Brant.ie

The last few blog posts that I have written have felt somewhat like treading theoretical and practical marketing water. In so much as whilst I think they’ve been comment-worthy, they’ve not exercised me one way or another, positively or negatively. Which is somewhat at odds with the Steve Jobs quote I posted last week! However, I’ve continued to plough on as I think it’s good practice. I read a Financial Times book on holidays in Nerja last year, in which the author reckoned that intellectual capabilities in certain fields are much the same as physical muscles: i.e. a sprinter is good at sprinting because he / she repeatedly exercises the same muscles that improve sprinting. Much in the same way that a marketeer should be constantly exercising their marketing / branding muscles to improve their overall marketing capabilities.

However, whilst I’ll be doing more marketing laps of the track this week, it’ll be with more fire in my analytical belly, as I’ve come across a campaign that has really struck a chord with me. The marketing nerd in me loves seeing one singular idea that requires implementation across a number of different disciplines. I’ve commented on this before and there have been some good examples of this in the past year: the best example is probably the Norte one from Argentina. Secondly one to this is seeing a media neutral idea that is implemented across different disciplines: TV, print, merchandising, etc… This week’s example is similar to the last few weeks in that it’s a beer brand, but it comes from the opposite end of the world: New Zealand.

Like a lot of interesting creative ideas, it’s grounded in a great consumer insight. The PR blurb around the campaign for DB Export alludes to this insight: namely that the 18-25 male target consumer was drinking more and more wine. Understandable how this situation occurred given the high quality and affordable wine available in a country like NZ. However, the crux was that they did it just to fit in and didn’t enjoy it: so DB Export comes to the rescue.  As with most campaigns the best expression of the idea is the TV version

The adherence to the period with it’s rubbish 80′s production values of the piece is just brilliant: the VHS-style transfer, the awful haircuts, the crap sports programme backing tracking, the terrible colour contrast (either drab or too much), the gaudy yellow Arial text. As that terribly over-used cliche goes, the devil is truly in the detail. The agency has really delivered for DB Extra in this regard. So, taking this into account, whilst they do bring the idea into the area of print, I was somewhat disappointed that they didn’t retain this attention to detail. Sure the print adverts below have clever copy-writing, but I feel they’ve missed a trick by not retaining this ethos of faux rubbish production values (click on the image to see a bigger version).

They did have a very clever idea for bringing this idea to the attention of the target consumer in the exact arena that they were trying to switch them from. They produced a faux wine brand with real wine in it and placed it in the wine section of off-licences around New Zealand. The copy writing on it really is excellent and I guess it would have been difficult to apply 80′s production values to this in a way that was immediately apparent to the target consumer.

I suppose I’m being somewhat picky though as all in, a really strong media-neutral idea based on a strong consumer insight.

Have a nice week!

Bonjour mes amis! Ça Va? Err…that’s about the extent of my pidgin French, so I’d better stop it there. I wonder where the word pidgin comes from…? Answers on an SAE…

The majority of stuff I’ve blogged about here in the last 9 months have all been advertising and, in particular, traditional TV campaigns. I guess that’s because it’s generally the most emotive stuff that you find and it usually has the heaviest investment. However, with the changing media environment, I’m always keen to find more and more digital / social media stuff to talk about. I’ve commented on this before but the reason I like it so much is because it’s completely new frontier for marketeers and, as consequence, it’s quite lacking in theory and is developing organically, which is great to see.

A year or two ago, the general thesis seemed to be focused on driving the size of a brand’s fan base on Facebook. Over the last year, that has since changed as marketeers have seen the spreading like wildfire of an equation that I have previously mentioned on this blog: (Apps + Prizes + ASU’s) x (Time) x (Cash) = Fans.  Magnus Cormack’s quote about fans not actually being fans in the actual full and proper English sense of the word is still the most insightful comment that I have heard about Facebook this year.

Considered and accepted opinion has developed past this to focus in on user engagement: or more specifically Liking, Commenting and Sharing. I saw two things actually two weeks ago now (significant life events have conspired to mean less blogging!) that talk to this newly and organically developed approach to a brand’s activity on Facebook. The first thing is from the department store C&A and a combined social media and retail experience that they tested in a store of theirs in Sao Paolo, Brazil. Watch the video below.

