BigShinyThing

Much as we love Nick Park’s national treasures, surely they are much more suited to flogging tea bags than glad rags? Mother‘s Hibby and Harvey campaign from the late 90s was far more on-brand. With their delightfully catty captions — “Nice Helmut” — the knitted dolls spoke directly to the fashionistas who shop at Harvey Nicks as well as modelling the clothes. It’s hard to see Wallace and his dog having the same high fashion resonance.

And yet. Marks and Spencer has just launched an ad campaign featuring that beloved working class stereotype Del Boy in an attempt to move away from its current upmarket image. Food retailers in the UK are increasingly under pressure from the ‘Aldi effect’ with credit-crunched shoppers switching to budget outlets. M&S claims that Del Boy has “universal appeal with the British public”. Maybe Harvey Nics is attempting a similar shift by adopting the distinctly mainstream Wallace and Gromit. But what does a luxury brand have without its exclusivity? Luxe brands from M&S upwards may well be about to find out…

Whilst researching something completely different, I came across an interview with Leigh Bowery in Campaign magazine, of all places. The context was a Pepe Jeans commercial that Leigh was featuring in: apparently when the client was around the director Tony Kaye told the performance superstar to ‘hide in a cupboard’. Unsurprisingly, the devastatingly original Leigh had some choice words to say about the ad world, including the following gem:

I am quite pleased that advertisers use dated ideas and concepts because good ideas should never be used immediately.

Good advice for ad-appropriated club kids, designers, artists, whatevers. I couldn’t find the commercial (anyone?) so here’s the Raw Sewage clip from ‘The Legend of Leigh Bowery’.

Andy Burnham, the culture secretary, has used his first big speech on broadcasting to voice his opposition to product placement. The minister in charge of what *you* get to watch also indicated he wanted to see self-regulation of violent, sexual and offensive content on the internet, somehow modeled on the 9pm television watershed.

Burnham is clearly living in lala-I’m-not-listening-land. Putting aside his ludicrous suggestions to monitor online content (good luck with that), his apparent dismissal of product placement is a Big Problem. Paid for product placement is increasingly looking like the only hope for beleaguered free-to-air UK TV channel ITV. TV ad revenues in recent years have fallen off a cliff and ITV had sought to make up the shortfall with money from gambling phone in competition lines. We all know how well that panned out.

Burnham asserts that product placement ‘contaminates’ programming. In the UK, many of our prejudices against product placement appear to have been formed from watching movies such as the Bond franchise, where placement is often clumsy and detrimental. This is strange, given that many homes have multichannel TV and are exposed to US programming – laden with placement – on both ITV and the myriad other channels. American Idol on ITV has to fuzz-out the Coke cups on the judges’ desk. But there is no such regulation of Horatio’s Hummer in CSI Miami, Dunkin’ Donuts in Will and Grace nor of the product references on reality shows such as Top Model. There’s simply too much *there*.

Moreover, US imports such as Seinfeld, CSI and Heroes are often held up as archetypes of fantastic TV. All are at least partially funded by product placement. Hell, they probably wouldn’t have been made had it not been for brands bunnying up the cash to be represented. Not that product placement is devoid of problems; script writers in the US continue to (rightly) complain that brands exert undue influence over the creative process. However, with an estimated $7bn to $10bn invested in product placement in the US every year, it’s increasingly hard to discount it as a revenue stream.

To be blunt, ITV and the UK advertising industry need product placement to happen. It’s their ‘get out of jail free’ card. With his ill-advised and ill-informed opinions on the subject, the culture minister may have just slammed the door shut.

Source: FT.

Update: Andy Burnham has also just launched a personal attack on the director of Liberty and leading human rights campaigner, Shami Chakrabarti. Clever.

Footage of Britney Spears being hospitalised for the second time in a month hits YouTube and Google‘s search advertising hits postmodern paydirt. Running next to the clip is an ad for a ringtone of Britney’s current single, ‘Piece of Me’, in which she sings about her life of overexposure and exploitation:

I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17
Don’t matter if I step on the scene
Or sneak away to the Philippines
They still gon put pictures of my derrière in the magazine
You want a piece of me?
You want a piece of me…

On odd occasions we use this site to eulogise the advertising agency where we both used to work: HHCL and Partners. In this case, we wanted to share a couple of ads that sadly never made it to air.

