In the recurring theme of this Ad:Tech, Paul Woolmington started with some comments about the election, of course! Barack Obama is the biggest idea America has had in decades. The campaign wasn’t about ad slogans but “a way of being”. Political advertising will never be the same again. OK, on to the panelists.
Moderator: Paul Woolmington, Naked
Panelists:
Andy Berndt, Managing Director Google Labs
Stefan Olander, Global Director of Brand Connections Nike
Nick Law, Tech Creative Director at RGA
Jessica Greenwood, Editor of Contagious magazine
The panel started with a show and tell about creative, online and offline, then went into a traditional Q&A with the panelists.
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Barack Obama ran a truly groundbreaking campaign. 2 weeks before he won the Ad Age Marketer of the Year Award at ANA. He stayed on message, used all media. The smartest thing they did was to look at what’s happening in digital media. They recognized that the internet gave them the chance to go direct and stay in continuous dialogue without any interference from the press. Imagine if Obama governs the way he ran the campaign. Even at 11 pm last night Obama sent an email. He’s set us up to be his missionaries.
Shelly Lazarus was on a panel two weeks ago where Gary Hart and Bob Kerry were interviewed. They were asked, was the press fair? Answer: the question is irrelevant. We don’t need interpreters, we can talk directly to the people. The Obama campaign understood this. Facebook, Myspace, Twitter. The Race to The White House game. The Obama mobile network , the iphone app. Simply the best CRM network we’ve seen to date. Obama got 4 milllion donors who get daily updates—with a donate button on every email. If you didn’t sign up to call voters they sent you names to call. They even used a sweepstakes: the first 5 people (then 10) would be selected to go to Chicago to watch election returns. Then they told you each day who won. Just like Publisher’s Clearinghouse. They used every trick there was. Shelly’s husband actually gave money to Obama because he felt left out… He wanted to get the emails too.
In this world of digital marketing, if you can think it, you can do it. Next was an amazing “Show and Tell”.
2008 was also memorable for the Beijiing Olympics. For Lenovo (a client of Ogily), this was a signature moment. The question was, how did you use 21st century technology to bring the Olympics to life? Lenovo’s voices of the Olympics featured stories from the Olympics contributed by the athletes themselves. To make this same content available Lenovo made a widget for iphones. The result is the largest social media marketing campaign during the largest sporting event of the world and a way for people to continually interact with the games. The IOC came forward and tried to stop it because the site was “stealing” the content that they had sold to media content providers around the world.
Creative is still important. Shelly Lazarus talked about Shreddies, a Canadian cereal brand from Post which hired Ogilvy for a traditional brand refresh assignment. Shreddies was a traditional brand refresh assignment Ogilvy was asked to find a new unique way to refresh a cereal brand: “Write some clever copy for the Shreddies box”. A summer intern came up with the idea of Diamond Shreddies. Shreddies are square. An intern came up with the idea of Diamond Shreddies, shreddies turned at a 45 degree angle—a diamond! The rest is history: take the test at diamondshreddies.ca. Youtube and other sites immediately got 800.000 views, a lot for Canada. Post launched Diamond Shreddies in test market. Ogilvy started putting focus group takes on the web, developed a complete integrated instore sampling program, newspapers wrote reviews. The launch generated 81 groups on Facebook. Hundreds wrote the company. One complained that the box he bought contained only 50% diamond shreddies. Post then offered the combo pack! Word of mouth/viral provided 90% of the buzz. Sales went up 20% in weeks.
Shreddies wouldn’t seem like a candidate for a highly interactive or viral campaign. A little idea struck a chord or funny bone and turned into a big digital campaign. That is marketing innovation for a brand which had been dormant for years. The idea is not the big deal. What you can do with it now is the big deal. The intern, Hunter Summerville, is now a fulltime creative in Ogilvy’s Toronto office
Another brand. Capri Sun. Introduced in the 1970s, it features an unusual foil pouch. The target is 6-10 year olds. Capri sun’s primary aouudience lives digitally, and the brand had to do something buzzworthy. They created a series of short irreverent TV spots showing what happens when kids don’t “respect the pouch” and a website, Respectthepouch.com. It was an instant hit which went viral immediately. Kids started posting their own commercials on Youtube. The brand has created Respect the Pouch games with Ubisoft to integrate the pouch into Wii—the game (rayman raving rabbids) will be released later this month.
