For the last few years we’ve been working with Coty across various brands, but most recently with Rimmel helping build awareness for their products in the US.  “Get the London Look” is the international tag line, so we went out and found 10 active video bloggers and asked them to interpret the London Look for their US audiences.

Rimmel London wanted to raise its awareness in the US using online. It worked with marketing agency Iris, which partnered with youth network Ruby Pseudo to find ten American brand ambassadors.

“Developing a social media presence has provided us with a forum to have a direct dialogue with our customers,” says Rick Goldberg, VP of US marketing at Rimmel London. “To truly connect, though, we need to earn the attention of our audience with the content we put out there. It’s not enough simply to have a presence. We know they don’t always want to hear from us alone, so we engaged ten creative, fascinating women to provide their
thoughts on trends, London, cosmetics and creativity.”

The girls have been set ten challenges over ten months, finishing on Rimmel London’s tenth anniversary in the US. “We can link the content they post in their social worlds through Rimmel London’s social media profiles, plus content from rimmellondon.com,” says Goldberg.

he campaign more than doubled the number of mentions of Rimmel London online within three months, increased the number of monthly visits to rimmellondon.com from 32,674 to 50,639, and increased the site’s number of monthly unique visitors from 27,943 to 45,108.

The story of Yahoo is an amazing story of the Internet and how quickly it moves and how ruthless it really is. 

I had lunch with Lewis Gersh the other day and we talked about the big ones — AOL, MySpace — but also the long list of others — GeoCities, Excite, Altavista, LetsBuyIt, Interworld, Netscape, The Globe, QXL — that crossed industries and have all disappeared.  The question of why is of course different for each one, but here is a very insightful post from someone that was inside Yahoo before Google was founded.

The big lesson I take from below?  Realize that if you rely on a website to succeed, you are a software company.  If you don’t understand how to get the best developers and keep them, you will fail. 

In my world of creative agencies we spend a lot of time understanding how to get and maintain the best creative culture.  How long before we realize we’re in the software business as well?

August 2010

When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be.

What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company. They were already very visible when I got there in 1998. Yahoo had two problems Google didn’t: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.

Money

The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons. He thought we were meeting so he could check us out in person before buying us. I thought we were meeting so we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop. It was a way of sorting shopping search results. Merchants bid a percentage of sales for traffic, but the results were sorted not by the bid but by the bid times the average amount a user would buy. It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded.

More

Interesting to see this article on IPG’s Media Lab.  We’ve been pitching dynamic advertising and targeted communications for years.  As Brian Monahan points out later in the article, it isn’t the technology that holds up implementing these ideas, it is how Madison Avenue (and clients) are organized.

All agencies across the spectrum from advertising to DM and PR will need to understand dynamic data elements being fed into interactive creative pieces.  Whether a banner ad (as described here), an e-mail or an side-bar given to the NY Times for the tablet version of an article — it is dynamic data that will get people’s attention and thus deliver the message.

Interpublic Takes Media Lab From Theory To Application: Initial Foray Focuses On, Well, Applications

by Joe Mandese, Friday, August 6, 2010, 9:11 AM

After years of studying the theory of how
emerging media are impacting the consumer advertising marketplace,
Interpublic’s renowned media lab is restructuring and shifting its focus
to practical , real-world application. Not surprisingly, one of its
first applications is, well, an application. Specifically, it will test
and deploy new forms of online advertising that dynamically connect with
other software or databases. The new format, which Interpublic
executives believe could be the next big breakthrough in advertising,
exploits so-called APIs, which in tech industry parlance means
“applications based interface,” but which from a marketer’s or agency’s
point-of-view means advertising will simply become a pathway to any kind
of programming a creative thinker, media strategist or programmer can
think of to connect with a consumer.

“We believe the next generation of storytelling will be fueled by
dynamic data elements,” asserts Brian Monahan, the head of social media
at Interpublic’s Universal McCann unit, who recently took over as
day-to-day director of Interpublic’s Emerging Media Lab, when former
chief John Ross stepped down to launch Shopper Sciences, a promising new
shopper marketing agency that will draw from many of the innovations
developed by the lab.

