Friends and valued readers I have good news! My oldest sister has just given birth to my parents’ first grandchild, making me a first-time uncle and very excited about this whole situation…so excited that I have trolled the archives of my favorite ads to express said excitement via commercial:
The good news, via this Citibank ad by Fallon, is that I have a lot more blessings to count.
The bad news is that I will be taking the week to spend time with my family back in Minneapolis and don’t plan to do much in the way of posting.
Like most agency people, I pride myself on being able to see through advertising and remain unswayed by it. Sure, I will occasionally make purchases of products because the ads are good, but more out of professional respect than actually having been swayed by the message.
Sometimes, though, even I give in and fall for the sugary sweet promises in ads.
Being a little bit hungover today from a random Wednesday night out, all I wanted was fast food. And even since the office-themed Burger King campaign from Cripsin, Porter + Bogusky there has only been one fast food joint that I will stop at. And, since this spot in particular, only one thing to order:
I love the Spicy Tendercrisp to this day and can only thank the boys (and girls) in Miami for their great work that still has me coming back to the well.
Euro RSCG has applied their talent to something more than hawking consumer goods and to good effect, too. The Chicago agency has developed a new identity and print campaign for the Lost Boys Rebuilding Southern Sudan organization.
The organization helps to rebuild schools in southern Sudan, where the Christian south has been ravaged (and its people raped and pillaged) in a long-running religious war against them by Muslim northerners operating under government auspices. The war has ended and the Khartoum regime’s murderous impulses have moved to Darfur in the west, but there is still much to do for the south to get back on its feet.
It’s nice to see that the work, which includes branding and supporting website and marketing materials is of a quality equal to the cause.The new creative debuted with an event attended by Former President Bill Clinton as well as celebrities Brad Pitt and Lance Armstrong who were presented with a branded t-shirt that represents the campaign (and is available online for a $100 donation).
Many times in agencies the best creative comes from pro bono work on campaigns that do good works – it’s easy to see why, what with the passion that can be felt for a cause like this – and this work from Euro definitely fits that mold.
And even worse because they do it under the guise of “responsibility.”
Liberty Mutual has a website that showcases how they are super-duper responsible in the world around them. To quote from their site:
We believe that the more people think and talk about responsibility, and even debate what it means, the more it can affect how we live our daily lives.
This is airy nonsense, especially because this talking about responsibility includes dredging up a man’s death a month after it happened (and was covered in the New York Times, you couldn’t miss it) and using it on your corporate site as a way to drive traffic and interest in your sales-driving project.Liberty Mutual’s desperate cry for relevance and eyeballs is simple transparent greed wrapped in righteous language about responsibility.
Responsibility is leaving the man alone. Responsibility is not using a man’s death to sell things. Responsibility is not blaming blog/bloggers for a death just so you can drive traffic to your website.
And perhaps, in this small way, together, we can make the world just a little better.
The world would be a little better if this site apologized publicly and just let it die. There is no excuse for a company to use this situation for their own financial benefit.
Unless they were being irresponsible, of course.
My thoughts on Mr Tilley’s tragic end are here and they haven’t changed. Nor has my position on those who would try to pin his death on a simple blog post.
To quote Tribble Ad Agency, who broke the story, on the subject: ” It’s wrong to blame a news outlet for what happens by reporting the news – it sets a bad precedent .. next time something happens that deserves to be reporting, we will have all the news outlets sweep it under a rug. From now on only happy news is allowed to be reported.”
Hal Riney, whose ad genius and voice made him a legend, passed away from cancer yesterday at age 75.
There is not a lot to say that hasn’t been said: he was a good man, was excellent at this advertising thing and I still look to his campaigns for inspiration. He did great work.
I like reader emails a lot and when I got one today from a woman who is finishing up her final year at a top-25 university and is frustrated at how hard it is to find a job in advertising I had to address it.
She wrote: Everywhere I look, people are only interested in SENIOR account executives or SENIOR brand strategists. Is there another way I’m supposed to work my way up?? How do I get a job at, say, Fallon, or Carmichael Lynch, if they’re not hiring entry-level workers?
The first job is always the toughest…especially if, like the e-mailer, you have not been able to snag an internship in an agency.
