As any skilled online advertiser will tell you, the smart money is on the ability to measure and optimise activities on the fly.  Does this mean that a lot of dumb money goes into random display? I guess there must be another award ceremony for search going on somewhere else, because it’s not getting much airtime on the Croisette.

When we pitched a major mobile operator last year, the online advertising investment (display/search/affiliates) was 40 30 30 in terms of cost, but 20 50 30 in term of effectiveness. I thought afterwards that we should really have looked into this as a primary problem, rather than get tied up in the creative discussion about how best to present the brand offers without resorting to even more template wallpaper.  Spend more on search, I said. Spend less on offers, more on engagement.

Pondering this today through a mild reality distorting field of haircuts shouting loudly in the Martinez bar, it occurred to me that we only celebrate display, and not search. We don’t think enough about the intelligence required to serve ads to people looking for something they want. I love the idea of advertising that isn’t advertising. I love the idea of search that isn’t search even more. And what’s the end game for all this as we start the probably impossible journey to reducing wastage in advertising from 99% to nil?

Through my reality distortion field, I imagined receiving stuff I wanted all the time. Some sort of magical CRM world, where my bank offered to reduce my mortgage, crème brulée would arrive endlessly and I could spend the whole day seeing no advertising at all. Would it be hell or would I crave some distraction of a bright and breezy display ad for something I didn’t want?  As Joni Mitchell sang, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.  I think I would miss it.

We mustn’t let the good intention of metrics eradicate the magic of invention and entertainment. But we must adopt more intelligent ways to advise clients on whether the work is actually any good or not. We have to help clients sell stuff. Every skilled online advertiser will tell you that.

Virals seem to be flowing out of the Home Office as freely as Tequila shots on a Friday night.  As following their Knife crime viral campaign they’ve just launched their new anti-binge drinking campaign – with a viral forming a central plank to the campaign.

I say “central plank” as although the campaign is cross-media with lots of different executions, the creative is designed to shock (and amuse to a point) and get people thinking and talking about the consequences of excessive drinking.  So arguably the campaign’s viral in its entirety, rather than just having a single viral aspect . . .

Having said that, they are actually running a viral film as part of the campaign:

One for the road anyone????

I’m in Manchester this week to attend bTWEEN08, where I’ll be sharing ideas with other digital entrepreneurs from thoughout the UK.

• My agency Hai Media Group is a finalist in the Branding Talent competition at bTWEEN08, and from what I can tell, this may be a bit like The Apprentice, Dragon’s Den and X-Factor all rolled into one for entrepreneur’s in digital media. Along with my media partner Isabella Hu, who’s design portfolio can be seen at Ecolocate.org, we’ll be offering our seed idea for our Rare Fruits campaign concept for Littlewoods. We’ve worked hard together to come up what we think is a client winning proposal to build excitement and customers for littlewoodsdirect.com.

• Facing the Judge’s Panel Who’s our Sir Alan Sugar, Simon Cowell, Paula Abdul, Sharon Osbourne, den of talent scouting dragons for this experience? The mentors are:

• Steve Taylor, Director of Innovation, Aegis
• James Estill, Senior Producer, 4Talent
• Nicole Yershon, Director, Innovative Solutions, Ogilvy
• Paul Bennun, Creative Director, Somethin’ else
• Neil Richards, Script writer
• Katz Kiely, Managing Director, Just-b. Productions 

• Shivers & Shakes Yes! We are nervous, but looking forward to the learning experience, and to gaining a lot of valuable creative confidence throughout the week.

• Take a Peek I’ll be peeking around bTWEEN08 and popping in here with updates about what’s happening.

• Follow Me You can also keep track of some of my updates by following lisadevaney on Twitter.

-Lisa
 

Looking forward to our seminar at Cannes today – we’ll have Facebook, MySpace, Intel and Blyk (the mobile platform) in a panel discussion working out whether brands can be friends and what form of advertising (that isn’t really advertising anymore) will evolve to be relevant, engaging and deliver new results in an always on connected world. I expect some powerful discussion and ideas for what brands should do to live well in the new space. Social media users do actually watch less TV. From their digital experiences, they want relevant stuff. They love free stuff. They don’t want to hear from you, unless you’ve been asked. They crave community. They want to belong. But they want to belong on their own terms. Of course this isn’t new. These are anthropological norms. The difference is the technology, the tools and the enabling attitudes of these enlightened businesses. When they provide real value to enormous communities, the value of other more classical media properties diminishes.

