Half the planet’s population is expected to watch at least some part of the London 2012 Olympic Games. With that reach it’s not exactly news that brands want to associate themselves with what is the daddy of all sporting events. Equally, it comes as no surprise that the Games organisers, having trousered half a billion from selling exclusive rights to advertisers and broadcasters, are keen to protect that investment. But do they really have to go to the lengths of putting tape over the non-wet areas of urinals and toilets in Games venues to ensure that no unauthorised brands get any exposure?
That could be a step too far in the opinion of Chris Robichaud, CEO of LA-based communications agency PMK*BNC. Speaking at the London launch of a pamphlet entitled Beyond The Games: How Popular Culture Is Shaped By A Mega-Event, he observed that the UK government has passed legislation giving sponsors exceptional protection, a Brand Protection Task Force has been set up and guidelines have even been issued to athletes warning against commercial messages in tattoos. In addition, spectators won’t be allowed to bring their own picnics but will have to buy food from approved outlets, and there are restrictions on what information they can send to friends or websites from inside stadia to avoid breaching broadcasters’ rights.
One of the key themes at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) third annual Innovation Days conference was simply the need for the marketing industry to keep up.
Much of the pre-conference buzz was about the series of upfront programming previews – gatherings throughout the week where networks and cable-casters preview their offerings for the next television year. And, for one IAB keynoter, the old-media show-and-tells seemed anachronistic in an interactive world.
"I sat through an upfront meeting yesterday and there was a lot of great content, great information," said Kim Kadlec, Johnson & Johnson Worldwide VP Global Marketing Group. "But I still had the impression that this was an industry desperately working to preserve the past."
Last week Warc Asia held its inaugural Warc Conversation event in Singapore. The goal of these informal, after-work events is to share some best practice and get people talking about some of the emerging issues in Asia’s marketing industry.
And we were lucky enough in our first session to have two particularly outspoken (and, needless to say, very experienced) panellists to help: Charles Wigley, Chairman of BBH Asia and also chair of the 2012 Warc Prize for Asian Strategy; and Tim Broadbent, Global Effectiveness Director at Ogilvy.
Coffee and croissants on the lawn was off the agenda: a May downpour put paid to that notion. 'We can't even predict the weather,' noted Flamingo director David Burrows ruefully as he introduced Addiction to Prediction, the latest in a London-based series of Big Ideas Breakfasts from the brand and insight consultancy.
The weather is but one of the many forecasting activities people undertake every day, pointed out the event's main speaker, Daniel Franklin, The Economist's executive editor, responsible for its annual 'World In…' reports and editor of the 2012 book Megachange: The World in 2050. Predictions are an essential part of life: consider the setting of government, corporate and household budgets, infrastructure planning and political punditry, to say nothing of entire industries built around trend spotting and futurology. 'We're condemned to be addicted to prediction,' Franklin observed.
Despite the From Silicon Valley to Silicon Roundabout tag the IPA’s Creative Pioneers conference showed that creativity has no post code. London and California are influential not because they’re where stuff gets made, but because their products and platforms reach a global audience. Eager to learn the secrets of this success, 300-odd delegates from the marketing and advertising industry gathered at The Venue at Shoreditch Village to guzzle over-proof coffee, listen to talks from the likes of Facebook, Yelp, PlayGen, LinkedIn and Double Negative, and multi-task at the behest of IPA president Nicola Mendelsohn who urged delegates to: “Tweet. Blog. Make noise”.
Presentations ranged from a succinct plea for better technical education to a two-handed account of the history of Shoreditch, but the key ideas of the day can be summarised in five words.
The Warc/AA Advertising Expenditure report shows that UK advertising spend (excluding direct mail) grew by 2.8% in 2011 reaching £14.4 billion in total. Growth is expected to continue in 2012 with new forecasts predicting a 3.8% increase, well ahead of growth across the rest of the UK economy. 2012 growth forecasts identify internet (up 8.9%) and out-of-home (up 5.0%) as the strongest contributors during the Olympic year.
These forecasts show renewed optimism for the UK and for our leadership in the digital economy. Our latest infographic gives you an invaluable snapshot of what happened and what's to come. Click below to see the full image.
Okay, so Amazon has the largest slice of the digital bookselling pie. And for the next decade, Ian Fleming's legendary Bond novels will be exclusively available from Amazon publishing. How did they beat the spectre of Apple and other online publishers? Says Corinne Turner, Managing Director of Ian Fleming Publications, "The reason we're going with Amazon is we believe that their online abilities will bring our books to a much broader audience than we've had before." Turns out sometimes bigger is better.
This is obviously quite a coup for Amazon, who has more than one horse in this race. Not only will Amazon use Bond to power book sales and brand cred; Amazon also happens to currently sell the crowd-favorite device for the digital viewing of that content: the Kindle e-reader.
This week Warc is reporting from the Asian Marketing Effectiveness festival in Shanghai. Warc will be running a full conference report on the event. But as a taster, it’s worth highlighting the entertaining talk by Charles Wigley, Chairman of BBH Asia and the chairman of this year’s Warc Prize for Asian Strategy, and Rob Campbell, Regional Head of Strategy at Wieden & Kennedy.
Their theme? Five wrongheaded ideas that simply won’t go away.
It was just announced that Donald Trump lent his name to a new luxury skyscraper project. Yawn, yawn? Not surprised? Well you might be if you knew where the building is going to be located.
It turns out that the planned building is in ex-Soviet Georgia. Yes, that ex-Soviet Georgia. The one that just emerged from a four-year war with Russia. They used to have a regular flow of tourists, but with most of the hotels and resorts turned into shelters for displaced persons, the country is now having to rebuild in order to attract Western tourists with Western cash. So a luxury skyscraper sounds like just the thing.
Once in too-great a while (if the mega-money spent on creating television advertising is considered) a brand message comes along that deserves high praise. As brand communication researchers, ads worthy of glory, to our minds, are those that do the job advertising is actually hired to do: both get noticed, and – crass as this may sound – move the viewer to give the advertiser priority when it comes to choosing a brand. That's why advertising is harder than simply making entertainment, and why P&G's effort for Mother's Day deserves this public shout out.
Since BMW blew the tires off the branded entertainment vehicle with their mini-movies, brands have been trying to use longer-format pieces to tell their story, trying to access the emotion they know builds brand meaning – and loyalty. Yet, what seems to happen far too often is one of two things: the message is a mini-movie that is disconnected from the brand and its strategy, or the product placement is so heavy-handed that viewers click out with a long audible sigh.