One question which came up constantly when The Big Won was interviewing various luminaries down in Cannes was, what exactly is direct marketing?
‘Vertical line’ theory (see below) is just one attempt at an answer.
Increasingly DM awards are being won by brand ads that have some sort of a response mechanism. Take BMF’s “Ducks” idea for Wonder Performance bread. Not what a purist would call direct, as Dylan Taylor, ECD of Direct at BMF Sydney concedes in our film here.
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The call to action in the Times of India’s launch ad to find the country’s leaders of tomorrow is in 10-point type at the very bottom, the compulsory add-on rather than the heart of the message.
This is something Philip Greenfield notes. As CEO of RMG Worldwide he was in Cannes to see what is happening in the name of direct. Not that any of the award winners were of any relevance to his, or his clients’, businesses. ‘Real’ direct marketing, he believes,is to be found at The ECHOs and The Caples.
As ad agencies move into the space marked ‘Direct’, pity the poor creatives in every direct marketing agency. They see the brand-building work that wins big and want a piece of the action themselves. Only they don’t get those mass-market opportunities when you can be all things to all men. Instead they are tormented daily with briefs targeted at very specific audiences and are given absolutely no budget to do anything other than fold paper.
Jury-member Emma de la Fosse of OgilvyOne remarks that Cannes reminds DM creatives what they could and should be doing, although, with the sheer volume of work they have to get through, it’s easy for them to forget.
Duncan Gray, Worldwide Creative panjandrum of Proximity, notes that nearly 50% of all the direct awards this year went to public-service campaigns of one sort or another. “Only a handful were actually trying to sell something.”
Very possibly, for direct bunnies anyway, Cannes may soon be less a source of inspiration than a source of frustration.
video was streamed to you courtesy of Groovy Gecko.
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Predictions schmedictions! I would never have guessed in a million years that UNIQLOCK would win the Titanium Lion this year.
The digerati have explained to me what is so brilliant about it, the way it knits bloggers together but, sorry, it still leaves me cold.
I’m a lot warmer about Halo3 and the “Believe” campaign, which started out as a model, a diorama, which became a museum, which became a documentary, which fed a series of commercials for both TV and the web.
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The idea was simply to celebrate the heroes of the battle. It was an idea worth £84m to Microsoft in just 24 hours from launch.
So, a worthy Integrated Grand Prix.
Cadbury’s “Gorilla” deserved to win a big ‘un, and it did. And, by and large, the punters didn’t feel cheated on Saturday night after the last ceremony of the week at the Palais.
Let’s hope that the same campaigns don’t win everything at the big shows that are looming up over the horizon. We’d like a few surprises.
Free – vertical thinking
If anyone wants a copy of the presentation I gave on behalf of FEDMA on the first Sunday of Cannes, ‘At last DM gets sexy’, you can download it by right clicking your mouse on the link here and selecting ’save as’. Then get the latest version of Quicktime to view. It’s an exploration of the vertical-line theory I developed in Directory magazine (www.directnewideas.com).
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Rounding off on the Cyber Lions:
It seems a lot of people are disappointed with the 2008 winners.
Here’s a short interview with Daniele Fiandaca, COO of Profero and one of the co-founders of Creative Social, the mafia of digital creative directors, saying pretty much that.
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Not that Lean Mean Fighting Machine will care much. Two Golds is two golds!
Elsewhere in the Palais des Festivals, they handed out the Press Grand Prix to DDB South Africa for their Energiser campaign.
The inaugural Design Grand Prix went to Turner Duckworth for its work for Coca-Cola while HBO picked up yet another Gold.
For me, one of the most interesting Golds was the Medal of Honor campaign from FP7 Doha.
This is an agency in Qatar. In the Middle East, the economy is booming and judging by the Dubai Lynx Awards earlier this year, the advertising scene is prospering too. By comparison, UK agencies won a big zippo in press this year. Nothing. Not one gong.
Isn’t it great to see the world order changing? Bahrein, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, these are the countries to watch in the year ahead.
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It was the Cyber Lions last night. Three Grand Prix were handed out.
One went to Mediafront, Oslo, for a nifty bit of work you can see at www.solcomments.com
I have a feeling I would think this was brilliant if I could read/speak Norwegian. I get the idea but the way the story of the campaign has been presented doesn’t give you much help.
Best viral went to the US shop 42 Entertainment for a campaign they put together for Trent Reznor and the band Nine Inch Nails.
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(http://alternaterealitybranding.com/cannes2008yearzero)
Hmmm.
Yesterday, Paul Kemp-Robinson, editor of Contagious magazine, gave a great talk in the Palais des Festivals about new ways brands are having conversations with people. He talked about ‘astroturfing’, when brands create grass-roots movements which are total bollocks. Nothing grass-roots about them. Just marketing.
And guess what? People know bollocks when they see it.
