There are some great things to love about advertising. All of them are directly below this blog description.
Written by Greg Rutter, who rules.
“Well guys I have to be honest. The commercial is good, but not great. I thought I said instead of green screening me against some boring law books that you should put in some awesome explosions and cars flipping through the air and stuff? That’s how you convince people you’re a reputable lawyer!”
Mmmm, I want to hide my salad with with Purple right now.
Skeptical Beyonce is skeptical.
Some ads leave you with a question. This one from Barbasol is multiple choice
Choose the best answer:
a) the people that made this ad have exactly zero sense of irony
b) the people that made this ad are super ironic geniuses that if you spoke with in the real world would make blood come shooting out of your nose and leave you crying tears of metal like that chick did at the end of X-Men 2 (or was that X-Men 3?)
(madeleinepascal, via bestrooftalkever)
For those of you not in advertising, Campbell-Ewald is an almost-100-year-old agency based in Detroit. It makes most of its money off of Big Money clients (Health Care, Automotive, Armed Forces).
In an industry where being “hip” is king, being viewed as old, stodgy and (gasp!) traditional is a death sentence. So C-E did the equivalent of ditching Talbots and buying a whole new wardrobe at Hot Topic: they have decided to recast themselves as a social media agency. This is despite the fact that the majority of their work is print and broadcast. As if that weren’t ridiculous enough, they’ve decided to host almost their entire portfolio on various social media sites.
The Company: Wikipedia
The Culture: Facebook
Case Studies: YouTube
The Work (video): YouTube
The Work (Still): Flickr
The Work (Digital): Delicious
Have you ever seen someone who’s really excited about their brand new skirt which is way too short on them and totally inappropriate because the skirt is really a top but they didn’t know that because no one told them how to put the top on and OMG GRANDMA I TOLD YOU NOT TO GO INTO MY CLOSET ANYMORE?
Yeah.
The major problem that I have with this is that not only did they completely rip off another agency’s idea, but they aren’t even doing it well. Even on the most basic level, their Facebook Fan Page is poorly executed and their YouTube pages aren’t even skinned. Their labeling of their company blog as “Campbell-Ewald’s Thought Leadership Blog” indicates that they don’t understand why most ad agencies have blogs, or they think that their readers are incredibly stupid. They call their Press area their “Social Media Newsroom”, but they’re posting items that aren’t even related to their social media work (probably because their social media work isn’t newsworthy, and an empty newsroom is a sad, sad place).
Let’s have fun with another extended metaphor: you can tell people that you have a cat, but it won’t take them long to figure out that you’re lying as soon as your cat starts to moo and eat your lawn.
As far as I’m concerned (and I’m sure many people would agree with me), the number one rule of social media marketing/engagement strategy is “don’t do it if you can’t do it well”. This site might fool a few people, but my guess is that it will alienate more traditional clients, and fail to impress the “cool” clients who they’re obviously trying to attract.
Incidentally, this attempt at catapulting themselves into the 21st century didn’t even work, it seems; this past October, Business Week published an article that revealed that Chevy is opening up to pitches from other agencies for the first time since 1922.
I’d tell them that the whole thing is FAIL, but they’d probably just try to correct my grammar.
“Wait, why did we unnecessarily hyper sexualize this commercial about car safety? It doesn’t even make sense anymore.”
“Yeah but sex sells, right?”
“I don’t think this is what they meant.”
From one advertiser to the rest of the world: I’m sorry that my people have done this to you. Here’s an op-ed that completely agrees with me.
TV advertising used to work like this: you sat on your sofa while creatives were paid to throw a bucket of shit in your face. Today you’re expected to sit on the bucket, fill it with your own shit, and tip it over your head while filming yourself on your mobile. Then you upload the video to the creatives. You do the work; they still get paid.
Hail the rise of “loser-generated content”; commercials assembled from footage shot by members of the public coaxed into participating with the promise of TV glory. The advantages to the advertiser are obvious: it saves cash and makes your advert feel like part of some warm, communal celebration rather than the 30-second helping of underlit YouTube dog piss it is.
Google Chrome does their best Michel Gondry impression and it’s a good one.
James Lipton looks like a child molester without a beard. Give that a ponder.
