We aren't normally a fan of iconic brands drastically changing their image, logo, tagline and overall marketing but we've taken a quick look at the new Absolut campaign from TBWA/Chiat/Day New York and we like it. We really like it. Gone is the bottle, mostly, and gone is the print heavy focus. TV has been added to the mix showing iconic imagery such as an image of Steve McQueen with the tagline, "The Absolute Man," an image of the Statue of Liberty with the tagline, "The Absolute Welcome" and an image of the moon rover with the tagline, 'The Absolute Road Trip." Clearly, the over crowded, hipsteresque vodka landscape has required a different tact for Absolut to set itself apart. This just might work.
Online consumer conversation measurement companies BuzzMetrics and Intelliseek, along with its BlogPulse blog prtal, have combined to form one mega-metrics analysis company called Nielsen BuzzMetrics. BuzzMetrics parent company VNU has been on a buying spree lately scooping up linguistics analysis company Trendum, BuzzMetrics and now Intelliseek. With the acquisition, VNU hopes to create "the new global standard for measuring and understanding word-of-mouth behavior and influence."
For those who don't know what these companies do or why you should care, the press release puts it quite succinctly explaining the companies "mine publicly archived online sources including blogs and discussion forums to collect and transform large volumes of unaided conversations into actionable consumer insights." In other words, they find out what people are saying about your brand and they package it up with a nice bow on top for your review.
Adrants is a blog. Do you care? I didn't think so. I bet you come here because there's content you like which is all that really matters. In today's Ad Age, Simon Dumenco wrote a piece entitled A Blogger is Just A Writer With A Cooler Name in which he breaks down the facade that blogging is something other than what it is: just a really easy way to publish a website. We read Dumenco's piece with appreciative glee that someone finally agreed with our position on the topic.
While lots of bloggers (writers as Dumenco defines) seem to get a kick out of sticking it to the man or mainstream media as "the man" is currently defined, all bloggers do when blogging is efficiently publish content and offer commentary on news or another person's opinion and the framework through which they publish that opinion. For some reason, the blog publishing platform has been equated to snarky opinion making which, to some degree, is fair as most blogs don't have editors are are written purposefully to ruffle feathers. But plenty of feathers are ruffled through mainstream media as well.
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Plageristic kleptomania is alive and well, as it always has been, in the ad industry indicated by this AdPulp find comparing an Art Directors Club Italiano 2005 ad to a One Show 2006 ad. While the stick and carrot thing is nothing new, seeing the concept used in very similar ways in the same industry just a year apart is depressing.
There's conceptual speed thing in the Art Directors Club Italiano ad and an almost "who gives a shit" thing in the One Show version so they each create a different feeling but there's no denying the similarities. Perhaps, that was the intent with the One Show ad in that there are so many pointless award shows, why should one care a this donkey clearly doesn't. Certainly, it's possible each ad was created in a vacuum but in our incestuous little industry, that's highly unlikely. We're just going to assume the One Show is simply riffing off the Art Directors Club in a wink-wink, nod-nod sort of way, adding its own snarky commentary on award shows.
AdPulp points us to an ad placed in AdWeek by Exclusive Resorts outlining the success of its recent advertising and thanking its agency, DDB Seattle, for the work it did on the account. AdPulp hopes, as do we, that our industry isn't completely made up of selfless, ego-driven cretins and that this isn't some sort of prank by DDB to achieve a clandestine, third-party high-five by placing the ad itself.
When the Magazine Publishers of America launched an ad campaign that illustrated even though life would be very different in the future and that people would still be reading magazines, online magazine ZOOZOOM spoofed the campaign and talked about how life is right now and that people are reading magazines online right now. ZOOZOOM has extended that spoof into a real campaign, taglined "Doing It," which shows people online in various scenes. There's also a video that illustrates how magazines aren't even good at killing a fly anymore.
It's sort of pointless for an agency to take legal action against a former employee if they end up going to another agency or starting their own agency and a few clients and former employees follow. First, no one forces an employee or a client to shift from the previous agency to the new agency. Agency people are big enough to make that decision on their own. Second, once a client makes the decision to leave, it's not like legal action is going to make them go back. And when the agency decides to somehow legally force an employee to stay when they've decided to leave and join the new agency, that's kind of pointless too. Short of shackles and a police escort, if someone doesn't want to show up for work, there just not going to.
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Blender magazine, Dennis Publishing's music magazine, and TAO Las Vegas are teaming to bring Blender Sessions at TAO Nightclub to the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah from January 19th-23rd. The nightly series of live music performances for celebrities, filmmakers and film industry executives will be sponsored by Absolut, Budweiser and Yahoo and take place in the Asian inspired Park City satellite of Las Vegas' Tao at The Venetian Hotel.
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Eschewing the usual source for sound effects, Wieden + Kennedy London has created a two minute commercial for Honda UK and used a choir of humans to generate all the sounds in an ad for the new Honda Civic. The ad will be available, beginning today, as a video podcast. A microsite accompanies the ad which features a 3D-ish model of the car that people can view from different angles, a "making of" video and a service where visitors can sign up for a test drive.
Capitalizing on Friday the 13th fears, Greenpeace, through The Viral Chart, has released an online video (here too) that, with compelling imagery, claims building more nuclear plants is an invitation to terrorists 911-style. Sarah North, head of Greenpeace's nuclear campaign, said, "Millions of people could die as a result of a terrorist attack on a nuclear plant. This is a totally unacceptable risk. This film shows that building new nuclear power stations is a catastrophic gift to terrorists."
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