First up, Harvey Keitel (yes, you read that right) for Texaco.

Magnificent. And, Shape ‘Eat It Like a Bloke’. Brilliant.

With thanks to Chris.

It’s a bit too close to Creature Comforts for — um — comfort but a nice stage in the evolution of corporate communications all the same. Coca-Cola’s ‘Making of’ last year’s animated TV spot features the v/os of actual ‘happy’ workers.

So we suppose the ad agency thought: grunge icon + iconic shoe brand – both a bit irrelevant nowadays = exciting brand-generated controversy and lots of sales.

Guess again.

UPDATE:

“The head of Dr. Martens shoes apologized yesterday for an ad featuring Courtney Love’s late husband, Kurt Cobain, and other dead rock stars.

“We are really, really, really sorry,” Dr. Martens chief executive David Suddens tells People magazine. “We do think that it is offensive. We made a mistake. My message to Courtney Love is: This is something we shouldn’t have been doing.”

On Wednesday, Love lashed out at the company via her publicist. “Courtney had no idea this was taking place and would never have approved such a use,” her rep told People. “She thinks it’s outrageous that a company is allowed to commercially gain from such a despicable use of her husband’s picture.”

Suddens says the ad appeared in a British publication and was intended for a one-time use, though it got attention when it showed up on Web sites this week. Suddens says it was a mistake to have allowed even limited use of the ad.

“I wasn’t even aware of it,” Suddens says. “I was still unaware until [Wednesday]. When I found out what happened, I fired [the agency].”

The ad agency that created the effort, Saatchi & Saatchi London, released a statement yesterday posted on the Web site The Daily Swarm. “We believe the ads are edgy but not offensive,” executive creative director Kate Stanners says in the statement. “We regret that the controversy has led Dr. Martens to terminate the contract with Saatchi & Saatchi.”

Stanners goes on to claim that the image was released on a US site without authorisation from the agency. However, an official-looking interview that the writer Andrew Petch gave to the Daily Swarm over a week ago would apparently demonstrate that they were keen to get the word out about the campaign. The article was accompanied by all the executions including ones featuring the recently deceased Joe Strummer as well as Joey Ramone and Sid Vicious.

Erm, do they not understand that the Internet is global?

Source: Newsday via PerezHilton.

Doubt it …

That planet’s about to fall apart like a pig in a blender.

Fab.

Full disclosure: this ad was done by HHCL (RIP), our former employer and manger of BST.

Late last year we noted how similar some ads for a Chinese Italian restaurant chain were to the photography of Jill Greenbergh. At the time we noted that while Greenbergh’s work had caused controversy in the UK, similar images were being used to sell pasta in China. We never thought that the agency would be foolish enough to have not actually asked permission, or — if they hadn’t — that they thought that they could get away with such blatantly copycat work. Shanghaist now kindly alerts us to the fact Greenberg was neither involved nor was she asked permission.

According to Photo District News — which has reported on the story independently from us:

The O&M ad, credited to art director Ng Fan and photographer Connie Hong, according to the site AdsoftheWorld.com, shows a 2- or 3-year-old girl with angel wings, apparently distraught because a strip of hair has been shaved off her head. The ad’s tagline says, “Freshly made angel hair” (a reference to the pasta served by the restaurant). The photograph strongly resembles not only Greenberg’s “End Times” concept, but her shooting style. The images from Greenberg’s exhibit were widely published and reprinted both online and in print, and can be found on her web site.

Pursuing a copyright infringement claim in China can be expensive and difficult. Even if Greenberg pursued legal action, “she would probably have a difficult time making a case,” opines intellectual property attorney Nancy Wolff. Wolff explains that subject matter—in this case, crying children—is not protected by US copyright law, at least. And the ad may not be similar enough to any particular image by Greenberg to meet the threshold for infringement, even though it evokes Greenberg’s style. “Style is not something you can easily protect in terms of copyright,” Wolff says.

Greenberg declined to comment on this story.
Responding to an e-mail request for an interview, Michael Lee, managing director of O&M Advertising in Shanghai, said that the agency is “working with Jill for a solution.”

