Prometheus live(ish) Twitter ad

Just a quick word about Prometheus, the new Ridley Scott film, which featured heavily in the ad breaks for "Homeland" this evening, and featured a TV first - viewers' tweets about one ad being featured in the second ad a break later.

Though I was mostly trying my best to calm my shattered nerves (that program makes you feel like you're actually holding explosives in your hands), I just about held it together to make the following observation:

This seems like the classic example of technology for technology's sake. Was there really anyone in the educated, tech-savvy Channel 4 audience who felt MORE persuaded to see the film because some people said nice things on Twitter? And are they really too stupid to realise that these people may well have said nice things entirely in the hope that they might achieve fleeting fame?

It's all very well being clever with media. But there's got to be a purpose for the cleverness. Just like the Old Spice "ad invasions" backed up their power angle, and the Virgin Media "buffering" ads neatly demonstrated a product feature.

What did this do? If they'd just booked the space, found some tweets, and made them into an advert, what actual difference would there have been?

It's just really lazy thinking.

The most redundant copy I've seen in a while

At what stage in the creative process did someone say "you know, I'm not sure that the words 'you'll think' adequately convey the fictional nature of the experience - we'd better provide extra reassurance"? And who said it?

It's from Discover Ireland, and seen on the tube - but no agency seems to be clearly responsible.

Another good experiential...

This one, by Ogilvy in Buenos Aires, is all about remembering the product you're selling. Just like the TNT experiential I mentioned a few days ago, it's really simple and consistently relevant - a particularly good idea when kids are your target market.

Just take what's fun about the drink (shaking it up) and dial it up a few notches. And make sure the brand name is in the foreground of your video just about non-stop.

The drink does look utterly vile, mind.

As the new Old Spice ad isn't very good...

...at least, not by their own high standards*, I thought I'd talk about a much better piece of work they did during the "Smell Is Power" campaign (but one I missed out on as it never got shown in the UK).

It's worth mentioning because it covers similar territory to the recent Virgin Media ads, which showed ads for other products being interrupted by streaming video style buffering. In this case, the interruption is somewhat more dramatic - although as both products are Proctor & Gamble, it probably wasn't that hard to set up.

But just like the Virgin ads, it does a great job of making people pay attention to, and more importantly remember, a commercial.

*It's ok, but there's nothing laugh-out-loud funny, the line is contrived rather than inspired, and the horse racing scene was weak (and a little too reminiscent of that Weetabix advert).

A couple of awesome D&AD winners

"D&AD winners never sell anything". That's the most common complaint about awards like these, and in some cases, it's fair comment. But on the other hand, these are the Design & Art Direction awards, and for those more interested in success, there's always the IPA Effectiveness Awards.

So, here are a couple of stunning pieces of craft. First of all, in the packaging category, the Shanghai 1910 special edition Johnnie Walker bottles by Love Creative. It's not rocket science why these won - yes, they're on brand, but any two-bit agency can make something look a bit Chinese. Not everyone can make it look as sumptuous and classy as this though - the perfect representation of a masterful, premium brand (click to enlarge).

Then, in the music videos, is "Simple Math" by Manchester Orchestra (who are American and not an orchestra) and directed by The Daniels. It won a yellow pencil for special effects, but for me the video was so full of depth and emotional weight that it deserved to take a bigger prize.

No embedding. Go here to watch it on Vimeo and get it fullscreen.

Other nominated videos, like this fun one for Is Tropical, may have a more memorable central concept. But as a marriage of music and images, it's just about unbeatable.

It's in the way you instantly know you're looking at the singer as a child and his Father. It's in the great acting job by all 4 main characters. It's in the way that you can watch the video 5 times and still see a new symbol tying together each strand of the plot. And it's in the way the editing is exactly in time with the music - not just in a simplistic "dramatic thing happens on big chord" way, but in subtle changes of pace and energy.

Great stuff - and it wasn't even the team's only nomination.

Death in advertising.

A little while ago, I tore into the new Google+ advert for being a little bit emotion-by-numbers. And as I saw it again recently, an idea occurred to me.

Why don't advertisers for Social Media take on death head-on? The Google+ advert tiptoed around the subject, but it's a fascinating one, and could give a platform an interesting edge, especially among an older audience. Imagine if, at the end of the commercial, a dying "Tom" had handed his now grown-up son a piece of paper with a password written on it - and the son had gone onto Google+ to find a circle with "funeral invites" written on it. Then there might have been a bit of pathos in there.

