While things in the European economy are looking extremely dodgy the advertising awards season in Europe keeps rocking like there’s nothing wrong. This past week saw both the Epica and Eurobest awards. Let’s look at some of the highlights…
EPICA d’Or for Interactive went to Jung von Matt in Stockholm for the Mini Getaway. I recently met the guys from Monterosa, the mobile agency that the agency tasked to make this happen. So instead of showing the old video here is a new one about the next Mini Getaway in Tokyo (it’s in Japanese just to annoy you all).
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There was a GOLD in the web category for Lowe Brindfors and thei Magnum Ice Cream “Pleasure Hunt”. The internet is a place where all kind of pleasures exists. They wanted to build a light-hearted story in which Magnums new ice cream came out as superior to everything else out there: Internet’s ultimate pleasure. The mechanic was inspired by something that has engaged and united people for decades: classic platform games. But this time with a totally different platform: the Internet. The user controlled a young woman literally running trough the Internet collecting the ingredients for her ultimate pleasure, the Magnum Temptation. Below is a making of video.
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Another GOLD, this time for branded content in social networks went to Forsman & Bodenfors for the REEBOK Promise Keeper. It was the first online running application (website, iPhone/iPad-app and Android app) that would actually get you out and run. Every run you promised to make in your online calendar was automatically posted on the social network of your choice and spread to all of your friends. They would also be notified about whether you ran or not. Every update was personal and became a direct message that spawned conversation. Everything was built on the insight that a promise to everyone you know is more important than a promise only to yourself.
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Let’s head over to the Eurobest Awards and see who triumphed there.
The Grand Prix went to Hypernaked for Nokia. In this joint promotion with Burton, Push Snowboarding introduced a new way of marketing. Rather than simply telling people about Nokia’s most powerful smartphone, they developed a piece of new technology to show people it’s power. Using the smartphone at the core, they developed technology that could take snowboarding to its next stage by developing wearable sensors that bluetoothed simultaneously to the N8, giving snowboarders live tracking of their ride: speed, airtime and even fear.
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Gold went to Tribal DDB Amsterdam for their latest Philips Obsessed with Sound campaign. To demonstrate that Philips is ‘Obsessed with sound’ and claim that you can hear every detail with the brand’s audio products, they created a unique interactive music video. They collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning Metropole Orchestra and recorded a specially composed music piece entitled “I’m No Prototype”- in 55 separate music tracks. On the site, viewers could experience the music video as a whole, played by the entire orchestra, and were invited to single out each musician to hear every detail.
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Another Gold went to SapientNitro London for Foot Locker
Sneakerpedia was not only the world’s largest sneaker archiving project and the first ever visual-wiki, it wasdigital solution specifically designed to connect sneaker fans, enabling them to share, discuss, follow and help shape future sneaker trends.
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Not every great project wins Gold. A Silver went to FORSMAN & BODENFORS for AMF. They knew that pension savings was boring but the future was exciting to people. Also, if you got a sudden message from a company, you were not very interested but if you got a message from a friend, you usually were. By offering people to send messages to their friends or colleagues that couldn’t be opened by the recipient until the year 2030, both the sender and the recipients would start to think about how life will be 20 years from now. And with a rising interest for the future, they would eventually have a rising interest on their pension.
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Maybe we should have an advertising Olympics. See which countries would come out on top in digital. From looking at these winners the Europeans would give the rest of the world a run for their money.
Lucozade Energy has launched The YES List – featuring seven limited edition bottles designed by some of the UK’s hottest music artists – using Augmented Reality via a mobile app.
Working closely with Aurasma, agency Billington Cartmell exploited an innovative feature of the technology, cylindrical mapping, where the Aurasma app’s interface recognises the 3D surface of the bottle and augments it with exclusive video content – an industry first. Once a smartphone equipped with the app is pointed at Plan B or Tinie Tempah’s limited edition bottle the design suddenly springs to life with the artist themselves directing fans to watch the ‘making of’ documentary with a simple touch of the screen.