More

This is a great example of how branded content, well executed, can grow bigger than a marketing campaign and generate real revenue back to the brand and agency.  Great work iris!

Channel 4 to air Sony Ericsson mobile programme

By Sara Kimberley, campaignlive.co.uk, 29 July 2010, 11:51AM

Sony Ericsson’s mobile music and entertainment programme, ‘Pocket TV’, is to air for the first time on Channel 4.

Pocket TV: Sony Ericsson mobile programme to air on Channel 4

Channel 4 has acquired the rights to the show, which has been a hit online and on mobile platforms, attracting 8.4 million views across YouTube, PS3/VidZone and MSN during series two.

The show, developed by Iris as branded content for Sony Ericsson, was originally created for the mobile platform and hosted a number of four- to six-minute interviews and live music tracks from artists including Ellie Goulding, Chipmunk and Sean Kingston.

A TV version will now be aired on Channel 4’s T4 and 4Music slots from 4 August.

The programme will include 11-minute shows featuring three videos each. The programme’s dedicated YouTube channel will run until the end of December.

Shaun McIlrath, executive creative director of Iris, said: “This is a great example of a marketing asset generating a value of its own because of the audience it has created. ‘Pocket TV’ has become quite a phenomenon”.

This article was first published on campaignlive.co.uk

I’ve been a big fan of the TED conferences for a bit — we host “MiniTEDs” with the digital team in London (credit to Tori Winn) and we bought the stream to the first Oxford TED conference and dedicated the Fishbowl conference room to it and invited the whole agency for the week last year (further credit to Tori Winn).

It is an amazing conference and even more laudable since they make all of the content available online.

Here is a nice intro to the power of the event from Contagious‘ co-founder Paul Kemp-Robertson that sums it up nicely.  Full Article

‘We spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to impress people we don’t care about.’

It’s not always easy being an Adland native in the crowd at a TED
conference. If you haven’t saved the world or don’t own enough liquid
capital to die trying, then the whoops that greeted this jibe from
economist Tim Jackson can make you feel like a dumb jock who’s accidentally
stumbled into the Chess Club Christmas party.

But maybe that’s just my insecurity and the nagging suspicion that my soul
has been stress-fractured thanks to 20 years of commentating on the
mechanics of mass consumption. When the biggest task you’ve recently
completed is a speech on ‘advertising as a conversation’ and you’re
suddenly surrounded by AIDS activists, women’s rights campaigners, MIT
brainboxes and people who’ve spent their retirement fund building an
eco-school in the middle of a jungle, it’s hard not to feel just a teeny
bit marginalised and shallow. But then, I guess, such abrupt
introspection is actually part of the value of TED. The compressed
intellectual energy of the 18-minute speeches certainly dragged this
editor out of his corporate cocoon and berated and beguiled him in equal
measure.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my job and I’m proud to
have played a role in building the Contagious brand during a period of
intense change and fragmentation. But commenting on the ad business as
it confronts the challenges of a new century feels like reading road
signs in the fast lane. What TED is good at is dragging you away from
the rut of routine and forcing you to confront concepts and issues that
hover on your peripheral vision. AA Milne put it much better than I ever
could (and props to Arup’s Chris Luebkeman
for reminding me of this quote): ‘Here is Edward Bear, coming
downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind
Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming
downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if
only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.’

To paraphrase another speaker – rational optimist Matt Ridley
- TEDGlobal is where ideas have sex. (It’s also the kind of event that
introduces people with job titles like ‘rational optimist’ or
‘retronaut’ without a snigger.)

Looking for something to make you next big event or product launch memorable?  Don’t hire jugglers or Elvis impersonators, hire this guy.
Amazing use of robotics as body enhancement prosthetics or near reality demonstrations.  Or leave the works exposed and get amazement for the Di Vinci-like coolness of the machinery.
Great for a big event — or if you’re making an ad or a movie of course.

http://www.johnnolanfilms.com/animatronics/showreel-flash.php

The fact that online media is served by ad servers makes all of the difference.

