Archive for October 2007

The Guardian has published the powerpoint decks from several of the speakers who presented at their Changing Guardian Advertising Summit 2007. Full details here.

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Craig Davis, the World Wide Creative Director of JWT has his own company blog. His latest post details the most awarded TV ads made this year. There aren’t many surprises except that the quality of entries hasn’t been all that high. Here’s the list:

- Happy Dent, White
- Coke, GTA
- Dove, Evolution
- Sony Bravia, Paint
- Axe, Crashes
- Coke, Happiness Factory
- Combos, Fever
- Skittles, Rabbit
- Toyota, Humanity
- Ariston, Aqualtis

“The language of aesthetics: order, variety, contrast, symmetry, tension, balance, scale, texture, space, shape, light, shade and color. This is the language of form.”

Adland have an amazing 4 min collage of the work of Paul Rand for his posthumous induction to the One Club Hall of Fame.

Link

Another outing of poor PR work - Gawker reacts to a publicist by publishing their email and deliberately omitting their client’s name:

“I noticed that last year Gawker covered the CLMP Spelling Bee and that a Gawker photographer was in attendance last night. I was wondering if anyone from your team was covering? It was apparent that sponsor, [Redacted] Vodka, definitely added an extra element to the evening for the contestants and guests! It would be great if you could mention that contestants sipped on [Redacted] Vodka Martinis!”

Crap Email From A Publicist

Wired Magazine Editor Chris Anderson has decided to list every lazy PR person who spams his box with irrelevant messages. Listing folks from Edelman and Weber Shandwick he says:

Lazy flacks send press releases to the Editor in Chief of Wired because they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching… The following is just the last month’s list of people and companies who have been added to my Outlook blocked list. All of them have sent me something inappropriate at some point in the past 30 days. Many of them sent press releases; others just added me to a distribution list without asking.

Here’s our take on this. We hold the belief that PR is probably the only marketing discipline that can keep up with the speed and dynamism of the social media. Advertising agencies spend too much time concentrating on campaigns that stretch over time to even cope with social media and digital agencies were set up to operate just like ad agencies - they can’t react minute by minute.

PR agencies have worked day-by-day with papers and magazines for a long time now but when it comes to social media they seem to have forgotten everything the learned - out with relationship building and subtle plays and in with an ad-agency style tool: spam.

More: The Long Tail: Sorry PR people: you’re blocked

The AdEaters blog has asked Tangerine Toad to compile a list of the 10 best TV spots ever to grace the small screen. This is what he reckons:

1. VW: Snowplow
2. Apple: 1984
3. AlkaSeltzer: Spicy Meatball
4. Starbucks: Glen
5. Wendy’s: Where’s the Beef
6. Levi’s: Drugstore
7. Guardian: POV
8. Nike: If you let me play sports
9. Pepsi: Cindy Crawford
10. Guinness: Surfer

You cna watch the films and read Tangerine Toad’s comments here.

To promote the iPod Touch Apple’s agency TBWA/Chiat/Day have turned to an 18 year old Englishman named Nick Haley. He created an ad in September for the just released Touch and it was picked up in LA.

Here’s the official version:

Here’s Nick’s version:

via TUAW

Rob Walker is on a bit of a mission right now spotting ‘Counterfunctionality’ in product design. He first spotted this in wrist watches with difficult to read faces and now he spots this bookcase. Mr Walker says:

One might fairly wonder what the upside of this approach is, over, say, a perfectly stable bookshelf. To echo Jonah Berger’s point in the column, regarding watches that do a less-than-optimal job of telling you what time it is, this seems like another object whose main value is that it “provides more information” about the owner. And part of that value is that not many others will swarm in to buy the thing and water down its identity value, because most people will want a shelf that doesn’t move.

murketing » Blog Archive » More counterfunctionality?

In an article entitled ‘the Supermarket of the Struggling Artist’ in New York magazine, Arianne Cohen gets a job at Trader Joe’s in NY to join all the other aspiring Filmmakers, actors, fashion students and marial artists. She explains why you get a different attitude with the store clerks at Trader Joes:

Vinny tells me to come at midnight for a tasting party. “You’re held to a higher standard here. Unlike at Shop Rite, you need to tell customers about their food.”

I arrive to find 45 employees gathered around fold-up tables along the meat wall. Ten crew members from the morning shift are here, along with dozens of artists of indeterminate art—only the fashion graduates are discernible, in buttoned cardigans and tank tops created from Trader Joe’s T-shirts. It’s a cliquey crowd, not unlike high school, but devoid of Queen Bee girls and King Jock guys. It seems odd to me that such a smart, creative group would come back at midnight by choice. Melody Louisdhon, a bubbly girl I’ve seen many times, stands giggling in the corner, despite the fact that she no longer works here. She came because, for these kids, the city can be a hostile place. It’s a cabless lifestyle of fearing the mailbox, and college friends who have moved on to jobs in their fields and who don’t understand.

The tasting features friends who understand and free grub. And sex. The crew can seem like an ongoing soap opera of sleeping around. Much of the sex is born out of the job: Crew members are constantly mobile, able to strategically station themselves alongside whomever they’d like. Once the store empties at night, I watched flirting extend to groping. After work, they frequent Beauty Bar down the street and sometimes go home together. It’s the only activity they can afford.

The tasting buzzes with last night’s gossip, something about a crew member sleeping with his girlfriend’s roommate. He’s a “Trader Joe Ho,” a term mainly reserved for guys, who see far more action than you’d expect for impoverished grocery workers.

How Trader Joe’s Kept Its Customers Coming Back - Money 2007 — New York Magazine