B-Reel have taken projection mapping one step further with this installation that allows people to play a game of Eels in 3 dimensions using mobile. Will be interesting to see how this technology develops further with some investment from a major brand. Then everyone will be doing it.
Who develops the best digital campaigns? America? Sweden? Japan? Who about Britain? Let’s take a look at the winners of the BIMA Awards (British Interactive Media Association) to see some amazing work coming out of Britain right now.
The Grand Prix went to AMV BBDO for the Who Killed Deon campaign for the Metropolitan Police. Their previous campaign was the highly awarded “Choose a different ending” interactive video. This one is just as powerful.
Winning the top prize in the Advertising category were Media Monks for their Desperados Experience YouTube takeover.
Profero took the top prize in the Automotive, Integrated & Outdoor/Installation categories (as well as being named agency of the year) for the MINI World Record Attempt. It’s a great example of a digital installation being used as the basis of a viral video/social campaign.
In the Consumer Goods and Services category AMV BBDO won the top prize for their Wrigley’s 5 Nightjar project. It’s a mobile game which places the player alone in space and challenges them to escape using only sound. People had to see with their ears.
Microsoft continue their quest to convince everyone that they are a technology company for the future rather than the past. Here is their latest video showing what Kinect could become.
With the sad demise of Steve Jobs the world of technology suddenly has one major obstacle out of the way. Nobody could out innovate Jobs and without him Apple could eventually lose some momentum. Other companies now have a fighting chance of being seen as innovators not just Apple followers. Microsoft has already made huge strides with the Kinect but is still lagging. With this new video they are planting their innovation flag firmly in the world of productivity. It all looks very interesting but can they pull it off in reality. Time will tell…
The dust has settled and the advertising folk have left Singapore to be replaced by the Formula 1 fans for a weekend of noise and mayhem. Not much different then.
Let’s take a look at some of the digital campaigns that were awarded at the festival. The Grand Prix went to Colenso BBDO New Zealand for their Doggelgänger project. Their idea was based around human to canine pairing software, designed to connect homeless dogs to their human doubles. This state-of-the-art software analyses your features, and compares them with a nationwide database of real dogs looking for adoption. By partnering with shelters across the country, Doggelgänger has given homeless dogs everywhere the very best chance to set up that vital first meeting in the journey to finding a new home.
Gold went to several projects already featured heavily in previous awards including Uniqlo Lucky Line and Sour/Mirror – both from Japan. See the Cold, also from Japan, was developed by McCann and used people’s tweets about cough, fever, runny or stuffed nose, chills, throat, and headache to build a picture on the website of where the cold is, how it’s moving, and what its symptoms are. Sicknesses can be tracked day and night, symptom by symptom allowing pharmacies to stock the right amount of the right drugs at the right time: before the cold hits. And consumers can buy remedies they’re about to require.
Japan dominated silver too with some brilliant campaigns. Hakuhodo gave us the Samsung Space Balloon Project for the Galaxy SII. It was the world’s first LIVE communication challenge set in space. It’s also the world’s highest media development linked with many SNS sites and USTREAM. They live-streamed the 90 minutes flight of the GALAXY S II headed to space on a meteorological balloon. During the flight, they showed more than 3000 messages and icons of hope and dreams to encourage Japan on the beautiful display of GALAXY S II, live. SBP gathered an USTREAM ASIA record 380,000 unique viewers, 98000 tweets, and in the same month GALAXY S II’s share in Japan reached number one.
One of the few non-Japanese winners came from Soap in Australia. Their brief was to create an online promotion/platform for PAC-MAN which could help build awareness for upcoming products and showcase the power of HTML5 on Microsoft’s newly released IE9. Their “simple and catchy idea” was to let the global PAC-MAN community create & play their own maze to become part of the “World’s Biggest PAC-MAN” game. The ever expanding maze provided endless fun for PAC-MAN fans worldwide. There were 1.5 million visitors in the first 3 weeks, countless amounts of positive press for both clients and one huge hosting bill. All without any media spend.