With computers placing ads not only can they can be highly targeted, creative run sequentially, and a host of other tricks, but also the business behind the planning and buying changes.  Upfronts are replaced by auctions.  Mind numbing spreadsheet-based media plans are replaced by a set of rules and budget allocations.  Today this business side is only really seen with search marketing and performance-based network buys.

But what would happen if all media were served?

Why It Could Happen Today

There are plenty of reasons to see this can and will likely happen.

• Tablets, slates and e-readers – CES has been overrun.  Slate mania has hit USA Today.  The HP Slate, the Dell Tablet — these have been expected.  But what of the Chinese offer? Lenovo’s Ideapad is real innovation. These are the big ones.  People spend so much time on their laptops they have to look for new devices — the phone is one, the ereader is another.  The reality is getting your media through digital devices offers fundamental improvements to consumers.  Like the mobile phone improves on fixed line phones, take up will happen.
• Internet-enabled TVs – It is true that TV manufacturers have been trying to get us to plug ethernet cables into our TVs for years, but it is only in the last two years that YouTube and Hulu have taken off.  Even if the Aussies don’t agree, there is significant attention going into Connected TVs.  And again it simply makes sense.  This 32, 42, 62 inch screen can do so much more and once the technology is made easy — just like the ipod showed with MP3 players — people will embrace it and start talking to our TVs like Microsoft has imagined in their Project Natal vision piece for the XBox.
• Digital outdoor continues to advance – I’ve always been a fan of digital outdoor as you can see, and while it is unlikely every billboard will turn into an interactive video display — we’d all be better off if they were replaced with kiosks that are a bit more useful like you see in airports.
• Ad neworks and ad exchanges – As more media money shifts online, more attention is being placed on the computers that serve the media.  Ad networks and exchanges get more confusing the foreign exchange trading systems (check out Ian Thomas’  explanation if you are new to them.)   Whether it is social media networks like 33Across (started by Eric Wheeler) or Media6º (where Kathy Leake has been); or performance networks like DrivePM (acquired by Microsoft) and Advertising.com (AOL); or in game media with Massive and IGA; and video networks like VideoEgg (where Troy Young is) and BrightRoll.  The reality is that negotiating specific buys with individual publishers doesn’t make sense when your request is more specific then their audience demographic. If you want Men, 25-38, interested in cars, that have recently visited a travel site and have seen your hotel promotion in the last 30 days — you can’t buy that with a traditional buy.

What Would It Mean Tomorrow?

If all media were served, it would be significant.  Take the extreme, imagine the possibilities:

• Measurement Junkies – One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned from from digital media is that as soon as there are direct marketing style metrics, people want to see them.  It would be interesting to see if the numeration of marketing were to extend to brand advertising, but it easily could as people ask not how many impressions an audience could see but how many were seen.
• Ad Networkification – When all media is served, we quickly realize there are better ways to aggregate audiences then simply by relying on the content our ads surround.  Age, location, daypart.  All of this then pushes the media providers to create networks across properties to build big enough audiences.
• Media for Reputation – Pretty quickly we’ll see media buys used for much more narrow uses such as the PR industry.  Buying editorial-style print ads is a traditional approach, but if we can buy and place media overnight, it becomes an even more powerful technique for impacting reputation with a specific audience.

It is amazing how the “agency of the future” articles continue to appear.  Mainstream ad agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi are doing spoofs of the last agency on earth, editorials appear in Campaign and Ad Age, and Forrester talks of the Great Race to the middle or connected agency.

What can we say for sure?

• Even in defined industries like DM agencies, agencies have never been the same.  The use of data, reliance on creative intuition, ability to really test & learn were all done to differing degrees.  The new integrated agencies and the new digital agencies need to recognize the variations and sell on them.
• Agency technology will be more and more important.  How long can clients be expected to receive creative via e-mail just before a review (“sorry it is a 5 meg file, might take a minute”)?  How much more media fragmentation before it can’t be planned by a human?  How long before everyone expects their agency to have results the next day, any time of day and in real time?
• Making great campaigns will continue to get harder. The idea that a planner can write a brief and a couple creatives can go off and come back with a big idea is rapidly appearing incredibly naive.  Where’s the technologist?  Where is the strategist with social insights from that afternoons search volumes and forum comments?  Where is the account guy who acts more like an industry consultant than a relationship manager? A media person that knows market prices and volumes to get the message out?

