond Skyfall franchise.

Instead of giving away tickets, Coke Zero created a challenge in a train station in Antwerp, in which ordinary travelers were required to go to a certain platform in 70 seconds. On their way, participants were confronted with different types of obstacles, like joggers, a woman with dogs on a leash, a girl calling them by name, and a man offering roses. When they arrived at the platform, they had to sing the famous James Bond tune to get their tickets for the movie.

Coke really paid a lot of attention to keeping its message consistent over different touch points: the cinema commercial was about an ordinary boy and girl in an unnamed city experiencing a James Bond moment culminating in sharing a Coke Zero.

In theatres, Coke allowed the audience to get a digital picture in a James Bond setting including Bond girls and props. As Coke Zero is a very male and macho brand, there’s a tight link between James Bond and the brand’s dna making is consistent and authentic. The challenge in the little station game immediately went viral with now more than 8.5 million views in only a few weeks time.

Wish I’d thought of….
Kraft’s Rainbow Oreo

Bob Witeck
President, Witeck Communications

I admire marketers willing to take smart risks to reap over-sized rewards. Especially with a simple iconic image like the Oreo.

Kraft Foods dolled up the popular Oreo by splashing it with an lgbt-friendly rainbow during June pride season, and wooed an enviable bounty of adoring fans and customers. This creative visual, so simple, low-cost and easy to execute, metastasized into a giant harvest of impressions and earned media that they could never afford to buy.

Did it rub some the wrong way? Did this suggest Kraft has taken sides in the so-called “culture wars?” Chattering heads sometimes painted it that way. However, for the century old food company, that modest risk made little difference compared with the way it resonated especially with younger audiences who are impressed when conventional brands think outside the box.

Transformative Targeting

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:23:00 -0400

At last, truly targetable display advertising reaches scale

Life insurance doesn’t exactly seem like a likely spot for digital innovation. After all, it’s an American industry that’s actually older than America (the Corporation for Relief of Poor and Distressed Presbyterian Ministers, eventually owned by Nationwide, started selling policies in 1759). Sales of term life insurance, the most commonly owned, have been in decline since 1960.
And while digital channels have done wonders for consumers’ need for instant gratification, buying life insurance takes practically forever: It’s typically a six-week path from a customer’s first inquiry to an actual policy. “Of 10 people who initiate the process,” says Amir Weiss, vice president of digital for MetLife, “less than one actually winds up buying it.”

An additional problem is that the industry has gotten increasingly sophisticated at assigning risk, thanks to blood work and exams and physicians’ statements, “and that’s been at a cost of becoming too expensive when you’re selling insurance in lower amounts, effectively driving the business upmarket. As an industry, we’ve been less successful penetrating the middle market. So even though many middle-income people want and need the product, they were finding it difficult to buy,” says Weiss.

Digital efforts are changing all that, and in addition to initiatives begun over the last several years, the company is currently moving forward with its most focused, intricate method of display advertising yet. (MetLife is the largest advertiser in its category, according to snl Financial, and spent $540.5 million in 2011, up 22.8 percent from the prior year.)

“For us to go out and find people that have been left behind this way is enormously important for us,” Weiss says. “We’re a company that has relied, pretty much, on the same distribution channel for the last 140 years.”

Essentially, for digital innovators like MetLife and Merkle, its agency, breakthroughs in data are changing marketing funnel-nomics, making it easier for them to find the prospects at different points on the path to purchase, and target them with banner ads that will guide them along the way.

MetLife was able to determine that “a certain type of consumer goes through the purchasing funnel at multiple time higher than others,” Weiss says. Specifically, it was able to identify households with $100,000 or less in income, and with a preference for working with a company in a direct way, either over the phone or the Internet, with subgroups falling into categories like, “concerned moms” or “young professionals. “Because we have very specific ways of retargeting these people, we can bid in a way that is much more efficient,” notes Weiss. “We’re fighting fewer eyeballs.”

“That’s what’s really exciting,” says John Lee, senior vice president and general manager of Merkle’s insurance and wealth management practice. “Truly targetable display, with the inventory that’s available and the capabilities from an ad tech perspective, is really reaching some scale at this point, and picking up speed. We can drive more precise high-performance display than ever before.”

A favorite example of Lee’s is a consumer who starts buying diapers on Amazon. “There are a ton of inferences you can draw about the life event that is going on and what it means, and Amazon has something like 150 million users. That’s a targetable universe that once upon a time, direct marketers would have killed for. If you can marry a platform back to your ability to have all your customer data, and then bring all those pieces together, you can create unprecedented business results. It’s the No. 1 thing we’re all talking about.”

And of course, the rise of real-time bidding buying systems, through automated trading desks, is also fueling the transformation. There’s also a massive amount of consumer data now available to advertisers of all sizes, from a company like MetLife to the smallest Web site.

“We’ve come such a long way from the early days of display, where we would call a Web site owner and negotiate,” says David Booth, a consultant and founding partner at Cardinal Path, a digital marketing agency, and coauthor of Display Advertising: An Hour a Day. “With rtb taking in information from so many data points, we are now bidding for those slots in about a third of a time it takes a human being to blink. It’s truly amazing.”

Over and above those changes, “when you add in this enormous amount of third-party data that comes from browsing patterns being tracked, advertisers of all sizes can learn so much. John Wanamaker would be very happy with display advertising,” says Booth.