Even though Year Zero is definitely not art, as they claim, it probably doesn’t piss people off as if it was, say, marketing Black and Decker products. So it’s not exactly bollocks and gets away with it. Actually, it is pretty interesting and beautifully crafted. So, well done to the guys in Pasadena.
Bad luck to Fallon, London, who may well have expected to get something for Cadbury’s Gorilla, one of the most viewed online films of all time. I guess it has become too ubiquitous for the jury, who are bored with it.
Personally, I think it’s a Grand Prix. It got advertising onto the front pages of newspapers and into the Financial Times as well when the CEO of Cadbury, Todd Stitzer, described his company’s amazing turnaround in 2007 to the ape on drums.
Then the third Lion went to Projector, Tokyo, for their Uniqlock site. Have a look at http://www.projector.jp/awards/uniqlock/everlasting/
The digital community has been raving about this work since it started picking up gongs at D&AD and elsewhere around the world.
But, sorry, it leaves me cold.
I can see that it’s technically terrific, but it reminds me of a Chinese meal. Afterwards you still feel hungry. Unsatisfied.
For me it’s design-driven and idea-lite.
But Cannes wouldn’t be Cannes without a few controversies. It’s a festival of opinions and it’s amazing that overall so many opinions do converge and the best work does get the recognition it deserves.
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I have just been talking to Joathan Harries, Chief Creative Officer for DraftFCB Worldwide.
For him, the single most remarkable piece of work at the festival is BBDO New York’s “Voyeur” campaign for HBO. And he is not alone.
Not only did this win the Grand Prix in the Promo Lions but last night it won the Grand Prix in Outdoor as well.
A five-minute film winning Best Poster award.
It tells you something about how all the boundaries are coming down between different advertising disciplines and it is no surprise that the man behind the campaign is David Lubars.
This was the man who changed advertising forever when, at Fallon Minneapolis, he created BMWFilms.com and who, since Andrew Robertson persuaded him to move to the Big Golden Delicious, has been transforming a stodgy multinational agency into a creative hotshop.
HBO started out as a film projected onto the wall of a building creating the trompe l’oeil effect of eight apartments revealed, with a dozen stories unfolding in each.
Most lesser talents would have set out to tell you what great stories you can find on HBO. This campaign allows you to come to that view yourself.
This is going to win in the Cyber Lions category and must, surely, be the front-runner for the biggest prize here, the Titanium Award, at the end of the week.
Sadly, after that breathless enthusiasm for an innovative creative director bending the envelope of creativity, it’s hard to get excited over the radio winners.
A fairly pleasant Grand Prix from Japan for the Canon Eos Kiss camera.
Canon Eos Kiss Camera (40 second)
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And yet more Golds for Bud’s Real Men of Genius.
Real Men of Genius (1 minute)
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Spare us. This series began in 1999 and while I’m sure the campaign has plenty more mileage with consumers, juries cannot continue to keep throwing gold at it. It’s old hat. Whereas HBO is very new hat indeed.
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Marcio Salem announced the winner of the Direct Grand Prix here at Cannes with the words, “We wanted to reward big ideas which are beautifully executed.”
In his view, the campaign launched by JWT Mumbai for The Times of India was all of that and more. A paradigm shift, in fact.
“The business of changing behaviour and working across media, that is where Direct is going and this moved a whole country.”
On August 15th, The Times of India published a direct response ad. It talked about how India is a ‘nearly’ country. Nearly a superpower, nearly an economic miracle. It called on its readers to become do-ers. “We’re looking for a few brave souls. If you have it in you to lead India log onto www.lead.timesofindia.com.”
A TV commercial raised awareness among non-Times readers.
34,000 people applied. And in December a Pop Idol type of TV show set out to whittle the candidates down to the last eight. And then to one.
R.K.Misra is that man.
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The plan now is to introduce him into public life. Maybe oneday even get him the job as Prime Minister.
So, an experiment in social engineering picks up the big gong.
In commercial terms, it’s smart marketing from the newspaper. They acquired leadership status themselves; got a TV audience of many millions; and gave the brand a halo.
The real proof of the pudding will be in what happens to Mr. Misra.
I can’t help remembering Andy from Simon Cowell’s X-Factor. He was the dustman who seemed to sing his way to fame and fortune. He sang for England at the Eurovision Song Contest. Nul points. No points.
Is R.K.Misra a nearly man?
If that’s what turns out to be the case, this campaign will look less than brilliant a year from now. Just rather cynical in teasing India with a dream of genuine democracy.
video was streamed to you courtesy of Groovy Gecko
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Kiwi émigré in London, Tim Ellingham, did not think much of English beer and asked his mates back home in New Zealand to send him some Speight’s, NZ’s best-selling brew.
Learning of this, Speight’s decided to build a proper Kiwi pub and ship it over to the UK so Tim and his Earls Court buddies could have a decent piss-up. Or, put another way, Publicis Mojo in Auckland wondered if they couldn’t do something a bit more involving than just make another TV commercial.
