Ad Biz

Coke’s undergoing some image changes, and one of the arenas they’ve gone about publicizing it is at the currently-underway Beijing Olympics. Following their Pemberton ad, which aims to spread awareness of the fact that Coke is made without any artificial flavours, the soft-drinks company is carrying out a number of initiatives in Beijing to promote environmental consciousness.

They have launched a new line of ’sustainable’ fashion - T-shirts that have been made out of cotton and polyethylene terephthalate, or PET. All participating athletes and officials at the Games have been handed these T-shirts, which say ‘I’m from Earth’ on the front, and the images of five bottles at the back, indicating the number of bottles it took to make the shirt. They have also partnered with the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games (BOCOG) and the City of Beijing to recycle all PET bottles during the Games into reusable items, and are premiering a documentary film featuring seven torch relay runners selected for their commitment to the environment. Last but not the least, they are selling their products at each Olympic venue from high-tech vending machines that emit over 400 tonnes LESS of greenhouse gases.

If one thing is for sure, it’s that Coke is certainly making an effort to walk the talk. For a brand that’s had its share of controversies in the past, that’s a welcome change.

[via WWD, Olympic.org and Stylewatch]

It looks like more and more agencies are waking up to the fact that Asia, and specifically India, has huge potential as a market for the advertising industry. The WPP group has already been operating in India for four years, and is now going about acquiring Indian design firms with a vengeance, to consolidate their design activities in-house. This article in Mint, an Indian newspaper owned by the Wall Street Journal, quotes Sujata Keshavan, of Indian design firm Ray & Keshavan, acquired by WPP in 2006:

…….almost 80% of the design work in India is done by advertising agencies. To deliver quality work and retain clients, most agencies are focusing on the design aspect and creating separate design cells.

Last year, Wieden+Kennedy opened a New Delhi office, and in the next year or two, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Naked Communications and StrawberryFrog are all looking to set up shop in Mumbai. The bigger agencies like Ogilvy and McCann Erickson have had Indian offices for years. The challenge for them now will be from the smaller hot-shops, like Naked and StrawberryFrog. From the International Herald Tribune:

The agencies are trying to keep up with big ad spenders, which are shifting more of their marketing budgets to India and other fast-growing Asian markets and away from Western Europe and the United States, where economies are slowing. “Our view is that we ought to go where our multinational clients are,” said Simon Sherwood, chief executive of BBH.

Agency faqs! quotes StrawberryFrog CEO Scott Goodson:

“We just don’t think that the systems of traditional holding company agencies are the systems for the future. They are outdated and were developed for a very different era. That era has changed dramatically in most parts of the world and it is changing in India too, especially for GenY.”

Just like the hectic building construction activity going on all around India, there’s certainly some serious activity in this industry as well. Look out for some good work from that part of the world in the near future.

[Via the International Herald Tribune, Mint and Agency faqs!]

John Grant says planners need to start to believe in something.

John Grant: Planning’s Midlife Crisis? from JWT on Vimeo.

[via zj]

The popular UK milk drink FRijj has recently launched an ad campaign pairing their sponsorship of a film festival with user created content. The B-Movie themed microsite calls on viewers to film their own masterpiece utilizing the brand. While the festival includes classics like Jaws and Scarface, the user videos are encouraged to pursue a lower standard of film with the clips on the site parodying not-so-classic movies like The Blob. From The Digital Mainstream:

By encouraging users to participate in a movie-making competition based around the drink, Frijj have created a genuine brand experience - something that is rare for an FMCG - that both involves the target audience and retains some inherent value. Furthermore, by launching a film festival, based around series of free screenings of classic movies in selected cinemas across the UK, to run in tandem with the competition, Frijj are providing a tangible reward for engaging with their product.

[via The Digital Mainstream]

We got shipped these bottles from Mountain Dew’s Green Label Art Range. They’re Volume 2 in a series. Sure, the art’s ok - and we’re not against artists getting paid. Good luck to ‘em. It’s just the this promotion annoys us because:

• It’s straight out of the 2005 Brand Manager manual, in the chapter ‘Let’s target the influencers with cool underground art shit’.
• Pepsi thinks it’s better to spend money on this to get the kids to drink more Corn Fructose (Corn Fructose is the principal ingredient in this drink after water) rather than spend money retooling.
• Maybe it would have been quite fun to discover these cans in the stores rather than the usual - let’s send it to the cool blogs to start a buzz.
• No-one needs to be shipped 8 bottles of pop with so much non-recyclable plastic.

Green Label Art

Rory Sutherland, who is the Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group UK, has an interesting essay where he ponders about the creativity of planners. He says that his view is “Planning + Creative = Good. Planning > Creative = Bad” but then goes on into 10 detailed points. Here’s his closing point in case you just want to have ‘read of’ his piece rather than have read it:

So, in a sentence, I think both disciplines are equally valuable. But I think creativity needs affirmative action more than planning does. In particular, the assumption that planning always gets to work on the problem first shows an inherent bias in our thinking which is not only uncreative, it’s also downright unscientific.

Sutherland

Over on his Digital Influence Mapping Project, John Bell interviews David Fowler, a senior creative from Ogilvy. In the video Fowler says:

To be successful going forward, I think a creative director today needs a global sense… the ability to interact with people from different cultures and with clients from other areas - and have an understanding how the world really works and how the world looks from other points of view.

(Hehe - nice to see that the ad industry still doesn’t see clients as people…

More: DIMP

Ford had a charity fundraiser last week that paired celebrity teams with the new Ford Flex. Press releases focused on the car more than the actual event, but we think the adoption of urban environments as playful spaces is noteworthy. LAist reports:

Basically the event challenged each team to use the interactive technologies of the new vehicle - Ford brands the Flex as a vehicle for “urban adventures” so it seems the scavenger hunt was created to showcase exactly that.

[via LAist]

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