I really like the thought of innovation behind this initiative. Sure, there are probably holes in it: based on my shopping experiences with my wife, I certainly can’t claim to understand the female psyche behind purchasing clothes, but might some not be that interested in how many people like a particular article of clothing. Also, isn’t it a bit of a nightmare to implement? What happens when consumers put clothes back on the wrong hangers etc…? But in the spirit of innovation, I guess that isn’t the point. Rather C&A the brand is bringing innovative and exciting initiatives first to market. Additionally, readers of the blog will know that I’m a massive fan of marketing initiatives that run across normally unrelated disciplines: and I’m struggling to think of 2 more unrelated disciplines that social media and merchandising. Well done, C&A.

The next thing in a similar-ish territory around engagement and Likes was also from the Portuguese-speaking world but this time from Portugal itself, by the large local beer brand Super Bock. As the whole campaign is in English, I can only assume the team behind this are hoping that it would go globally viral.

Right off the bat: I really don’t rate this at all. I know this is clearly intended to be light-hearted but it carries some hallmarks of causal marketing. But what a cause. I mean, seriously, a campaign about changing the ‘Like’ button. Don’t people have anything else going on in their lives? If one is to go purely on fans numbers alone, thankfully this non-idea doesn’t appear to have captured the public’s imagination as the fans numbers have stayed at about 30,000 for about 2 weeks. Additionally, other than the really tenuous link of the word Super at the end, where the bloody hell is the brand in this? This whole thing smacks of a digital agency and the client trying to come up with something that they thought everyone would be interested in and completely forgot about their brand: the thing that pays the bills.

And ultimately that’s the difference between the two pieces: to my mind, one succeeds from a marketing strategy perspective because it is innovative and the brand experience is at it’s core. Whereas the other, is trying to create some really bland band-wagon that has nothing to do with their brand in the hope that loads of people will want to jump on it. The folks at The Oatmeal said it better than I ever could with this cartoon.

Been pretty bad on the blogging front lately: this is my first post in 15 days. I try to write an article at least once a week as a good standard but then sometimes life and a lack of decent content conspire and get in my way. Not today on either front though: my wife’s asleep upstairs and I’ve come across a very interesting campaign by Heineken for their Newcastle Brown Ale brand. Have a looksie below and see what you think:

From what I can tell from the mandatory information on the creative, this seems to be targeted at US consumers. Hence the reason one would imagine that they don’t have any problems in using the term “bollocks” in advertisements there. I’d imagine this would never get approved for usage in the UK. This theme of “No Bollocks” is further developed upon in their social media presence, where it’s pretty clear that they’re positioning themselves as the anti-Stella Artois. As an aside, having the URL facebook.com/newcastle is pretty handy.

It’s an interesting case study. In some ways it’s related to the challenger brand theme that I had discussed early in the year with Ecotricity and Paddy Power. However, Newcastle Brown Ale’s work here feels more like a proto-challenger brand in that it’s owned and marketed by Heineken. Additionally, I choose the word proto- as it would only apply to their position in the US market (where this is targeted at) and not the UK, where it is a large, traditional brand with ingrained perceptions of it amongst the general populace. As a broad rule, I like seeing challenger brand activity as there’s an overall lightness to it. I don’t mean lightness as in light-hearted humour, rather in the fact that it isn’t weighed down by the expectation of being successful like big brands are; it is free to do and act as it pleases.

However, I’m not sure about this one. Firstly, from a brand strategy perspective, I think that directly referencing one other brand in such a manner represents a very risky route to go down: if you take the position of standing for what your competitor isn’t, then part of the definition of your brand DNA, what lies at it’s core, is owned by your competition. From a strategic point of view, I can’t understand why in the long term, you would want to do this. I’ve always believed that it’s much better for a brand to stand sure in it’s own beliefs and not outwardly concern itself with how competitors position themselves. Sure, the positioning statements and brand platforms need to pass the OURS test (ownable, unique, relevant and simple), but past that, for longer term success a brand needs to be able to define itself independent of it’s competition. Secondly, and this is quite a personal point of view that some of you other marketeers may not agree with, but I’ve always thought that it represents a really difficult creative challenge to directly talk about competitors in the fashion that Newcastle Brown Ale have done in here without appearing to be petty. To my mind they don’t achieve this.

That’s your lot for this week. Talk soon.

