When a bunch of agency creatives get together and brainstorm a new ad campaign, some of the racier concepts get left in the conference room after the campaign is approved by the client taken to the market. When Ford had Ogilvy and Mather create a campaign for is new SportKa, one of racier and un-approved concepts found its way virally to market. The concept is a clip - based on an originally "approved" concept for the SportKa showing a pigeon getting his due when trying to land on the hood - that shows a cat getting its head cut off by the cars sunroof. (View it courtesy of Viralmeister)
In typical corporate denial, Ford is decrying this concept as "abhorrent" saying, "It was done as a proposal somewhere deep down in the bowels of the agency. As soon as we saw it we said absolutely not. We are appalled - this is not something we want to be associated with." But one can be assured they are quite pleased it is floating around the web, receiving press from the distinguished Financial Times of London and the equally distinguished Adrants located in a quaint little prep school town called Groton.
Independent Wieden & Kennedy has launched a school, called 12, for aspiring advertising professionals. It's a 13 month program in which student will do real work for real clients. While any good school should cost good money, and this one does at $13,000 a year, it seems strange that an ad agency would make someone pay to work on their clients. While clients worked on by 12 students will be charged a reduced rate, Wieden will still pull in that fee as well as the $13,000 per year for each student in the program. Sounds like Wieden is getting a good deal here. OK, I'll admit there's something in it for the students as well.
A new Yankee Group study of consumer media habits identifies the rapid spread of media fragmentation and consumer audience segment's multi-tasking approach to media consumption. This growing fragmentation yields a double edged sword for advertisers. Fragmentation and multi-tasking begets deeper and more effective targeting yet creates daunting marketing challenges.
Procter & Gamble has launched an agency review which calls for the "redesign its media planning agencies into communications planning agencies." Acknowledging its concerns over waning audiences and increased costs of traditional media, P & G, in an agency review, will ask agencies to re-create themselves to embrace a broader range of consumer communication. An early adopter of media optimization, P & G's agency request for a broader approach to consumer planning, which, in essence, would include anything a consumer comes into contact with, asks agencies to rely less the traditional "tonnage" approach to media and more on "non-media" approaches such as product integration, video game advertising, package design, SMS marketing, IM advertising and musical tour sponsorships.
While this harkens back to many of the pontifications we have heard before regarding P & G's desire to revolutionize its approach to marketing, this time, albeit slowly, it might stick. Agencies and media shops are averse to change but two billion media dollars gets attention. One can't help but hope P & G's pontifications become reality.
Not to be outdone by his American counterpart, British entrepreneur Richard Branson will launch his own reality series on FOX. Temporarily called "Branson's Big Adventure," the series will follow Branson and six contestant around the world for six weeks as they face various challenges. The loser, rather than being fired, will, appropriately, be left on the tarmac as Branson and the winners fly off to the next destination on one of his Virgin airlines planes. The winning price has not yet been determined.
Kinja, creation of Nick Denton and Meg Hourihan, has launched. Kinja is a site that pulls together content from many weblogs into a website that is customizable by the user. Denton explains the site is designed for those who do not know or care to know about RSS, a method of pulling content from many blogs into a desktop program or website. Kinja provides a easy to understand layout with simple categories to click into and browse. Or, one can create a custom layout pulling posts from weblogs of one's choosing. It's an admirable effort to bring weblog content to the masses.
Starring Revlon spokeswomen Halle Berry, Julianne Moore, Jaime King and Eva Mendes, director Scott Hicks has created a two minute mini-movie for the cosmetics company. In the movie, the four women are shown in narrative segments with Revlon products playing a role.
The Movie, another in this increasingly long line of adver-movies, will debut in New York by the end of this week then roll out on the Internet and in movie theaters.
View the Adver-Movie here.
Fashion Designer Tommy Hilfiger has launched a new "Style Rx" website that functions like an offline catalog where pages can be flipped. But it goes further providing the visitor the ability to page through various tops and bottoms to find matches that meet a visitor's sense of style. Refreshingly, there's no distracting hot models; just the clothes making it easier to picture them on oneself rather than being depressed knowing most will never acheive the hotness quotient of a fashion model.
As if with a giddy school girl's "like ohmigod, isn't this cool" excitement, the recently very much in-the-news advertising group, The Association of National Advertisers, will publish two weblogs. The first, called "ANA Marketing Musing," by President-CEO Bob Liodice will contain as many as two to three posts per week on major industry issues. The second, with the oh-so-cool blog-like name "ANA Regulatory Ramblings" by Executive Vice President-Government Relations Dan Jaffe will be an even timelier blog with as many as one post per week on legal and regulatory issues.
Blog snobbery aside, it is with high hopes that these weblogs become a forum for insightful industry commentary and not simply a platform for the Association's political mission. Strangely, while Liodice says he would welcome user posting and feedback, the ANA has not enabled the "comment" feature on either of the blogs. If participation is truly encouraged, one might assume there to a be a link to the blogs from the ANA home page which there is not.
UPDATE: The ANA informs me that the Comment function has been turned on. Let the conversation begin.
A recently released study from the Cable & Television Association for Marketing called "Tracking the Evolving Use of Television and Its Content, which examines television viewing habits, revealed most (64 percent) in the study still make an "appointment" to watch a particular show at a particular time. Most in the study also have favorite channels that they return to over and over.
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