Retargeting Atrocities

But because the targeting display business is still in its relative infancy, practitioners say there’s a lot of room for improvement. “It is a nascent industry, and many marketers don’t understand how to use this technology. They’ve got a lot of data, and they are not even using it yet,” says Booth. “And some are using it badly. Here’s one I hate. I shop, and put something for $10 in my cart. Right after I leave the site, they start chasing me with offers, including the same product, but now it costs $5. So instead of feeling good about the purchase, now I feel like this company just stole $5.”

Excessive retargeting is Lee’s pet peeve, as well. “Everyone says retargeting is the most efficient method to reach people, but then they will absolutely kill you with it. Of course, the agency would probably say it still outperformed, but hey, you probably would have done even better if you didn’t annoy the crap out of everybody and cost me 30 percent of spend that I didn’t need after the first four times. Hopefully, the industry will get better at that. More companies will realize that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”
The flipside, of course, is the gratification that comes with a company getting its display messaging right. “I bought a big bag of dog food online recently for delivery, about a month’s worth,” Booth says. “And sure enough, at the end of the month, I started seeing dog food offers — that’s smart retargeting.”

And as those offers smarten up, Booth thinks consumers with privacy concerns will be less concerned about freakishly specific ad targeting. “These privacy debates are big issues around the world,” Booth says. “Today, our lives are being led online and that’s scary to many people, and we’re still in this initial recoil phase. But as people begin to realize they aren’t being targeted personally — for example, by Social Security number — but by behavior, they will mind less. They will realize they like the Internet being free, and that means advertising. And they will decide that if they have to see ads, they might as well see ones that are relevant to them.”

Evolving Formats

While the industry is enjoying the thrills that come from innovations in collecting data to drive smarter buying, and then smarter buying via rtb, Lee concedes that conversations about the actual formats used in display are pretty tame by comparison. But even there, he sees innovation ahead. “We’re seeing clients test the video they’ll use for display alongside tv. There’s a lot of convergence.”

But yes, the actual display advertising is still pretty dull. “The industries for whom display has to be accountable? They don’t care what it looks like,” says Lee. “Time and time again, it’s often the ugliest and plainest creative that wins.”

Weiss agrees. “In our testing, we continue to get reminded that people want a straight message. Our best advertising is very clear about what it might cost you, and what you should expect in the buying process.”

But as marketers continue to test the best display methods for their business model, “there is a huge opportunity,” says Booth. “With the rise of mobile, the mobile app, the tablet and the minitablet, advertisers are really having to differentiate their methods, adapting and reinventing as they go.”

Adds Lee: “Display, through integration, truly has the potential to be the most accountable digital method there is.”

What We Talk About When We Talk About Ad Agencies

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:22:00 -0400

The future of advertising isn't advertising," says Rei Inamoto, chief creative officer of AKQA. It's a funny thing for one of the most decorated advertising executives of the decade - a guy whose life revolves around selling products - to say. Or is it? Then again, it's the sort of Zen koan admen have been lobbing since David Ogilvy tread Madison Avenue. Before you shout, "Explain yourself, Rei!" be sure of two things: He isn't really going to, and he's got another one for you: "We live in a world where change is the only constant," says Inamoto. "That's the only certain thing that we have."

Mobile Goes to the Polls

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:22:00 -0400

Geotargeted mobile advertising is political advertising's new technological toy this fall. Candidates and Super pac advertisers will exploit mobile not only to deliver their newest attack ads, but to draw supporters to a candidate's nearby rally, pass out campaign literature or just get out the vote on Election Day. Or -- and most crucially -- raise money for campaigns.

Taming the Data Beast

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:20:00 -0400

Design by platform and gamification are helping direct hit its targets, despite its data problems

Taming the Big Data Beast is the #1 thing practitioners mention when asked to identify the trends in direct response marketing.

What direct response actually is these days ranks as #2.

For the purposes of this discussion, we’re using a wide-ranging definition that encompasses anything a marketer does with the hopes of stirring active engagement and participation by the consumer. That includes email, social, mobile, certain forms of display advertising, search and even direct mail.

Now, about that dinosaur direct mail …

There have been rumors of physical mail experiencing a revival due to its sheer novelty factor, but no compelling evidence exists to show marketers are returning to a vehicle that rises in cost and yields a diminished return on investment.

“I don’t get into any conversation these days where a client is saying we have to do more mail,” says William Burkart, vice president of Acxiom’s global agency services in the San Francisco office. “The only think keeping direct mail at its current levels is having no opt-in email address.”

Deliverability also has to be a concern for any direct mail-dependent company as the cash-deficient u.s. Postal Service contemplates a 5-day delivery week. And with Uncle Sam looking to trim costs, it’s hard to imagine the government won’t take some kind of action within the coming year or two on the long-subsidized bulk mail rates that make direct mail campaigns viable.

Let’s Get Back to the Big Data Beast.

The multiplicity of channels producing a firehose of data sounds like an opportunity for marketers to gain insights to use for product development and integrated messaging. But it’s still a far cry from fairy tale to reality.

Taming really means capturing, sharing, then figuring out how to glean true insights and ask the right questions. There is such a thing as optimizing for the wrong variables.

A recent CEB study of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies found the majority still rely more on intuition, using data for just 11 percent of all customer-related decisions. And those who do use data, the study found, are likely to do it badly or too aggressively, adjusting for every little blip in the data.

“How do I figure out what to do with data? How to manage it and drive insight?” asks Acxiom’s Burkart.