Now from the supermaerket shelf to luxury goods: Louis Vuitton. Ten years ago the focus would have been print ads. Now print ads with photos by Annie Liebowitz. In a huge serendipitous stroke of good luck, the shot of Gorbachev in a car with his Louis Vuitton bag had a magazine poking out of it with a headline about Litvinenko, the Russian agent who was poisoned with plutonium. The ad became a viral phenomenon with a lot of buzz about the headline—was it deliberate or a coincidence? The campaign also features Andre Agassi, Catherine Deneuve, the Coppolas, Keith Richardson.
Ten years ago it would have stopped at print. Now they’ve put each of the stars on the web. Each takes us to a city they love. Gorbachev Moscow, Deneuve Paris, Richards London, etc. The website also shows what you might find in the luggage of each person. The response to this brand-turned-experience has been phenomenal. Actual time spent on site is 16 minutes. The campaign is driving double digit growth in shop visits and sales. A clear cause and effect. The latest portrait: Sean Connery, at 78 still an icon. Connery breaks this month.
Shelly Lazarus moved on to IBM, not dry technology but stories of how IBM people solve big problems, told on the web. The team created short films 2-3 minutes long so we can share how IBM technology is behind some of the great endeavors of our time. The work frst ran on a website codeveloped with CNBC, “The Business of Innovation”. Films are digital so they can work anywhere. Usually you see static facts. This is storytelling. When people watch one they watch 4. To date 23 million people have watched these and we’re just getting started.
If you are uncomfortable with change and ambiguity this is not your time. Lazarus loves this world where we have to think differently. She loves making it up as we go. This is a most happy collision of advertising and technology where we can be really creative. We can respond instantly. When Lazarus started in direct marketing, we tried to simulate conversation. Now we can have a conversation. With these new tools we have to think in new ways.
Two final examples. Last spring Six Flags had to distribute 45,000 free passes. The client asked for radio and direct mail. A creative guy said “let’s put it on craigslist”. 5 hours later ALL the tickets were gone. For Hellman’s mayonnaise Ogilvy created an online show where mayonnaise was the central character. It was on the Yahoo Food Network. TV isn’t interactive. Online you can ask questions, submit recipes and interact with brand. The campaign doubled sales and achieved the hightest ROI: 250%!
Does this stuff work? You betcha as, Sarah would say. 500 million people saw Dove’s campaign for real beauty. That simple video cost $50,000 to create and starred the Creative Director’s girlfriend (who said “no one is going to see this, right?). Who would imagine that it would ignite a global movement and become the first ever double winner for film and interactive at Cannes?
These are challenging economic times. It is at precisely times like this that we need to experiment. Smart, strong, insightful, brave, fa sighted marketers spend more behind their brands in times like these. It’s been proven to be a most successful strategy. Those that spend in recession come out with stronger brands. Don’t just spend, though—grab the new tools. Then test, and optimize. Bring it on. New tools, tech channels, devices, partners, ideas. Cereal, mayo, high end luggage. We’ve just begun to move and motivate. It’s a time of great possibility. It’s up to us to seize this moment and lead our industry into digital.
If the next president of the USA can do it, so can we.
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Posted by
Steve Hall · Wednesday November 05, 2008
As if there weren’t a Republican in the house, ad:tech keynote speaker Shelly Lazarus gushed with excitement about the uplifting optimism brought on by Obama’s presidential win the night before. No doubt, she had planned to speak about Obama’s campaign, universally agreed to have been stellar and one of the best ever, but the fact he won couldn’t contain the glee clearly resident in the room.
In her keynote, Lazarus commented the Obama campaign dubbing it a masterstroke of CRM and the digital realization of Obama’s “yes we can” mantra. While the Obama love in the room was, without doubt, palpable, Lazarus did not spent the entire keynote talking about Obama.
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Despite all the doom and gloom about the economy, according to eMarketer’s Geoff Ramsey, there are bright spots. And those bright spots, thankfully, are in the online marketing space. Ramsey sees a 14.5% growth rate for online ad spending for 2009. Wipe that sweat off your brown now because you may actually be able to pay your mortgage in 2009.
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