Filed under: Brand/Advertising, Australia
Big Red’s lack of creativity afforded by Coles must be an excruciating result for DDB to bear. This campaign is a perfect example of the sort of dialogue that clearly did not take place between client and agency Big Red; the sort of dialogue that was the catalyse for starting this blog in the first place.
There is no real ‘idea’ in ‘Downdown’. Someone just said, “Lets change the words in ‘Downtown’, slap big, red thumbs on people’s wrists that can also be used instore, use people who look and sound like they’re real staff …what a laugh.” Indeed Coles, but an embarrassing one! If this was intended to be a piss-take, it is not at all clear.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I’m like a kid in a candy shop when it comes to lists, especially when it gives me a numbered list of worldwide creative ideas. Take a look - http://www.trendwatching.com/briefing/#happiness
Timing is everything whether you’re a marketer or a consumer. Let’s be honest, brands miss out on business just as often as their consumers miss the right deal, but only due to bad timing. Introducing Quickerfeet, a technology that finds consumers and promotes relevant offers when the time’s right and in the right location.
On 15 February this year, US company Valuevine Inc. launched Valuevine Connect, a location analytics technology for retail chains, restaurants, franchises and multi-location businesses. The technology’s Australian licence will be carried by The Bendalls Group and will be launched some time in June. Available as an iPhone app, the benefit to consumers will lie in having the choice to receive marketing messages that are relevant to them at the right time.
In the US Valuevine’s technology works by pulling together online consumer content posted on review community sites such as Yelp, City Search, Facebook and check-in social media sites Foursquare and Gowalla. It then uses this information to provide marketers with reports showing consumer trends and activity.
Consumers should be celebrating the new-found channel of power that social media has enabled. It’s integration with commerce is one of the most intelligent and useful applications of market information the digital age has seen.
"I just started bleeding & I feel fantastic!" Typical image used for feminine hygiene products.
JWT’s latest campaign for Kotex works for all the reasons the media have spelled out. But for many women it will work simply because it was created by women, and therefore makes sense. It’s not that the ads are even that hilarious – JWT could have pushed the humor further – but the campaign is market focused, clever, relevant and fresh.
In the close to 33 years of my mensturating life, advertising agencies have strangely rationalized that clients selling tampons and pads – conservatively categorized as ‘personal hygiene’ products – would do just as well to be communicated by the half of the population who don’t buy (or rarely) buy these products, who don’t use them and wouldn’t know how to put one up ‘there’, who actually don’t have vaginas and who probably wouldn’t know how to take the packaging off either a tampon or pad if asked. Advertising execs are a strangle lot indeed!
Tampon and menstral pad advertising has, up until now, been pretty much dreamed up to suit male fantasies or could it be just plain stupidity – it’s not clear which.
Kotex U: old print ad
Gone are those bleedin’ days when we women should feel we are fabulously feminine which actually = getting onto the third day with four to go – bloated, cramping and craving chocolate; OR that our hormones should be stable which actually = “I’m going to kill the kids and ask for a divorce tomorrow, I can’t live like this anymore”; OR that the wind in our hair and our flowing white gown trailing behind us in real life means - “My roots are growing out and I can’t fit into the cocktail dress for Friday’s awards night”, all the while we’re straddled on a handsome black stallion with stretches of warm sand tempting perfect intimacy, comfort and happiness which = “No, I’m not up for it, how could you possibly think I would be? I just really need to sleep.”
So, hats off to Kotex for moving on. I can now relate to Kotex as a brand. It speaks to me, it has a sense of humor, it understands my experience and it can provide me with a decent product when I need it. What more could a girl need?
Maybe Kotex should be the new generic word for tampon from now on. I know I’m going to start using it.
If you haven’t seen the TV spot yet, follow the link below -
Filed under: Branded environments
Dental Spa KU64, Berlin.