Back to Japan for another silver winning project. Dentsu were asked by Ezaki Glico to change the image people had of their biscuit products as being cheap and childish. They developed the “smile chocolate factory”, a special production line in the real factory using high technology in biscuit and chocolate processing. People could make original chocolate biscuits by sending their smile via a website. The system analysed the face, generated the portrait sketch and drew it with chocolate on the biscuit. People could see the production line of “smile chocolate factory” in realtime with a webcam.
You can check out all the other winners here along with the best work from all the other categories. With this being an Asia Pacific award you’ll get to see some interesting work that might have been overlooked in other festivals. Until next year…
What have the Simpson’s got to do with Spikes Asia? Well Simpson’s scriptwriter Joel Cohen was the speaker invited by DDB to talk about “Lessons in Creativity and Innovation from the Simpsons”. Easily the most entertaining speaker at the event, Joel explained how the writing team managed to stay original after 22 years on the air. He talked about some of the crazy scenarios that have appeared on the show and made a connection between that and innovation in our own industry. Joel explained how vital it is to connect with the audience before you innovate. What you say has to be relatable. At the same time big ideas don’t always fit into the context of the story so you have to filter. Joel had a few suggestions for anyone that hits a creative roadblock. Sometimes you just have to suggest the opposite of what you were thinking. But the best solution is jamming together with others to get more diverse ideas.
Laurie Coots, Chief Marketing Officer at TBWA did a seminar on the Gamification of advertising. With a stock photo heavy Powerpoint she said that gaming techniques drove participation leading to engagement and interaction. This leads to greater meaning and behavior change. In the attention economy we had to find greater brand value. The Starbucks app with its reward system was mentioned as one great example. However research shows that 80% of apps are downloaded less than 1000 times. If you are using an app as part of your marketing campaign then gamification can help make participation addictive. Laurie shared an interesting case study for New York Library where gamification was used to get kids interested in books as a source of information that you can’t find through Google.
Wunderman US CEO Daniel Morel had the misfortune to speak first on day 3 meaning that the room was half empty. He presented a lot of statistics overlaid on stock photos and built his case around the need for Context, Community, Commerce and Creativity. With a big focus on mobile he presented cases from Austria airlines with their Red Guide, UrbanDaddy and HomePlus from Korea who saw sales go up by 130% and an 76% increase in members with their virtual stores in the subway. He was skeptical about co-creation saying that there was very little talent out there but that brands should listen to customers to get real insights. After showing the Decode with Jay-Z case (pronouncing the rapper’s name Gee Zay) he showed the Land Rover Mobile Fair Stand from Austria – a great example of how you can get your brand noticed and generate real results with some left-field thinking.
Jeff Benjamin from Crispin Porter + Bogusky was up next with a much more inspiring talk called Invent or Die. Ironically he opened with the example of Gutenberg who didn’t become rich with his invention of the printing press but died broke. He said that only later did we realize what he had invented. Culture just wasn’t ready for it at the time. Jeff told us that it was the same for the steam engine and electricity. In a similar way it has taken 15 years for culture to finally catch up with technology and the internet. Not so long ago online dating seemed bizarre, online commerce seemed risky yet we now buy TVs from Amazon and even our notions of what friends are has been redefined by social networks. Digital technology is now an essential part of our lives and the public now expect innovation. Jeff said that the current creative revolution is being fueled by technology. If a brand is not inventing it isn’t going to be around much longer.
He gave a few tips for surviving:
Everyone can be an inventor – it isn’t just the creative department. Burger King chicken fries were invented by an account service guy in their agency.
Fill the void by working out what the consumer needs. The Pizza Hut pizza tracker came from the insight that ordering online is great but then you wonder where your pizza is at for the time it takes to arrive. The technology already existed within Pizza Hut to track employee efficiency. They just repurposed the data.
Prototype fast and often. Inventions don’t live on paper so take action to test your ideas.
Have fun – A great example is the Pringles Crunch Band app that came from their Sweden office.
Fail First. Fail Harder. It’s important to embrace failure and clients need to allow agencies to try things out that might seem risky.