There are a number of reasons that I started writing this blog last summer. One of the primary ones was that I enjoyed and still enjoy talking about campaigns that provoke a reaction: both equally positively and negatively. In fact, it’s the negative element that was the inspiration for the name of this site. To that end, my writing has somewhat lost it’s way as I haven’t had a good rant about anything for a while: this has probably been both conscious and subconscious. Chrysler are allowing me to right that wrong today.

They’ve recently launched a new TVC in the US for their 300 model. Make sure you have a bucket to hand when watching it.

Certainly since I started this blog and even before that, I can’t remember seeing a more schmalzy, insincere, stomach-turning piece of advertising. Can anyone think of a recent era when it wouldn’t have seemed toe-curling? Everything about the advert grates with me: from the opening line to the closing shot. Firstly, the whole father and son dynamic has been done to bloody death in American advertising, it’s so boring. The last interesting take on it was Canadian Club channelling some Mad Men (click here), which is in a completely different territory to this. Then to the opening line “We didn’t grow up fancy”. Urrgghhh. What is this? The Depression? As an aside, why doesn’t someone somewhere make an advert that opens with “We grew up loaded and, you know what, it was bloody brilliant”. This whole lazy being ‘poor but happy, loaded but miserable’ idea is so cliched. Life is more complicated than that. Chrysler riff on this appalling theme in the press release.

Not all of us grew up with everything we wanted. That’s why it’s important to take risks, as scary as they might be sometimes. Dream big, set your own course and shoot for the stars and the world will hear the roar of our engines.

Clearly, Tony Robbins has got a job as a copy-writer in Chrysler’s PR agency. Then there’s them ham-fisted parable about the son being allowed to stay up late and watch his ol’ Pa play cards with the boys. As they didn’t grow up fancy, I assume the cards were hand-made out of cereal boxes that rich people had thrown out and everyone was huddled around a match for warmth: that scene is probably in the 90″ edit. This is all verbally segwayed into how staying up late watching his dad play cards has been a lesson in life.

Judging by the casting of the protagonist in this advert, I’m guessing that the target consumer is a 35-44YO ABC1 professional, urban, male. Additionally, I imagine this thing was put through a reasonable amount of research given the production values and the relative spend. Taking both of those facts into account, how did this thing get produced. Seriously, who were the people in the focus groups for this? Whilst I’m not American, I do fall bang into the target consumer for this advert. I can only assume that Chrysler’s competitors managed to stuff the research groups for this advert with agent provocateurs and give this dog the “thumbs up” across the board .

If this advert has one mildly redeeming feature (other than the fact that it won’t appear on TV over here), it’s the sign-off “The world will hear the roar of our engines”. But even then, that is the kind of statement that isn’t founded in any kind of product truths. Anyone ever driven a Chrysler? I have once and I would have only applied the word roar to myself after it and definitely not it’s driving experience: they’re shit. Also, world? Sorry, what? Who buys Chryslers outside of the US?

Aaahh…glad I got that off my chest.

Jeez. Yet another busy week.  So busy that I’m writing this in the barber’s waiting for an overdue haircut. Well, what’s left of my hair. I hadn’t really had much of a chance to look around for campaigns and activities of note. However last night I did come across two things of reasonable interest from a similar industry which are debatably comparable brands that I wanted to share.

The first is from Microsoft and is a viral that they done around their launch of the latest version of Internet Explorer, IE9. Readers of this blog or my Twitter feed will know just how much I hate IE. I avoid it at all costs: I have removed it from my work PC and I only run Mac at home. Browsing the internet on IE running that God awful Ask.com toolbar must be the surfing equivalent of listening to a double album of Ronan Keating covering the Black Eyed Peas. Completely annoying, totally unnecessary and simply infuriating. Thankfully it appears that Microsoft are aware of this and, not only that, they are playing up to it in the creative for IE9.