Will clients need agencies?  Yes.  But not for the old reason that they can’t hire and manage creative people but for the new reason that they can’t hire and co-ordinate creatives, technologists and strategists.  Much less build and maintain the tools they need to do their job correctly.

Meet the agency of the future

By Jodi Harris

March 04, 2010

Article Highlights:

• The current agency structure hasn’t evolved at pace with media
  innovations
• The interactive agency model disincentivizes greatness and
  fails to penalize mediocrity
• Think about how your property can serve as a conduit for deeper
  interactions between brands and consumers
• If marketers want to radically impact change in the marketing
  ecosystem, it starts with how you allocate dollars

Sure, agencies can look at all the
technology changes, media shifts, industry turmoil, and business
challenges they are up against and feel nothing but stress and pressure
to meet the needs of the dynamic audience. But that’s not how Bryan
Weiner, CEO of 360i, chooses to view the opportunities presented to
agencies during what he refers to as the golden age of the agency.

“It’s time to leave the pessimism behind. This represents an
unprecedented opportunity for agencies to become indispensable marketing
partners,” said Weiner in his Agency of the Future address at last
week’s IAB Ecosystem conference in Carlsbad, Calif.

Full Article

Just came across a great posting on Cap Gemini’s Technology blog by Gaurav Sharma.  Yes, Twitter is catching in India and yes this post looks exactly like how it caught in the UK and the US.  Ironically, mainstream celebrity driving mainstream media to build digital properties.  It is right out of the Integration Triangle.

Love the writing and love globalization.  Ye twitter kya cheej hai!

Ye twitter kya cheej hai! What thing is this twitter !

During a recent backpacking trip in Indian hinterland, one of the
evenings as I watched TV placed in corner of tea shop in a small town,
news of an acrimonious war of words between a famous Indian movie star
and a political party was playing on. News channel was reporting what
the star had to say on controversy, not through interview given to news
agency or channel but through tweets on his twitter account. As the
saga was unfolding on twitter the new channel was merely picking it up
and broadcasting. Someone seated nearby exclaimed “Ye twitter kya cheej
hai (what thing is this twitter)” . And this could have summarized
what many people in India have wondered for past few months. Twitter
has been in constant news. If it is not a political leader who is fast
building a reputation of getting into trouble in parliament because of
his tweets ,then it is news about what some Hindi movie star has posted
on his/her twitter account. In a way it is ironical that mainstream
media that had labeled twitter as flippant when it was gaining traction
with geeky crowd and early adopters, is now doing more for twitter’s
promotion.

More

The UK story:
The Telegraph’s article:Stephen Fry posts Twitter updates while trapped in lift
Analysis in a business article in The Independent and new media industry magazines like eConsultancy.

There have been a few articles lately about Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty and it appears the campaign is losing steam and that is showing in the sales and share numbers.  I find it surprising a campaign that is so based in an idea that is so much bigger than the product isn’t still resounding with consumers.
What are the longest running ad campaigns today?  Smokey Bear’s Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires (since 1944)? Absolut’s bottles (since 1980)?  Neither of these are fundamental to the product.
I’ve always thought this campaign would last longer.  Makes me wonder what types of campaigns do last longest.

In Its Campaign for Real Beauty, Dove Tells Women That They Are Beautiful as They Are. But the Push Is Showing Signs of Aging

By Jack Neff

Published: September 24, 2007

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — As Dove’s widely lauded Campaign for Real Beauty enters its fourth year, the results aren’t looking so pretty anymore. After two years of double-digit sales growth and share gains, Dove’s sales have abruptly slowed. That raises the question of whether the campaign, hailed as one of the most courageous creative breakthroughs in recent years, went a step too far in embracing aging in all its naked, wrinkled and sagging glory. …

http://adage.com/article?article_id=120640