Harvey Marco is getting settled into his new job at JWT here in the city and though it is early, it sounds like the self-styled biggest agency in the country has pulled off quite the coup in enticing Marco back east.
From what I hear, the creative team is happy. The clients like him. And the man has a trail of success that goes back years.
Of course, even coming from Los Angeles, he is going to be in for a bit of sticker/culture shock…just check out this article in the Wall Street Journal about how the recent economic turmoil has hit Fairfield County, CT (where Marco lives):
Local Democrat Ned Lamont, in one fell swoop compared Greenwich’s money woes to the Japan malaise, Asian tsunami and the New Orleans flood.
“It really is a financial tsunami, and it could go either way,” said the multimillionaire telecommunications mogul who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006. “It took Japan 20 years to recover from their buying binge. How long does it take us to work through excessive leverage? That could take years not months. This is our Katrina.”
That’s right. He compared the recent economic issues to Katrina.
I know that a few big investors lost a lot of money (like $700 million dollars of money by one guy alone), but I struggle to see how that is in any way comparable to the swath of destruction and misery that Hurricane Katrina wrought in Florida, Alabama and Louisiana.
Marco, an unflashy regular guy, may need some time to adjust to a place like Fairfield County, a place where coddled rich folk consider losing money as tantamount to a large-scale people-killing natural disaster.
That said, it’s nice to know that you can still make a pretty darn good living doing this advertising thing.
The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences has officially entered the modern world…they have recognized that advertising doesn’t just exist on TV. Bottoms up to that. Or, seriously, bottoms up to whatever happens to be happening at the moment because it’s Advertising Week here in New York and everyone’s already drunk so why not celebrate DDB/Chicago’s Emmy win?
Exactly, let’s celebrate away, and not just because it’s a good ad:
Let’s celebrate because it’s nice to know that a spot doesn’t have to air on something as passe as television to bring home an award for sweet, advertising-y goodness.
In many ways that is debatable…I mean, creating ads to sell something like beer, which is all about fun and image and occasionally taste, is considerably easier than selling your classic parity product. Sometimes you wish that there was a degree of difficulty score multiplier at these award shoes to recognize the truly great work, the work on tough products, difficult brands and with challenging clients.
But there isn’t. So at least it’s good to know that they’re not restricting awards to simple TV spots anymore.
Thank God for bureaucrats, those unelected, unaccountable apparatchiks who always seem to screw things up for regular people who just want to keep on keepin’ on.
Or, in this case, know that their meat is safe from Mad Cow Disease.
Not genius, perhaps, but certainly a competitive advantage, new news and something that might drive an incremental purchase or two. After all, who wants beef from a company that can’t say for sure that its cows don’t have the disease?
But, thanks to the USDA not only can Creekstone Farms not advertise that they are Mad Cow Disease free, they can’t even test all of their cows. See, the USDA only tests about 1% of cows for the potentially deadly disease and if Creekstone were to advertise that all of its cows were tested the larger meat packers are scared that they would have to test all of their cows too. So they pressured the USDA to block Creekstone’s plan.
It is understandable, considering the rareness of the disease, that the USDA would not do more testing.
However, to block a company that wanted to test more from actually doing so…it’s simply inexplicable.
I’m not much of a gamer…I don’t even own a gaming system, though at times I have considered buying an old Nintendo off of eBay. I never had a Nintendo as a kid and figure that if I am going to start as may as well start where everyone else did and slowly move myself up through the Sega Genesis to N64, Playstation and then to Xbox 360 or Wii or something.
Or I could get a girlfriend.
Boom.
At any rate, when I came across DraftFCB’s new spot for EA’s Red Alert 3 I had to keep my lack of gaming knowledge in mind. Because I hadn’t the slightest idea of what the fuck was going on in the spot:
And then, unlike the Bob Garfield’s of the world who would have used his lack of understanding of this ad as an excuse to decry sexism or racism or stupidism or whateverism with the usual pompous prose and over-long column, I did some research into the game itself.