Collaborate. It isn’t easy as many people don’t like sharing before an idea is fully formed. You need to be bold enough to bring in other opinions.
He showed some great examples of the agency inventing new things based on a simple brief. Small Business Saturday was not a campaign. They invented a day to help answer a need for the smaller companies that missed out on the retail frenzy of Black Friday and Cyber Monday that occurred every year after Thanksgiving.
Be fast and nimble, daring and relentlessly scrappy. You need to participate in technology to be able to invent new ways of using it. Be on Facebook and Twitter. The Whopper Sacrifice came about because the team were exploring what could be done with it.
Don’t stop – keep making it better. The Jello pudding face idea was a cool way to read the mood of people on Twitter. But rather than just use it online they came up with a giant pudding face billboard. Always ask what else you can do.
Be an entrepreneur. Pretend your client’s business is your own. What would you do? When the carrot farmers came with the brief they asked how the public could eat them as naturally as they eat junk food. So the carrots were packaged like packets of crisps (chips if you’re not English) and sold in vending machines.
Jeff talked about how the first 15% of work you do is 90% of the effort. That’s because you need to evolve your idea, experiment and keep changing it until it is right.
You need to invent where people are. That was the driver behind the Whopper Lust idea that ran on cable channel Direct TV.
Above all he said that we have to be delusionally positive. When you are asking yourself “how are we going to make this” and when you’re scared that’s when you find that positive energy breaks down walls.
Later I saw an inspiring talk by Mark Holden from PHd about 2016 – Beyond the Horizon. He started by talking about the famous IBM 1401 computer that is now in a museum. It filled a room but we have more computing power today in our mobile phones. The world is changing fast. Right now one in two people on earth has joined a social network. Indonesia has the second largest presence on Facebook with over 40 million users. If we consider the 1.2 billion social network members globally as “independent media owners” we can see the power of influence they have. He showed how in the UK 44% of mobile phone sales are influenced by online comments. In the next 5 years the true driver of business will be us – the people. But what drives us. It is the desire for abundance – everything, everyone and everywhere. He said that the future depends on Infrastructure, Interface and Internet.
Looking at Infrastructure & interface he predicted that by 2016 the cloud will be default. We’ll be using ultra HD connected TVs. Watching will be a social experience like we can see with HBO Connect.
You’ll be buying through your TV screen with t-commerce being worth 15 billion dollars by 2016. Embedded content will be accessed through natural user interfaces that will work like Kinect and use facial recognition to personalize information. Meanwhile mobile phones will be made with flexible graphene, maybe transparent with NFC, audio spotlight technology and use advanced augmented reality. The world will be seen through the “looking glass” of your mobile device with the internet smeared across cityscapes. Instore you can see instant user reviews while even your friends’ faces will launch augmented reality content.
The internet will continue to harness HTML5 so the web becomes one big app. We’ll see an increased socialization of the web where links become likes, vertical searches mean you can buy straight from search results and you’ll get direct answers to complex questions through AI. Social commerce will dominate and we’ll see an increase in gamification of the web to drive deeper engagement.
For medial planners there will be a social dashboard that will allow everyone to be tailored – even TV ads. There will be a need for audience management platforms where every aspect of brand communication can be optimized. The biggest threat will be social contagion since the power of consumer influence will be even bigger than today.
So what will the agency of 2016 look like? Creative will be more like a technology industry while media will be a data industry.
In my next post I’ll share some of the award winning work from Spikes. As usual the Japanese dominated but Australia and New Zealand gave everyone a run for their money.
I haven’t been to Singapore in over 10 years. What a difference a decade makes. It’s become like physical manifestation of the internet. Overblown, full of ways to spend money and geared for entertainment. Spikes Asia 2011, like every other advertising festival today, has digital on the brain. Every speaker and panelist says that the industry has dramatically changed. So how come the work submitted in the digital category was not hung on the wall with the other categories? Some things never change.
