I still think that things with BMW aren’t likely to end well for the folks in Texas.
The first issue is the work, which can only be described as uninspired. Sure, not everything that Fallon did for the brand was as good as the BMW Films or as ads like this:
But the work was good. GSD&M’s hasn’t been.
Beyond the work and the creative espionage situation, there has been turmoil on the account with Lee Newman, the VP/Group Account Director who had been brought in from McKinney to land the business, heading out for Weiden + Kennedy Amsterdam earlier this year. Oh, and that good work that I referenced that came out of Fallon? Yeah…Lee was the driving force behind it from the account side.
And now he’s gone.
But it’s not all bad down at GSD&M…they’ve debuted their first work for Popeyes, an account that they recently landed. So that’s good.
GSD&M has brought the brand back to the Southern roots with a “Louisiana Kitchen” slogan and are talking a lot about their quality (ho-hum) and process (relatively interesting, as far as these things go). Advertising for fast food brands is notoriously uncreative, but considering the limitations of the category and the difficulty working with franchisees who aren’t professionals and who want to use advertising to drive short-term sales, I think that GSD&M has done a good job:
I am just on the cusp of old enough to remember Max Headroom, the spokesperson for the failed (but well-advertised) New Coke. He also made a cameo in one of the Back to the Future movies and, since I watched those with my brother maybe 15,000 times in the Eighties alone, I got familiar with him.
He was pretty cool, what with his computer generated (!) image and electronically sa-sa-sampled voice.
He is still cool, come to think of it.
I am not the only one who thinks so…I checked out the website of New York agency Hanft Raboy and they clearly have an affinity for him as well. Their intro animation is nothing less than a re-cast Max Headroom, complete with the same voice and static-y, cutting out visual style.
I like their work for Match.com and don’t have a beef with their agency, but I just can’t decide about their into animation. Whether to like it or hate it.
On the one hand, Max Headroom is funny, kitschy and pretty interesting. On the other hand, agencies are supposed to be around originality and they totally ripped off the idea of the first thing that people coming to their website see. One the other hand (apparently I have three hands), if you take a post-modern view of things nothing is original and they are repurposing a good idea in a new way to do something different so it’s acceptable and even cool. On the other hand (now four hands), it’s awfully close to Max Headroom, so close that a blogger is commenting on it.
The verdict: cheap rip-off of an Eighties idea that makes them seem kitschy and unserious.
I was watching the X Games back when they were actually on (for no other reason than that they were on television which happens sometimes, okay) and saw an ad for Subaru that had as good a line as I have seen in a while:
Sure the ad looks like it was cobbled together from some running footage, but it’s hard to ding them for it because I understand how budgets can be tight and you have to make do with what you have. And boy did Carmichael Lynch with a spot that not only looks like it had a concept from the beginning (even though, again, it is clearly only track footage) but hits hard with the payoff line.
Buy stock in rubber.
Boom.
I know that I can be hard on car advertising (and that car advertising can be hard on me…let’s be honest, a great deal of it is total crap), but when good work is done, good work is done. Enough said.
The dog days of summer have hit hard this August and I have been remiss in posting…I know that I have it. It’s not you, it’s me. Me and my desire to get out and enjoy the days while the weather is good…oh, and this little pinched nerve issue I’ve been having with my shoulder. It makes it less than fun to post.
There is also the situation with The Pretty Account Supervisor.
Sure, she is going to be joining the House of Biz next week and that could make things awkward, but at the same I need a date for my cousin’s wedding this weekend, everyone has fun at weddings as long as they are open bar, and if I play my cards right I think that I could really make it happen.
No bashful pining away this time around.
No, this time around it’s time to make things happen. And what with the summer formlessness giving way to the hardness of fall, the season change that is in the air is telling me that I’m doing the right thing.
It’s that time of year again I hear…back to school time. Of course, since I left school long ago and don’t have any kids the only way that I know this is by watching the advertising.