It did not make me change my mind about not being a gamer.
It did make me change my mind about the ad.
The whole music video-based trailer remix idea isn’t totally original, but it’s hard to ding DraftFCB for that…I mean, most ads follow a similar convention with the difference coming in a better idea of how to express the brand within said convention.
And I am inclined to like how they take advantage of this convention because, based on what I have learned about this game, the celebrities featured represent characters in the game saying phrases that someone who has already played the game would be familiar with. The music is apparently from the original game as well. And they threw in some scenes of the game being played for good measure.
Though, based on my ill-informed stereotypes, I imagine that the gamer-azzi who have played the first two versions of the game will march like lemmings to the store to purchase this third version and don’t need advertising to help them on their way, I imagine that this ad does a good job of getting them excited for its release…especially with the cues it takes from the original version. Sort of an insider wink at those who have been there from the beginning.
And people love insider winks. It makes them feel like they’re part of a group, which is even more intoxicating a feeling than heroin.
Or so I hear.
Also, I like the celebrity babe cameos (looking at you Jenny McCarthy and Kelly Hu!) because for those of us non-gamers out there who would otherwise be confused by this ad, we are instead distracted by all the smokin’ hot babes and the driving techno beat.
In the end it’s a pretty fun, interesting in an unchallenging kind of way, gets the current base of consumers excited for the game launch kind of spot that does what it’s supposed to do.
It’s a strange time…most economic indicators are solid, including GDP growth and a low unemployment rate, yet we’re in the middle of a mark-to-market regulation-caused investment bank meltdown, the media has been running the storyline of recession for almost a year and consumer confidence is low.
Everyone is expecting the worst.
So how do you sell stuff, especially luxury items and stuff that people don’t need, in an environment like this, an environment where people are retrenching and watching what they spend?
Harley-Davidson, whose motorcycles are primarily indulgence purchases by middle aged white dudes if my anecdotal evidence can be trusted, has a new spot out that shows how to sell value in a tough economy…and how to do it creatively, thanks to agency Carmichael Lynch:
It certainly fits the renegade feel of the brand and is the sort of spot that, should you be the type of person into thrash metal, powerlifting and other testosterone-overdrive activities, you might pass on (or at least tell your friends about)…yet the whole concept is based around a value proposition and the end line, the strangely powerful “less than $18 per pound” talks pure price.
When was the last time a price spot made an emotional connection with the target?
Not to be that guy, but I think that you mean that it has achieved the objective of advertising, not lived up to the definition of it.
But I digress…because our commenter goes on to say “maybe you should watch it again and also check the stock market as Pepsi is destroying coke one day at a time thanks to Arnell’s ad campaign.”
The commenter brings up a good issue…just what is good advertising? It is the kind of creative-driven work that wins awards and worms its way into pop culture? Or is it the more prosaic work that gets results.
Not to ruin it, of course, but it is a mixture of both.
But why isn’t it the work that sells things that gets all the accolades? Those Head-On spots sure move product (albeit from a small base), and according to the commenter (if you ignore things like distribution, on-trend product, competitive pricing and retailer sell-in strategy) so do the Life Water spots. They are selling crap. So why aren’t they great ads?
Part of it is that you know great work when you see it.
And a model in a bathing suit dancing to music played by some animated geckos just isn’t great work. A great ad needs a concept and if I have to explain why, you’re just not going to get it.
The other part is that an ad campaign like Life Water’s isn’t a direct response effort aimed only at immediate short-term sales. It should be doing that yes, and it should be raising awareness of the brand and product and it should be building a pipeline of future sales by branding, etc and so on.
The final part of why ad campaigns have to do more than just sell in the short term to be great is because there are so many other things that go into immediate sales – things like distribution, on-trend product, competitive pricing, retailing sell-in strategy and others.
That is not to smirk at actually selling things but rather to explain why creativity and a concept are necessary additions to a great ad (as much as hitting the ad’s objectives are)…you can’t just greatness just by the brand’s stock price.