Two things intrigue me about this advert. Firstly, the fact that they have the confidence to essentially take the mickey out previous versions of their product. I guess this is a mixture of not only confidence but also due to a not insignificant amount of people like me out there, who really hate the previous versions of IE. Secondly, and this is something that seems to be unique to the computing industry, but this is an advert for something that you can’t buy and is given away for free. I realise that Google do the same, but I guess they make their money back by advertising to people once they start using their products. I can’t see how this applies here and I can only assume that the objective of this is aimed improving the overall brand perception of Microsoft and it’s main products. Nevertheless, advertising something that’s free. Hmm…

The second thing that I wanted to share was the latest Intel social media campaign. I’m sure you came across their really innovative “Museum of Me” App on Facebook last year. So many people posted this to their Fb profiles last summer as, for me, it did two things brilliantly: it cleverly utilised the technology of social media and in a way that was interesting to consumers. Not only that, it was beautifully produced also and had a really bespoke feel. However, I don’t think the same can be said of their latest effort: “What About Me?” Essentially you let this access your Facebook, YouTube and Twitter profiles and this App creates an infographic of your life. Sounds possibly interesting, but the end result is just so flat, such a let down. It seems they’ve forgotten the consumer in all of this and that the greater fun was in the technical challenge in trying to do this. Give it a go yourself, maybe you’ll feel differently.

Right, it’s sunny outside, my hair is cut and I’m off to Belfast. Enjoy your weekend!

¡Ola! I’m in the process of making changes and additions to the website over the past week and next few days. Some of which, you will hopefully notice and some which you probably shouldn’t unless you’re trying to hack in to the back end of the site.

I was running my eye over three things to blog about this week and they have all sort of been hot topics in the last two weeks. I was thinking that I probably should have blogged on that KONY2012 thing, but it didn’t interest me and there’s been bloody reams and reams of stuff written about it at this point. This picture probably sums up my feelings about it best. Also, there was that One Dollar Shave Club thing doing the rounds, you can see it here. What with the Ecotricity thing I wrote a few weeks back and the Paddy Power piece from 2 weeks, I wanted to think and write about something other than challenger brands. More for my own interest than anything else.

With this thought in mind, last week I saw this new piece of creative from the anti-thesis of a challenger brand, in fact, one of the world’s great luxury brands: Cartier. They have commissioned director Bruno Aveillan to produce a 3-minute cinematic AV in celebration of their history. The official blurb about it says “Discover the new Cartier film, a journey between dream and reality. For the very first time, Cartier has decided to create a cinema epic focusing on its history, its values and inspiration, its artistic and universal scope.” The final work is called (quite typically artistic of a French luxury brand) “L’Odyssée de Cartier”. Judge for yourself below.

Most of the time the stuff that I’ve blogged about here has nearly always been creatively led: i.e. what story the creative is trying to tell. Less often than not I’ve commented on the creative in the context of the brand challenges. Last week’s example of Sky Sports being a case in point: in reality, ITV or the BBC could have done that same advert as there was nothing inherently Sky Sports in the creative.

This one is slightly different however. Don’t get me wrong, I like the creative: it’s quite cinematic in scope and it’s superbly made. Plus from the pure point of view of a marketeer, who wouldn’t like to be told by the senior management “There’s €5m, go off and make us whatever”. Rather what interested me most about this advert and that of luxury brands in general is the context that they find themselves in as regards the world market. I have nothing to back this opinion up but from my point of view, it appears that people in the west are becoming more subtle and unobtrusive in their consumption of super luxury brands. The likes of Hermes, Gucci, Rolex et al. are obviously still around, but are less visible amongst the general population (certainly in this country anyway). Perhaps that’s a combination of two things: the shittest recession to hit Western Europe since the 1930’s and the general collective social conscience in which it’s bad to be seen to flaunt it. From my own point of view, I’ve never really bought into any of that collective social conscience bollox as I see it as abdication of your own thought processes. Also, I’m a bit of a sucker for Prada stuff, so there’s that as well. But I digress.

This current Western European view of super luxury brands however apparently couldn’t be more at odds with their purchase and usage in China, India, Russia and the like, which is the definition of conspicuous. I remember when I used to work on the ex-USSR markets, a former colleague explaining his theory on why super-luxury brands are so big in the East, specifically former / current Communist regimes. In Western European countries, there is still generally speaking an established class structure, where it is noticeable from someone’s surname, place of birth, accent, secondary school and / or university what their background and ‘stock’ are. However, in a country like Russia, this isn’t the case as there is essentially only one accent and everyone went to the same schools and universities. Therefore, the only way for someone to show their peers that they have become something in life is via conspicuous consumption of luxury brands. This is something that is explicitly and tacitly recognised in the creative: as there are only three vignettes of the four that aren’t set in Cartier’s home place and they are clearly Russia, China and India. No accident, surely. It’s interesting to see an old world, super luxury European brand focus its global creative so specifically on new territories that are quite far removed from its historic base. Interesting in that it shows that for established luxury brands to continue to grow the big all the focus lies east.

