My Grandparents were farmers in Somerset. They never really saw the necessity for television and indeed only got one in the early ’90s when my grandfather got ill. Consequently childhood visits were rather delightful since in the evenings we were required to make our own entertainment just as they had all their lives – the last vestiges of an Edwardian upbringing full of tennis parties, journal writing and the vigorous consumption of slim volumes of poetry.
And it rather tickles me to think that our sources of entertainment are coming full circle – back to ourselves and a world my grand parents might have been familiar with. But instead of keeping diaries we blog, instead of amateur dramatics we have You Tube and Googleidol and instead of dusty slide shows of people butchering endangered species with gay abandon we have flickr.
In my day we make our own entertainment.
None of that Lucozade nonsense here. I am trying to gather together set of utterly legendary repositionings from any part of culture or society. There are bonus points for total originality and deductions for mentioning the Fourth Emergency Service (tell me something I don’t know).
The World’s first planner?
A house ad for HHCL from the early 90’s proving that we have always known that ad avoidance is as endemic in the UK as avian flu.
So here is a rubbish idea. I am going to call it pimp my proposition. You give me and the rest of us a brand or category by posting a comment and I give you a proposition at best or a brilliant insight at worst. You decide I am way off the pace and ignore it while everyone else thinks i am an arrogant tosser. Eventually someone out there comes up with the goods three months after you needed it. Job done. If its a brand outside the UK I’ll definitely need the category.
This is a film that forms part of the PVR speech – an ad break of Cannes winners sped up to X30 just in case someone out there still hasn’t go the point yet.
An old HHCL mazda ad that was a little bonkers in a world of VCRs but may have fortold a way of engaging the PVR…
Bit of an aquired taste this but for those of you interested in some of the implications of the timeshifting revolution on ad engagement in general and pre-testing in particular here is the paper I gave to Admap’s pretesting conference on the 9th Feb 2006. Don’t all rush at once.
I cover some perenial favourites of mine like ad avoidance being a national sport and brand dawinism. But also introduce some stuff on the geometry of the break and the creative imperatives of the new communications world order.
There is also some new research in there – both quant and qual. Hurrah.
Both the speech and slides (you’ll need both) are available as downloads. A couple of the slides are missing (the mpeg of a fast forwarded break and a house ad we ran on ad avoidance) because they make the file too large. Frustrating! I will try and solve this.
It seems to me that there are two equally important things happening in advertising at the moment that are more than a little contradictory.
On the one hand is the emerging popularity of what I call identitity rich advertising. In its current incarnation this appeared in the mid 90s with WCRS’s work for Orange and HHCL’s for the launch of the low cost airline Go. Interestingly the identity partners in both of these campaigns was Wolf Ollins.
At present this type of work finds its most ubiquitous expression in VCCP’s work for O2 and also in the Ipod campaign in which the principle focus of the communication is always the identity rather than a bigger thought about the brand. Indeed the potency of this approach seems to reside entirely in the aesthetic and the emotional, something that is slightly scary for someone schooled exclusively in a world of conceptual creativity – what we used to call an idea in the old days. Of course identity rich advertising need not be vaccuous and BBH’s campaign for Vodafone proves that this isn’t always the case – the power of now work is identity rich and intellectually satisfying.
If identity rich advertising is domniated by the aesthetic and emotional then Google’s adwords is presisely the opposite. Here is an advertising environment where not only are creativity and executional precision absent they are actively legislated against with every advertisement typographically and aesthetically identical. This is rational advertising at its most extreme where relevance is the key driver of communication success not creative standout or appeal.
Unfamliliar and challenging as these approaches may be they are by far the most dynamic developments in an industry searching for a new creative language. And in many ways the advertising world seems to be going back to the future, to the creative approaches present at the birth of the modern industry in the late nineteenth century – a big logo painted on the side of a house and text heavy press advertising, this time on search engines.
Some books I read and some I chew on.
Chewy books are those where the thinking is so profound or ideas so counter intuitive that they are tough to digest.
Douglas Holt’s How brands become icons is a chewer.