"When presented with bold new ideas, people reference what they know more than what they can conceive."
Senior Director Michael Perman of Levi's passed us oranges, recounted memories of his dad and deluged us with blue-jean trivia in an ad:tech sesh entitled "The Power of Storytelling."
See snippets of tweet coverage. It's apt that Levi's give us the skinny on storytelling's underrated appeal, given that its capacity to spin tales has beguiled us for years. Anyway, here's some videographic deja vu.
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Ogilvy Vice Chairman Steve Hayden conducted a keynote titled "Fear, Love and Advertising" at ad:tech SF last week. I livetweeted it; you can see some of the tweetage here.
Hayden kicked off by explaining the premise behind his talk: in this dire economic clime, when everybody's castrating their own creativity, he hopes to encourage the industry to shelf their fears in favour of a little (well-informed) wonder.
He woke the muse by blasting us with iconic ads, like the Apple Newton stuff and "True Colors" from Dove's Real Women campaign.
Then he gave us a long, colourful explanation of a hexagon he calls Hayden's Mandala -- a complex (and yet simple!) cycle of everything a person/brand goes through when facing a major growth trajectory or change. Here's a video snapshot of that:
Then Hayden did something I've never seen a keynoter do before: he passed the floor to people whose products he thinks will change the media environment. I was awestruck, and only more so when I saw what came next.
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Amielle Lake is the CEO of Tagga, a Vancouver-based company that helps agencies add a strategic mobile component to their campaigns. (Think broad SMS efforts, mobile websites, etc).
The service -- currently live in Canada and the US -- includes reporting and dashboard management, and payment models are flexy.
We sat down yesterday to talk about Tagga in a video interview. As luck would have it, I ended up gleaning a lot more than I expected. Amielle tells this great story about Tagga's birth and the state of agencies at that time; it also turns out she worked in mining and knows French cheese like this. (*crosses fingers*)
Funny what you can find out when the pressure's on (ad:tech was ending, hence the skulky suited man in the BG) and you know your first take MUST be perfect (I don't know how to use my video editing software. But you probably guessed that).
Compulsive Twitterers can hit the Follow button at: @tagga and @amiellel.
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Forget, for a second, about the vacuumy cafe noises and the girl with the crutches in the background. The weather is pretty, Schoggi is cozy and we have pistachio and rosewater macaroons.
Fun fact: Founder/CEO Ryan Holmes of Invoke Media, parent company of HootSuite, has never had a macaroon before. When I ordered them at the register, he asked if they were "Asian hamburgers." And then I died.
Notes on this video:
1. HootSuite is one of the cooler tools available to marketers on Twitter right now. It has a proprietary URL shortening feature (ow.ly) with a built-in ad and revenue sharing model. HootSuite can also manage multiple accounts at once.
An update, slated for the near future, will boast still more features and turn the HootSuite UI into a cross between Firefox (with tabs!) and TweetDeck. Yeah, that sounds scary, but Ryan assures me they've got good info architecture/usability peeps back at Invoke.
I believe everything he says. EVERYTHING.
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As tipster Zeke suggested, asking ad people if they know cool strikes me as a good hook. I agree. So what's the problem I have with Little Black Book, a city and resources guide for creative folk? It only hits the same old international metro locations like London, NYC, Toronto, and so on. Maybe it's due to the ad royalty behind it, but really, not even San Fran or LA? Telling that there's no mobile feature? Well, that's the main problem. The other is that the Flash is real slow.
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When Angela isn't busy interviewing famous Wikipedians in San Fran, she's hanging back in Paris. Not sure if she's fully converted yet and become an American tourist-hating local, but I recently got to talking with her about the differences between internet life there and here in the U.S. Jerry Lewis never did come up, but David at AdPulp was kind enough to give us free room and board while we talked about the other differences between Al Gore's Internet and the Euronet version.
There's decent amount of back and forth talk about a post Alan Wolk had over at Agency Spy. I came away thinking there are a lot of issues at work there lumped together under the single banner of why are ad people so damn angry. In talking offline with a few creatives about it, even more points were raised. At the risk of continuing the separation of church and state between creatives and the rest of the world, the focus for me becomes:
1) Why are anonymous comments overwhelmingly bitter/negative on ad blogs?
(The flipside to why are ad people so damn angry.) Are we talking in the workplace? Or online. Two different things. If I was stuck in a lousy shop, I'd be angry too. I might even go online to vent about it anonymously. What if they're tired of reading fluff pieces about someone they know to be a prick. Sure beats the mall and rifle approach.
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This is for those who've recently mentioned Adrants seems to have forgotten about or shunned the fact there's a lot of sex, sexual innuendo and gratuitous almost-nudity in advertising.
So here you are, doubters. Purple lingerie. Hot chick. Rad music. Courtesy of Blush.
And to all those who feel we occasionally pimp ads just because they have a hot chick wearing lingerie, you have to sell a product somehow and what better way to do so than to show the product on a person everyone wishes they were. It's called aspirational marketing. OK, so it's the basest form of aspirational marketing but still.
Last week at ad:tech Paris I got to hang out with VP-Strategy Robin Sloan of Current TV. We built rapport over Extremely Important Stuff: why the universe needs Battlestar Galactica, how you (or, well, I) can't get a good burrito in Paris, and whether the talking space ship in Flight of the Navigator would look as cool today as it did when we were weebies.
Anyway, at some point I randomly said, "Can I take video of you talking?" or something to that effect, and he was all, "Cool," and by some strange juju I managed to catch him saying some pretty agreeable stuff about the media industry: what it needs (in the context of the perfect conference) and where it's headed.
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OK, we're like days late to this new Lifestyles Skyn Condoms commercial and all its domestic, international and web-only versions. But when a release screams, "quite possibly the raciest commercial ever made," our interest is peaked.
Sadly, it's no where near the raciest commercial ever made, online or off. Oh yea, it's got all kinds of sexual gyrations, racy shots of barely dressed hotties and a condom fairy but it's far from the raciest anything. Seriously. How racy can a commercial featuring people having sex be if the people having sex are still wearing their underwear?
Created by AMP Boston and produced by Best Company Ever, the ad...wait for it...uses sex to sell a sex-related product. How revolutionary! Brilliant! Call Cannes!
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