Anywho, that’s it for this week. Enjoy the ad.

One of the best things that I’ve learned since starting to write this blog last summer is not actually about branding or marketing but rather about myself. I think I’ve got a better understanding of what I like as both a consumer and marketeer and why I like it. Sure, maybe I could have got that without writing this blog, but only when you write your opinions down, do you have a documented and time-bound record that you can refer to. It’s become a lot more apparent to me quicker than it may have otherwise as a result.

I say this because this week I saw what is probably my favourite advert in about a year. Only looking back over the archive here on Brant, did I realise the creative similarities between it and my favourite advert from last year, adidas’ “all in” campaign (here’s last year’s blog on it). I’m talking about the new Sky Sports advert for the F1 season and the launch of their dedicated F1HD channel. Check it out for yourself below.

In some ways this follows a similar storyboard and types of creative treatements to the adidas advert. Firstly, a lot of the footage has very close up almost hand-held feel to it in the same way the adidas advert did. I think that this is a really clever editing cue as it places the view at the heart of the action. The fact also that it uses real live footage and not some staged studio nonsense really adds to the credibility: close-up’s of the drivers interacted with each other, real race footage. This shouldn’t be underestimated in communicating a brand’s credibiity in a sponsorship involvement: I’ve always found those Gillette adverts with the likes of Roger Federer and Thierry Henry just incredibly forced and staged. Nothing does the job like the real footage: isn’t that why people love the respective sports in the first place?

Secondly, the audio that is used and the way it is segwayed with the footage really builds to a crescendo beautifully around the “5 Red Lights / Go” near the end of the 90 seconds. The epic of nature of the track no doubt helps, which itself bears some resemblence to Clint Mansell’s amazing but, at this stage, flogged to death ‘Lux Aeterna’.

Finally, one thing I think it has in common with the adidas advert is the way it balances it’s cinematic scope with the roots of the sport(s) that it’s based in. I think it achieves this through both it’s use of audio and imagery. The jump cutting of fans, with crew and drivers communicates all the levels of the sport from being the best exponent in the world to being a simple fan on the hill. It’s documentary nature speaks of a very egalitarian ethos. In terms of audio, the aforementioned epic track achieves the cinematic scope but this is really well balanced by juxtaposing this against the sounds of the track. The best example of this is the last 5 seconds of the advert as the Red Bull car roars by: I’m sure that this breaks what might be considered acceptable sound levels for an advert. There could have been the temptation to dial this down, but I think that would have been a mistake: because that’s what it’s like at a real F1 race. The car roars by and you can hardly hear yourself think, your entire body shakes. It’s an attention to detail around the sensory elements of the actual F1 experience that Sky are really living in all areas of their activities as some of the photography that they are using for the campaign attests.

Brilliant creative.

It’s been a very hectic week, hence my silence on the blogging front and the Saturday post today.

I’ve had today’s post in the back of my mind since writing the last one. Hence the reason for this being Pt. II. It might not be immediately obvious how they could be connected, but I think that they’re both different sides of the same coin. I saw this Paddy Power Transgender advert the same day as the Ecotricity advert and decided to park it and come back to it. In the interim, a whole load of brouhaha has been kicked up about the advert, which was running on Sky Sports and on their YouTube channel. Judge for yourself:

I mentioned above that I think that they’re different sides of the same coins. The same coins because the both display characteristics of being challenger brands. I say this not sticking rigidly to Morgan’s definitions from last week, but expanding on those to include things like the spirit of rebellion and that both brands act as if they are breaking the old order in the interests of the consumer. However they are different sides as, whilst Ecotricity is a genuine challenger brand, Paddy Power is a brand that bears the hallmarks of a challenger brand, but paradoxically is the No.1 player in the market. It is the leading bookmaker in the UK & Ireland.

