Dr Pepper is launching a limited time flavor extension, Cherry Chocolate Diet Dr Pepper. While that sounds completely unappetizing to me, this viral video for the new product is very tasty:
With over 300,000 views since it was posted last night, this is clearly what success looks like for viral marketing.
Which is a little strange, I admit.
Building off of the success of Tay Zonday and his original Chocolate Rain video, Dr Pepper adds its product into the mix without making the video seem too marketing-focused or losing any of the off-beat humor.
More importantly, it doesn’t look like an ad. I mean, it’s a man who looks like Steve Urkel and has a voice like Al Green…and they splash a squirrel with chocolate.
I don’t get that part, but it’s the kind of humor that spreads like wildfire on the internet, and the kind of humor that marketers too often ignore because they want to talk about their product, its benefits and all those boring things that make consumers ignore them.
Dr Pepper recognized the traction that Tay Zonday was getting, saw a confluence of interest and asked him to do a video. They gave him a lot of freedom for the video production and it shows.
Which is surely why so many people are watching it.
Y&R is the agency of record for Dr Pepper, but, wouldn’t you know it, they were not involved in this. At all. Good job, guys.
I am traveling this morning and expect that posting will be slow…I am excited to be on this trip though the account manager on the job has a relationship with this group of clients that sounds an awful lot like the one Agency Tart’s account manager has:
“THIS MEETING IS AT 11:30 TOMORROW AND I NEED YOU THERE. This client DOES NOT like me. PLEASE LET ME KNOW ASAP IF I NEED TO RESCHEDULE!!! THANKS-”
Luckily, I am usually really pleasant after having been on a plane for four hours…
I am all about the environment…but I am not all about bad advertising, whether it’s for a good cause or not. Like this public service ad by Stark Communications, a publisher out of Bangalore, India:
You are a publisher. You want people to read your books and magazines, you want more advertising revenue and that means that you want ads printed…maybe not PSAs, but you want people to read ads and to have more paper laying about – it’s your entire business.
The line is cute and all, but you’re fooling nobody.
Stark is like a girl I used to work with who was good at posturing like she was greener than thou while driving around the corner to get lunch every day in her SUV. She didnt’ want to be better for the environment herself, she just wanted everyone else to be. Stark doesn’t want you to use less of the paper that they produce, just less of the other paper.
Very classy.
[CORRECTION: Though Stark World, the publisher, owns Stark Communications, the ad agency, this print ad was the sole work and responsibility of the agency. Which changes things at least slightly - sure, it's still an ad printed on paper talking about using less paper, but getting the good work out, it could be argued, is worth it - and definitely puts Stark's heart in the right place. As their owner commented in the comments section. Apologies to all for the mis-attribution.]
It’s award season again, and I’m already gearing up to not win at the One Show for yet another year in a row.
I don’t think that awards are the end all, be all of this advertising thing, especially for a guy like me who, because of my agency and the clients I work on, does precious little pure brand advertising on clients that appeal to an Upscale Urban 30-something White Male Hipster.
That said, I would still like to win something.
Not any award, of course, because, let’s face it, there are a lot of crappy award shows out there. Just like I wouldn’t drive slowly down the Sunset Strip to show off a Yugo, I wouldn’t enter or care to win an award at a second-rate show (now we’re getting into Groucho Marx, “I don’t want to be a member of any club that would have me” territory…and I’m okay with that).
Apparently, this kind of attitude is not universally held.
George Parker at AdScam calls out an award show whore: “Piyush Pandey, executive chairman and national creative director, Ogilvy, India South Asia, has been named jury president of the second Dubai Lynx Awards. Pandey will preside over every category.” And no doubt award himself the Diamond Camel in every category. Fuck, just what we need, another awards show.”
This new award show may or may not be a vehicle for Pandley’s own vanity, but the Diamond Camel statue sounds pretty cool…
We are still working on this new agency website thing, though hopefully not too much longer. We plan to launch for the first of the year. Which is not a moment too soon.
If it happens.
I am currently on the third iteration of writing this website and Bozo the Clown has now tasked me with making the copy more serious, more business-like (a week after telling me that we needed to show off our personality a little more…sigh). That is okay, I guess, though it’s not really the personality of this agency. Also, I worry that writing the site so it is too business-like will mean that it just becomes another website full of meaningless marketing generalities.
There are enough of those around. And, to paraphrase Adomatica, “one should hire agencies who refuse glittering generalities—who are skeptical of assumption, hyperbole and preconception.”
And have a little personality.
Like the website for Toy, which I have always liked for its simplicity, ease of use and engaging copy that conveys the company’s personality without being silly:
Too bad Toy’s website is so hard to find through a search engine…
If there is one blog that will pick up on negativity in the midst of euphoria, it’s The Daily (Ad) Biz: Tribble Ad Agency is ripping on Minneapolis agency Olson + Company because of their webpage design. Or, rather, their SEO which “they either don’t care about… or they have no clue about.”
That is certainly a counter-balance to glowing profiles here, here and, of course, here.
An Olson staffer responds that the agency is the first hit for a Google search of “olson” which, to Tribble, is all well and good, but they are non-existent in a search for “advertising agency.”
As Tribble says:
“SEO is more than ‘ranking for your domain name” it includes keyword researching, finding out what the clients needs are.. and ranking them for it…
Ranking Oracle for the word “Oracle” isn’t the challenge.. it’s ranking it for “database”
Ranking KBToy Store for “KBtoy store” wasn’t hard … it was ranking it for “toy store”
I think you get the point… you need to rank for the industry and work that you do to generate a positive ROI…”
Though Olson’s Flash-designed website hampers it in terms of searchability of its content (like if a prospective client wanted to find the agency that did that great launch of Phillips UV vodka, as an example relevant to Olson), does it really need to rank on “advertising agency” as much as KB Toys might for “toy store”?