For as long as there’s been talk over the past few decades of “one-to-one marketing,” there’s been acknowledgment of silos, turf battles and an inability to ask the right questions, says Jim Sterne, founder of the eMetrics Summit.
Amazon, Dell and eBay are doing it well, says Sterne. Ecommerce companies have a leg up on brands because they have the direct relationship with their customer and are often organized to maximize data.

“Then someone like p&g has so many different products and data collectors, they’re never going to get it together,” Sterne adds. But they’re not alone. Mid-size companies actually stand a better chance of making it happen.

“Things get bogged down in reality. Implementation, integration and who’s going to pay for it. It’s months on end,” says Sterne.

Still, the promise of merging all sales, marketing, and social media data into one actionable pool to implement solutions online and offline remains a goal.
“If I’m able to tame the big data beast so I can connect my offline data with my real-time data, I’m way ahead of the pack,” says Michael McLaren, president of mrm East and chief client solutions officer.

People Are Players and Gamification Techniques Will Continue

Gabe Zichermann, ceo and founder of Gamification Co., is the source authority on the technique.

The drive to gamify all kinds of marketing is driven by the need to achieve scale — principally through the use of virtual rewards and viral customer acquisition.

As the world gets more game-like and interruption-driven, it becomes ever more important for direct marketers to learn the techniques of games to cut through the noise and engage.

“What’s emerging at the intersection with gamification are smarter contests, smarter sweeps and interesting pivots that use social media in concert with game dynamics to drive cheaper (and more viral) results,” Zichermann says.

Ford’s Facebook-focused campaign for the tv show Escape Routes is a good example of the concept, he says.

Overreliance on badges is tapering off, Zichermann says, as marketers understand this recognition technique is no longer sufficient to drive consumer engagement.

According to calculations by the Gamification Co., gamification is on target to hit $2.8 billion in direct spend by the year 2016.

Instant gratification will get more instant, says McLaren, of mrm.

Design By Platform Becomes Even More Important

It’s no longer ok to wing it for mobile. As consumers use mobile devices increasingly to make purchases, as well as consume content, optimizing the experience on each device is no longer an option.

While clicking on mobile ads isn’t expected to go anywhere soon, using mobile apps to make purchases is becoming mainstream.

In some cases, the technique of responsive design is being used to create all platforms at once, starting with the most important elements visible on mobile and working back to the full website.

The new Starbucks website is an example of responsive design in action.
During the Olympics, smart devices were a major platform for downloading video. According to comScore data, 60 percent of visits to the official London 2012 Games website and apps came from mobile devices and 45 percent of nbc video requests came from mobile. In 2012, consumers will watch 30 billion hours of video, McLaren notes, and there is an opportunity here for dr messaging in the right context.

Building the entire experience around the device and not only customizing intent demonstrates respect for the consumer, McLaren says. “Respect my time and my business. As smart phones become the lingua franca of the web and primary communication tool, a lot of people will be predisposed to act. If you can hit it, wow, it’s a big bang.”

Triggered email and personalization

What data should be doing is allowing better forms of marketing — as in triggered emails and personalization. As marketers develop a more comprehensive understanding of behavior patterns, it is possible to target email campaigns to recent actions and activities.

With email being so cheap, there was little motivation to target. But given response rates falling because of massive clutter, the trend is away from volume and using data to know more about the email recipient and more targeting.

“We can now include social data,” says Burkart. “If I know I have a more brand-loyal recipient, I know my success will be higher (based on number of likes, tweets, favorable mentions across the ratings engines.) So if I pick between you getting it and Jeff, if I know Jeff and his social profile, my chances are better. I know my index. Do I know your age, income, home status, value of home, etc.?

Across all the emails Acxiom has launched, it has just crossed the 50 percent mark for email being opened on mobile devices — smart phones and tablets. And the ability to optimize is better than ever.

“Now we can send an email on a Monday morning in a structural test for subject line, content, call to action and creative. With all these test cells triggered, within an hour the system can determine and continue to run the winning campaign. It’s a major driver for efficiency,” says Burkart.

Social graph data incorporating an individual’s friends’ interests gives marketers an opportunity to create targeted messages that encourage customers to share with friends via email or on social posts.

Younger consumers are more comfortable with the implicit commercial trade-off between giving out data and receiving something they want in return. Personalization is fine so long as it doesn’t get too creepy.

Some categories — such as health — may be ones where recipients never become comfortable receiving customized ads and alerts. Hello, cancer patient.

Integration of Messaging

In an ideal world, messaging will be integrated whether tweet or text or display ad. But it’s tough to do in a real-time environment.

“Social and mobile has everyone’s attention right now,” says Jim Sterne. We want to reach out to our shoppers omnivorously.

It’s a trend called omnichannel or transmedia. It’s storytelling.

“If there’s a new movie coming out, you want to make sure the characters in your story are tweeting and blogging,” Sterne says. “People use iPads to read reviews. They don’t think of the iPad as a channel.”

It is now technically possible to tap all sources based on how you arrive at a site and click around what you say and what they are saying. You can give your messaging more relevance through machine learning.

Runa, for instance, is one company that delivers the most profitable automated real-time offers by leveraging big data and predictive analytics.

Sterne says he saw a system recently that analyzes websites for keywords and automatically generates content on the fly for a category you didn’t even know you needed.

Burkart says data management platforms (DMPS) are really the next great breakthrough in targeting. They allow you to gather landing page, clickable banner visits and website Facebook likes. All those disparate data points are being gathered in a compliant way, he maintains.

