Adforum's Angela Natividad sat down with SapientNitro's Freddie Laker and Darren McColl along with Omar Epps, all of whom were on a panel Monday at Cannes Lions and spoke to the topic of who's a better marketer, brands or celebrities. At least in the seminar, it appeared celebrities won out.
The interview on the whole is an insightful look at how the definition of an agency has changed over time and how the different toolsets and partnerships define just how an agency approaches a marketing challenge.
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- Former ad exec Mark Gardiner, who had been in the business for 20 years, quit last year an took a $12/hour job at Trader Joe's to see how the brand became a success without an ad agency or PR firm. The result is a book, Build a Brand Like Trader Joe's .
- Here's a case study video on Jung von Matt's Lipsum.com campaign in which they buried a recruitment ad within Lorem ipsum text generated from the site.
- Here's how Fitzgerald + Co got that vintage 1972 MINI up to its 11th floor offices as part of their failed bid for the MINI business. Incumbent BSSP retained.
- GoDaddy, which for years has created its own advertising has, wait for it, hired an ad agency. Yes, a Deutsch New York campaign called Inside/Out will break this summer during the Summer Olympics on NBC.
- If you're into the NBA, you might like this. If you like basketball footage with block type messaging, you might like this. For all others, feel free to skip.
Good luck. No, really. Our best to you Michael Sheldon and Kim Getty from Deutsch LA. Honestly, we hope you can keep agency types from jumping ship every year. But if history is any guide...not gonna happen.
But hey, at least you get to do a panel on retaining talent during Cannes Lions. That can't be half bad, can it? And, shit, half the people in Cannes this year will have new jobs next year so you might as well propose this panel over and over again, year after year. Because, you know what? Nothing's going to change. Why? Because most agency management don't give a shit about their employees. All they care about is the bottom line.
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Today, Max Page, the seven year old boy who play mini Darth Vadar in Volkswagen's The Force will undergo open heart surgery to correct a congenital heart defect. He will have his pulmonary valve replaced and a whole in his heart fixed.
Not to be deterred by his health issue, Max has become an ambassador for Children's Hospital in LA and, with help from Deutsch LA, has launched a donation site to raise money for kids with heart problems.
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- Ladies, need a better bra? Check out Brayola. Your boobs will thank you.
- This is how advertising people make a wedding announcement.
- Need inspiration> Graphic resources? Check out Online Graphic Design Degree.
- ThinkLA and the 4As have teamed up with Hyper Island to create and publish the fastest book ever written on the subject of... well, speed. Rabbit or Roadkill: Ad Agency Leaders Write The Book On Speed is the first of a new Hyper Island series called, Write the Book On It, in which executives participate in a group exploration of a current business challenge and address it in a book written in a matter of hours. Order it here.
To find creative talent, Saatchi & Saatchi Germany tried something a bit different. They created an iPhone app which allowed them to share their creative idea with a Mobile Creative Director. And just as creative were having fun with the app submitting creative ideas for judgement, up popped a message that Saatchi & Saatchi was hiring.
Looks like it was quite fun. Check out the case study video below. Is it just us of does Mr. Mobile Creative Director look like the Cannes Lion?
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It's like Melancholia but with a little feminine Buck Rogers thrown in. Remarkable new work from Ogilvy Paris for Perrier features a French woman, Earth's last hope, who boards a space craft and heads towards an over-heated sun to save the planet from certain doom. Called The Drop, that's all it takes to get the raging sun to back off and allow the planet to live on.
Upon arrival at the sun, the woman who, apparently, can't resist what may be the last bottle of Perrier in existence hesitates before offering the sun what would be Earth's savior. Torn between saving the Earth or enjoying what is obviously the most refreshing drink known to mankind, she caves and consumes the entire contents of the bottle while standing on a plank as the sun rages on destined to engulf the earth.
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Usually when a brand creates a virally-intentioned video, press commentary comes after its release. In a strange twist of events, the revers happened last week. The Onion wrote a lengthly article about a "cool new Tide detergent video" which went on and on ans on about, well, how cool the video was. Trouble is, the video didin't exist yet.
But that didn't deter Digitas from whipping up the video in a couple of days and posting it everywhere The Onion said it would be posted. As described in The Onion piece, "it's [the video] got these cute, funny talking animals, a cool indie-rock song, and it's just so hilariously random. And it's got this amazing cameo by Bret Michaels, which is so funny because Bret Michaels is hilarious and from the '80s."
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To be clear, we bear no ill will towards any agency's attempt to self promote. OK, that's not exactly true. Why? Because when agencies decide to self-promote, the results are often disastrous. See Agency.com. See SapientNitro. See Bold Ogilvy. And the list goes on.
Part of the problem in these situations, of course, is that agencies are under increased scrutiny because they are expected to be even more creative when they are unencumbered by client involvement. But, if history is any guide, client involvement just might not be such a bad thing after all when it comes to agency self-promotion.
The other part of the problem is that we, as an industry, can't help help but trash the competition every chance we get. The moral of the story, then, is that no matter what sort of self-promotion an agency does, it's likely to be met with sarcasm, snark, cynicism and mockery.
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We just returned from Internet Week and were delighted to find Lee Clow's beard on our doorstep. Well, not literally Lee Clow's beard but a book entitled Lee Clow's Beard written by Dallas-based copywriter Jason Fox (aka @leeclowsbeard) and Lee Clow himself.
Fox started @leeclowsbeard several years ago and he now has 26,000 followers. Of the project, Fox said, Lee Clow's Beard started off ans an experiment. A very small experiment. I wanted to provide bits of insight for fellow ad folks, almost like crumbs of inspiration. And since beards are natural repositories of crumbs, I thought of Lee and his iconic whiskers. He's an ad legend everyone loves, so to have his facial hair act as the tweets' source was a nice way to keep things on the lighter side of the snark meter."
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