Anyway, I hope someone picks up on the idea, because it won't be all that long before old age overtakes accidents and untimely illnesses as the most common cause of death for Facebook members. In the meantime, here's a few adverts with a little death...

John Cleese on creativity

"Creativity is not a talent - it is a way of operating".

This talk by John Cleese, at some anonymous event, is pretty essential viewing for budding or wannabe creatives. 36 minutes, but well worth it.

If you don't have the time for the whole thing, I'd urge you to consider the following wonderful advice.

If you need to solve a problem, set yourself a time to start being creative, and set yourself a time to stop.

Why? The instinctive response is to say it seems overly regimented; that it goes against the free-wheeling nature of creativity.

But as Cleese says, applying a deadline makes it easier to seal yourself off from the demands of the uncreative world. If you don't know when your creative period ends, it's harder to push these thoughts ("should I email this person", "maybe I should clear my room") to the back of your mind. With a deadline, you can just think "I can worry about that at 3".

Which fits in very neatly with the conversation I was having with a fellow SCA student about musicians and writers who stick to a regular working pattern. Nick Cave, for example, famously went to write songs in an "office" somewhere around Brighton and Hove, just like any other commuter, starting at nine, and closing the piano lid at five.

It's also worth mentioning this final thought:

"It's easier to start little things we know we can do, than to start on big things we're not so sure about".

Clickthroughs - response to Ad Contrarian

Bob Hoffman, on his Ad Contrarian blog, expressed disgust recently at agencies' dishonest use of "branding" to wriggle out of the responsibility of actually selling a product. He also accused agencies of doing the same in the online arena, using "engagement" - a word you can interpret just about any way you like - to disguise the failure of their adverts to achieve anything more than minimal click-through rates.

Doubtless this is true. It's human nature to look for excuses, or retrofit a problem to your preferred solution. But I would be in favour of never counting click-through rates in the first place.

Of course they're going to have such low click-through rates you can barely measure them. If I'm reading a story about Rwanda, or the budget, or Fernando Torres on the Guardian site, I'm not going to break off to find out about budget airlines or slimline laptops. I just want to read the article.

How many people read a newspaper and immediately react when they see an advert, leaping straight to the computer or heading to the shop to find out more? It would be a ridiculous expectation, and barely any less silly online.

Online ads should be treated the same way as print - it's a chance to get your brand seen, and get a message across. The only meaningful metric is to ask how many people visit the page - and then make it as simple, eye-catching, and memorable as possible.


Plus ça change...

Press button for relevant experiential

I saw this over the holidays and instantly loved it. It's been a huge hit on YouTube too (20 million views in 5 days), which is, of course, the real point of these things.

There's much to praise - the simple but effective use of the button device, the slick choreography, and the reactions of the unknowing (?) participants. But the most important thing is how they kept it simple and, even more importantly, relevant.

It's a TV channel - so show customers the drama; simple as that. So much better than hidden camera stunts like T-Mobile's execrable traffic wardens stunt, which had only the most contrived, tortuous link to the product.

Produced by Duval Guillaume Modem, an Antwerp agency who know a thing or two about stunts.

Black Swans and Black Hats

I'm back. What a nice relaxing Easter break it's been - I've celebrated several birthdays and tried to think about anything other than advertising for a week.

However, with term starting tomorrow, it's back in the saddle time. For my birthday, I received "The Black Swan" by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I don't intend to critique it, or at least not yet, because I'm only a third of the way through, and I'm not 100% convinced that I fully understand everything I've read.

But roughly speaking, the book is about how our minds lead us to seek out patterns, and twist facts to fit our theories, when in actual fact these patterns and theories are constantly broken by unexpected events - the Black Swans of the title. But when these Black Swans occur, we act afterwards as if we should have expected them all along, and formulate a new theory to explain them.

One symptom of this mindset is the prevalence of "confirmation bias" - the tendency to seek out information to fits rather than challenges our views. It's part of the reason the opposing sides both inside and outside the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are so entrenched in their positions, wilfully ignoring the flaws and demons in their own team.

So let's apply this to an idea evaluation technique we're taught at the school - Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats.

When you're analysing an idea, the hardest hat to put on is the black one - the one that searches for flaws. The other hats you may barely need to don - you're so caught up in the brilliance of your idea, the immediate response is to look for reasons that it works.

