Last week in his monologue, late night host Craig Ferguson went on and on and on and, yea, on about youth and advertising and how marketers all got together in the 50's and 60's to "deify" youth, put it up on a pedestal and focus all their advertising on that particular age group.
He goes on to explain how youth became the most important thing, how everyone wants to be young and how stupid that is because, well, the young are inexperience and, therefore, stupid. And how that deification of youth made being young fashionable which, of course, resulted in a bunch of idiots running around doing anything and every thing to be young no matter how old they were.
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Oh this one's near and dear to our hearts. Dumb Dads in Advertising. We love them because, for the most part, they make for amusingly funny ads. We hate them because, for the most part, all they do is mirror the "refrigerator mom" ads of the fifties and sixties. It's like a giant game of tit for tat.
Our fave has always been the Verizon Dumb Dad. The classic, clueless idiot trying to help his daughter like he's never heard of the internet before. MSNBC via AdFreak (which pulled a few of the best ads) has a round up.
- The Consumerist has a list of the top ten ironic ads including Dutch Boy touting lead paint, James Dean promoting safe driving in a PSA and Union Carbide promising to build a new India.
- Want to win a trip to Hawaii? Enter Pacifico beer's Epic Adventure Photo contest.
- Did you know that you - yes, you - are killing YouTube. Why? because you are a cheap, greedy bastard.
- Want some free ideas? Bald Guy is giving them away here.
One of the most interesting people I met at Cannes last week was Herve De Clerck, who runs Ad Forum and Act Responsible.
In this video he talks about how Ad Forum operates, and in great length about Act Responsible -- its humble roots out of the ashes of 9/11, and how it's pushing to do two interesting things:
o Encourage the advertising industry to contribute its talent to social and environmental causes
o Promote the work of those that do
"Every year we gather the work for social and environmental issues ... and every year, we put on an exhibition," he said. The exhibition was held with support from DraftFCB, on a sunny terrace alongside the Palais, where you could grab a coffee, check out the beach and stroll at leisure through a wide-open gallery of interactive and print-based cause work from around the world.
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- Houses come a-hunting on Twitter. (More proof that in this market, it's do-or-die time.)
- Love can be complicated. (But once you pop...!)
- The revolution will be Tweeted. In Iran, anyway.
- 140-character twibutes to Michael Jackson. Srsly.
- Spike Lee, out loud and in Cannes.
- Seed bombs. That plant seeds!
- When writers go apeshit.
At 72 Croisette (the so-called Gutter Bar) last night, Shannon Stephaniuk introduced me to the members of Ogilvy Stockholm, which won a Gold Lion for its work for UNA Sweden.
Their objective was to raise funds to support the war victims of Georgia (the country, not the state); and to do this, they spoke with the locals and gathered small, specific and personal items that belonged to people affected by the war.
See Shoes, Sweater and Sheet; I found the sight of those scorched, warped items physically painful, and the stories still more moving.
It's my strong feeling that the work deserved a Grand Prix, but apparently you can't win one if the effort is nonprofit. Weird logics. In any case, I hung out awhile and talked to the guys about the work, what they did and how it made them feel in general.
Video interviews below. Given that it's the Gutter Bar at 2:00 AM and not, say, an Embassy lobby, try to bear with the background noise. Better yet, imagine you're there, stumbling around with your third vodka tonic, playing guess-the-accent with your group of chums-for-the-week.
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Biz Stone's Twitter talk this afternoon was met with a full auditorium, people clamoring for places to park cameras and laptops so they could livetweet questions in real time.
Kind of a neat format. Stone addressed questions as they appeared under hashtag #hkcannes, the results of which were projected onto a screen. Two problems with this method:
1) Wifi outside the press room isn't accessible for free, meaning those that livetweeted from inside the room were either paying for use or mobiling it up. Questions were never taken directly from audience members, raising their hands, for example.
2) Questions were still for the most part selected by a Hill & Knowlton rep. I'm pretty sure the Oracle of Delphi had a less formidable filtering system.
Stone talked a bit about Twitter's birth, which I'm sure will become the stuff of online legend, so I don't really need to go into it. (Hey look, here it is.) One point of interest: his partner, Jack Dorsey, conceived the idea out of a fascination with AIM status updates.
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"We're looking for seven pairs of travellers, one for each of Australia's stunning states, to become Van-Tastic Adventurers."
Winning pairs will be flown from anywhere in the world to Australia, where they'll be given a "karmic campervan" that looks a lot like the Plaid Nation tourbus, actually. They'll also get to digicams and laptops for six weeks, $1000 worth of gas, free access to the area's top attractions and a list of places to go.
But that's not all! The best travel documentary produced by one of the seven couples gets $10,000 and two Virgin Blue domestic flights.
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- Twitter delays scheduled downtime, following the Iranian elections, to give Iranian users a platform for protest/discussion/covert tweet-ups/etc.
- Not one to miss a hot show, Anonymous launches iran.whyweprotest.net, a space for what it calls a "tech-savvy uprising."
- Okay, onto less serious things. CK orgy scandal action.
- "Contextual dating sadness."
- Swill from Lovemarks man.
- AgencySpy ponders the tough stuff.
- Harley Davidson gets all musical.
With the explosion of social media, the direction marketing flows is shifting from outbound to inbound. After all, with the ability of a company to have an infinite number of "findable" touch points in every corner of the internet, spending the bulk of marketing dollars on traditional outbound push marketing makes less and less sense.
As this shift continues, the practice of inbound marketing becomes ever more important. So what is inbound marketing? According to inbound marketing company HubSpot, it's a combination of "getting found" through SEO, blogging and social media; conversion through landing pages, lead tracking and lead management and analysis through marketing analytics, competitive analytics and lead scoring.
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