The first seminar off the block was brought to us by Coca Cola and crowdsourcing platform eYeka. The title – Is tomorrow’s agency the consumer? With panelists from both Coke and eYeka along with agency folk from Draft FCB and BBH plus someone from Diageo there was a lot of debate. The featured project involved co-creation with the public for a Coke competition called “Energizing Refreshment”. Some amazing figures were mentioned such as the 1.6 million submissions within China when Coke launched a previos crowdsourced campaign. The challenge was to sift through all of that to find the “diamonds in the shit” as one panelist put it. Would agencies become curators rather than being the sole producers of the creative ideas? The panelist from eYeka suggested that crowdsourcing accelerates innovation for brands. Co-creation questions the role of agency. The public now competes with agency creative departments. There are “millions of talented people out there” so why restrict yourself to an agency? Clients like Coke are looking for creative collectives rather than agencies where you might mix up “teenagers with professionals” as one speaker suggested. It was pointed out that the most popular Superbowl ad in 2011 was a $500 film created by a member of the public. It had “authenticity and simplicity”. Co-creation is “not about changing advertising – it’s about creating an environment where public gets involved with the brand”. One panelist said that the role of agencies needs to change for co-creation – but can they? Many agencies “missed the boat with the internet revolution and are still trying to catch up”. During question time I pointed out that the best work submitted in crowdsourced projects was most likely submitted by moonlighting agency creatives rather than the public. The speaker from eYeka admitted that a number of participants are from agencies but over 60% are non-professionals from the general public. Then they showed the winning entry for the “Energized Refreshment” competition… who just happens to be a motion graphics designer based in Brighton UK. Say no more.
Another interesting seminar was hosted by Yahoo and covered emerging markets such as Vietnam, Philippines and Indonesia where 6 out of 10 people that access the internet do so via mobile phones. There was a lot of discussion about the internet not being the same there than in other countries – especially the west. We should not try to impose a western way of thinking on these new markets. We need to bring “5000 years of experience and knowledge” to whatever we do with digital.
There followed an inspiring presentation from JWT about breeding creativity with cultural diversity. Shame all their links to sound and video failed as it was a thoughtful and well put together seminar. They began by showing how Picasso did not find his path until he saw an exhibition of African art while the architect Frank Lloyd Wright was highly influenced by Japanese design. Special guest Gilles Peterson is a DJ that has spent his career exploring the cultural exchanges that can make music so diverse. In his words, to be “truly creative you need to get out of your comfort zone”. Havana Cultura: Remixed // Gilles Peterson Bonus DJ Mix by gillespeterson
Matias Palm-Jensen, formerly of FarFar but now chief innovation officer at McCann, presented his pinball approach to advertising. The old way was more like bowling where you sent your ball down the alley hoping it will knock down as many pins as possible – then you turn your back and walk away. Now things are a lot more dynamic with assets, stories, formats, vehicles, destinations, conversations that then create more assets… and the ball keeps moving. Today every creative idea “needs a digital/social platform”. Fascinating guy with a big job ahead of him at McCann.
This post is getting a bit long so I’ll follow up with a second one featuring Microsoft Advertising, TBWA and Joel Cohen – one of the writers for the Simpsons who showed everyone how to make an entertaining presentation.
Amazing new mobile ad from Google to promote their search app. Like all the advertising Google puts out it is engaging, entertaining and reveals what the services can do by experiencing them.
The making of is quite incredible too where the AdMob team shows how 3D printing was used as the basis of a virtual world people could explore to uncover all the product features.
Laurie Coots, Chief Marketing Officer at TBWA did a seminar on the Gamification of advertising. With a stock photo heavy Powerpoint she said that gaming techniques drove participation leading to engagement and interaction. This leads to greater meaning and behavior change. In the attention economy we had to find greater brand value. The Starbucks app with its reward system was mentioned as one great example. However research shows that 80% of apps are downloaded less than 1000 times. If you are using an app as part of your marketing campaign then gamification can help make participation addictive. Laurie shared an interesting case study for New York Library where gamification was used to get kids interested in books as a source of information that you can’t find through Google.
