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.

  

Two month placement at Brass

The day begins at 9am, for me this usually involves grabbing a strong coffee from the filter machines and checking my emails; in a bid to jump start my brain into action (I am not a morning person, and often annoyingly come up with ideas in bed). The turn over of briefs is fast here, but it means you automatically work faster and don't stew on something for too long (loosing sight of what you're doing in the process). The briefs have included food brands, a recruitment ad (to help me work on my art direction), a fruit (!), health stuff and a keep Britain tidy campaign to encourage people to pick up their dog's crap...glamorous eh. The creative department are very keen to share the words of wisdom, which is nice - perhaps they remember the graduate wilderness too? A recurring theme is, everyone has their own opinion on what is right and what is wrong; about my book (digital or hard copy, case study or no case study), about the work I'm doing there for them...everything really. I know this happens at uni in terms of the creative work - it seems it doesn't go away in industry. So for me, this means having the balls to decide for myself what I think is right or wrong after asking other's opinions. As well as working in the creative department, I've also been gaining (valuable) experience in the digital department. They've taken me to meetings about social media strategy and online communication strategy (which did involve quite a bit of me not knowing a lot of the jargon words - but it was learning). There was opportunity for me to have my voice listened too (which if you know me, you know I quite like talking - so this was good). Having said that, I only spoke when I was absolutely sure I should. But people liked what i had to say. It gave me a bit of confidence - maybe I can actually do this in the real world. The days are long, but the weeks go fast. The office is relaxed, which means I can get into my own creative flow, and don't notice 5.30 come around. Alas, the road to creative employment is long it seems, and the creative world is bigger and expecting more of me than I realised sat in the studio at LCA; but the nice people at Brass are encouraging me to better my book...this is what I am concentrating on in the 2 months I'm placed here. Lauren. I'll upload a picture soon. Janine, i don't like how all of the text is bunched up together - makes it very hard to read stuff on here :/

at Brass

Our placement at Brass is quite intense, we’re already working on a second brief.

‘Office work’ can be exhausting, but at the same time, rewarding.

There’s a hairy rhino, a huge melon and some golden cats distracting us from work. 

We are receiving good feedback.

At the end of the day our eyes are red, our hands coloured in markers and what we say doesn’t make any sense anymore.

We are living on coffee and sandwiches.

Our 4 hours of Facebook a day have been reduced to half an hour in the evening.

No lazy mornings and no ‘Let’s go for a pint’.

But we’ve been coming up with more ideas than ever!

Bianca and Danielle

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.

hello bloggers

Hello Bloggers...

We're all in this together.

Creating ads from conversation

A really good creative exercise: listen to conversations and spot a headline.
I overheard a group of kids chatting, and one said "Everybody likes me when I've got money. When I've got none, no-one talks to me."

Put it into a context (a brand!), and it becomes an ad.

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!