About this time last year I was, frankly, having a whale of a time in a swimming pool in a villa in the south of France, pretending to go the Cannes advertising festival. As all my old chums set off for Cannes I have just returned from a wet field in Manchester, Tennesee and you know what, I couldn’t be happier.

Ok, I get these emails inviting me to lunch at Cannes and texts from people on boats and all that la-di-dah and I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to be there. Who wouldn’t, it’s a gas. But having traded a semi high profile job in Advertising for a job at a place that continually needs to remind people that we don’t do advertising, where are the perks goddamnit?

Well, I just got back from a most incredible weekend out in Tennesee. We are working with the guys that put on the Bonnaroo music festival. For those of you in the UK, Bonnaroo is like Glastonbury, but bigger – and I am not exaggerating – a zillion times better. We are trying to help them become more of a media entity that exists longer than four glorious days in June.

Brands were relatively inconspicuous at the event. Of course there were sponsorships. Fuse TV had a pretty cool barn where you could charge up phones, use the net, cool off (it’s hot, damned hot there) ride a bucking bronco etc. Fruictus had a good tent with hundreds of girls queuing in the morning to get their hair washed while other girls sang karaoke. There was a Nokia tent but it looked so boring we never went in it. Gibson guitars had a great idea – they set up 10 amazing guitars and bose headphones and allowed people to jam to themselves for as long as they liked. I’m not a guitar freak but I would imagine they were pretty pricey. The headphones themselves were worth 200 quid. There was no lock on them or anything. At Glastonbury some scouser would have had them away before a hippy could play the first few chords of ‘Stairway…’

So this is of course the challenge. How do you create a meaningful experience that resonates with many without being in your face. I’m nowhere near working that out, especially having left half my brain at the Sigur Ros gig, but it seems simple in theory: be useful and don’t be a dick. We’ll see next year if we can pull something off for our partners.

Another thing that I noticed was that out of 90,000 people we were the only English people there. This is the first time I have experienced this in the states. You can usually hear or spot some pasty Brit like me lurking in the corner. John Hegarty made the point when he was at BBH NY that to crack the US you had to get out of New York. I think he’s right. I assumed there would be loads of New Yorkers on our flight to and from Nashville. Not so. On our return flight we did bump into Sean Avery  (the Ice Hockey equivalent of Theirry Henry) who is very into his music and was also quietly digging Sigur Ros with us. Nice to see an uber celebrity just chilling and genuinely liking great music.

For those of you who are also into music the highlights were The Raconteurs – Jack White and friends on fire. B.B.King, still rocking at 82 years old. My Morning Jacket, a band I had not heard of before getting to the States but who played a five hour set from 12 to 5 in the morning. Bonkers video clip here. And Sigur Ros; where I was lucky enough to be backstage to witness, by all accounts, one of the most impressive festival performances in recent history.

All good stuff. All good stuff I never would have seen had I been packing my bags for Cannes. There’s a whole world out there folks.

I’m a new blogger here with Brand Republic and I’m happy to be a contributor.

I’ll be peeking about at a variety of happenings from the worlds of new technology, art, entertainment, business and beyond.

I hope you enjoy what I invite you to take a peek at from time to time.

-Lisa
 

Mark Twain once wrote, upon reading his own obituary, that reports of his death were exaggerated. Here we are in Cannes, and the Cyberlion judging president now predicts the death of the category, no less. I think what she means is that because so much work is valid across categories, there is room to lose one or two of the categories. Last year, there was considerable blending of the promo and direct work, and this year there is much expectation that plenty of work demonstrates cross media effectiveness. It’s true that there is far more blurring around the edges of discipline centric awards than ever, but I think she has mistakenly created a rod for her own back.

If she genuinely believes that the Agencies can be idea neutral (in the way that they claim media neutrality), she is deluding herself. We’re all too familiar with the bunfights over owning creative leadership between Agencies, and the need for a better way. I think the industry still has a way to go, and is in need of some restructuring. Obviously I wouldn’t want to be running a TV centric creative Agency today, not because TV is no longer the medium of choice for today’s media literate consumer, as this is not actually always true, but because Clients demand Agencies that can genuinely think about more than one medium in developing brand properties.