Jeff Benjamin from Crispin Porter + Bogusky was up next with a much more inspiring talk called Invent or Die. Ironically he opened with the example of Gutenberg who didn’t become rich with his invention of the printing press but died broke. He said that only later did we realize what he had invented. Culture just wasn’t ready for it at the time. Jeff told us that it was the same for the steam engine and electricity. In a similar way it has taken 15 years for culture to finally catch up with technology and the internet. Not so long ago online dating seemed bizarre, online commerce seemed risky yet we now buy TVs from Amazon and even our notions of what friends are has been redefined by social networks. Digital technology is now an essential part of our lives and the public now expect innovation. Jeff said that the current creative revolution is being fueled by technology. If a brand is not inventing it isn’t going to be around much longer.
Euro rising
While things in the European economy are looking extremely dodgy the advertising awards season in Europe keeps rocking like there’s nothing wrong. This past week saw both the Epica and Eurobest awards. Let’s look at some of the highlights…
EPICA d’Or for Interactive went to Jung von Matt in Stockholm for the Mini Getaway. I recently met the guys from Monterosa, the mobile agency that the agency tasked to make this happen. So instead of showing the old video here is a new one about the next Mini Getaway in Tokyo (it’s in Japanese just to annoy you all).
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There was a GOLD in the web category for Lowe Brindfors and thei Magnum Ice Cream “Pleasure Hunt”. The internet is a place where all kind of pleasures exists. They wanted to build a light-hearted story in which Magnums new ice cream came out as superior to everything else out there: Internet’s ultimate pleasure. The mechanic was inspired by something that has engaged and united people for decades: classic platform games. But this time with a totally different platform: the Internet. The user controlled a young woman literally running trough the Internet collecting the ingredients for her ultimate pleasure, the Magnum Temptation. Below is a making of video.
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Another GOLD, this time for branded content in social networks went to Forsman & Bodenfors for the REEBOK Promise Keeper. It was the first online running application (website, iPhone/iPad-app and Android app) that would actually get you out and run. Every run you promised to make in your online calendar was automatically posted on the social network of your choice and spread to all of your friends. They would also be notified about whether you ran or not. Every update was personal and became a direct message that spawned conversation. Everything was built on the insight that a promise to everyone you know is more important than a promise only to yourself.
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Let’s head over to the Eurobest Awards and see who triumphed there.
The Grand Prix went to Hypernaked for Nokia. In this joint promotion with Burton, Push Snowboarding introduced a new way of marketing. Rather than simply telling people about Nokia’s most powerful smartphone, they developed a piece of new technology to show people it’s power. Using the smartphone at the core, they developed technology that could take snowboarding to its next stage by developing wearable sensors that bluetoothed simultaneously to the N8, giving snowboarders live tracking of their ride: speed, airtime and even fear.
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Gold went to Tribal DDB Amsterdam for their latest Philips Obsessed with Sound campaign. To demonstrate that Philips is ‘Obsessed with sound’ and claim that you can hear every detail with the brand’s audio products, they created a unique interactive music video. They collaborated with the Grammy Award-winning Metropole Orchestra and recorded a specially composed music piece entitled “I’m No Prototype”- in 55 separate music tracks. On the site, viewers could experience the music video as a whole, played by the entire orchestra, and were invited to single out each musician to hear every detail.
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Another Gold went to SapientNitro London for Foot Locker
Sneakerpedia was not only the world’s largest sneaker archiving project and the first ever visual-wiki, it wasdigital solution specifically designed to connect sneaker fans, enabling them to share, discuss, follow and help shape future sneaker trends.
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Not every great project wins Gold. A Silver went to FORSMAN & BODENFORS for AMF. They knew that pension savings was boring but the future was exciting to people. Also, if you got a sudden message from a company, you were not very interested but if you got a message from a friend, you usually were. By offering people to send messages to their friends or colleagues that couldn’t be opened by the recipient until the year 2030, both the sender and the recipients would start to think about how life will be 20 years from now. And with a rising interest for the future, they would eventually have a rising interest on their pension.
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Maybe we should have an advertising Olympics. See which countries would come out on top in digital. From looking at these winners the Europeans would give the rest of the world a run for their money.