Beautiful Internet Advertising

Buick has come up with a delightful little ad. It works with the idea that something fun and colorful (internet art?) is less intrusive and does what internet advertising ought to do - it throws paint at your eye and gets you to look where it came from. It might still be on the Yahoo site now, and if you want to watch it again, click 'replay ad' underneath. You know your advertising is hooking eyeballs when you're replaying it a couple of times. The Nike Armstrong ad on New York Times did the same. As a brand builder (online) this is unbeatable.

BRRRR! (Photography)

(de)ploys (MARKETING)

First of all, it's a branding coup that the Springbok logo has done so well. It's a self-reinforcing feedblack loop thing...the Bok logo becomes the stuff of legend, the players aspire to the legend, they become legends, further reinforcing it. Now even Bafana Bafana are copying the green and gold thing, and Mbeki, having experienced Bok Power firstahd, is telling the soccer lads to chuck Bafana and get a Bok-style makeover.

Then, simply because I feel it is my duty (and I'd like to encourage the collective, communities all over) to celebrate nature, I love Pam Golding's new print campaign. One image shows a massive whale and a diver in a pristine, crystal clear ocean lit with desaturated carbon color. The charcoal appearance understates the simple but important message: Discover the place that makes you happiest. I like the implication behind that; that nature is where a person can find themselves, and some of their highest happinesses.
"A new home is an important contributor to the overall feeling of happiness."*

Sonja Bulkin in the Saturday Star punted the TOTAL ad. It's an excellent concept promoting the economy of the fuel, using The Three Degrees song: "When will I see you again?" Caltex is onto the same thing, but they render it less well. BP has their split screen version; also not quite bad.

Lowlight: Terrible ads include the perfume spray that a cartoon elephant punts, then suggests that even smelly shoes aren't a problem if you're a mother to centipede. But you're an elephant!

Highlight: At Vida e cafe I noticed on the earpiece - is that the correct term - of the white cup, a small card dangling. It was branded with Halo 3 advertising. A great ploy. Nowhere is offlimits, and the fresher the advertising turf, the more effective the message comes across.

Nedbank Breaks The Rules

Marketers generally try to co-brand or create alliances keeping to color profiles. Which is why you won't see Coke and Vodacom doing promotions, or Coke and Samsung. You do see Coke and MacDonalds. You might see promotions with LandRover and Amstel and Nedbank, but why not Virgin Active (red) and Kauai (blue). You could argue that this isn't as much a question of color but industry, but take a look around. Marketing by color is a cogent strategy.

Blue is the New Red

Dynamic colors tend to math their brands. Some of the world's biggest brands today are blue, and many of these are computers/eletronics (Intel, Dell, Samsung). Marlboro and MacDondalds and Coca Cola are red brands, but I predict we'll see these brands fall out of favour over time, as the world gets more serious, and thinks about cooling down its demands, and its appetite.

TJDR

So it's interesting that The Jupiter Drawing Room are adding some dynamism to their brand. Green is being combined with Red. This is obvious in big print ads (in newspapers; the first time I saw it was at a marathon in Cape Town. The 'end zone' was blazzoned in green (balloons, the works), and above the finish line was the word: CELEBRATE. Yes, it had green blleding red. I thought this was odd at the time, then noticed it in Nedbank's other marketing as well.

ABSA it could be argued has been forced to go RED and BLUE, having been taken over by blue Barclays. When you're a leader, it is best to stick to your color, and reinforce it wherever possible. But when you're a contender, not number two, but further down the line, it helps to dilute the brand message of the number one brand. Is Nedbank doing this? It would seem so.

Remember Nedbank started off in a totally different direction with their BLUE and RED 'Go Green' TV commercials. Sometimes you have to break a few rules to get ahead. Is Nedbank breaking the right ones? Right now the banks are taking a lot of heat, not only locally but internationally. Right now might not be a good time to rock the boat. A conservative SAFE approach (given fantastic turbulence and credit insecurity) is the appropriate approach in my opinion.

Virgin Active: New Marketing Concept

Virgin Active, the health club chain, is to become the first company in the UK to adopt a new marketing concept developed by On Product Publishing.

The idea – which has already been picked up by Coca-Cola – is to print a miniature, removable magazine on a bottle.

Virgin Active’s on-bottle magazine will be called Move, and will feature competitions, celebrity fitness trends, reader offers, fitness tips and other features. Bottlestop, Mineral Water Supplier of Buxton, will partner with the fitness chain for the promotion.

Mark Taylor, UK marketing manager for Virgin Active said: "We are very excited to be the first company in the UK to sign up to this unique approach.

"Not only are we confident about it from a marketing perspective, but we are also delighted to offer the public special Virgin Active offers and discounts as well as something fun that they can keep and read at their leisure."

The water bottles will be distributed free to the public across the UK, throughout August 2007.

AdAwards

Spot on advertising means tickling the consumer in the right place

When you’re in an advertising agency it’s easy to feel pressured into thinking up a light storm of entertaining and groundbreaking marketing. But all that’s needed is a touch of magic, a tickle of inspiration in the right place.

Rocks

The Jupiter Drawing Room is very good at instinctual communication that scratches exactly where it itches. They’ve very accurately portrayed this with SASOL, and increasingly SASOL is becoming a heroic brand for South Africa.

They’ve cleverly used the platform of SASOL’s Springbok sponsorship to build and grow a public sense of pride in the brand. (Remember green muscles Boks in the 300/Hulk SASOL campaign?)

SASOL has a crucial role to play in South Africa’s energy future, and has recently announced massive profits once again.

Because SASOL is a powerhouse of ingenuity (a world leader in its field) linking this best feature to a more generalized sense of ‘being imaginative’ and ‘what if’ is really effective. This is tickling the consumer where it counts, and still being congruent to what the brand really stands for.

Tickling the consumer, but being irrelevant (the Wimpy ad comes to mind) to the brand, dilutes the message.

The Jupiter Drawing Room did the same on their MTN campaign. They knew the message was inherently: MTN = yellow. In this sense it was a powerful campaign, but I would suggest taking it one step forward: what does yellow mean? Beyong community, yellow symbolizes…?

Another commercial that deserves kudos is the Pepsi ad that takes on the challenge from Cokes ‘world-inside-a-vending machine’. Pepsi responds with a hard and rebellious spoof, showing their vending machine smashing through the various levels of a building. Good, but perhaps a copycat version of the Motorola Razr ad (based on the same floor crashing theme).

A radio ad that does a brilliant reverse psychology tickle is Twin Savers. A man orders food from a Indian restaurant asking for the hottest curry possible (in order to spend as much time as possible on the toilet, using Twin Savers toilet paper). Meanwhile, God is like TwinSavers: he forgets you not.

Huh?

First National Bank is a brand I love to hate, and their ugly green/orange/purple advertising is always open to abuse. Their TV ad featuring a bank customer in various situations with a bank security guard in tow (bizarrely carrying around a security scanner everywhere they go) is an example of a tickler that misses the spot completely.

How does having a nuisance security guard (or car guard or anyone else) following you around say anything good about the brand?

Rubbish

The Tempo ‘Power Your Beat’ ad almost gets it right. The play on the word makes sense, but the actual music doesn’t have a discernible tempo, even after the tenth listen.

The various street sounds do organize into some sort of structured noise, but not enough. No one would want to download the Tempo advertising jingle as a ringtone. And this ought to be the goal; to musically produce a bit of viral song and dance around the Temp theme. The current Tempo ad falls far short of this goal.