Rock Bottom. Droga 5 has possibly created the worst campaign ever.

Dezember 8th, 2011 • 3 comments Games
Tags: Ads, Agencies, Brands, Creativity, droga 5, Ethics, Gaming, Ideas, Industry, Politics, World

If the following video is no hoax it has the realistic chance to become one of the most disgusting, cyncical pieces of marketing I have ever seen. I thought the ‘concept campaign’ White Bull Army was pathetic. But the crap idea that Droga 5 is about to launch for gaming headset brand Turtle Beach is hard to bear.

Check out the video

Quote: “Gamers want the immersive feeling of being in a warzone. Turtle Beach takes you there.” Even if it is a hoax (it will be in the end): Putting a first person shooter into the same context as a war zone where thousands of people died and millions suffer every day makes me want to spit out.

And no, I disagree. Not any PR is good PR. This is shit. Cynical, pathetic shit. I am ashamed to work in the same industry as the guy who came up with this. (via adverblog)

The Truth. How TV (Advertising) Ruined Your Life.

März 8th, 2011 • 1 comment We like
Tags: Advertising, bbc, Funny, Industry, People, Truth, TV, UK, World

If there is one thing about the UK that I am really, really jealous of, then it is Charlie Brooker. This is his episode 3 of his latest BBC2 six-part series ‘How TV ruined your life’ (along with advertising). This time it’s about aspiration. And even though it is 29 minutes long – every minute is worth it.

Convergence. Why talking about Social Media bores me to death.

Dezember 19th, 2010 • Allgemein
Tags: 2010, 2011, Advertising, Agencies, Future, Industry, Social Media, Trends

As 2010 ends it’s time for new year’s resolutions once again. I should stop smoking but it would be kind of dumb to initiate my new healthy lifestyle on new year’s eve. So my professional resolution is this – I try to avoid the use of the term ‘Social Media’ once and for all.

I feel kind of estranged nowadays when I stumble upon one of the many, many social media presentations that we keep on quoting over and over again. Or to put it more precise – I get sick of them. I cannot flip through these decks anymore that try to teach the industry about the ethics and mechanisms of Social. I simply think we’re past that point.

2010 has taught me that the focus on customer interactions and conversations simply must be part of any piece of marketing that you come up with. No matter if you are talking about e-retail, a Facebook page or a classic microsite – if you still don’t listen, if you still don’t enable users to share or talk about your brand you will soon have a problem. The crucial element here – to understand the distinction between earned and owned assets. Your client’s Facebook page is NOT earned media. Earned media is what this platform can initiate. But the platform can be a trigger, while brand-user interaction (hopefully) is the result. We simply cannot produce social interaction. But we can lower access barriers, invite and give reasons to interact on our behalf. This is our task. It is not our task to build platforms in the first place.

Doubtlessly the campaign of the year was Wieden’s Old Spice guy. And while I engaged in debates about whether this campaign was a Social Media campaign or not (and whether social media campaigns exist at all), I now have to admit that my position at that time was wrong. The strength of this campaign was that it added a conversational layer to a traditional advertising campaign. It built upon a traditional ad campaign and made it dynamic. But it turned a traditional piece of marketing into something relevant and real time. Something that turned a TV ad into something that was fun to talk about and to share. And that’s what made it both successful and trendsetting.

By now most agencies struggled with integrating traditional and digital marketing concepts. Wieden’s Old Spice campaign may not have been deep-digital. But it tried to bridge the gap between traditional advertising and customer conversations. My respect to the team around W+K’s Ian Tait to bring this risky concept to live.

In 2011 I hope, both digital and traditional agencies are intelligent enough to stop talking about isolated marketing concepts that almost always lack real sustainability. As a customer I want to print ads that makes me want to start a conversation with or about a brand. I want to get invited to an online store through a TV ad and I want to get a discount if I make my friends buy there as well. And here we are not talking about just driving to a campaign site – I think about integrated marketing models that truly deliver added value when it comes to interaction. Value exchange that is. And this is not just an agency challenge.

One of the best articles about this topic comes from my former colleague at Razorfish, Shiv Singh, who is now responsible for digital at Pepsi Co. In his article ‘From the other side‘ he has summarized his experiences as an ex agency guy who is now on the client side. Shiv’s advice to agencies is simple – stop telling your clients stories about how special you are, start understanding and managing the complexity of nowaday’s marketing.

In the digital space, digital agencies don’t like that the fact that they’re at a significant relationship disadvantage. Brands don’t like the fact that they’re sometimes kept at arms length from consumers (agencies and publishers are in the middle). Digital agencies feel traditional agencies don’t get it and traditional agencies can’t understand why brands don’t completely appreciate their digital chops. In a sense, everyone is unhappy. That’s not good. It has to change and probably only will when truly a new form of an agency rises (yes, I know there have been lots of false starts!).