Advertising itself throws up some barriers:
1. Only a few agencies are very large which means that they don’t have the same outreach programs or need for entry-level workers as the corporate blue chips
2. Smaller agencies are hard to find if you don’t know about the business and they are unlikely to come to a job fair or post on monster.com
3. Advertising is an insular business in which networking is critical…which means that if you are coming without background it’s hard to even get people to look at you no matter what school you went to
4. Lots of people want to work in advertising and the more competitive it is, the more difficult it is
5. Minneapolis is not exactly living the high-life advertising-wise. With layoffs at Fallon and Martin Williams inflating the pool of experienced ad rats willing to work, shops like Colle + McVoy, Periscope and Olson that are hiring have their pick of people who know more than a college grad
So what do you do?
Be relentless. Plaster the town with your resume and other information, follow-up with actual phone calls as much as possible (while being polite about it), go to networking events when you are home on breaks, and maybe try something I haven’t mentioned…(like looking in Chicago or New York?)
Droga5 is the agency of record for Rhapsody and is in the midst of rolling out its first campaign for the brand, starting with this spot that has been running in very heavy rotation:
Agency Spy may love the band in the soon-to-run newest spot in the campaign, but it doesn’t matter how much you like the music if the rotation is too heavy. I like Sara Bareilles, but if I see this current spot one more time I am going to throw my Wii controller into my TV like this spot that didn’t run in such a heavy rotation on the channels that I watch:
The poor media rotation is the fault of ZenithOptimedia, Rhapsody’s media planning agency.
In terms of the Rhapsody campaign, it sort of reminds me of purgatory…not bad…not good…
I get the whole “make music a part of your life” idea that goes through the spot but, whether it is the technology of buying and playing music through your TV that sort of seems like doing it through my computer and anyway Apple TV got there first, or whether it is the “band in your living room” concept that has been done before, I’m not wowed by the spot. It wins on production value and a catchy song.
Sometimes that’s enough, but it isn’t really anything to get jazzed about.
Both Adfreak and Adrants have the goods on the Fox Business Network’s ad poking fun at CNBC, specifically Jim Cramer, for telling people to keep their money in Bear Stearns just before it cratered.
“Don’t move your money from there…that’s being silly…”
Say what you will about Fox, but this is opportunism, quick-thinking and vivid comparison all wrapped up in an ad that probably doesn’t make you change your mind about the network in general but at least is a pretty funny slap at a so-called expert.
What qualifies one to be an “expert” anyway?
I was out in the Village this weekend and ran into a kid I went to college with who now happens to be a producer at CNN. He has specific responsibilities for their business programs and yet has no business or economics background. He even admitted to just learning what options were but, in the course of explaining to me, mixed up “put” and “call.” But he is in a position to determine what is newsworthy or not, who is an expert or not, what makes the news and what doesn’t. Only in America is this possible.
Rant aside, if Fox is able to show actual expertise/credibility while the other networks make high-profile mistakes, more power to them for advertising that fact.
Even though the comparison to Neville Chamberlain is a little ridiculous.
Chamberlain would never have kept his money in a failing, illiquid investment bank.
Though an ebullient Zonday went a little far when he described the award show as “the new Emmys…the next Oscars…the next People’s Choice Awards” when it clearly is more a low-budget American Idol, it’s an understandable overstatement. After all, he had just won.
And he had won, in a very post-modern way, for a spoof of his own video:
This video saw him to victory over such other viral video hits as I Got A Crush On Obama and Chris Crocker’s tears of pain over Britney Spears…not quite Oscar-level competition, but enough to give him his fifteen minutes and to give Dr Pepper a huge marketing victory on the back of a viral video that is rumored to have cost around $200,000 all told.
Energy BBDO, Chicago has found another dirty mouth for Orbit gum to clean up, this time targeting “America’s first supermodel” Janice Dickinson:
Using supermodels to sell stuff is not a new strategy, but this one finds a way to have it come off as good clean fun. As opposed to, say, this spot:
It helps that Ms Dickinson is a supermodel in the more classic sense than any of the other, more modern senses such as the “I will have sex with you and all your friends if you buy this product” sense or the always popular “I haven’t eaten in eighteen days despite making millions of dollars” sense.
It also helps that the Orbit campaign is strategically on target, that the British accent woman a perfect mnemonic for the brand (and has gained pop culture traction) and that this vignette is a relatively amusing extension of the campaign. It’s a good, solid ad from the boys in Chicago.
Oh, who am I kidding? I just love that 70s bathing suit…