If I were into that sort of thing, I would marry a small agency. I love them that much.
I love the independence, the Quixote-like feeling of continually tilting at windmills (chasing after new accounts, pitching against big, established shops, making a name for the agency in a world chock full of agencies…), and the knowledge that you’re doing it for more than the bottom line of a faceless holding company.
That love hasn’t stopped me from working at holding company-owned agencies, of course.
It happens.
Anyway, one of the most interesting thing about small agencies is how they advertise, promote and otherwise sell themselves. Agency Park & Co, “internationally renowned in the greater Phoenix area, created a YouTube video and, despite the immediate yawns about another YouTube video, it doesn’t suck:
And anyway, where do you put a video these days? That’s right. On YouTube.
It surprises me that there is or ever was a question that the “firing” of Jerry Seinfeld by Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, Microsoft’s agency of record, was anything but a pre-planned and calculated PR stunt to generate maximum buzz for their agency and new campaign. Oh, uh, and yeah, it’s nice that Microsoft got some play, too. I mean, didn’t anyone read Bogusky’s book Hoopla!.
What? Eh? Oh.
Okay, so maybe not that many people read it…but I did. And their M.O. is to pull something like this, pretend that it’s real until there is a big media swell behind it and then pull out something…like an event or a website or a sneak visit by Jerry Seinfeld like two months into the “new” campaign or something.
Not that there is anything wrong with the way that they roll.
It’s not like it has been unsuccessful for them.
But seriously people, it’s not like they haven’t done anything like this before. And really, after it’s happened more than once it’s probably time to realize that, maybe, they’re kind of a one-trick pony, trying to pull this Hoopla! stuff over on consumers of every brand that they work on.
And I say this as a fan of CPB.
Albeit as a fan that is kind of tired of the pointless yammering of “they’re fucked” and “they screwed up” and “did Seinfeld really get fired?” For God’s sake, if you’ve been paying attention to the agency you know that it’s all part of their master plan.
I ripped on the Obama campaign’s laughably backfiring attempt at an attack ad on John McCain a few days back, but in the spirit of advertising-focused non-partisanship that characterizes this blog, I did want to bring up a potential marketing masterstroke that could save the faltering Obama from defeat.
The masterstroke?
That much-maligned 3am text message to announce Joe Biden as his vice presidential pick.
Though the McCain bounce may prove to be a convention-fired and Palin-powered temporary boost, should the race stay as tight as it currently is up to election day that text message could come in handy…because Obama has one heck of a database of likely voters that it can reach out to via text message of phone call.
Oh, and the database is already sorted by area code. So the Obama campaign can send out get out the vote messages targeted by district that could boost turnout on election day.
I have a problem with the AdAge Power 150 list of top advertising bloggers. The list is crap.
The general idea behind it is a good; the problem is that the execution of the idea falls far short and instead of being a nice tool to be able to find top-drawer ad blogs with well written, interesting and regularly updated content about advertising it has become a mish-mash of SEO whores, PR, marketing and other blogs with a smattering of blogs about advertising.
I want a place that captures the top advertising blogs. And only the top advertising blogs.
A more philosophical problem with the Power 150 list is its crude ranking system, which is rightly skewed by Tribble Ad Agency. Beyond the fact that it doesn’t work, since when was traffic and incoming links a major determinant of quality? Oh, right. It isn’t.
I want the top blogs chosen based on quality of content, not traffic or SEO-manipulatable things like incoming links.
The Power 150 reads like the average blogroll…there is just a whole ton of rough that I have to wade through for every diamond that’s stuck in there. Why just list the name of the blog? Especially on the Power 150 when the blog could be a place to post all of the ads from Europe, or a dead link or a PR blog or any number of random sites that I don’t want to go to.
I want a list that actually tells me the what and the why about what is listed.
I could go on and on, as I am sure that the regular reader already knows…but instead of continuing to complain that there is nothing out there that meets my needs, I did something about it. I lit a match instead of cursing the darkness (and before it burns out I think that we should all hug and sing kumbaya).