Responsive Design and Designing for Device

Not only do things look different on different devices and multiple screens, the way people use each one alone and together requires a different approach to design.

Another major trend is responsive design where things automatically configure to look right on the device you’re on.

The Emergence of SEO-cial

“Search and social components are becoming seo-cial because you really can’t have success in seo without some social component,” says Marc Engelsman, director of strategy and client relationships at Digital Brand Expressions, which is agency of record for sempo’s social media programs.

Search Retargeting will Continue

While search was historically a direct response tool and display was on-direct response, that has changed with the big trend of personalized retargeting. If I go to Zappo’s and look at black patent leather shoes, suddenly those ads appear everywhere.

Google’s revision of its privacy policies earlier this year will now allow them to store data across its entitities. That has big implications for search retargeting, says Antony Chen, who was in the Yahoo Response advertising division, and now works on a startup he says will marry online data with offline.

Facebook’s introduction of ads based on cookies will also make that a viable direct response advertising channel for the first time, Chen says.

Continued Push to Mobile

To what degree is sms or text a viable marketing communication? Contextually it can be for relationships versus prospecting. Text is going to become an appointment arrow in the quiver of CRM.

Look at the presidential candidates, says Burkart. Opt-in push messaging is now the way many are finding out about vice presidential picks.

“Relationships via smart phones will definitely grow,” he predicts.

The Network of One

Digital natives have abandoned programming designed for them and are establishing their own personal networks.

It’s More About Context

Digital is a fundamental driver in the evolution of engaging with the customer base and has moved to more of a crm-driven richer customer experience. This combines offers with content and utility. Building loyalty and driving deeper engagement, says mrm’s McLaren.

Hyperlocal Targeting

The growing penetration of location-sensitive smart phones and gps enable the matching of offer with location. A sandwich shop that knows you’re around the corner has a new opportunity. This is just beginning to emerge in the u.s., but is more fully developed in Asia.

In Seoul, for instance, taxi drivers respond to text messages for service calls.

Is DRTV Dead?

Susan Rowe, president of Rowe Media Group, says a thread with that very title has been drawing responses like mad on a professional users’ group.

Her take: It’s still a viable channel for products targeting a demographic of 65 plus. But as younger viewers migrate to watching tv on the Internet, the costs for buying Direct response media don’t yet make sense.

On the plus side, the trend of multiple screen watching has created an interesting dynamic for drtv because response can now be tracked in minutes or seconds as opposed to hours or days, according to Core Media, a technology provider to the indsutry. This means marketers can accurately tie specific campaigns for producing visitors to a website or calls to a call center.

Ed:Blog

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:20:00 -0400

At a publication like OMMA, it’s almost a given that we spend hours (ok, days) dodging hype, superlatives and horsepucky. We love our platforms as much as the next media maven, but we work in a self-congratulatory world. Radical. Dramatic. Transformative. Innovative. Revolutionary. Game-changing. Almost every pitch we see uses these words.

Yet, most of the time, we know it just isn’t true. From major overhauls to minor tweaks, digital marketing is evolving. But let’s call them upgrades, not revolutions. News that truly transforms the way a business or platform functions is rare.

That’s why we devoted this issue, “Radical Digital Transformation,” to the ideas and technology that really are rewriting the playbook.

Take the upcoming presidential election. When President Barack Obama faced off against Sen. John McCain back in 2008, everyone was abuzz about the youth vote and social media. This time, mobile rules. See P.J. Bednarski’s insightful “Mobile Goes to the Polls” on page 24.

Or remember how words like “campaign” or “ad agency” used to mean something? Read John Capone’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Ad Agencies,” (p. 18) to find out how digital marketing has everyone struggling to redefine what an agency is and isn’t, and where that might lead. “If the acquirers have changed, the targets might also change,” he reports.

In David Gianatasio’s “Connecting with Content,” (p. 12), he argues that the campaign, that big-idea extravaganza of the past, will be replaced by content that doesn’t just find consumers, but engages them.

“It’s about technology enabling the brilliant execution of ideas, facilitating more immediate and exciting interactions,” Judy Austin, a longtime agency creative director and now an associate professor at Boston University, tells Gianatasio. She adds: “What hasn’t changed is trying to be relevant and doing something meaningful with your brand.”

In fact, some of the biggest changes aren’t in advertising at all, but in the data that drives it, such as the massive changes in direct response (see Laurie’s Petersen’s piece on p. 48) or display advertising (see “Transformative Targeting,” p. 39.) We talk to both Amir Weiss, vice president of digital at MetLife, and John Lee, senior vice president at Merkle, its ad agency, about those changes. Through integration, Lee says, “display truly has the potential to be the most accountable digital method there is.” (See the duo present at omma Display on Oct. 1.)

What’s your idea of true transformation? Let me know: sarah@mediapost.com.

Gamechanger: iPad Takes the Field

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:20:00 -0400

It's no secret that football and technology go together like ranch dressing and wings. But nothing has caught on as quickly as the humble iPad, which is now used by a wide swath of college and professional teams. Sarah Mahoney caught up with Chad Q. Brown, business director for DragonFly Athletics, to find out why drafting the tablet has been so transformative.

