As cuts consume publicly funded art projects, there is great scope for advertisers to become patrons of the arts during the age of austerity.
Canon (for their 'Bring Colour to Life' campaign) employed the biochemist cum photographer Linden Gledhill to create a series of his sound sculptures, which are high definition 3D videos of paint dancing to sound vibrations. The results are truly beautiful.
The following ball of friendly fun is an ad (albeit jolly well hidden) for Swisscom tv. As my predecessor remarked after watching it, we've seen some similar stuff before, but this is a much classier effort.
Feed a photo of 10 friends into the website, and it casts them in a personalised horror movie trailer. Then of course you publish it on your social networking site and round the merry-go-round it goes. It takes just the right period of time to do, with a satisfying payoff. In terms of participation, this is an intimate way of encouraging groups of friends to take part in what you are doing.
I did one with some people from my book club. Check it out.
Before web 2.0 the world of anonymous scrawlings was reserved for the men's lavatory. Now there is barely a page online that can't support some sort of anonymous comment; some funny, some banal, some abusive. But does this online platform for opinion encourage people to carry that online right into the real world? As far as I'm concerned, this piece of graffiti is as brilliant as any viral video I've seen for a long time.
'This car has an enormous engine', 'now with super navigation system that will help you locate your self esteem', 'airbags to stop you dying!'. What luck that none of these tired tropes fought their way in to the new Megane campaign. Using a now popular documentary style narrative for their advert, Renault build upon their fond telling of crosschannel cultural divides. It is an endearing and cheeky way of maintaining the entente cordiale.
Meet Claude, a diminutive Cote D'Azurian who travels to Gisburn, Lancashire to inject some joie de vivre into the abject tedium of the locale.
Interestingly they are one of the only car manufacturers at the moment doing integrated brand advertising, rather than plunging money into tactical press; with a wonderful microsite that amongst other things provides psychometric testing to see how much joy you have compared to the sickeningly gleeful Claude.
This is my first post on this blog as the pretender to to Tom's role as Saatchi's arbiter elegantiarum, and in an effort to create a seamless transition I refer to one of the short films recently mentioned on his Nokia post.
'Dot' is a 1''37' film produced for Nokia by Nick Park's Aardman Films and uses a Nokia N8 phone with a microscope lens attached. It is billed as the world's smallest ever stop motion film, and the results are impressive. Stop motion is the Lazarus of film making making a comeback every couple of years, but with such advanced technology available, why do we keep coming back to this old method of animation? Firstly, it is precisely because of the new opportunities opened up by advances in the peripheral technology that keep the style coming, with digital cameras significantly easing the load of the stop motion animator. But to me this is secondary to the fact that stop motion is a genre fraught with restrictions, and that it is these limitations that give it its power to create truly original work. Sometimes the seemingly limitless options afforded by digital effects actually stifle creativity instead of stimulating it. It is the restriction of the technique that gives the film life, and makes it this example as impressive and original as it is. What you inevitably are left with is innovative and displays real craftmanship, like in this ad for Kindle from earlier this year.
We now have an exciting new insight manager who, despite resolutely failing to be called Tom like his predecessors, is nonetheless an interesting chap who will be taking on the majority of the blogging from now on. His name is Chris.
Make him feel welcome.
This new work from Nokia and Wiedens is an example of niche DIY/hacking culture becoming mainstream. "Hacking" products from furniture to Google has been on the up the last couple of years, but it tends to remain unsupported or discouraged by the brands themselves. It is arguably a dangerous move to suggest the best thing about your product is that people can improve themselves, but nonetheless interesting to see from such a global brand. Clearly Nokia know they need to do something interesting to regain the momentum from Apple and Google.
There are a lot of brands out there attempting to reflect back values at their target audience (Koppaberg, Converse, Nokia?). This presentation asks why brands have become obsessed with stalking their audience and collecting information on their likes and dislikes, rather than taking time to discover something about themselves. Interesting thoughts; plus there is a bonus slide featuring Xzibit!
This is a great presentation on why things go viral. We particularly like the insight that a lot of content passing is by bored workers, and the targetting of maniacs. Give it a read.
Brands used to be confident and ballsy; shouting their slogans from the rooftops. They had jingles and proclaimed they were the best you could get. Recently though many seem to be almost embarrassed to be centre stage, and there are a host of example of brands hiding behind either irony or invisibility.
One way to attract savvy consumers who reject outright marketing, is to step out of the frame completely. "Branded Content" is becoming more popular, and it also seems to be getting less "branded"- such as Gatorade Replay, Orbit or Pepsi Refresh Everything. In these examples the brand is very much a minor player in a larger show. By not intruding the brand becomes part of something genuinely engaging.
The alternative though seems to be irony. Old Spice is in many ways a very traditional campaign where pack shots and product benefits are spoken directly into the camera, but the large dose of post-modern irony heaped on top makes the whole thing seem more knowing and wise. The caption under the original youtube video was "We're not saying this body wash will make your man into a romantic millionaire jet fighter pilot, but we are insinuating it." Similarly we came across this (on the 3 Billion blog), where a collaboration between music and a brand is prefaced by a self-depreciating warning that they are trying to sell you something. This is not something we would have seen even just a year ago.
It is early days, but it is certainly a trend to look out for, as many brands are forced to question what their role is in a world which is increasingly cynical of marketing messages.
Tippex, the product we all forgot existing, just popped back onto the radar with this excellent piece of Youtube content. It is a great use of annotations but is so much more. I will leave it at that and invite you to give it a go. Enjoy your weekends!
Arcade Fire have been consistently innovative in the way they have approached marketing. They had a Terry Gilliam directed live show, succesfully promoted the 'Suburbs' on Twitter and for their previous album had this great website. Their latest offering, as if you and everyone else in the world hadn't already seen it, is a personalised online video. It is not only great to see a band trying something new, but it is also a fantastic piece of advertising for Chrome, which I have resisted downloading for months... until now.
This interactive piece from the New York Times tells the stories of readers who volunteered to unplug themselves from technology. Along with the continuing debate over whether connection makes us stupid, and the questioning of Facebook's future, this is a hot topic at the moment. For more links check our last article on the subject.
There are no shortage of videos, presentations and the latest bandwagon, "infographics", showing how massive the internet is. The "What the..." series was one of the first though, and is still the best. Here is the latest installment, including such unbelievable numbers as:
- 500bn minutres spent on Facebook per month (150bn last year)
- 24 hours of video uploaded per minute to youtube (double last year)
- 1/3 women aged 18-34 check Facebook immediately upon waking up
Its been a while since our last post but holidays are over and we are back to it. First off we have been noticing a lot of niche web cultures leaking into the mainstream. Alongside a slew of recent articles digging into the online message board 4chan, we noticed this recent video from Microsoft, featuring Yosemitebear of Double-Rainbow fame. Although there's a risk that a big brand involving itself will be viewed with cynicism, so far the response seems to have been good. Microsoft have certainly come a long way since their last unintentional viral hit.
Posts