Minneapolis shop Colle + McVoy, who boast swanky new digs in the city’s warehouse district, are out with a new campaign for Taubman Malls based around, you guessed it, back to school. Continuing the trend they set with their recent work, they have built a pretty fun website, Yearbook Yourself, that lets you upload a picture and see how your yearbook photo would have evolved over the decades had you been hip to the latest trends.
Instead of my own photo, I chose Bob Garfield’s. Why not?
He’s not a bad looking cat.
I have been a big fan of Colle + McVoy’s recent interactive work and in many ways this follows suit. The design is solid, the animation quick to load and to run and the piece is interactive and surprisingly fun.
The meat of the campaign was in-mall signage and displays that showed the trends of today and which stores to find them in, so my comments on the site may be a bit nitpicky, but for the online piece I just didn’t get it right away. It demanded that I upload and adjust my picture before I got to a mall drop down and even then I didn’t really see the connection until, on a lark, I chose to click one of the store links next to the picture image and found myself in a mall locator.
Cool linking and a good idea, but it took a while to understand just what was going on.
Far be it from me to ask any agency to make the logo bigger, and this is a tough assignment since you are being asked to bring geographically different malls together under one roof and yet still make them relevant to the user, but I wouldn’t have minded a bit more explanation of just what was going on.
I’m sorry to say that it’s busy, busy, busy here at the House of Biz and I haven’t been able to follow up on this one fully, but perhaps some readers might be able to give me some more information…on the rumors that I am hearing from very reliable sources that BMW just shitcanned GSD&M.
The world wants to know. And so do I.
UPDATE: GSD&M media relations are saying unequivocally that the rumors – which have been flying around like a painted dragon (no, I don’t know what that simile is supposed to mean either) yesterday and today – are not true and they remain the unchallenged agency of record for BMW.
How is this for the plot thickening…the Pretty Account Supervisor and I were at happy hour last night with a number of other ad folks (mainly producers, which was fun even though one or two had the LA-like propensity to name drop it like it’s hot) when she casually mentioned that she was leaving her current agency for a new opportunity.
At my shop.
We had a nice, appropriate quasi-date on the weekend that seemed to bode well for a future liaison and had been sending each other cheeky emails and someecards.
No, it hasn’t affected my productivity.
But this recent development just may affect the trajectory of the (I don’t want to say relationship because 1. there isn’t one and 2. that would jinx me and 3. I’m a dude so that word is as distasteful as China’s exploitation of pre-teen gymnasts…yes, I went there and no, I don’t feel bad about doing it), er, relationship (dammit, where’s my thesaurus).
I was poking through award books yesterday, thinking to myself that there is a formula for ads that win awards…that there is a specific style and tone that always seems to do well when award season comes around. Not that there is anything wrong with that, of course, but only if, and I channel Alan Wolk here, your target isan upscale urban 30something white male hipster.
If that is your target then your award-winning ad is sure to be as effective as it is creative.
If that is not your target then perhaps the advertising is as self-serving as it is unoriginally templated to the One Show format.
I say all of this not because I don’t like the ads in the award books. I do (though, of course, I am an urban 20something white male hipster). It’s just that if an ad doesn’t hit the highlight points that please the One Show judges, it’s it isn’t the very specific type of creative that catches their eye, it’s just not going to win. Even if it is dripping with creativity beyond cool visuals and a wearily post-modern headline.
Agency Crowley Webb bought a single billboard location and ran this series of ads, a new one put up every week on the Monday, for the Irish pub Garcia’s.
The first cardinal sin of this campaign (besides being of 1989 vintage), is that it is local advertising…in Buffalo. That’s not even Manhattan. Strike one.
The second cardinal sin is one of composition – there is nothing short, punchy, pithy or oh-so-clever about the headlines, there is no compelling visual or product shot and the brand name (!) is in the headline copy. Not sexy. Strike two.
Finally, the campaign was done by a small agency…agencies like that, the ones that don’t have the budget to wine and dine the trades, that ones that the award show judges don’t care about because “they would never work there,” the ones that don’t enter every award show with thousands of entries because they can’t afford the fees and don’t have the scale anyway, agencies like that don’t often sweep the coveted creative awards shows. Strike three.