Radical Digital Transformation

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:19:00 -0400

As one platform unfolds into another, advertisers find new flight patterns everywhere

Trying to predict the growth cycle of any one digital platform has gotten more difficult every day. As we pulled together our report for omma Global Fall 2012, we couldn’t help but laugh, again, at the number of times the industry got it all wrong. Display isn’t dead; it’s actually growing. Ditto direct response. Video, once seen as a low-budget refuge for second-rate campaigns, now drives mobile and social, and has challenged the way the industry thinks of advertising versus content. Social, too, has kicked off its training wheels, with its unique ability to drive (or drive away) sales. And mobile? It’s emerged as the star other platforms want to orbit.

“What was supposed to take 10 years took three,” reports L2’s latest Digital iq Index. “Everyone, including Facebook, has been caught flat-footed by the adoption rate of smartphones, which has reached 165 million users in the u.s. alone. M-commerce is now the fastest growing retail channel in history, and mobile devices are likely influencing more on- and offline purchases than traditional broadcast, let alone an in-store salesperson. E-commerce is now m-commerce. Social media is now consumed via mobile app. Digital marketing is now centered on mobile search and mobile-optimized email.”
The point of all this transformation, of course, isn’t about mastering any one platform. It’s about unifying all platforms, to reach — finally — some level of integration. And that goal of integration is forcing agencies, holding companies, and specialists everywhere to take flight in new forms and directions, whether they have the evolutionary skills or not. At last, digital may be coming together.

Connecting With Content

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:18:00 -0400

Brands are finding ways — new and old — to woo consumers.

Tasked with creating an engaging vehicle to highlight JetBlue Getaways packages — which combine flights, hotels, ground transportation and more — the airline’s senior vice president of marketing and commercial, Marty St. George, and his team decided to put a Millennial spin on a tried-and-true media trope: the game show.

According to St. George, the “big-vacation-to-wherever”-type prizes described in breathless fashion on vintage programs like The Price Is Right served as his primary inspiration.

St. George laughs recalling the “B-reel” footage of folks frolicking on exotic beaches and partying in far-flung locales that would invariably flash on air to illustrate travel prizes.

Crafting the online competition “spiraled from that,” he says, and seemed consistent with the brand’s image and message, especially as the airline’s actual vacation packages could be awarded to winning contestants who correctly answered questions on various topics via Skype.

Dubbed “Get Away With It,” the branded content play ran live for 15 minutes daily from June 18-22. The effort was broadcast from a glitzy game-show set in Manhattan. It featured a wacky mustachioed host (who could have stepped off the set of almost any Game Show Network rerun) and more than 100 contestants. Winners’ gaping grins and losers’ disappointed pouts — displayed on studio screens in real-time.

St. George says the results — 13,000 contestant sign-ups; 10 minutes average viewing time; and a 117 percent boost in Getaways awareness — surpassed all expectations.

By going “back to the future” — using familiar concepts (a game show) in a novel format (the real-time Web) driven by the latest technology (Skype)— “Get Away With It” provides a blueprint for the future of innovative advertising campaigns.

Agency, client and media executives agree that the future of advertising has already arrived. It’s all around us, highly tech-driven (of course), and borrows strategies that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in 1955, 1965 or 1980.

“We’ve over-talked it,” says Sean Corcoran, senior vice president and director of digital media and social influence at ad shop Mullen, which helped develop JetBlue’s game show. “We all know what’s here and what’s coming.”

It’s a no-brainer to extrapolate from current trends and predict that brands will, as they have for more than a decade, continue to shift their attention and funds into digital platforms. We’ll see a swift acceleration of a five-year trek toward heightened sociability, mobility, consumer sharing, laser-sharp targeting and constantly improving measurability.

“None of that is new,” says Corcoran, and the time for navel gazing about apps versus the open Web and tablets versus conventional tvs (interactive, addressable or otherwise) has long passed.

It’s also clear that campaigns must be keenly targeted and served to the proper screens in ways that ensure maximum acceptance. Measurement tools abound, and quantifiable results, tied more closely than ever to sales, are required.

The what (compelling, targeted creative) and the why (to drive demand and spur sales) are readily understood variables.

The key to the equation is how the high level of engagement demanded by brands can best be facilitated.

“It’s about technology enabling the brilliant execution of ideas, facilitating more immediate and exciting interactions,” says Judy Austin, a longtime agency creative director who now serves as an associate professor in Boston University’s advertising, marketing and pr program. “What hasn’t changed is trying to be relevant and doing something meaningful with your brand.”

“The key to great campaigns today is the same as what it was yesterday: outthink your competitors, outthink people’s expectations,” says Angela Natividad, digital strategist at cb’a, and high-profile industry blogger. “Think of Lowe Roche Toronto shaking up direct mail by parking a Porsche in the target’s driveway and producing a creepy but compulsively keepable ad for every home.” (The agency snuck brand-new Porsches into affluent neighborhood driveways and photographed them — then made the snapshots into ads left at the homes where they were taken. “It’s closer than you think,” read the copy. According to the agency, 32 percent of recipients — astronomical in direct-mail terms — visited the dealership’s Web site to schedule test drives.)

Specific delivery systems (desktops, smartphones, ooh installations and even potential buyers’ driveways) are, to some extent, secondary concerns. Providing entertainment and utility are paramount.

Increasingly, agency, client and media execs blazing new trails (in essence, creating advertising’s future every day) are discovering that they must fashion content that delights, informs and, most importantly, plays a vital organic role in consumers’ daily lives.

“Branded content is going to be a centerpiece of marketing communication in this decade,” says Corcoran. “This is happening because of all of the available touch points brands have — from their Web site to their mobile apps, from their Facebook page to their Twitter account and Pinterest board, etc. This is a great opportunity for brands because it offers up direct relationships with customers beyond traditional advertising, email and direct mail, packaging and shelf space.”