In our hyper-networked times, why do ad agencies think they can get away with this? There are even websites entirely dedicated to spotting when commercial interests rip off independent artists: check out You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice. Note to agencies: you will get found out.

Miranda July’s lo-tech site for her new book mightn’t exactly be up there with Chris Marker’s La Jettee but is nonetheless a nice story well told against the grain of online visual convention: no Flash, no video, just humour and an excellent sense of timing. Nice.

[Via IF:Book]

In a piece entitled Why Advertisers Still Don’t Get It, Business Week has confirmed our Esther Dyson nugget about good products selling themselves. According to the article:

It’s time to remember that advertising needs brands more than brands need advertising. A good product creates its own relationship.

The example of a good product is the usual one from the usual place — the Apple iPhone — but Business Week also takes the opportunity to roundly skewer advertising as good advertising for, well, ads.

Miami hot shop Crispin Porter & Bogusky’s latest marketing wheeze has been to re-animate the long-dead eponymous founder of Orville Redenbacher popcorn. Apart from being downright creepy (oh we’re sorry — we mean edgy), the campaign — like CDP’s previous Subservient Chicken — seems to have done little to actually sell popcorn.

But for all the campaign buzz and blog-talk, nobody seems to care about Redenbacher’s revival. One might even wonder if, by becoming the reborn star of his commercial, Orville might attract too much attention to himself and none to his product. The hype surrounding the communication might fail to draw new enthusiasm for the product itself. I wonder if this commercial isn’t a sort of subconscious metaphor for how we keep propping up the lifeless tool of advertising, which is no longer the inspiration it used to be.

Well golly. This isn’t some disgruntled blogger dissing a whole industry. This is Business-flippin-Week! It’s as if in the face of Apple’s success, a whole tide of ‘well we never liked you anyway’ anti-advertising antipathy has begun. Again.

[Rather important note: the Business Week article is, of course, written by one Marc Gobe, head of Desgrippes Gobe New York, a brand design firm. We think we're going to rather enjoy the forthcoming advertisers vs. designers hair-pulling.]

I kid not: a big old animated banner ad, trying to sell me stuff, large as life, cluttering up my monitor. I almost fell off my chair. Turns out someone else had been using my machine, and had left Internet Explorer up on the screen. I didn’t notice it wasn’t my usual browser — Firefox – until I clicked into a site and there it was, The Banner. And it was then that it struck me that it’s been months since I’d seen one — the combination of the Firefox plugins AdBlock and FilterSet.G Updater are really that good at blocking the little buggers out.

You can fill in your own moral ending to this tale — be it that I’m one of the scum free-riding on sites that only exist because of ad revenue (whatever — kill them all and let God sort it out), or that Advertising is Dead (in which case someone had better go over and tell it, because last I saw it was dancing on the table and bragging as how it could still pull teenage blondes down the Coach and Horses).

Anyway. I saw an ad! On the Internet! How peculiar.

We toddled along to an ‘Advertising 2.0′ conference last week. Esther was on a panel discussing the presentations. We thought that Esther makes a lot of sense. An early investor in Google, Flickr and del.icio.us, we think that Ms Dyson — like in the song — knows where it’s at.

She made a couple of excellent points last night. One: if we pay more than lip-service to the thought that users are now in control then we should really face up to the conclusion that pushing ads onto them ain’t gonna work no more. Obvious you would have thought. Not given that the prior presentation had been all about online advertising models that presumed attention as a given. No mention of ad-blocking, RSS-ad filtering and — oh yes — search…

Esther talked a bit about the potentially interesting models being developed in the States by companies such as Root Markets, who are basically bribing consumers for their attention. Not a bad idea when you consider the success of crowd-sourcing and gold markets [as discussed in previous posts]. People love to share an opinion. Hell, we’re overjoyed when someone leaves us positive feedback on our Amazon seller account: imagine trapping that will-to-be-liked for your brand.

Second point: advertising is having a good product. The iPod and very-possibly-any day-now the Wii are bearing this out. Have a good product and your consumers will do the selling for you.

Ms Dyson. We salute you.

How many times do we have to say it: there is nowhere to hide on the Internet. This time last year we were talking about how Sony had attempted to exploit street art to market the PSP and now the company has been caught astro-turfing on behalf of the brand. According to Brandrepublic:

Sony Computer Entertainment has been exposed as being behind an embarrassing online viral campaign intended to boost sales of its PlayStation Portable handheld console at Christmas.