It would be a blessing if the industry began to realize that concept convergence would help all of us – to make marketing more engaging, interesting and fun to interact with. If agencies found a way not just to promote themselves and their isolated view of the world and if marketers finally understood that it is not about communication but about integrated business models. Talking about social media simply bores me to death…

Dear Forrester. No, We Are Not Going to Die.

März 29th, 2010 • 2 comments Business, Strategy
Tags: Adaptation Marketing, Agencies, Brands, Business, Diagram, Forrester, Future, Ideas, Industry, Reports, Social Business Design, Strategy, Trends, Truth, World

Since Digital has initiated the revolution in Marketing the question for the ‘Agency of the Future’ has almost become an Internet Meme. Pretty much every agency around claims to have found the recipe. That’s in fact no very surprising. Over the time the already-complex agency-marketer relationship has been significantly altered by factors such as the recession and the rise of social media. With brands and agencies stumbling into the real time web and over interacting customers (OMFG!) the key question is obvious: Whose agency future is it anyway?

The challenge

In their late Forrester report about ‘The Future of Agency Relationships‘ Dave Frankland, Sean Corcoran, and Vidya Drego have tried to define a CMO’s challenges and their criteria catalogue when it comes to choosing an Agency of Record – a highly complex task. Agencies have always managed to adopt to changes. There were many paradigm shifts from the ad sales era of the early 19th century to our wired reality. Nevertheless agencies (or similar institutions) managed to offer services which were relevant enough. Today, once more, agencies are faced with new requirements in what they are supposed to deliver:

That may not exactly sound completely new. But it is quite interesting to ask which agency model might be able to accept these challenges.

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Apple iPad. Endorsed by Print Publishers Worldwide.

Januar 28th, 2010 • 1 comment Allgemein
Tags: Apple, Burda, Industry, iPad, Media, Murdoch, Print, publishers, Strategy, Tablets, Tech, Tools, Touch, Trend, World

What a week for Hubert Burda! The Grandsigneur of German Publishers, ‘Chairman of the Board and Publisher of Hubert Burda Media, President of the Association of German Magazine Publishers, and co-founder of the European Publishers Council’  must have had a great night last night.

Why? Because it seems to me that he, as one of the most conservative protagonists of paid content on the web, has finally won.  Earlier this week he had opened Burda’s annual digital conference DLD in Munich. A digital conference which looks like all the industry meetings you know from around the world…except that it was hosted by a brand which publicly asked to disappropriate google because of their online media market share. Sounds ridiculous? Well, it is.

Burda described Google as a “killer application” which delivered almost half of all traffic to local journalism Web sites and yet managed to keep almost one-third of all Internet advertising revenues in Germany for itself. “All of that without making any investment of its own in the expensive business of journalism,” Burda noted.

Burda called for amendments to copyright and even suggested that Google should pay for the use of news it had not produced itself. Of course, the search engine wanted nothing to do with this suggestion. (‘Der Spiegel‘, Sept 09)

Actually your failed business model is not my problem

Earlier, in summer 2009, Burda and other publishers had managed to channel their whining about antiquated business model into the Hamburg Declaration of European Publishers. It demanded a ‘fair share’ by search engines like google. Google reacted with an offer to deny robots the access to the publisher’s pages. The conflict went hot. The web manned the battle stations when Silicon Valley started fighting against Munich. Well, and of course it could get even more bizarre when Rupert Mordoch started to ‘threaten’ google to block them from his newspapers and rumors about a Murdoch pact with Bing versus google made the headlines.

Burdoch’s ‘new business model’ was the old one…translated into digital: Making readers pay for stuff they read online.

In the new business model, we will be charging consumers for the news we provide on our Internet sites. The critics say people won’t pay. I believe they will, but only if we give them something of good and useful value. Our customers are smart enough to know that you don’t get something for nothing.

Similar to the music industry publishers never condescended to think about alternative business models. While print advertising revenues worldwide dropped like they were hot, no alternative business model was even explored. The direction was clear: Save mainstream print media at all cost. No matter wether there simply is no need for so many general interest magazines anymore, we do print…with a digital touch to make it look cooler.

The web’s response was unambiguous: Twitter founder Biz Stone commented the Burdoch’s closed payment model will ‘fail fast’ and it would be impossible to ‘put the genie back into the bottle’. Others compared the old men’s inflexibility to the disaster of the music industry etc. In autumn 2009 both, Burda and Murdoch, demasked themselves as dinosaurs – powerful but inflexible, free from creative power and about to make the same mistakes so many others had done before.

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