Serendipity Book

All change

A truly great piece of communication. I can see how this could work really well in a pitch situation.

Via Toad

Cadbury's Trucks - advertising eats itself

Juan 'the man' Cabral serves up 'Mad Max' via Pixar's 'Cars' in an attempt to give us a glass and a half of joy for Cadbury's.

Whilst 'Trucks' would no doubt score pretty high on engagement when compared to most ads, it seems to lack the drama and downright audacity of 'Gorilla' or the glorious multi-sensory indulgence that was 'Balls'.

I'm not sure that 'Trucks' quite cuts it as a piece of pure spellbinding entertainment in the way that 'Gorilla' and 'Balls' do.

And I'm a gearhead with a life-long interest in aviation (sad, I know).

'Gorilla' and 'Balls' both went spectacularly viral because they were truly incredible pieces of entertainment.

'Trucks' is merely quite interesting.

The question is, will that be enough for Cadbury's given that the strategy that Fallon are using appears to lean heavilly on driving salience at the cost of creating an enduring link back to the brand.

In Hey Whipple, Luke Sullivan cautions that to be effective "your interesting device cannot just point to the sales message, it must be the sales message."

Sullivan goes on to quote a similar piece of advice from Bill Bernbach ("Stay with the product") before continuing to recommend that creatives should avoid getting "tangled up in unrelated ideas, however fanciful. There is no such thing as borrowed interest. Interest lasts as long as something is interesting. Interesting words make for a delightful sentence but not a persuasive one."

I'm sure others would no doubt disagree.

Ad Battology

It's early 2008 and in a trendy office somewhere in the vicinity of Bloomsbury a young 'creative' turns to his colleague and says: "I've got a great idea for Pot Noodle. Why don't we make an ad with a chain reaction in it? You know, sort of like those contraptions in the old Rube Goldberg cartoons. No one's ever done that before. And we could make it really of the moment by casting some chavs."

Battology: needless and tiresome repetition (esp. in writing)

Chav was the Oxford English Dictionary "word of the year" back in 2004.

YouTube analytics arrives at last

YouTube: "Today [March 26th] we're releasing YouTube Insight, a free tool that enables anyone with a YouTube account to view detailed statistics about the videos that they upload to the site. For example, uploaders can see how often their videos are viewed in different geographic regions, as well as how popular they are relative to all videos in that market over a given period of time. You can also delve deeper into the lifecycle of your videos, like how long it takes for a video to become popular, and what happens to video views as popularity peaks."

If only you could do the same (or get limited access) for videos that others upload too.

HiPPOs kill ideas

An acronym you may not have come across which was used recently in a presentation by Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP product management and marketing at Google ...

Avoid HiPPOs: A hippo kills more people than any other animal. In business, hippos kill more products & ideas than anyone, A hippo is the highest paid person’s opinion. Hippos say “I think…”

Via David Knox (a blogging P&G Brand Manager!)

Fallon's Social Media Trends Presentation

Another slideshare treat. This is a trends presentation given by Aki Spicer to his colleagues at Fallon in Minneapolis over lunch the other day (which they incidentally broadcast live by video across the internet using Yahoo! Live).

His focus is on 10 trends in social media and how to take advantage of them. Here's the takeaway for those in a hurry:

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A Millward Brown LINK test for Gorilla?

Meanwhile over on Millward Brown's blog, the ever provocative Charles Frith has challenged the normally unflappable Nigel Hollis to use MB's proprietary pre-testing system to test and improve upon Cadbury's "Gorilla" and make the results public!

So far Nigel has chosen to stonewall a bit by saying that it had already been successfully LINK tested but that he could not confirm or deny the results it got or whether it was changed as a result of the test. Intriguing. Perhaps someone (Mike?) could have a quiet word with Phil Rumbold and ask him to release the learnings to the industry for the greater good.

Charles suggested testing an ad that has not been tested before.  Nigel's comments on an earlier post suggested that he would be up for the challenge. Any suggestions?

Taking on the research orthodoxy

Jason Oke has started an important discussion about the shortcomings of our current use of research in marketing over on his blog.He kicked off the discussion with this deck.

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In the comments Jason argues: "The tweaks required to make research more valuable are often minor ones, but ones that are counter-intuitive to people stuck in the old frameworks. They require asking people questions that are less literal, less direct, and sometimes require asking people fewer questions altogether. They also require allowing respondents to have more fun and flow with their answers, giving up some control and direction in the research. These things can seem scary to people who don’t understand the reasons and benefits for doing so. It’s a lot easier, and easier to explain to your boss, to just ask people directly “which proposition statement do you like best.” Unfortunately it’s also completely the wrong thing to do."

Decapitated ads

Clearly adding moustaches to ads isn't subversive enough for some people. The East London Decapitator has taken to protesting against urban spam by ripping the heads off ad people and leaving nothing but bleeding stumps where their heads once were. ELD on Flickr. ELD on YouTube.

The story of David Ogilvy

Note to self.

Remember to set the PVR for another potential treat this weekend: there is a documentary on BBC Four on Saturday night about the life and work of David Ogilvy:

"David Ogilvy's advertising agency started out in 1948 with no clients and two members of staff, and became the largest advertising conglomerate in the world. This documentary reveals Ogilvy's extremes and eccentricities through interviews with individuals whose lives he touched: those who knew him and worked with him during the conception of some of his most famous campaigns."

I hope it's better than the recycled pap that is 'Hard Sell'.