Advertising Week - a time to be social

Trevor Beattie opened the Advertising Week conference yesterday with an announcement that the 30-second-ad is dead.

You can get involved in the event by joining the advertising week social club; through the blog (check out the student area) and/or facebook and linkedIn.

The blog gives you access to many of the sessions and the AWSC  linkedIn enables you to join in discussions.

Go on, be social and maybe even leave a comment about something interesting you come across...

Advertising games, David Jones gives social ads gold

David Jones cites the medal winners and losers in the advertising industry today as agencies who've grasped social advertising and those who haven't. Havas recently bought Victors & Spoils the worlds first and largest crowd sourcing agency, who don't have a traditional creative department - instead they use the power of the crowd to get their ideas - check out the V&S Community.

In a recent interview with the BBC Jones CEO of Havas, one of the biggest global advertising agencies gave gold to BBH's don't fly campaign for British Airways as it understood the audience. The commonality that the advertising medal winners have is an awareness to be open, to share and be collaborative.

Losers are brands and agencies that use an enforce and command model, like Visa, whose sponsors rights and privileges have gone too far in only allowing visa payments to be made in the Olympic stadium. The line 'We're proud to only accept Visa' is out-of-touch as it serves to annoy people.

The sponsor MacDonald’s had the privilege of being the only Olympic retailer (out of 800) to sell chips. Jones asserts that in the world of new media, you can still censor venues however it is very hard to 'lock down' social media, which he describes as 'much more powerful than the Olympic movement'.

The exclusivity rights the games give to sponsors have created a problem for the movement, as brands could be damaged by such sponsorship deals.  Social responsibility is important to the world and business today, people want brands to stand for more than just profit - they want to know the purpose behind the profit.

'Is the whole relevance of global advertising dead? Are you a burning platform?' Jones replied that the advertising industry is more relevant than ever as the industry has shifted from a TV advertising industry to a digital and social media industry.

'When you can kill a brand in an afternoon by leaving a comment on a blog how do you have a cat in hells chance of keeping up with that?'   Jones explained that as long as advertisers evolve we can. If we don't we will go the way of the dinosaurs. Clients know the rules of the TV advertising world; they don't know the rules of the game for the social media world. How you operate in that space and how brands can be socially responsible is what matters. New media is intrinsically linked to social responsibility and being able to deliver in this space is to be successful [achieve gold].

Can you bill a million pounds for running a twitter account or running a very well done blog? It's different to TV advertising isn't it? Yes it's a completely different model and every six months something new appears. Jones then describes the recent purchase of Victor and Spoils and contends that although this new approach to creativity could damage our legacy business - this is much smaller than our competitors. 

For Jones only socially aware agencies with entrepreneurial agility will be Olympian medallists.

  

BA campaign by BBH is not about flying

 Justin Moore (BBH Creative Director) proudly revealed  (Metro, 26th June, 2012) how his team 'broke all the rules by demonstrating 'support for Team GB in the most profound way ...by asking people not to use the product'. interestingly this 'not about flying' approach runs through its social activities too. 

After viewing the commercial on British Airways Facebook page I scrolled down the time line, which shows the full sequence of the campaign revealing what a social brand BA has become.

Like in the Qatar's tweet a meet audiences are invited to write up sight-seeing tips for destinations (ok to win flights), vote on their favourite Olympic flick, consider how much tea BA makes for customers and offers little quizzes on the company's heritage - all little quirky strategic ways of reinforcing brand identity.

It's a ten! Blogging - ideal for Creative Advertising

While David is in London at D&AD, here I am in Edinburgh on a staff development activity called Better Blogging. Here are ten reasons why Blogging is ideal for our Creative Advertising programme:

Blogging is the ideal medium for copywriters!
Like writing good endlines, you need to decide the purpose of your post, think about your target audience and language, use strategy and reduce all the unnecessary noise. [David will like this bit] It is good to use the inverted triangle model - punchy headline first, then background detail later.

Blogging is ideal for making our research quad visibly active!
As the course team has four areas of research interests; narrative, new media, copywriting and art direction - what better way to share such a (dynamic) ever-changing activity than in an ever-changing environment like a blog?

Blogging is an ideal method of (as Richard says) collecting creative fuel!
You can capture imagery, sound, narrative (anything) pretty cheaply and immediately for inspiration for your art and copy.

Blogging is an ideal way of sharing work experiences!
Thanks to Coming Soon's shout out on the IPA Gradvantage blog - I had an idea that A Day In The Life Of series would be great for sharing work placement experiences, in real time.

There are lots more reasons, which I will write up later, bye for now and good luck Tom!

