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Archive for August, 2009

“Creativity can solve anything.”

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

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The director’s statement for Art & Copy easily sums up why great advertising transcends media and becomes woven into the fabric of popular culture. It also characterizes the kind of advertising we strive to create as an agency:

Hate advertising? Make better ads.

What’s different and perhaps surprising about this movie, is that it isn’t about bad advertising, that 98% of which so often annoys and disrespects its audience. I didn’t want to make a doc that just trashes trashy advertising. Too easy, too obvious, and why bother? Instead, granted access to a handful of the greatest advertising minds of the last fifty years, I felt it could be a more powerful statement to focus the film only on those rare few who actually moved and inspired our culture with their work. And that higher standard made me want to make a film that reflected the same kind of disciplined artistic approach that my subjects used.

The films features such ad greats as Mary Wells, George Lois, Cliff Freeman, Hal Riney, Rich Silverstein, Jeff Goodby, Dan Wieden and Lee Clow. Read about the film and watch the trailer here.

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Social media is still media.

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

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Establishing an agency viewpoint on social media has only led us back to a core fundamental of great advertising: you are going to be more successful if you utilize media in concert with an idea or concept that engages, entertains, provokes or generally creates an emotional connection.

Most advertising isn’t liked because it doesn’t give the consumer credit for having intelligence. This goes for traditional media and nontraditional media. Being on the radio to simply be on the radio is okay. Being on Twitter to simply be on Twitter is okay too. To be successful, you’ve got to bring an idea to the table.

For Zea Restaurants’ latest campaign, our creative is simple: their take-out is so good, you’ll find any excuse to order. So on Twitter we’ve created a feed that offers humorous, daily excuses not to cook. You can read and follow it here. Rather than reeling off menu items and prices (Zea’s food is a great value), we’ve chosen to entertain and deliver the value message implicitly. And who doesn’t have the daily, mental tug-of-war over cooking or not cooking?

The bottom line is social media is still media. It’s another channel to your consumer, albeit a two-way (or multi-way) conversational channel to your consumer. You don’t like having conversations with boring people or salesmen, do you? Then don’t talk like that in your advertising, traditional or otherwise. Instead, treat your consumers like people. Entertain them, enlighten them, emotionally connect with them, and they’ll become more than your consumers. They’ll become fans.

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Isn’t the Internet awesome?

Monday, August 24th, 2009

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Tonight while researching online music experiments and crowdsourcing, I found this site. Further evidence the Internet is awesome.

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Visual search

Monday, August 24th, 2009

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I’ve got no clue how to pronounce their name, but Idee is up to some cool stuff. This weekend I found a link to their Multicolr software, which extracts “the colours from 10 million of the most ‘interesting’ Creative Commons images on Flickr” and, by using “visual similarity technology,” allows you to navigate the collection by color. It is really pretty amazing. Give it a try.

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What is “visual similarity technology,” you ask? Here’s what Idee has to say about it:

Visual similarity technology uses sophisticated algorithms to analyze hundreds of image attributes such as colour, shape, texture, luminosity, complexity, objects and regions.

These attributes form a unique visual signature and are arranged by our software into a visual index of your image set. The compact image signature is calculated quickly, stored efficiently and used to facilitate searches for similar images using an optimized and accurate comparison engine.

The implications and applications of the software are only limited by imagination. For our purposes, it’s a great way to test color combinations and find Creative Commons photos that might assist in comp layouts. Very awesome.

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The Red Shirts are coming.

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

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Interns have been around since the invention of coffee. And while we’ve always taken pride in providing an experience that actually teaches students and prepares them to perform, we felt it was time to up the ante. Our newly improved, restructured and repackaged internship program, Red Shirts, has just graduated its first class–and now, we’re looking for the next crop of maniacs. We want the ambitious ones, the ones who live for this stuff, the ones dying to do work that gets talked about.

Check out the shiny, new Red Shirts site–and if you think you’ve got the goods, upload your work/resume. We get tons of requests and have a limited number of spots, so get on it. It’s a great way to get some experience (maybe even some exposure), and it may just land you a real job paying real American currency at Red Square Agency. Ask J’Rett.

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Define success.

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

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Not long ago I sent the following email to our entire agency:

I’m writing a blog entry on how we keep score. I’d like your help in making a list of all the ways we measure success.