Sure, it won an Obie award.
(crickets)
Enough railing against the awards shows, the point of the post is to call out a great campaign…the creative thinking behind this, of how to use OOH, how to tell a story in a static environment and how to wrap consumers up Garcia’s is all top drawer.
Who cares if it didn’t win with the hipster judging set?
I guess that whole Subway thing didn’t work out…maybe Seth MacFarlane just got sick and tired of drawing fat Peter Griffin slavering over the tasteless processed meats and cardboard cheeses that Subway puts in their so-called sandwiches.
Either way, he’s working for a new fast food company these days.
He’s working for the king. Burger King, that is. Though numbers weren’t released, you can be sure that Burger King paid him a lot of money to animate The King in a series of spots that will run before MacFarlane’s new online show, the catchily named “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy.”
The MacFarlane-animated series of three ads will run as “preroll” ads in front of the “Cavalcade” clips and is a great example of how doing ads just isn’t considered selling out anymore.
“Cavalcade” is distributed exclusively through Google (though YouTube will have a dedicated page), served through its AdSense program, serving targeted websites with streaming video of an episode instead of a typical banner ad.
Burger King is along for the ride, and is doing it in a way that is as close to total integration with the show while still being separate.
It’s a fantastic idea…and about time, too. Crispin, Porter + Bogusky had been relatively quiet after taking the interactive portion of the account from struggling VML (not to mention that they hadn’t really hit any creative home runs on any of their brands recently)…this puts paid to rumors that the agency was too stretched to churn out their traditional level of work.
This is a great idea, a short lesson it what it means to do truly 360 cross-functional work.
Final thought: Maybe that’s why MacFarlane told Subway to shove it…they and their hack-tastic shop MMB, Boston just aren’t able to think outside their silos. Or maybe they’re just not able to think in general (the trail of evidence starts here).
Their name remains as flat as it was when I first heard it and their animation-heavy website still takes an awful lot of clicking to even get to the homepage, but they’re still sticking it to the big agencies and they’re carpet bombing the ad world with promotional material.
These guys are showing that persistence isn’t a dirty word…the point is getting noticed and they have.
Even though I am still upset that their emailed manifestos still can’t be clipped out and posted as-is on my blog.
Old World Agencies,
Enough with the gimmicks! Enough with the marketing stunts! It is a shortsighted Old World approach that does nothing to build a loyal audience.
We do not live in a time where our clients can survive on clever tricks. We live in a New World. Our clients need to build roots deep within their community. They need to build real relationships, not through flashy gimmicks, but through strong bonds that will payoff tenfold in the long run.
It takes more than “playing the part” to gain access to a community. Co-opting a membership is the main reason to be denied entry. Our clients need to be a member of their community… to be first-movers… and to enhance and make a LONG-TERM commitment to their community.
Old World Agencies, roll up your sleeves and migrate your methods to the New World. And if you think you can’t afford to change, we are here to tell you that you cannot afford not to.
With warm regard,
Inform Ventures.com
I don’t want to be rude here because I always pull for the plucky little agencies that are taking on the big guys – especially in times like these when the big guns aren’t shy about taking the $5 – $10 million accounts that are smaller agencies’ bread and butter – but has an agency ever really had anything interesting to say about itself? Woodcut visual aside, this “manifesto” could have been written by any number of shop.
That last line in particular, I think that I’ve heard more than once.
Okay, okay, so you’re not going to give away what it is that makes you really special in a mailer that you send to a blogger…I get that. And I agree with what is being said about long term bonds, genuine connections, etc and so on. But so do a lot of people and agencies.
I am still not really sure what makes these guys different…or what these “new world” tools that they use are.
I am pulling for them to make it, and they have certainly jumped the first hurdle by getting themselves noticed and all that, but they leave me feeling like I’ve just heard a lot of marketing speak that doesn’t translate into anything tangibly different or compelling.
Though I do like the woodcut images and digs at the big agencies.