Given their antics at the previous events such as the Ryder Cup in Celtic Manor in 2010 and at Cheltenham also in 2010, it’s fair to say that controversy is part of the brand intrinsics of Paddy Power. In fact, both of these videos where people in the public eye refer to Paddy Power as scum are hosted by Paddy Power on their own YouTube channel, fairly strong evidence that the brand owners are quite happy to encourage this perception of controversy.

The transgender advert is an interesting case for a few reasons both from branding points of view and from technical points of view. Firstly from a technical point of view, the advert was developed with the involvement of the UK’s broadcasting watchdog, Clearcast, and the Beaumont Society, a body run by and for those who cross dress or are transsexual. Neither Clearcast or The Beaumount Society found the script idea offensive. However, following complaints from members of the public, Clearcast have rowed back on their decision and decided to revoke approval for the advert. As someone who has worked on advertising creative in the past that needs the approval of an independent authority, I’m sure that this is pretty annoying. The advert surely would have only started incurring production costs when it went from scamps to shooting, which surely would have only been green lighted once Clearcast had given script approval? So, to have you previously approval advert pulled after only 3 days is probably annoying.

Secondly from a communications point of view, it’s interesting to see how they are integrating their content across the marketing mix. The original prompt for this creative came from the comment of one of their Facebook fans. What with Kellogg’s launching that god-awfully monickered ‘Totes Amazeballs’ cereal this week that was prompted by a Tweet from Tim Burgess we’re led to believe (hmmm…), I think that this is the kind of thing that were going to see more and more. Interesting also that they are encouraging consumers to give them more ideas by calling the campaign ‘We Hear You’. I’m sure there will be a good degree of consumers that would want to see their idea for an advert made. We’ve all been in those research groups where there’s some bloody tedious bore who fancies himself as an advertising creative mouthing off to everyone with “You know what kind of advert you lot need to make…”. If Paddy Power’s campaign gets that lot of our collective marketing backs, for that alone I thank them.

Finally, from a branding point of view, I find the controversial element of Paddy Power a challenging concept to deal with. On one hand, it clearly appears to be part of the brand DNA, is something that is actively dialled up in communication and fits the rebel persona of the brand. However, on the other hand the marketing purist in me thinks that controversy can be like price: in the same way that being the cheapest is never a competitive advantage, being controversial alone isn’t enough: someone can always beat you at it. Additionally, when does being controversial become the means to an end for the creative? For a brand that is happy for people to call them scum, is being talked about just enough in itself? Wouldn’t it be better in the long run to create a more meaningful proposition for the target consumer?

That’s yer lot for now. I’m off to London tomorrow to watch The Arsenal vs. Tottingham. Hopefully the tiny totts will get the shoeing they deserve. Hopefully, but unlikely. Come on you, Gooners.

I’m in the middle of a house move and making changes to the back end of the site, hence my radio silence on the old blog for more than a week now. But I’ve taken a day off today to clear the decks and I wanted to post on something that I saw last week. It reminded me of a book from a few years ago by Adam Morgan called “Eating the Big Fish”, which details how challenger brands take on large incumbents. Morgan suggests in the book that all successful challenger brands follow a mix or all of the following 8 credos:

1. Break with the Immediate Past
2. Build a Lighthouse Entity
3. Assume Thought Leadership of the Category
4. Create Symbols of Re-Evaluation
5. Sacrifice
6. Overcommit
7. Use Advertising and Publicity as a High-Leverage Asset
8. Become Ideas-Centered Rather than Consumer-Centered

What I really liked about the above thoughts was the degree of zeal contained within them. Namely that such brands almost acted as mini-cults in their behavior: they had a unique and disruptive view on the world that they lived religiously in all areas of the mix.However, it wasn’t necessarily this idea of zeal that I saw in the creative that I’d like to talk about this week, it was rather more it’s overall challenger brand approach. You might have seen this advert being posted by friends of Facebook, Twitter or some such. It’s by a UK energy company called Ecotricity.

Apart from choosing a portmanteau as there brand name (something that the marketing nerd in me always likes), there are a number of things that I like about the creative style of this advert. Firstly, it follows a great rule of disruption in that it doesn’t actually feel like an advert. Rather it starts like one of those clips that we’ve all seen on YouTube: you know the ones where some media student has spent weekends editing and re-editing old footage of something like a kids show or a 70′s documentary. They have then juxtaposed in something really odd to make the whole thing come to life. As an aside, my favorite one of all time has to be Bert & Ernie channelling MOP’s ‘Ante Up’.