Some might claim how to go about achieving all these exciting interactions is the toughest value to deduce — and tougher still to execute in captivating ways.

Consider the phrase “commercial interruption.” Who likes being interrupted (especially during one’s favorite program) by brand mascots selling soap, cookies, cars or whatnot?

But … what if those characters had their own channels you could access at any time and on a device? And their shtick was catchy and provided information you actually wanted, even needed? Maybe you’d spend daily time with them … and even share their antics with friends and family.

In surprisingly short order, you’d feel kindly toward the folks who brought you those icons. Maybe you’d even choose to buy their products.

Everything Old Is New Again

From the golden age of tv in the 1950s until roughly 1990, the sheer scale of mass media and the homogeneity of its audience made consumer connection relatively easy. Everyone watched the same shows and saw the same commercials. (This was true even in print, which was more highly targeted, because the same car ads that ran in Vanity Fair and Time would also appear in Sports Illustrated and Family Circle.)

In that era, brands could use relatively few long-lasting and ubiquitous campaigns to forge and reinforce their relationships with consumers.
With the media world now fragmented — and consumers able to change “channels” on any device in an instant — we see a logical inversion: Brands feel they have to “connect” on a one-to-one basis (through games, social media, etc.) to achieve the same intimacy they once had with a single commercial buy.

They are crafting increasingly brand-centric, brand-identifiable content … but that’s actually a return to a ’50s model of Lucy stepping out of character to do a cigarette ad during her eponymous sitcom.

“Contextual” or “native” ads — so called because they blend into their surroundings — are hardly new. They’re “like Route 66 using a Chevy Corvette as the third star of the show on cbs. Like Gracie Allen palavering with Harry von Zell in her kitchen about the wonders of Carnation evaporated milk,” says Tom Messner, a legendary ad executive whose career began during the Mad Men era. Ads are as integrated into their settings as ever.

Take the brilliant lunacy Stephen Colbert brought to a little ol’ cracker this year — one popular, in fact, in the ’70s: What Colbert provided for Wheat Thins on the February 23 Colbert Report is still talked about in ad circles and beyond — undoubtedly because the content had more to do with the popular tv host’s personality than the cracker’s charms: Colbert turned his famous satiric wit full-force toward the product and its pr — and garnered more than 5,000 social mentions, 6,000 new Facebook fans and 2,000 Twitter followers, plus a Cannes Gold Lion. (According to MediaVest, the segment has been viewed more than 750,000 times to date.)

Brian Terkelsen, then global president of LiquidThread, Starcom MediaVest Group’s digitally led content creation unit (and now ceo of MediaVest usa), says of the collaboration, “A certain amount of courage was called for to work in such fashion with Colbert. Even though the general thrust was worked out in partnership with the show’s producer, Viacom, ‘You agree you’ll yield control to him.’ ”

Of course, Terkelsen knew that Colbert would make merciless fun of the product. He didn’t necessarily realize, however, the wildfire success the segment would enjoy. The effort proved so popular, Terkelsen jokes, “it’s become the gold standard for such social media integrations.” As its big win in the south of France attests.

Terkelsen’s risk was richly rewarded. As Natividad puts it, “Right now, everybody’s making an effort to be more ‘personal,’ with varying tolerances for risk. The degrees to which they succeed depend on how far they’re willing to go.”

Andrew Essex, CEO of Droga5, seems to agree: “Content is king, but context is kingdom. You can’t just have the hubris of the big idea. It’s critical to think about the receptivity of the work.”

(Essex’s agency has long been in the forefront of branded content. To promote Bing maps, Droga5 created a sweeping treasure hunt in tandem with the release of rapper Jay-Z’s autobiography, Decoded. The effort was one of the largest-scale pieces of branded entertainment yet attempted, and won an Outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes in 2011.)

11 Things No One Wants to See

Today, the brands themselves “break character” and become the educators and entertainers — and this is a truly media-agnostic trend, as true for old-school tv ads as it is for branded communications on Web sites and apps.

Even online advertising echoes certain print ads from long ago: Long-form ads like those written by David Ogilvy in the 1950s were info-rich and, at the time, considered as fun to read as the copy around them. In today’s jargon, they would count as contextual advertising. For example, an Ogilvy ad for British tourism that ran in The New Yorker would mirror that magazine’s highbrow style, while an ad for cookware in a woman’s magazine would speak to consumers in the tone and parlance of the publication’s audience. In each case, long-form print ads included lots of product information and would almost serve as mini-handbooks. By and large, the public responded positively.

It still does. Buzzfeed ad-article hybrids such as Virgin Mobile’s much ballyhooed “11 Things No One Wants to See You Instagram” drew 329,676 total engagements and more than 2,000 Facebook likes — and an enduring place in viewers’ affections.

“The type of customer we look for at Virgin Mobile embraces unlimited data,” says Ron Faris, the company’s cmo. “They’re a hyperconnected set who value their social communities above everything else. To fuel conversation in these communities, a brand must build an authentic voice and express its pov often, no differently than your more dialed-in friend on Facebook.”

“BuzzFeed helped us define a voice that could earn the right to go viral. Virgin Mobile publishes content four times a day now, and BuzzFeed was integral in helping define for us the difference between funny and shareable content,” Faris says.

“This is what all the brands want. People like it,” says Jon Steinberg, BuzzFeed’s president and coo.

