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May the foresight be with you
posted by Mad Mags @ January 5th, 2009
Recently, while working on a list of “cool things I want to buy for me,” I happened to find a few Star Wars gems certain to top my lineup.
Of course, after further reading, I realized these beauties are not for sale, and are actually concepts that had been tabled. I know. How was this possible? I wanted to order at least two Han Solo carbonite fridges, and the Tauntaun suit would have served as my go-to first-date outfit certain to weed out the unworthy in seconds.
Anyway, I shared the rejected Star Wars items with a few of my advertising friends, and everyone (Star Wars fans and non-Star Wars fans included) found at least one item they were interested in purchasing. It made all of us wonder just why the items were rejected.
After a group pow-wow, we decided that the reason must have boiled down to one thing - timing. Unlike 1999, when these items were proposed, this year’s holiday season would have embraced these quirky items. I’m relatively certain if the Death Star grill was available last November, someone would have been nicked by a lightsaber in the rush to get one on Black Friday.
The rejected Star Wars items made us all realize that whether we’re talking products or slogans or platforms, it is definitely worth revisiting ideas that didn’t make the cut the first time around. We’ve begun to keep better files and to revisit ideas before we concept, just to make sure one of our seeds hasn’t ripened when we weren’t looking.
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AgencyThink • Social Media • Trends
Writing print’s obituary?
posted by McKenna @ December 24th, 2008
At a recent company meeting, a coworker stressed that all of us, every employee of Avicom, must become skilled in video and social and online media. Not just in using it for personal use, but supporting it in a meaningful way for our clients. He said we must build our individual skill sets to include video, multimedia, Web and social media – and whatever else might be coming down the pike.
And all I could think was: Really? We must? Who says?
Most of my background is in newspaper reporting and copywriting for printed marketing materials. These skills have served me pretty well in my career. So I felt a little chagrined that I was being told to abandon my hard-earned experience to chase emerging technologies and ways of communicating. I kind of resented the assumption that print has less value – or none at all – just because new technologies are changing how we communicate.
But in the end, it’s not my coworker’s opinion that counts. I want to hear from clients: How do you plan to use print and online media or video in 2009? Are you changing your media mix in the face of new technologies? In your marketing efforts, is print dead?
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AgencyThink • Social Media
For Those About To Blog
posted by Greg Batiansila @ December 11th, 2008
I just read this post from Social Media genius Rohit Bargava about failing corporate blogs, and it makes me cringe a little.
Are we sucking?
I need your help. Let me know what you want an agency blog to look like. More creative? More insightful like insider stuff? Hear about how to be great at marketing? Whether if you roll four ones in Yahtzee if you should keep them and go for the Yahtzee or just reroll? I wanna know.
The goal all along has been to say: hey, we see this…this ad, this trend, this article and it’s interesting BECAUSE and Avicom can help you with it.
Do you mind the salesmanship? Let us know.
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AgencyThink
Your Vote Counts
posted by Greg Batiansila @ November 26th, 2008
I hereby and forthwith am accepting nominations for creepiest and/or least effective ads of 2008. Admittedly, this might end up in two categories: creepy and ineffective. But we’ll start as a combined category.
My first nominee: this. I need to meet the AE/Creative Director/Client who thought this would rock the world. Bring them to me.
Any other nominees?
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AgencyThink
Advertising that sticks — and tastes good
posted by Jason Fleck @ November 25th, 2008
Do me a favor; open your desk drawer where you house all your loose pens, white out, and those two random paper clips. You know the drawer I’m talking about — the one right above your knees that pulls out into your stomach. Yeah, the one you’ve been planning to clean out for the past six months, but haven’t found the time. That’s the drawer I’m talking about.
Now, what do you see? If it’s anything like mine, it’s cluttered with all the free garb handed out by other businesses. Cluttered with those pens that just magically appear in your pocket after leaving the bank or the one given to you by a co-worker that somehow become yours after carrying it around all day. Half of those pens probably don’t work anymore and yet they still occupy precious desk space.
Do these traditional forms of advertising still work?
Maybe.
Gone are the days of conventional advertising for TD Bank. Instead of pens, TD bank is handing out free coffee, pizzas, and umbrellas.
What better way to spread brand recognition is there than connecting with your customers, prospective and current, on a physical need basis? It connects with them on an emotional level and also fills their stomachs.
At Avicom, we understand this need to connect emotionally with your client base. Can we do pens?
Of course.
However, we urge our clients to think “outside of the box” just like TD Bank did. What’s going to work best with the clientele you’re trying to reach? Why resort to printing your logo on a thousand pens when there could be a much more effective way to reach your audience?
Do you covet your pens or do you like the change TD Bank is bringing to conventional advertising? Comment below and let me know.
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AgencyThink • Social Media
Heed The MommyBloggers
posted by Greg Batiansila @ November 21st, 2008
CEO of Corporation X wants to get in on that…what do they call it?…that “Social Media.” Maybe he can get one of those “blogs.”What else can he do? What else should he do?
Here’s a thought: maybe he doesn’t need a blog. Maybe he just needs to read blogs.
Blogs are about voice. About opinion and dissent. Perhaps our CEO would find the general population is less interested in hearing his voice - and more interested that he hears theirs.
Emarketer.com has an interesting - and informative - article about “MommyBloggers” - women who write blogs. Over 3/4 of them review products on their blogs. Think our CEO needs to hear how his product or company is being reviewed? It’s free, unfettered research.
Social media may not always exist in this form. It may not always be called social media. But it’s efficacy and ability to make connections between CEOs and Mommies is another sign that it has a place in marketing in the days to come.
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AgencyThink
Here’s What I’m Saying: Flexible, Scalable. And Groundbreaking.
posted by Greg Batiansila @ September 16th, 2008
Marketing Thinker David Meerman Scott is sick of all of us using the same terms which mean nothing. Can we cut it out?