Secondly, the pace of the advert is also cinematic in scope. This is in no small way helped by the choice of music, which is apparently ‘Porgi Amor’ from Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro”. It bears no small resemblance to the famous Pan-Am docking sequence in Kubrick’s masterpiece ’2001: A Space Odyssey’. I think that this speaks of a really confident brand in that everything is done on their terms, it doesn’t attempt to be liked.

Finally, the ethos behind the creative idea for the advert is brilliant challenger brand thinking: “dump the big six”. It’s a classic “stickin’ it to the man” rebel outlook. But, who says they are the Big Six? Well, Ecotricity of course. Also, won’t Ecotricity eventually become ‘The Man’ if we’ll also sign up? Yes, I suppose both of those points are true, but that’s not the point. Rather Ecotricity is redrawing the parameters of engagement by taking this point of view of new vs. old. Immediately the others (e.On, EDF, etc…) become the old and dusty and Ecotricity becomes sexy and new.

Anywho, that’s it for now, I’ll going to post “Eating the Big Fish, Pt. II” later in the week hopefully. Take it handy!

I didn’t get around to posting last week as I was trying to sort something out on another website in my spare time and it just fried my brain. I don’t know if you’ve ever had a site attacked by malware, tried to get it fixed and then re-up it via an FTP. Trying, to say the least. Lucky we don’t have a curse jar in our house or I’d be fucking broke. Also, I didn’t really see anything that sparked my imagination in the way the VW, Cadbury’s and SAS stuff has in recent weeks. Well, I’ve managed to get that other website issue fixed, but I still didn’t find any single piece of activity or a campaign that had inspired me to blog. Rather I wanted to post write a post more about marketing theory and something I touched on 2 weeks ago with the Cadbury’s piece.

There’s a Social Brands conference taking place in London this week with the great and the good of branding in the UK presenting. I think social media is currently the most exciting area of marketing to be working in: simply because the theory and practice of it are still in a nascent stage. There is no real established best practice and lot of us marketeers are still learning on the hoof. Further to my comments last week about fan acquisition, it was really interesting to see where the thinking of some of the senior people in the world’s biggest agencies and FMCG companies is currently at in relation to social media strategy. This comment struck home most with me.

We need to remember they aren’t actually fans, that is just what Facebook calls them, they are often just people that have been recruited by competitions and they aren’t really engaged.

Magnus Cormack, Director of Strategy & Intelligence at Syncapse Corp.

I think that the above statement is a really powerful thought. A lot of brands seem to have got lost in the rush to acquire bigger and bigger fanbases, using the formula that I referred to 2 weeks ago: (Apps + Prizes + ASU’s) x (Time) x (Cash) = Fans. There are some brands operating in the Republic of Ireland on Facebook that have seem to have significantly more people in their fanbase than could possibly be in their defined target in the country. Given that on average 80% of most brands’ fanbases are acquired via ASU’s driven by prizes offered by those brands, what does this say about their targetting?

In some ways, I can partially level this accusation at myself, as I have sometimes wandered away from first principles and got lost in the bloodlust for fan numbers on Facebook. What is the first principle? Isn’t it the same as every other sphere of marketing, be it advertising, PR, off-trade, etc..? A relevant, unique and ownable proposition that engages with a defined target. iPad and iPhone giveaways might be relevant and drive your fan numbers, but they are aren’t unique or ownable, unless you’re Apple. And ironically, as the only brand that really has the licence to do this, Apple doesn’t bother.

As an amusing aside, there was an equally interesting insight from the same person (Magnus Cormack) on Twitter after his presentation.

Social Media is like teenage sex. Everyone talks about it, only a few are doing it, and almost no one is doing it well…..

Magnus Cormack, Director of Strategy & Intelligence at Syncapse Corp.

At the end of the conference, Debbie Weinstein from Unilever offered a vision of the future for social media and how powerful it can be as a tool for a whole business:

Now we are using social media to feed into innovation and research and development

Debbie Weinstein, Senior Director, Social Media Innovation at Unilever

Brands and businesses, to be more precise, that are willing to utilise social media to such an extent will give themselves a great advantage over competitors that are unwilling or unable to see such possibilities.

See you next week!