Faris says Virgin Mobile is the most successful brand on the BuzzFeed platform, averaging one million unique views per month across 200,000 viral sharers on Facebook and StumbleUpon.

The key, according to St. George, Corcoran and other industry execs, lies in crafting entertaining communications that straddle multiple platforms and spur engagement on numerous levels, building overall image while giving consumers helpful information — and not just a sales pitch — about specific products and offers they can use right away.

“You’re still trying to be relevant and meaningful with your brand,” says bu’s Austin, who stresses that service has become a paramount concern. “Today, brands should say, ‘We’re here to help you.’ ”

Earlier this year, Swedish furniture chain ikea offered visitors to Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris a huge, adorably appointed space in which to rest.

And, of course, mobile phones’ portability makes them perfect vessels for interactive creativity. Charmin’s SitOrSquat app, which debuted in 2009, helps travelers locate and rate public bathrooms. The company reports 120,000 downloads in the four months since its most recent version (out of 840,000 total downloads). “What a wonderful thing to give your audience,” enthuses Austin. “It really cements a relationship.”

Where ’50s shoppers might have watched in-store demonstrations, today’s consumer gets up close and personal. In return, brands that make our lives easier (or just more fun) can receive the kind of loyalty that pundits said went out by the ’80s.

“The future of advertising is a return to the 1950s,” Steinberg says. “Today’s shared content is driven by word-of-mouth — also a vintage thing — and powered by social media.”

“It’s a matter of making better advertising,” Essex says. “The future of advertising is this: Be good or face the consequences.”

Banner Days

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:13:00 -0400

A veteran looks back on nearly 20 years of what’s gone right — and wrong — with display advertising

Oh, the lowly banner ad. Since the first one squeezed through a 56k modem nearly 20 years ago, the Web banner has been seen as either a bane or a boon (or both) to advertising.

For marketers and publishers, banners were hailed as advertising nirvana, providing highly targeted, transactional display units that could be monetized and monitored — all in real-time. For consumers, banners were perceived as novelties at first, but quickly devolved into Web page irritants, thwarting user experience and cluttering otherwise elegant site designs with flashing, blinking nonsense. For creative people, banner ads were (and still are today) both a challenge and an opportunity. It’s a shame that so many of them are odious.

Despite general disdain for the banner ad, though, it’s a digital display stalwart that’s probably here to stay. At least for the foreseeable future. Thankfully, a lot has changed in the years since the first banner ad appeared online. Credit Moore’s Law for facilitating much of that change: significantly increased bandwidth, better technological options, cleaner design, and a more strategic and disciplined approach to messaging consumers online have all contributed to the rise (or rebirth) of the once reviled Web banner.

But let’s take a step back.

As industry legend has it, the first commercially viable banner ad appeared on October 27, 1994, on hotwired.com, which was back then the online home of Wired magazine. The advertiser was either at&t Corp. or Coors Brewing Company’s Zima brand, depending on which source you choose to believe. Most people, however, credit at&t Corp.’s inaugural banner ad, which ran at a measly 468-by-60 pixels, as the shock troop of the digital advertising revolution.

Since then, digital display advertising has grown to become one of the biggest — and arguably one of the most important — channels for marketing. According to eMarketer, the rise of digital display has been supported largely by increased investment in banner and video ads. Advertisers spent an estimated $6.23 billion on banner ads in 2010, which grew to $7.61 billion — or 24.3 percent of total online ad spending — in 2011. By 2015, banner ad spending is expected to reach $11.73 billion.

Digital display ads have progressed from simple, pedestrian banners to rich-media ads that could easily be mistaken for actual Web site content, complete with streaming video, HD graphics and interactive features.

This evolution has brought both people and practices from the software development discipline to advertising. What began as an uneasy courtship progressed into a long-term relationship, and with the advent of widespread, high-speed Internet access, the partnership between advertising and technology looks like it will be everlasting. And unlikely as it may seem, the banner remains an often-maligned but resilient component of the digital advertising toolbox.

Here are a few highlights (and lowlights) from the quick, and sometimes scattered, evolution of digital display advertising.

1994: Hotwired.com ran the “first” banner ad for AT&T Corp. The modest banner used a simple call to action with copy that read, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.” A humble beginning, but echoes of this thought can be seen in Google’s “Watch This Space” campaign from 2010. Subsequent display campaigns on hotwired.com featured banners from Coors’ Zima brand and Club Med.

1995: Within a year, banner ads gained so much popularity that DoubleClick — the original banner measurement and placement firm — was created, heralding the profit potential of digital ads. Following suit, InfoSeek and Netscape began selling ads based on cost-per-impression, versus the pay-per-click model that was often used by first-mover online advertisers. AT&T also upped the ante in 1995, creating an interactive banner that allowed users to send a message through a virtual pager that would be displayed for the world to see within the banner.

1996: By 1996, digital advertising was becoming such a hot advertising medium that the newly founded Internet Advertising Bureau (which later became the Interactive Advertising Bureau, or the IAB) established the first standardized guidelines for online ad units. During this year, the first animated banner ads were released by AT&T and The College Network. AT&T also released the first interactive image, which considered a user’s needs or preferences.

2000: Taking digital display advertising to a new level, Google unleashed AdWords, a pay-per-click service accessible to small- and medium-sized businesses that did not necessarily have access to an agency. Though small in its beginnings, AdWords gave prominence to performance-based ad models, and today accounts for a lion’s share of Google’s ad revenue.