Revealing Coming Soon

This years (level 6) final show is revealing in the sense it goes beyond a mere showcasing of undergraduate work. The show offers an experience that captures both the (collaborative) creative spirit and individual personalities of 19 creatives. A screening of a short documentary (see below) is the focal point and visitors are made welcome by being offered a comfortable seat (am I showing my age here?) Anyway, as this short review is tagged with the label 'social media' (a research interest of mine) the following exhibits are selected because of the social strategy employed. The Coming Soon campaign itself was seeded well, through blogging e.g. Gradvantage blog and tweeting with reach as  far as Beattie and beyond. Lily Tidy's blogtweetrepeat project illustrates her individual work ethic and the creative thinking philosophy of the course. Lily uses the headline of the day to kick start a creative thinking process. Chloe Robinson's Advertising and Travel book has some excellent case studies such as Lemon & Paeroa by Ogilvy New Zealand as Chloe describes 'a social media success and tourism figures rose to 425%'. Another book caught my eye, but perhaps not for the right reasons was So there I was by Molly Henage, I just wanted to emphasize to all less senior creative undergraduates that 'though paying attention is something you should do, everything is on the VLE' is not of course accurate or good advice - Molly merely jests! The Art Vinyls series by Chris Poots for the Cara Cowan are both on and off the wall, as the campaign is simultaneously an art installation, ambient and sound cloud. The last mention goes to Tom Birds' Birdeux Tapestry which is a material scroll-like-tapestry depicting the narrative of his creative escapades over three years, which also appears in his website where he invites creative directors to complete the tapestry with their contact details. There is so much more I wanted to say but alas it is home time and David has told me to stop blogging my time away.

Notes on Social Media Mastery

Today I joined a webinar to listen to a live talk by Ian McKendrick a Social Media and Technology Strategist called Social Media Mastery run by Brand Republic. Social Media and its impact on Creative Advertising is a hot topic within academic and industry circles (see this blog at Brass agency). McKendrick said some interesting things, which I've organised into themes: actions, language, social campaigns, variety, future and thoughts.

 Actions
 He began by illustrating a scenario where he used http://www.twellow.com/ (yellow pages for twitter) which allows you to search by key words/subject. He searched keynote speakers as part of his consultancy role. Within hours he had a query and tweeted his blog address, which resolved the issue and contained a 'call to action'. His blog asks people to contact him with any queries and contains his email, twitter and facebook addresses. In a week he had recieved over £5000s worth of work. McKendrick emphaises that calls to action are vital to social-media-communications and gave some examples: join our mailing list, sign up to an event and tell your friends.
Language
 He discussed the importance of using the right language, giving the example of google's ad words.  He explained that any social communications need to contain the same words as those used by social networks e.g.facebook groups, bloggers and any type of online communities of practice. This is so that the communiciation ranks better on google otherwise known as SEO (search engine optimisation). McKendrick explained that this new process of using online conversational language entails a) building communties of interest b) giving something of value to people and c) utterly omitting 'sales talk'. So creatives need to find out where 'fans' of products and brands hang out and, as Paul Burns (copywriter TBWA) once told me 'talk with, not at people'.
Social Campaigns
The notion of giving people something of value also links to a talk by Andy Fowler ECD (Brothers and Sisters) available on the IPA Creatives channel - worth a watch (25mins). Fowler and McKendric illustrate the types of valuable content that social media campaigns can host. Fowler points to Nike Grid  whereas McKendric described a personal health campaign that began with creating a group twitter account with hash tag. Using hootsuite.com a social media dashboard he conntected with websites supermarket e.g. health pages, fat secret.com and Apps e.g. Pedommeter pro (GPS). This personal campaign resulted in 550 fans/followers in a few days. Among these were health and fitness coaches, health clubs, chefs and even professional food photographers.

Variety

Social networkers, like learners like to process information in different ways e.g. text, image, location, audio. McKendric contends that variety leads to engagement.There are lots of tools available, which creatives should be aware of, like social media dashboards, tweetdeck, cotweet, hubspot, spredfast and tweetadder. Social bookmarking sites like delicious are useful for content syndication e.g audio boo is intergrated with itunes, which is a massive platform.

Future

The future is the knowledge economy. Where knowledge and 'know how' is shared freely and content is king. Give it all away is McKendrick's advice, write for fans using community words and phrases. Promote and share. Social media strategies entail an investigative role and thrive through conversations on new media platforms e.g. blogs that also contain imagery that creates/reinforces brand value. McKendricks gives the metaphor of creating a honey pot; social media strategy is about making something attractive, something that people will tell all their friends about (creates buzz). He adds that it can be particularly useful for B2B campaigns. Finally, he ends by point to the 'next big thing' - curatorial software like pinterest which gathers 'collections' of 'stuff' that people are interested in, in real-time, a sort of bespoke magazine. As you can guess many products, services and brands will appear in these 'live' publications.  

Thoughts

In what ways do you think that using social media strategy could impact upon conventions of copywriting and art direction? Please share your thoughts and comment if you have found this post of interest.