“Have you had a good day?” – the bottom line is that your answer to this question rests entirely on your emotional and physical experiences since waking up this morning. Whether it be your work setting, a trip to the dentist, the production you saw last night, even your train ride home. The state of being awake is your body’s involuntary experience with the world. It moves through spaces, inside and out, in parallel with your emotional reality. Physically and emotionally you are intrinsically bound.
Sears Sky deck, Chicago
Trendwatching.com talks about experiences and storytelling in relation to status, and our quest for status as consumers. The ever growing trend towards individuality whereby we seek experiences (in many forms) that others haven’t, is the means by which we achieve status. However, achieving status through difference is extremely hard to find. Just when you think your new wardrobe purchase will set you apart, someone turns up wearing the same; just when you think you’re on top of the latest news, someone will disappoint you by giving you a more updated version, and just when you think you’re blogging about something new, you get a damn email alert beating you to it.
How is this relevant to emotional spaces? Two of the most talked about ‘platforms’ in marketing today are social networking where emotional connections are made with ourselves and others, and experiential marketing where we experience a brand physically, leading to an emotional response. For marketing to arrive at this junction where the relationship between our emotional and physical worlds are recognized is one of the most significant developments in the commerical world. The images shown intend to illustrate how our physical experiences are inseparable to our emotional lives, and therefore how brand perceptions can be formed based on these.
We have a mutually beneficial relationship with brands so let’s all look forward to having more meaningful brand interaction with them to feed our emotional and physical well-being. Brand owners and marketeers, step up that creative gear, please!
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: advertising, brand, design, Lovely Packaging, packaging, tobacco
Blow in her face and she'll follow you anywhere
This copy line for Tipalet cigarettes marketed to men, will give you a laugh! How bold we once were.
As a follow up to the last post, I came across some interesting work showcased on Lovely Package, a comprehensive and good looking packaging blog worth visiting. Check out the student designs for Nomad Self Lighting cigarettes by Matthew Smiraldo, Norway’s Andreas Fossheim’s packaging for cannabis cigarettes (if they were legal), and Derek Hunt’s packaging for X Tobacco. Cool stuff.
http://lovelypackage.com/category/tobacco/
Filed under: Brand/Advertising, Australia, You should know | Tags: advertising, Australia, BAT, branding, Imperial Tobacco, PMI, tobacco
Smoking Kids
Australia is about to become the first country in the world to ban tobacco companies from branding their products. As of July 1, 2012, no brand images or colors will be permitted in cigarette packaging design. Additionally, there are to be restrictions introduced online plus a 25 percent hike in excise tax bringing a pack of smokes to about $A16.70 or $US15.40.
In Australia where tobacco advertising is outlawed, the government described cigarette packaging as, “one of the last remaining frontiers for cigarette advertising.” And so it looks like Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd is about to take the big boys down. Only brand and product names will be allowed using a standard color, position, font and size making cigarette packs look similar to a prescription medication.
Of course this is a serious deal for tobacco companies going forward and let’s not forget the design companies that do their work who are paid extremely well but never publicize such relationships for fear that it would affect their own corporate brands. (I know because I worked for one of them).
Health warning on Australian cigarette packs: mouth cancer
The New York Times spoke to Imperial Tobacco who ludicrously responded by saying that there’s no evidence to support this action as effective in reducing consumption. Well, er, no…it hasn’t been done before so no, there isn’t evidence yet, but you just wait. And interestingly publicly trading tobacco giants Philip Morris (PMI) and British American Tobacco (BAT), Australia steered clear of stating the legal action that the industry could pursue but both wanted to put the possible case forward of there being constitutional issues relating to intellectual property and international trade obligations.
Clearly they’ll fight the ethical position and discard their social responsibilities, whatever it takes to get rich on the addicted and lure the young. Gotta love their passion. But as Susan Mercado, the World Health Organization’s regional advisor said in an emailed statement to the New York Times today, “Australia has taken a stand against all forms of advertising of a product that kills half of the people who use it.”
Currently Australian cigarette packaging carries health warnings as well as graphic photographic images showing the possible results of long-term smoking such as gangrenous limbs, cancerous mouths and blindness. (See above image).
