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As agencies work on these ideas they are increasingly looking for ever more promising hooks that are able to get the news media's attention, advertising as PR, as an example, Crispin looks at much of its work through the lens of a press release.
While this is great and a valuable awareness builder, do these efforts suffer because they are so focused on the news media as the target vs. the real audience?
SF Eater recently posted a graphic which they took apart Denny's recent Grand Slam breakfast promotion from the perspective of the end user and came up with a nice piece of math to quantify the opportunity cost of free.
While this is extreme and I am sure the Denny's promotion was a huge success on all fronts, it pays for planners and the media folk to work out whether these big ideas can really do all that's promised.
Of course this should all be in the brief, but if it is not, perhaps we need to employ some kind of bullshit filter to see if the proposed "big PR idea" has legs with consumers.
Posted by Ed Cotton
G&B managed to "infect" Cadbury and got it to incorporate a lot of their ethical smarts into their own brand. Now with Cadbury being purchased by Kraft, many are questioning if the American company has what it takes to maintain the progress made by these two brands.
In a recent article in The Guardian, one of the founder's of Green & Black's was somewhat optimistic about the prospects. On a side note, it's interesting, he points his finger at consumers for not demanding organic and Fair Trade from brands, of course, this is a little chicken and egg because it often takes a company to lead consumers, as we've seen with Wal-Mart.
"A brand is like a child. It is born into this world, fragile and in great need of parental care and attention. Eventually you send it off to school and university, entrusting it to the care of others. Then it embarks on its career. Green & Black's, to follow the analogy, was nurtured to maturity and eventually got a good job at a big multinational.
It's still our baby. The fact that it can now look forward to continuing its career development with another multinational with a different name (and most of the same shareholders) is not a great cause for concern.
If Kraft screwed up with Green & Black's it would damage their reputation and cast a shadow over their competence. But there is no reason to expect them to goof. They have converted US household names like Oreos and Ritz crackers to organic and even do an organic macaroni-and-cheese dinner.
Every successful organic product represents another welcome step forward in the vital process, whereby the GM dependent climate-destructive industrial farming model gives way to sustainable, organic and fair ways of producing food. Successful corporations identify and follow these deeper underlying trends and would be betraying their shareholders' interest in trying to reverse them.
Frankly, it's the consumers who don't buy organic and fair products that upset me the most. Consumers have a choice, companies don't, they only sell what customers buy. Kraft and Cadbury are on the right track and I am confident the new entity will continue to pursue this.
I have no idea if Kraft will ask me to stay on as president, but if they don't that could be your canary in the coal mine."
Kraft's indirect purchase of Green & Black's follows a familiar pattern of ethical companies falling into their hands of giant corporations- Ben and Jerry's at Unilever, Howies at Timberland and The Body Shop at L'Oreal.
Many of the ethical companies start out with the belief that it's possible to change the world and when purchased may still harbor idealistic notions of this dream because of scale. However, for the acquring company to radically change it's operations, brands etc to all be in-line with the ethical company, is highly unlikely because it's just simply too hard to do.
What's more likely is a token response where the ethical brands sit in limbo and nothing really changes. They can grow because they can distribution muscle, but beyond that, they can't do much.
Posted by Ed Cotton
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This is a clear sign of the move away from corporate web destinations in favor of the locations where consumers are spending most of their time. This is a big shift and one that must be quite a challenge for companies to get their heads around, but it reflects the new reality.
This is just the start because it forces the agencies hand to work out how best to Facebook and looking at the Barclaycard example there are certainly some challenges.
Interestingly, the experience seems just like a corporate web site and not the organic, fluid experience you expect on Facebook.
While it's smart understand where your customers are, getting the experience right is critical .
Posted by Ed Cotton
Something that it's key competitors can only be extremely happy about, especially when a number of the players including- GM, Ford and the the emerging Korean brands have made such strides in this space.
The problem is especially acute for Toyota because quality has been such an integral part of the company, management books have been written about it and the whole DNA of the organization is structured around it.
It's been suggested that Toyota's push for growth has been the cause of all these problems. It was so fixated with overtaking GM to become the biggest automaker in the world, that corners were cut and compromises made.
Pushing hard for growth has been the undoing of many a great brand.
Toyota's problem seems to a show a lack of understanding of how to scale their production to achieve optimal quality and not thinking hard enough about the impact of potential failure on the brand.
Starbucks is another brand who expanded way to fast and ended up diluting their equity.
In both these cases, while it certainly true that they built amazingly powerful brands, they failed to treat them with respect and didn't use tools to help them to understand the resulting impact of over-expansion on their most valuable assets.
Quite simply, their brands were important, but not important enough to be front and center of the CFO and CEOs agenda.
Posted by Ed Cotton
The enlightened folks at Ogilvy decided that small, local businesses in the Brixton areas of London could benefit from some of company's strategic and creative thinking. It's a cool PR coop, but it's also a great idea and something more agencies should pay attention to.
Agencies exist in physical locations and probably should kind of responsibility to contribute to their neighborhoods and broader community. Obviously, many think that their pro-bono efforts are probably good enough, but perhaps these contributions need to be smaller, more focused, truly connected to their communities and less interested in the potential of creative awards.
Posted by Ed Cotton
(1) Fallon gets the brief and the chance to elevate the often mundane world of advertising into an art form.
However, we all know how hard it can be with one client, how about two public institutions? They must have done some great selling and/or had great clients because the result is pretty close to art, judging by this one spot.
This is a very artful ad aimed at a highly cultured and educated audience who can appreciate the idea and the story, this is not for a target called "everyone".
Looking at from the US perspective it would be hard to find a client to brave enough to do this type of work and you can imagine when presenting the script getting questions about how slow it is and how long it takes to get to the main message- "would people have the patience to stay the course?"
Could this you see this advertising running in the US? Why and why not? imagine The Smithsonian and NPR creating type of initiative
Posted by Ed Cotton