Ready? Go.

Here are some the of the answers I received, in no particular order:

  • Increased public awareness of client/product
  • Increased sales/inquiries for client
  • Client goals/expectations met or exceeded
  • When the client tells other people good things about us
  • When the client hangs the creative on the walls at their corporate office
  • When the cash register rings
  • When the client brand becomes a part of pop culture
  • The number of stories we place and the resulting sales increases
  • Success is when you make the competition nervous
  • PR lineage
  • Incoming calls/leads
  • Awards
  • Web analytics
  • Improvement in perception
  • When we truly help craft a client’s brand culture
  • Isn’t the prime measure of success client happiness?

These are very broad definitions of success, and each can be further broken into subsets of more precise metrics. Web analytics, for example, can get extremely detailed. Personally, I prefer quantitative metrics like sales (not that there’s anything wrong with qualitative success).

The most interesting facet of this little email experiment is the widely varying replies. All are correct, which I think leads to the takeaway: you must define what success is before implementation of any marketing initiative. And it must be measurable.

Last night I read a post by eConsultancy about JetBlue’s latest promotion. Brilliant stuff. September is their slowest month, so they’ve decided to offer an all-you-can-jet price of $599 for the entire month. Their ultimate goal was to “fill seats,” but the success far eclipses sales:

Between September 8 and October 8, travelers can take to JetBlue’s planes as often as they’d like. For only $599. The airline, which is known for its social media savvy, sent out a press release about their offer and tweeted about the deal yesterday. Since then, they’ve sold out 1/3 of their inventory.

According to JetBlue spokesperson Jenny Dervin: “September is a slower month for us. Peak seasons are the holidays and summer. So we thought: ‘Let’s find a way to fill seats.’”

And it appears to be working. To announce their offer, JetBlue sent one tweet to their over 1 million Twitter followers, a general press release and a newsletter to their frequent flyers yesterday.

Since making the announcement, JetBlue has found over 10 million mentions of its brand on blogs and news sites. They’ve seen hits to their trip planning route map grow 861%. Meanwhile, other sites are piggybacking on the deal. For instance, travel mapping site Evelater is encouraging people to post their All-You-Can-Jet plans. They were a trending topic on Twitter yesterday and the positive word of mouth continues to grow.

As we say in the Red Square house rules, always keep score.

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From 0 to :30. The art & science of TV production.

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

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This month’s Red Tuesday presentation was all about TV production. Diana Nichols, our fearless ACD, presented on how we make magic for screens big and small. As the title implies (”From 0 to :30″), the gamut was covered, with examples from the Red Square archives. Good show!

I would tell you more, but that would be spilling mystics.

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Big banks + dinosaurs = metaphorical awesomeness.

Monday, August 3rd, 2009

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It’s not every day that a business turns 100 years old. It’s not every day that a bank turns 100 years old, especially in the market we’ve had recently. So when our long-time client, First Community Bank, wanted a campaign celebrating their 100th anniversary, we felt compelled to do something a little different. Instead of the typical, “hey we’re XX years old!” campaign, we’ve taken the opportunity to make a meaningful statement.

Our strategy for the past several years has been simple and consistent:  position against the big banks. This has seen numerous incarnations, most recently UN_BIG. The tag succinctly states what First Community Bank is, big enough to get the job done without sacrificing conveniences or customer service. Bank president Glen Davis has always said, “We’ve remained a successful bank by treating our customers like people instead of account numbers.”

What does being in business for 100 years mean? In a word, stability. And in banking, stability is king right now. So how do we make this statement within the overarching positioning strategy? Given many big banks are unstable (with some even failing), what else big has had trouble?

The biggest of the big failures had to have been the dinosaurs. So our metaphorical story line was cast. We’d explore the different theories explaining the extinction of the dinosaurs, illustrating that “being big leads to big problems.” Then we’d deliver our point, First Community is 100 years old and going strong. The anniversary is given meaning, and we continue to position against the big banks.

The budget was tight, so we had to get inventive on the television production. We partnered with our friends at Shiny Object in Austin, Texas–and then the fun began: table-top sets, toy dinosaurs and DIY props. Picture kids in a candy store.

The resulting spots are quite different for the category. Have a look.

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