We spend all our time trying to prove ourselves right, when such a thing is nearly impossible. Proving something wrong is much easier. For example, to prove I am the perfect lover, I would have to give a faultless sexual performance at every single opportunity for the rest of my life. But I know that I'm not - and all it takes to prove it is just one ropey night in the sack*.

So the main message I'm taking from Taleb is simply, for the moment - don't ignore the Black Hat. But at the same time, I won't be forgetting the Black Swan either. Just because an idea doesn't fit established rules doesn't mean it will definitely fail.

School starts tomorrow, let's throw a few curveballs this term.

*and there have been more than one of these.

Virgin Media BBH launch

Well, not really much of a launch. Certainly, considering what a massive acquisition the client was, and the way they pinched it from under the nose of DDB, it was released with relatively little fanfare - certainly compared to the Guardian launch.

Perhaps it's because it's an advert made for purpose rather than to win awards and plaudits. And in fact it's so similar to the Mark Warren adverts produced by the previous agency, you'd barely be aware that the whole change had been made. It's another famous face and another product demo.

Apparently the DDB advert had the TiVo boxes flying off the shelves, so why change a winning formula? But you have to wonder what it does for BBH's reputation - and the extent to which the client is calling the shots in this relationship.

Why?

Behavioural Meteorology

A little change of pace - we're back to behavioural economics, and a quick look at how we use frames to make sense of raw information. They can either be provided to us, for example by employing a trustworthy voice to give the information, or applied by us - if raw data is too complicated to fully understand, we use rules of thumb to make an educated guess.

And I think there's an opportunity being missed in weather forecasts - particularly the morning one, the one we pay most attention to - to frame the information and make it more meaningful.

Let's face it, judging what clothes to wear or take out with us can be tricky. A distinctly chilly spring morning may turn into a fine balmy afternoon. And the weather forecast is only of limited help when making that decision. OK, if it says 4 degrees, you're going to take a coat. If it says 20, you'll be fine in a tshirt. But somewhere in between is that terrible grey area. Is a coat needed? A jacket? A jumper? Both, and swap them if necessary? Who really knows how warm 13 degrees C is?

So the simple solution? Systematically show or refer to yesterday's temperature. We can all remember how warm it was, and what we wore, and whether it was too much or too little.

So at a glance, instead of hearing "temperatures will start around 7-8 then pick up to highs of 14 by mid-afternoon", you'll hear "it will be a little bit warmer than yesterday in the morning, but a little bit cooler than yesterday during the afternoon". And that's a frame we can all work with.

Adam and Eve drop the ball on Google+

Currently sweeping the awards ceremonies with THAT John Lewis ad, Adam and Eve must be on a bit of a roll - and this weekend they brought the first UK Google+ TV ad to our screens.

It launched in primetime, during Britain's Got Talent. A lot is resting on it. But I think it's a massive misjudgement. Have a look if you haven't seen already, then I'll do my best to explain.

First of all, the criticism has already been made that it's ridiculous that the social network's user interface will look exactly the same when the subject is an elderly man as it does when his child is born. But the bigger problem is that it is pitched both too high and too low. 

Too high, because Benedict Cumberbatch reading Shakespeare, is, let's face it, going to go over the heads of a large proportion of the ITV audience. It's like the kid from the Thomson's Holidays multiplied by a hundred. Not to mention how chattering-class it all is; it was like watching the life of Nigel Slater's straight twin brother.

And too low, because anyone who does know As You Like It will be aware that the speech does not end with old age, it ends with senility and death - "sans eyes, sans teeth, sans taste, sans everything". But the advert cops out (it edits out a lot of the rest of the speech, too).

If it had gone on to the bitter end, it might have had more emotional resonance, because as it currently stands, it leaves me completely cold. And again, its problem is in falling between two stools.

Take BBH's work for Google Chrome. It hits us on an emotional level because we know that Jamal Edwards and Dan Savage are real people, embarking on journeys which we know are authentic, and have affected real lives. Whereas "Tom" is clearly a character, a tool created for a purpose.

But a fictional character can be equally affecting, as Adam and Eve have shown - like the child from The Long Wait, or more pertinently, the life portrayed in "Always A Woman". So what's the difference?

We never learn their names. It's as simple as that. Unlike Tom, with his football refereeing and his mountain climbing and his rock band, we're not really given any detail about their "lives". Because those ads are not about a little boy waiting for Christmas, or about a woman's life from birth to old age. They're about us.

Whereas this Google+ advert is about some guy called Tom.