A website appeared last month, at alliwantforxmasisapsp.com, intended to look like a genuine fan site unaffiliated to the brand. The site, which included a video clip of a “Cousin Pete” performing a rap asking for a PSP for Christmas, triggered suspicion among the gaming community about its creators’ impartiality.

Speculation that the website was a Sony creation was initially dismissed by the site administrators, who wrote: “We don’t work for Sony. And for all you dissin’ my skillz I’m down for a one on one rap off or settling it street stylez if you feel me playa.” [Quite].

It has since emerged that the site was created by Sony Computer Entertainment US.

Contrast this with the launch of the Wii. Now we don’t think that all of those pictures of Wii-related black-eyes and customised wrist straps are necessarily a Bad Thing. And recalls also have a tendency to make the heart grow fonder. At least it demonstrates that people are actually playing with the damn things… as The Mirror headline notes:

Wii-OWW! THE new Nintendo Wii games console is causing mayhem — as over-excited players hurl themselves around.

Meanwhile, we’ve seen a grand total of three PSPs this year. Another gauge? Flickr is already hosting nearly 21,000 photos relating to Wii to PSP’s 23,000.

Jill Greenberg’s hyper-realised photos of kids crying caused a mini-storm a whle back in the States and the UK. Critics accused the artist — who confessed to tactics such as taking sweets off the children to make them cry — of child abuse. The Guardian reported at the time:

When photographer Jill Greenberg decided to take a lollipop away from a small child, she had a broader purpose in mind.

“The first little boy I shot, Liam, suddenly became hysterically upset,” the Los Angeles-based photographer said. “It reminded me of helplessness and anger I feel about our current political and social situation.”

As the 27 two- and three-year-olds featured in her exhibition, End Times, cried and screamed, demanding the return of the lollipop given to them just moments before, Greenberg snapped away.

The results have provoked a storm of criticism from bloggers. “Jill Greenberg is a sick woman who should be arrested and charged with child abuse,” wrote Andrew Peterson on the Thomas Hawk blog.”

Funny then that the same idea (and maybe the same artist — unattributed or not) should turn up in ads for an Italian restaurant in Shanghai.

Ogilvy & Mather Shanghai ad for Italian restaurant chain Gondola Veneziana:

Jill Greenberg’s End Times series:

…

The evidence: that malevolent clown is styled to look like Malcolm McDowell’s Alex and they also share the same music — Rossini’s Thieving Magpie.

Isn’t the stylised murder and mayhem of A Clockwork Orange a bit dark for a mainstream brand? Or maybe this is the directors/creatives’ little in-joke. The presence of the clown would suggest not. In the film, Rossini’s music always accompanies the gang’s acts of senseless violence. We also think that the ‘making of’ leak onto YouTube — whilst clearly a cute thing to do — has made the actual ad somewhat anticlimactic. Maybe they should have done something like this (below) instead… just a thought.

With thanks to Martyn.

To promote its More 4 drama Death of a President, Channel 4 used the wraparound on News International freesheet thelondonpaper.

Thousands of Londoners got an almighty shock as the ‘headline’ appeared to report the death of one George W Bush. What was particularly smart about this campaign is the photo is modelled on an already iconic image: the near-fatal shooting of Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Understandably, both the drama and its ad campaign have been rather controversial. And by working with an actual newspaper, More 4 have successfully blurred the lines between fact and fiction — a brilliantly provocative example of ‘what if?’

[Full disclosure: one of us works for United London, thelondonpaper's ad agency. We did not do the More 4 ad].

So the *shock horror* news from last week was that London ad agencies BBH and Leo Burnett are to open premises in Second Life. Leo Burnett think a virtual office will be a good way to run international business and BBH see possibilities in a virtual creative office. Well whoopee doo: virtual offices ain’t that new. HHCL did it back in the day (1998) with their MOO-based HowellHenryLand [full disclosure here -- BST's designer built hhland and BST's editor worked at HHCL]. As that experiment showed us, there is a valid space for virtual offices, but we would suggest that Second Life isn’t it.