2001: The early years of the new Millennium gave birth to pop-up and pop-under ads, the bane of nearly every computer user’s existence. These ads were initially effective, with their quick and novel calls to action proving to elicit response more often than static banner ads. That novelty quickly wore off. Today, most computers have pop-up blockers and the ad format is more synonymous with viruses than with cutting-edge digital-marketing practice.

2005: A landmark year for digital advertising, 2005 began the era of ads that foster interaction between brands and their target consumers. With one click, a banner ad would become a minisite that held a wealth of information, quizzes and games. These ads also began to incorporate small-scale video. This year was also one of the last quiet years in terms of digital innovation — in 2007, the digital display space started its ascent as one of the most desired placements for advertisers.

2007: By 2007, the banner ad seemed to lose its effectiveness, leaving marketers in search of other online solutions. But the next generation of digital display advertising — skins, non-interrupting ads, and timed pre-roll ads shown before video content — had been taking root for a few years. This form of advertising allowed users to enjoy content uninterrupted, while seamlessly integrating messages about products, brands and services. These types of ads continue to this day, and have become more popular on free video sites, including YouTube, Hulu, and a number of news sites offering video content.

2008: If 2001 was the year of the pop-up ad, 2008 became the year of the ubiquitous social media ad. Popular social networking sites including Facebook, MySpace, as well as popular search engines including AOL and Google, begin to roll out self-service and engagement ads from a number of advertisers. These ads were the precursors to the hotly debated targeted ads that soon followed, inciting discussion about just how much privacy Internet users were entitled to. Streaming video also became a possibility for advertisers, with GE, EyeWonder and Akamai Technologies leading the way.

2009: Major players, including Google and Yahoo, were among the first to adopt targeted ads that followed users’ Web searches to better pinpoint their interests. But, as advertisers discussed the option of highly targeted ads, the Federal government stepped into the privacy debate. In conjunction with the Federal Trade Commission, industry trade groups (including the 4A’s, ANA and the IAB) encouraged advertisers and agencies to use self-regulation to protect consumers’ privacy. Also of note, major Web sites began to transition from banner ads to those within their sites’ content, offering a smoother experience for users.

2010: In 2010, major site publishers including Yahoo and AOL launched new ad formats to make more user-friendly, yet effective, ads. In September, Yahoo unveiled an expandable unit offering social tools, which took over the Web page and allowed users to flip through content like a magazine. Meanwhile, AOL revealed Project Devil — an ad unit that could host photo galleries, videos, coupons, social network updates, text messaging and maps. Joining in this trend, Hearst Magazines launched ad units that featured real-time streaming HD video. Gillette’s Venus Bikini Kit was the first to use the format on cosmopolitan.com.

2011: With many sites shying away from using banner ads by 2011, the digital display ad no longer focused on a call for action, turning its attention instead to consumer engagement. To further drive this home, the IAB introduced new ad units called “Rising Stars.” These units were larger than previously established units, and allowed room for videos, games and other elements that fostered interactivity and engagement. Social media sharing buttons also become universal, as a vast majority of news and entertainment sites offered consumers a chance to share content via their social network profiles.

2012: As we head into the second half of 2012, there are fewer technological limitations hampering the creativity of digital advertising than ever before. But unbridled creativity can breed chaos. So to ease the potentially bumpy transition to newer, more advanced online display formats, the IAB released a revamped version of its industry standard guidelines, which was last updated in 2003. The 2012 portfolio took into account new ad unit formats, as well as plug-and-play DIY units that many advertising platforms have released over the past few years. With these guidelines, Web sites look less cluttered for a better, more readable and more desirable user experience.

Banners I Love

It’s not always easy to say why a banner ad grabs someone, and why it fails. But here are four of my all-time favorites, and why they’ve stuck with me:

Brastemp Water Purifier (2005/6)
Agency: Agencia Click (Brazil)
This banner is deceptively simple. The running water almost begs the viewer to engage with it, and in doing so you are delivered a very simple message. A water purifier is the subject of this piece, and that product (and its benefit) is kept in the forefront at all times.

FedEx: Just In Time (2005)
Agency: DM9 DDB (Brazil)
Nothing particularly new in a banner reading the system clock of your computer, but the use of the hands moving boxes that ultimately represent time and timeliness is a particularly memorable way to convey the message. It’s a really smart awareness piece for the FedEx brand.

NHS: Leg Cross (2007)
Agency: Grand Union (UK)
It’s no revelation that sex has driven the evolution and popularization of technology since the advent of the camera. This banner uses the foolproof hook of sexuality to convey an important message about stds. It’s a great use of the difficult skyscraper format and rollover/expand functionality.

Stride Gum: Be Ridiculously Long Lasting (2011)
Agency: JWT NY
A banner that challenges the user to stay engaged for a long period of time. One person apparently did so for 67 minutes. What I like about this ad is that the engagement is tied to a product/brand/campaign idea: that the flavor of Stride lasts a long time. For that reason, I like it better than the Cannes-winning Pringles ad that used a similar technique in 2009.

Bruce Henderson is chief creative officer at G2 USA. In 2006 Henderson was the recipient of the first-ever OMMA Award for Best Use of Video in a Rich Media Banner Ad, for Ameritrade “Marathon.” And he still likes banners.

Video Goes Godzilla

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 14:12:00 -0400

Online video may still be a sliver of the $40 billion ad pie, but if projections hold true, it may be eating the other media for lunch by the time next year's NewFronts roll around.