Is any prospective client doing an agency search by Googling “ad agency” and then calling the top shops? Is any prospective client searching for an agency by searching any general Google terms?
I think that Tribble is being far too hard on Olson and other agencies.
Tribble is being especially hard on Olson because the main point of their, and any, agency website is to impress potential clients with hot design – and Flash is the best way to catch the eye with cool design and motion. If you are not worried about people searching for you with general terms, why make the trade-off away from a Flash-heavy site?
I am not saying that agencies should completely ignore SEO or that Olson has a fantastic site, but rather that an agency website has different objectives than other sites – searchability just is not as critical as showing off your design.
The incumbent, Fallon, Minneapolis, was not invited to defend yet, as Agency Spy reports, Ministry of Tourism Senior Director of Communications Nalini Bethel said that no one should slam Fallon. “If you looked at Bahamavention as a campaign in and of itself, you have to look at the objectives that we wanted to achieve with that campaign, and when somebody calls it a failure they don’t even know what the objective was.”
So…the campaign was such a raging success at meeting its objectives that the agency responsible was fired and not even invited to defend?
I was never a fan of the Bahamavention campaign, but of course I don’t know what the objectives were:
I do know, however, that if the Ministry of Tourism were happy with the campaign then Fallon would still have the account.
There are lots of things that poison client-agency relationships – things like turnover at the agency, personality clashes, new management at the client, mistakes by the account team, creative that the franchisees (or ministers) personally don’t like and so on and so forth. But none of those things, on their own, are enough to lose the account if the work is effective.
But work that doesn’t sell alone is enough to lose the account.
Whether the account loss was due to ineffective work or due to a combination of other factors, I don’t know definitively…though it is interesting that Fallon landed the account because of the design work of now spun-off Duffy and reading between the lines makes me think that it was a combination of factors.
Whatever the reason, this is another body blow to Fallon, not because the account is especially large but because it is cringe-worthy how quickly accounts are scuttling out of the place. What client would want to park their account there now when so many others have jumped ship?
Some good news this morning: Olson + Company, one of my favorite shops in Minneapolis, has won AOR duties for (the unattractively named) Fifth Third Bank.
Fifth Third spends about $30 million in measured media and is the third win for Olson in a 60-day stretch that also saw it win creative chores on Allen-Edmonds shoes and Starkey Laboratories’ hearing aids. They are on a roll.
And it couldn’t happen to a better agency (I am not just saying this because I am thinking about sending my book their way…at least not ONLY because I am thinking about sending my book their way).
They do great work that goes beyond traditional advertising, their recent win record speaks for itself, especially in the current Minneapolis climate, and I am impressed by how they get this webbernet thing.
According to AdFreak, “’tis the season for luxury car commercials that make the non-rich feel horrible.”
Which, when you read further and realize that he is angry that some people have the means to give expensive luxury cars to others as gifts, really just sounds like sour grapes. Not that I give or have (or will) get an expensive luxury car as a gift, but I don’t mind that others do.
It’s their money. As long as they made it legally, I don’t care that they have it.
As long as they spend it on things that I advertise, I don’t care how excessive they may be.
And even if they don’t spend their money on something that I advertise, I am not all that bothered because this is America and I am not one to tell people what to do with their own money. It may not be what I would do with it (I would spend it on clients’ products, beer and crayons mainly), but who really cares?
It always fascinates me that advertisers, of all people, will so actively disdain consumers’ purchase behavior. Guys, we WANT them to have sometimes impulsive purchases. We NEED them to (occasionally) indulge by buying things they don’t really need. Our GOAL is to make people buy brands. So when they do, why do we rip on them?
As if people in the business are any different.
I love cars. Always have. Should I have the disposable income, perhaps one day I will treat myself:
This is one of my favorite auto print ads ever. The photography and art direction is fantastic, the headline is one of my very favorite and the car just happens to be one of those really expensive cars that is so hot that it seems completely worth it.
Not being an art director, I have a great appreciation for what they do. I self-servingly blog that great copy is what makes an ad while recognizing that, as the Denver Egoist puts it, art directors have the inherently harder, more time-consuming job.
Especially when art directors are stuck having to make an ad look hot with limited means. Like using only a CD of client-approved images. Yet, somehow they do it.
This outdoor ad by Circle One for Sunoco has apparently been so popular that it is regularly torn down from gas stations and other locations and put up for sale on eBay. That is the sign of a good ad:
Oh, and the ad was done with just a few images provided by the client. And some cool Photoshop brushes.
I have worked with clients that demand One Show-quality work without wanting to pay for more than a few hours of creative time and with no hope for a photo shoot. There were times when we were lucky if they would send an eps logo and spring for some royalty-free images on Shutterstock. Which at least kept me busy as we would inevitably gravitate toward copy-driven ads. So I had that going for me. Which was nice.
But must be maddening for art directors.
Minneapolis-based Group One did a complete branding campaign, including packaging, advertising and in-store for Constellation Wines’ Twin Fin brand with elements from one stock photography CD:
Oh, and they didn’t buy out the art so if you’re interested in re-creating this very cool design for your nascent wine brand, it’s all yours.
They would probably deserve it for being so cheap.