This photo of a Second Lifer from The Economist this week shows why. Folks, the clue is in the name. Second Life is a place where people come to exercise their fantasies, not their reality. Second Life users don’t want this space to look like London’s Soho — they’ve already got one of those.

Maybe, if ad agencies and brands are smart they’ll use their Second Life presence to probe users’ ‘other’ life — the one where they have leather wings and flying rollerskates — to find out what drives peoples’ desires and leads them to want innumerable handbags. What ad agencies have to recognise about SL is that it’s (deep breath) Not Real. If they must be in Second Life, we’d like to see ad agencies get genuinely creative: how about BBH fire-bombing Leo Burnett from flying Llamas?

Anyways, isn’t SL well, just a bit emo? In our idle moments, we dream of the day when ad agencies and other brands try and invade the blood-and-guts online game World of Warcraft. After all, that MMORPG boast an impressive 7m subscribers to Second Life’s paltry 700,000. We’d also love to see who would win in a fight of Second Life users vs World of Warcraft but it would appear for now that these virtual worlds are not mutually inclusive. Shame. Designer Adidas vs. Broadsword +3? That battle would be short but very sweet. Ah well…

Here we have a classic example of ad agencies’ tendency to simply appropriate a new space as opposed to thinking about how to contribute to it. Witness the numerous feckless experiments we’re seen already with street art from the likes of PSP and Saatchi & Saatchi.

As Henry Jenkins tells The Economist, Second Life deserves credit as “a world of hypotheticals and thought experiments”: it’s not just another territory — like New York — for ad agencies to plant a flag on as a PR wheeze.

First up — CBS in the States is advertising its new schedule on eggs. Yeah, right, whatever, we hear you say — after all Internet bank Smile advertised on bananas yonks ago and we’ve already written about tattooed fruit. But. But this latest effort to merge food and media appears to be well thought out and even has a copy-worthy back story.

The New York Times reports [registration req'd] that network plans to place laser imprints of its insignia and logos for some shows on 35 million eggs in the autumn. CBS’s copywriters have had a load of fun with their sloganeering: CSI — crack the case on CBS; Shark — hard-boiled drama etc.

As cracked as this scheme sounds, George Schweitzer, president of the CBS marketing group, said:

It’s a great way to reach people in an unexpected form… You can’t avoid it.

Just one of the many claimed benefits of the medium is that ’91% of egg buyers look through eggs to check for breakage prior to purchase’ — more dedicated eyeballs than the average TV commercial can claim (maybe).

The imprinting tech used to brand eggs has been developed by a company called EggFusion, based in Deerfield, Illinois. The founder Bradley Parker claims he wanted to reassure shoppers that egg producers were not placing old eggs in new cartons, so he developed a laser-etching technique to put the expiration date directly on an egg during the washing and grading process. Mr Parker, whose family runs a chicken farm in North Carolina, knew that the only way to get egg producers to co-operate was to make it worth their while. Hence turning the eggs into an advertising medium.

To ensure that egg producers stick to the rules, EggFusion has technicians assigned to each egg plant whilst it owns the equipment and data. The eggs also carry a code that can be checked on a website, www.myfreshegg.com, to find out where the egg originated, the date it left the plant and the names of the distributor and retailer.

Meanwhile in the UK, food producer Birds Eye have continued their ‘we don’t play with your food’ theme into a blog written by one of their pea-farmers. We think that this is a really nice attempt by a corporation to engage with consumers in an open and honest way — right down to somewhat blurry photos. Plus it has a real ‘how it works’ cuteness about it.

What’s clever and zeitgeisty about both of these schemes is that they encourage both consumer trust and producer transparency. The Birds Eye blog has posts titled ‘The folks from ISO are here for an audit’. There is little doubt that consumers Really Care about where the food on their plate comes from nowadays and whether or not it is safe to eat and these branded initatives are picking up on that. And even if the blog in particular is subject to rigorous cross-checking and PR controls it doesn’t show. Plus it’s about peas…

Pea-blogging via Russell Davies’ blog.

ArtNotAds do what they say on the tin — replace outdoor advertising with art. They’ve also utilised Pledgebank to get a campaign going to get enough pledges of £10 to start the campaign by placing a piece or art/poem/etc on one of the Underground station advertising slots.

What the big outdoor media placement companies think of their antics, we shall soon find out…

Via Protein Feed.