As we move more and more towards platforms and technology-based platforms, we need the Cyberlions all the more, to seek out innovation and challenge the status quo, and invent and grow the brand propositions that will succeed in the digital world. A gardening analogy struck me -  somehow TV ads are pretty flowers that occasionally get picked and stuck in a vase for a bit, but digital platforms that are long term and never ending are more like trees. They have the potential to grow to be very tall and strong. I’d rather be doing trees than flowers, wouldn’t you?

This is just a amazingly fabulously wonderful piece of digital creative:

www.ecodazoo.com

It’s from McCann’s in Japan and I just love it.  I was having a fairly heated debate the other day about what the definition of viral was, and one way of defining viral is f@cking great advertising, which this ticks the box of.

Having said this,  I’d be interested to see how it does.  Often the ad industry’s reaction to campaigns is completely different to the general public’s . . . I’ve seen some campaigns that are regarded as masterpieces which are a flop with the public.  Still, I think there’s enough Flash geeks in the world to get hot under the collar about the amazing rendered animation and transitions for this to go viral . . .

The range of content at Cannes next week is extraordinary. Obviously our own event on Tuesday with Facebook, MySpace and Intel will be brilliant, but I wonder whether the industry is about to explode with ‘issues overload’?

Metrics; magic; big ideas; TV obituaries; agency models for the future; new Russian advertising; will the Chinese believe anyone who isn’t Chinese; can a brand really be a friend? Is it all about telling a story? Even the word ‘new’ qualifies for evaluation.

I originally got into this business because people in it told me that it was full of bright and interesting people who were clever at invention. It still is, but there just aren’t as many of them as there used to be (see Rory Sutherland’s blog passim).  I also discovered that the industry was, in fact, rather more clever at reinvention. That’s why, every other week in Campaign, there’s a “preferred the idea when we did it” letter from some disgruntled wag or other. Cadbury’s Crème Egg is the latest one for me – we dressed Dom Joly up as a Peperami for the 1996 World Cup (Sam and Jason, now of The Red Brick Road fame may remember that campaign). We had great fun making the first Peperami websites – there’s an example live here – an early web classic.

It was also genuinely new. Proper ‘never been done before’ stuff, and a privilege to work on too. I think that of late, so much of what is talked about is reinvented, rather than new. Digital technology is actually driving innovation, and working with imagination to change the way in which people communicate. For example, I’m interested in the social networks right now because they have developed technologies that enable new forms of communication, engagement and participation. We can’t recycle ideas that depend on no feedback for success in these environments.

We can try harder to think of new ways to communicate, and challenge ourselves to break the habits of convention in our briefs and business process. I look forward to seeing what the great and the good of our industry have to say about this next week.

I have talked about this quite a bit in the recent months. The need for new
revenue models with our clients is vital to our success, most especially in
digital work due to the layers of work required and different aspects of the
process that we can charge for e.g. strategy, planning/buying, ad serving,
tracking, creative, project management etc…

Traditionally in big local and global pitches, the client has been more prominently
interested in prices that the agency can deliver. While the client will highlight
the major importance of creativity and in more recent days, being “digitally
lead”, more often thatn not they select the large global agency that
offers the best price cuts in buying media – also applicable here are resources
within the agency, ability to deliver on time etc…! Price is off-course most
applicable, when the client is focusing on traditional medias such as
Television & Print.

The pitching process I believe though is shifting in favor, in some cases,
towards the more dynamic creative agencies that are truly lead by innovative
ideas. I am not only talking about digital though, innovation comes from any
media including for example digital, interactive outdoor & television. The
creative pitch is starting to shift towards innovation and, the ideas are
focusing on completely integrated concepts that have a clear defined path for
the brand outlining the effects of the different revenue models and why they are
there. It is not so vital to display TV 2.2% & Digital 7% for example…
this is already a bit old really isn’t it? Well off-course, maybe it depends on
the client – but what about the shift towards behavioral buying, performance based
models centered around leads & ROI… We could go into a whole discussion about
different revenue models but then perhaps we’d be giving our secrets away eh?

Here in Helsinki,
a few global accounts have gone from the big global agencies to newer style
startups with far more innovative ideas – ideas that don’t evolve purely around
the masses, but rather creative ideas that are creatively modeled and in turn,
new revenue models arise & the agencies make good on their return. Big
agencies simply charge for their buying fee & maybe “consultancy”
for strategies etc… – Common guys… get with the times and get more creative!