Probably not. It reminds me of my days in graduate school, when fellow grad students seemed to be making references to the same canon of uppity books and self-indulgent authors. “Did Bronte write Jane Eyre, asked one thinker, or did Jane Eyre write Bronte?”
What?
In his most recent blog post, Scott noticed the following usage of baloney and gobbledygook in some big-time press releases:
HARTFORD, Conn.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Sep 15, 2008 - Aetna (NYSE:AET) has been awarded the prestigious “Recognizing Innovation in Multicultural Health Care Award” by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) for its prospective randomized study to determine if a telephonic culturally competent disease management program can improve the health of African American members with hypertension. Members in the study who received culturally competent disease management outreach and educational materials achieved a higher percentage of clinically acceptable blood pressure levels, increased their frequency of self blood pressure monitoring, and greater medication compliance when compared to a control group of members who received a light support program.
AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire/ — Campus Advantage, a world-class student housing management and development company, today announced its partnerships with the Student Association for Voter Empowerment (SAVE) and HeadCount, a non-partisan organization dedicated to facilitating voter registration and participation through the power of music, to educate students and their advisors about available voting resources.
DALLAS and DUBLIN, Ireland, Sept. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Trintech
Group Plc (Nasdaq: TTPA), a leading global provider of integrated financial governance, transaction risk management, and compliance solutions, today attended the 2008 Sibos Conference in Vienna to promote its innovative LCM Payments solution developed using Microsoft technology.
If you didn’t make it through the above, why would anyone else? How about we write something that’s readable?
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AgencyThink
A New Idea: Priceless
posted by Just A Nick @ September 16th, 2008
At the Milwaukee zoo this past weekend, I was innocently eating lunch with my family. When I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt that read “Got Freedom?”
I skipped over trying to figure out what social/political statement he was trying to make, and went straight to rage over the excessive use of the phrase “Got [insert something here]?”
Don’t get me wrong, the Got Milk campaign is arguably one of the greatest of all time. And the fact that it’s constantly parroted means that it has crossed the line into the lexicon of pop-culture slogans (it’s not just selling milk any more). That being said, can we please kill it now?! The campaign was launched in 1993!
Poor Apple has suffered the same fate with their ground-breaking iPod ads. Marketing campaigns sporting silhouettes of people dancing over brightly colored backgrounds were winning awards in Southeast Wisconsin as late as 2006! I hope the winners at least sent a thank-you note and a Starbucks gift card to the apple team atTBWA\Chiat\Day.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe “nothing is original” as someone said when I self-righteously scoffed at the notion of an award winning rip-off. But if nothing is original, where did Apple get it?
I can tell you that when brainstorming campaign concepts, being influenced by great ideas is not only acceptable, it’s necessary. Understanding conceptual trends is important, and finding ways to modify/advance those ideas in order to communicate with the right audience at the right time is what geniuses do. However, aping a concept wholesale is a cop-out. Even if it does immortalize of the influencer.
Let us marvel at the cultural impact of great ideas. Let us be influenced by them. Let us produce great campaigns. And let us never belch the phrase “Got [anything]” again.
![Got [anything]](http://adweek.blogs.com/photos/uncategorized/gotmilk_big2.jpg){kind=link}
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AgencyThink
Tightening the Belt
posted by T-Schanz @ August 15th, 2008
With the economy still in a slump, companies continue to find ways to trim the fat off projects. If a client brings us a project on a shoestring budget, reducing the amount of travel time is one way help keep costs in line. Most of our travel time at Avicom is due to client meetings. So, for the past few weeks I’ve been looking into alternatives to face-to-face meetings. Hardware-based video conferencing was the first thing that came to mind.
Some of you probably have your gears turning, thinking of Cisco, HP, Polycom, Lifesize, etc. (for anyone who hasn’t seen Cisco’s TelePresence system in action, definitely take a look). Providing a higher level of immersion compared to simple teleconferencing, hardware-based video conferencing is great when you have a dedicated room with dedicated equipment. But, should I expect our clients to have these resources available? No – we always want to be accommodating to our clients.
Furthermore, hardware-based video conferencing only works when the client is in the office, and only provides an audio/visual bridge. During the course of a normal meeting, we may use a laptop, projector, whiteboard and leave behind files the client finds interesting. How could we do these things in an effective manner with video conferencing? This brought to light two additional requirements:
• Accessibility: Anyone, anywhere can join the meeting.
• Unification: Instant message, speak, draw, share files and view other participants using a unified solution.
With the proliferation of broadband internet service and the fact that many of our clients carry laptops, turning to Web conferencing can address the accessibility requirement. Web conferencing provides the audio/video, but we still need unification.
Enter online meeting applications. Often grouped in the generalized Web conferencing category, online meeting applications take the audio/visual concept of Web conferencing and layer it with the unification requirement I mentioned above. There’s a wide array of competing products on the market, some even at no cost. We’ve been testing a few different applications in-house and the results have been promising thus far.
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AgencyThink
Making Dreams Real (This Might Hurt A Little)
posted by Greg Batiansila @ July 14th, 2008
I can’t get over how much advertising is like this. A client comes to us with a rough idea of what they want - no matter how detailed the idea, it’s still rough - and we set about taking their concept and making it real. Putting it on a billboard, or a webpage, or a brochure.
Inevitably, there is friction between what the idea became and how it existed before. Some of these drawings revealed a rude idea of perspective; some of the implementations of the drawings were too literal. Success requires trust and communication and understanding.
In our video department, we sometimes encounter client objections about a camera angle or style even though they, the client requested that particular angle or style. The idea is going through its own rite of passage. It’s all part of making a dream real.
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