So, what does the government intend to do with the $5 billion generated over four years that it forecasts to make out of this initiative? It will be reinvested in the national health care system. Take note America!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/business/global/30tobacco.html
Anyone remember chocolate cigarettes? Well, you can still get them, frighteningly enough. In my opinion, these should be banned too. At least the ones below have health warnings about chocolate consumption!
Chocolate cigarettes with warnings
Filed under: Brand/Advertising, Australia, Inspire | Tags: Ben Lee, environment, Leo Burnett, Space Monkey
Ben Lee - Australian singer, environmentalist
It’s a fact that creative people make the world go round. Or that’s what Dezomo reckons anyway. They make us laugh, they make us inquire, they inspire and they make life worth living by making us experience the world through our emotions and focused thinking. It is music, art, design, literature, poetry and even, yes, advertising in its fundamental form where ideas are king.
Creative expression in any form allows the human race room to think. It is where politics and real life collide peacefully. Artistic expression of contemporary culture now and before has an inherent right to be left untouched. Once created it remains a statement of a time, a feeling, an experience. It can’t be amended, overturned, re-instated or re-done. It is how change is affected.
There are many examples but I liked the relevance of this message that this clip was pushing. Hear and see for yourself in the following link where Australian musician Ben Lee states his point.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5E9nrcY5IIE
For more information visit Australian Creative on http://www.australiancreative.com.au/yaf-news/ben-lee-music-video-call-to-action
Filed under: Brand poser, Retail experience | Tags: Armani, design, Dubai, hotel
Armani’s first hotel launches tomorrow, April 27, in Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower. The project was scheduled to launch on March 18 last month but was moved with no explanation by hotel management.
The Armani Hotel Dubai occupies ten floors of the tower (floors 1-8, 38 and 39) and offers 160 guest rooms and suites. Room prices start at $US462.90.
According to a hotel management site, www.hotelmanagement-network.com/projects/Armani/specs.html, the joint venture between Giorgio Armani and EMAAR Properties, EMAAR Hotels and Resorts Inc cost $US8billion! An extraordinary amount of money to be invested in anyone’s name and, in this case, Armani’s empire. However, the opulence will no doubt be jaw dropping to experience. The good news is that Pentagram New York created the naming, identity, visual brand positioning and marketing collateral which guarantees an aesthetic of grace and a degree of visual subtlety – www.pentagram.com/en/.
Milan is the next city in line for an Armani hotel followed by London then New York.
Paul Theroux was right when he said today in the Opinion pages of The New York Times, in his article titled, ‘Troop therapy’, “SOME pizza deliverymen are safe drivers, and though it seems incredible given the recent news to the contrary, some clergymen are pious, some politicians monogamous and some car dealers honest. There are ethical Boy Scout masters, too. Yet nothing is so satisfying to the lazy mind as news that reinforces a negative stereotype.”
Boy Scouts of America, FlagBoy
However this week’s landmark case awarding sexually abused boy scout Kerry Lewis, a further $18.5 million on top of the compensatory damages of $1.4 million awarded on April 13, has serious ethical implications for the organization, and hence to its brand.
Can the Boy Scouts of America withstand the hit? How markedly will this case affect brand perceptions going forward? Is this the end of another American institution?
Here are some facts:
(1) In the period between 1984 and 1992, the BSA was sued no less than 60 times for alleged sex abuse to the tune of more than $16m.
(2) The convicted former assistant scout master was permitted to associate with the scouts after having admitted to a BSA official in 1983 that he had molested 17 boys
(3) The BSA kept documents they jokingly called the “perversion files” that outlined almost 100 years of suspected incidents that were kept under lock and key at the organization’s headquarters in Irving, Texas.
Doesn’t this reek of the superficial demise of the Catholic Church? The problem is that like all products and services, institutions are brands yet they are not governed by the same rules. Society’s ability to survive through hope and trust, somehow exempts community-based brands from extinction. How else can their continued existence be explained? Ongoing discussion about this would be interesting. Please send your comments!
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/opinion/25Theroux.html
