One of the most prestigious award shows in the world also seems to be one that's not discussed enough in the US. D&AD has impeccable taste and the latest show was just held.
Sometimes D&AD awards Black Pencils. It's the highest honor and some years no one wins any. But this year three brands did. Among the top three winners (Black Pencils plus more) are two efforts you know very well: Tide's Super Bowl ad and State Street Advisors' Fearless Girl. But also at the top, winning 8 pencils (!) was the Palau Pledge. You may not have heard of this one...
The Palau Pledge is an in-flight movie pointed at visitors coming to the island of Palau. It's a wonderfully told story that ends with requiring each visitor to the island to sign a pledge that they won't hurt Palau while they're visiting. Host/Havas in Australia is the agency.
It's a sweet tale and a great creative idea to begin the week. Hope you enjoy.
- Steve posted this ad in #greatcreative from Facebook showing just how bad it’s become down there. For a company to do this type of ad themselves, about themselves, says a lot about the seriousness of the subject matter.
- Who says the box office is slowing? Avengers: Infinity War broke all global records last week.
- A point-of-view stated as a fact about how to do something creative is a powerful thing. Look no further than the amazing Coco Chanel for a great example of this: “Luxury must be comfortable, otherwise it is not luxury.”
- This is a great piece to bookmark about choosing talent and team members from learnings surrounding the NFL draft. Key point: create complete individualized judgement throughout all interviews and evaluations.
- Chiat\Day, the first US Agency to staff accounting planning in the 80s, knows how to dig out an insight as seen in their latest piece for long-time client, Gatorade.
- Our huge loss of US manufacturing jobs... It’s automation right? That might be wrong. For the last 30 years economists might not have looked at the data details in the most accurate way. I think this is an important story and applaud Quartz for pursuing it how they did.
- According to RAND Corp. the biggest obstacle facing government today is speed. RAND's answer to work with speed is to take control of the tempo. That’s a brilliant philosophy toward managing speed and you can read about it here.
Saw a BMW with three stripes on the grill the other day. Wondered what it was. Turns out the first red stripe on the right is for Texaco, the American oil brand, who, I guess, partnered with BMW during the early days of M racing. The light blue stripe on the left is for BMW and the Bavarian region. The purple in the middle represents the partnership of those two things and allows for a nice transition between the two colors. Always cool when nice looking design has meaning.
Did you see the new Apple ad, "Earth"? It's voiced by Carl Sagan with an excerpt from Pale Blue Dot and made of images from iPhones. The move was reportedly in part to the US pulling out of the Paris agreement. What's great about the spot is the subtlety. They also took their time and rolled it out during the NBA finals (which are reporting good ratings.)
There are probably tons of viewers who didn't attach Apple's message to the Paris decision... You don't have to, but if you do, it really connects. Which is what Rich Silverstein of Goodby once said about great advertising--it leaves a few gaps that the audience fills in, which makes them feel a closer connection to the work. This can go too far, of course. But treated with the right dosage for selling stuff it's a wonderful way to think.
There's this thing with print. When it's good it just grabs your attention. Nothing to click, watch, listen to, search for, or forward to anyone. Just you, internally processing your thoughts about a brand in silence. Until you decide to turn the page.
Like every other form of art, country music has expanded over the last two decades---becoming younger, flashier, pop-ish.
Which isn't bad. Most everything adjusts with the constantly evolving world that feeds it.
This latest expansion of country music was unmissable at the ACM Awards. The flash, the glitz and more were on full display.
Then Miranda Lambert played "Tin Man". And there it was. A shove back at the new. A reminder that country music, at its truest form, still digs deep. Still brings forward hardcore truths.
It's a beautiful song... How someone can take something so personal, bounce it off of The Wizard of Oz, and then produce something so good, is an incredible act of creativity and art.
Artists dig deep for all of us. They carry the weight of that around. They push us forward. And sometimes, they pull us back, as if to say, "remember what this is really supposed to be about."
An email train about vintage DDB was happening and I had to add the Porsche work by Helmut Krone. The files online were a little hard to work with so here are some. In the 70s and early 80s you can imagine how inventive these were for car ads. Perhaps still to this day--although how people would take them in would certainly be different. Think of how beautiful the elements of these would be online...
I moderated a panel at MarketMix about how marketers can be bold. I was up there with three people I greatly admire: Peter, Ryan, and Michael. Theirboldworkspeaksforitself. The session ended up being standing room only--it was quite fun.
The idea for the panel started here: As an agency, you present a very bold idea, it gets approved, and then you leave. But the marketer is left with an entire organization of people who don't work in marketing or advertising so they have to champion the work internally and get it approved and supported. Imagine how difficult that is when your idea is extremely bold?
One of the great bits that came out of our discussion was how to recognize a bold idea. The group's answer: when it makes you uncomfortable. Their opinion was that, when the work is presented, if you don't feel uncomfortable it means you've probably seen something similar before... even if you're not sure where.
Which doesn't mean it's not good! It just means you're probably not in "bold" territory. And that's fine, of course. But if you're looking to be bold, to stand apart, to turn convention around, to surprise your competitors, to earn an unfair share of consumer attention, then you should anticipate being uncomfortable on your way there.
"Always go a little further into the water than you feel you're capable of being... go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting."
But my favorite part was about why it's important to be bold... you do it on behalf of the customer.
The core reason for bold ideas isn't to make your organization "be different." It isn't to strongly position you against your competition and it isn't to grab headlines. The reason it's important to be bold is to make something notably better for the customer. As Bernbach said, a brand value isn't really a value until it costs you something.
T-Mobile, Xbox and Amazon are all bold because they put the needs of the customer at the top of their thinking. And when they do that, their ideas become bold--and the advertising has to level-up.
When you first start to write you get all the kick and the reader gets none, but after you learn to work it’s your objective to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read but something that happened to himself. That’s the true test of writing. When you can do that, the reader gets the kick and you don’t get any.
Tracy Wong offered one of my favorite descriptions of advertising: "commerce, artfully told." So it's not surprising that the process of being bold--understanding what it takes, and what it means--is similar to what the world's best artists, writers and musicians experience, too.