The story ran around the world of the five volunteers (among the thousands who applied) aboard the MV. Lida, bringing the ale-house to the mother country.It’s even on the Motor Boats Monthly website, for heaven’s sake!
As the lads made their way from New Zealand to Samoa, on to Panama, the Bahamas, New York and then London, they blogged and vlogged their experiences. And opened up the pub every evening for an hour!
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Okay, so it’s what media planners call ‘a stunt’ but a stunt that reached several million TV viewers when it made the news on both sides of the world; a stunt that has spawned a 60-min TV documentary; that was followed daily on national radio; that got people talking; that drove Speight’s back to number one in the market. A stunt that wouldn’t have worked as well without social media.
The point is, it’s not easy to place messages in social media, but if an idea is intriguing enough, it’s where it gathers momentum through wob. (Word of blog.)However, before we assume this is yet another death knell for TV advertising, the news in the UK is that spending on TV advertising is up.
The good old-fashioned commercial still remains the single most important way to reach mass audiences.Even though they are selling a console game, Halo 3, Microsoft used trade media to launch the game on September 12 last year.The campaign won the Grand Prix at the Clios two weeks ago and is sure to do well at Cannes next week.
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People have been talking up mobile marketing for years but there’s been little evidence of any genuinely engaging mobile content - until recently.
In January, BBH launched their ‘Get in there’ campaign for Unilever’s Lynx with a host of apps you can download to your phone to make it look like a harmonica, sound like a spray or, best of all, turn it into a ‘fit girl finder’.You can make your phone click like a geiger counter and pretend it has been programmed to search out only really hot babes. This little bit of instant theatre gives you permission to start chatting up girls. In other words, it helps you ‘get in there’.
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This interactivity means the brand has moved from simply telling angst-ridden teenagers it can help to becoming genuinely useful. The brand is repositioning itself as every teenager boy’s good mate.
It won a silver at D&AD ten days ago, as did Glue, London, for The Royal Navy. They’ve been doing something similar, providing a useful, if unexpected, service with its ‘Get the Message’ viral. The way this works is, you go to www.getthemessage.net and write an e-mail to a friend which then gets delivered in video form. It’s funny to have a message about something completely trivial like ‘see you in the pub at 6’ delivered by a lantern-jawed helicopter pilot.
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It’s a neat way of telling teenagers that there is a greater breadth of careers in the Navy than they may have supposed but without actually lecturing them about it.However, according to The Big Won stats, the most awarded idea in mobile marketing to date is DDB Germany’s campaign for Volkswagen spare parts.The message sets out to warn teenagers that if they don’t use VW-manufactured parts for their ageing Golfs, then they must expect to pay the consequences.
A viral film was seeded in a number of sites showing an elderly couple having dinner. The cuckoo clock whirrs into action but instead of a cuckoo, out pops a little black rapper who sings ‘Yo muthafuckah, yo.’
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The viral sent viewers on to a microsite where they could download the rap as a ringtone. You could argue that that is being useful. Now, when the nation’s youth talk to each other, on buses, trams and trains, around 100,000 phones start muttering in pockets and handbags ‘yo muthafuckah yo’.This is progress.
video was streamed to you courtesy of Groovy Gecko.
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I came across some pretty hungover folk this morning who seemed to have had a good time.
There was no particular bitching about the main winners. And as for the new venue, well, the feeling was that it had been a bold experiment that hadn’t quite worked. Worth a try but somewhere else next year, please.
D&AD has come in for some stick recently for losing its way. Creative Circle, under the leadership of the evergreen Mark Denton, has pitched itself as the British awards show that rewards the best of British work done by British agencies. Its latest annual, designed by Paul Belford, has been described as “making D&AD look like an Argos catalogue.”
And it is true that in recent years, from the advertising perspective anyway, D&AD has been pretty much a clone of The One Show, The Clios or Cannes. But this year’s winners have more of a home-grown flavour about them, with UK agencies netting 18 pencils and a black pencil going to Fallon for Cadbury’s “Gorilla”.
What has given me particular pleasure is to see that several pencils have gone to the Over-50’s club.
Nick Gill must be around the half-century mark – and he picked up 2 pencils for Dr. Barnardo’s “F**k” and a pencil for Vodafone. His art director on Barnardo’s is Mark Reddy, well into his sixth decade but as fresh as any 20-year old when it comes to make an ad look modern, interesting and inviting.
It is not polite to talk about a lady’s age, but Joanna Wenley has been winning pencils for quarter of a century now, from the same address of 12 Bishop’s Bridge Road.
Her campaign for Harvey Nicholls is as elegant and tasteful as she is herself.
The truth is, talent does not wither with age as both D&AD and Creative Circle 2008 can testify.
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