soap operettes

This is a fantastic Nescafé campaign from the late 1980s.

It’s an interesting variation on the leitmotiv approach: evolve a creative concept over time to deliver increased depth and duration of audience engagement:

The same technique was harnessed in the equally wonderful Nicole, Papa work for Renault Clio a few years later.

Such storytelling is a powerful communications proposition that brands can deliver through conventional media like TV.

However, the proliferation of storytelling media like the Web means we now have many more opportunities to engage people than we did in the 1980s; which brand will be the first to refresh this approach and deliver the first epic  transmedia story?

I’d love to see more examples of these brand ’soap operettes’ – please share any links via the comments section below.

in the flesh

Geb over at Ruby Pseudo shared an interesting perspective on youth marketing recently.

The opening line of the post sums it up:

“Not many brands ‘get’ the youth market; they’re either too in-your-face, or try too hard to be ‘down with the kids’.”

Some brands do get it right though, as demonstrated by a recent partnership between Burger King and a Singaporean fashion brand, Flesh Imp.

Flesh Imp have designed a range of items as part of the tie-up, including some great T-shirts and headwear, and have implemented some engaging in-store activity too.

The result feels very natural: a hint of self-deprecating irony from both brands builds their respective personalities by showing that neither takes itself too seriously.

Nicholas at Flesh Imp gave me a bit of background to the whole collaboration, but it’s probably easiest to let some pictures from the brand’s flickr tell the story instead:

‘King’ playing card T

T-shirts come packed in great ‘take-away’ boxes

The window dressing at the chain’s flagship store

‘King’ T close up

Have it your way…

Limited edition headwear

Here’s your order

The brand has put together a great Facebook profile that shows more of the collaboration:

[click image to enlarge]

The whole tie-up fits nicely with the global BK Studio initiative – something that Flesh Imp have helped the brand with before:

BK isn’t the only multinational brand that Flesh Imp has collaborated with though.

This clip gives a taste of some great work they produced on behalf of Coke Zero, again in Singapore:

They did a great line for the Transformers movie too:

Flesh Imp 3D Transformers T

The magic ingredient that makes all these tie-ups work is authenticity: Flesh Imp manages to find an overlap in relevance between these large brands’ positionings and its own irreverent personality.

There’s a similarity to the Adidas Originals approach:

The difference is that Flesh Imp creates success for partner brands as well as its own, connecting them with a more cynical, younger audience.

As Nicholas pointed out, how many ad agencies could achieve that kind of impact?

As Ruby might say… Nice.

See more on the Flesh Imp tie-ups on their official blog, facebook and flickr sites.

media myopia

There’s something very wrong with media planning.

We all seem to agree that things have changed.

However, too few of us are doing anything to really harness that change.

Bizarrely, we seem to be perpetuating an old, broken model.

I’ve seen this dangerous image in far too many places recently:

Every time I see it, a little piece of me dies.

People think it shows how far we’ve come, but I think it shows the opposite.

I recognise its accuracy – it paints a realistic picture of advertising today – but it’s that very reality that I find so disturbing.

It highlights a ‘menu’ approach that continues to stifle media planning; an apporach that erodes the value we should be adding to our clients’ businesses, and destroys their trust in our work.

It proves that we still see the world from our perspective, instead of planning from our audience’s lives.

The sad fact is that we’re barely scraping the surface of what we could do.

I can’t stress this enough:

So why do we continue to focus on so few channels?

As Neil pointed out earlier this week, many of us blame our inertia on clients who “just don’t get it.”

But really, we are the problem.

So what can we do to fix things?

Firstly, we can adopt a more strategic approach to planning – planning based on the things we want to share, the people we want to share them with, and the lives those people live.

The second point goes much deeper.

The real barrier to making the most of the opportunities at our disposal is a revenue model built on commission.

Fundamentally, that model means that we can only survive if we sell paid media.

But if we are to succeed, we must stop operating as mere brokers, and aggressively push the strategic agenda we know to be correct.

These changes must begin with us.

So, I’m asking for your help.

Do whatever you think it takes: tweet it, share it, write your own version and blog it; even better, do them all.

But above all, let’s do something: it’s high time that we make a real difference, instead of just talking about it.

I believe the channels graphic first appeared in the FT.

blending the 4Ps

The trendspotters over at Springwise featured this great piece of activity from Domino’s Pizza in the Netherlands, developed by agency Indie Amsterdam.

They’ve placed ‘doors’ in parks and on beaches, highlighting the fact that Domino’s will deliver almost anywhere, provided the location is within the catchment area of one of its stores.

These ‘doors’ serve as actual delivery ‘addresses’, expanding the brand’s sales opportunities, but they obviously double as engaging communications too.

They’re a great example of something I’ve been thinking about quite a bit recently: the convergence of communications and distribution.

In a world where ubiquitous access to brands is becoming increasingly realistic, and where even the boundaries between product offerings and advertising are blurring (Nike’s Run London being a good example of something that fits in both disciplines), the lines of demarcation between the classic 4Ps are blurring.

This is very exciting: for those with creative minds, this evolution into ‘transmedia offerings’ opens up a whole new universe of opportunities.

Expect more on this soon…

Image taken from the Springwise article, with many thanks.