The fundamentals of human nature take thousands of years to evolve, not decades and certainly not a matter of months. So don’t listen to anyone who tells you the explosion of digital technology is changing basic human nature. It’s not.
But what technology DOES achieve is shifts in the patterns of culture – that fuzzy collection of shared habits, belief systems, ways of behaving and accepted norms we all exist in and are affected by.
How this is happening can be classified like this:
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“I’ll never draw as well as a photograph” I think then that Stan Rizzo would have been a firm fan of Hyperrealism.
The new season of Madmen is back and all is right with the world. Don’s busy being upstaged by his ‘Zou Bisou Bisou’ teeny bopping French Canadian Beauty, Betty is battling the bulge with boredom induced comfort eating and Joan Holloway is busy forging a path as an independent single Mum after thankfully ditching the sinister shadow of Greg.
But this post is drawn from a secondary characters comments which struck me as infinitely sad and unfortunately still true today. In a recent episode one of the artworkers Stan Rizzo makes an observation about never being able to draw as well as photograph.
It’s a statement made to evoke sympathy in a period of time where tastes started to change more towards the realism of film and photography in advertising over the more traditional illustration techniques used by the creative agency artisan.
The happy art of hyperrealism
How happy Stan Rizzo would be then to live in a world where ‘hyperrealism’ in art means that for a fine artist with the requisite skillset they have technology at their fingertips capable of producing a painting which can quite literally be mistaken for a photograph.
Photography has long lost its stigma of being the poor relation to the painted medium. Esteemed collector Sam Wagstaff and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe did much to purport the notion of photography as fine art and indeed a skilled photographer who wields magic with a manual flash deserves just as much respect as any undiscovered potential Picasso.
Why then can’t art be considered just as good as a photograph or a real representation of a product in advertising?
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Who can take a mobile, sprinkle it with dew, cover it with chocolate and some digital or two…? Well for some marketeers this can be a struggle.
I was recently at a client-side conference where Mobile was repeatedly referred to as a channel, a very important channel that needs attention (I’m not arguing with that!), but a separate channel nonetheless. The speaker went one step further and determined that mobile is ‘a spoke in the marketing wheel’, along with search marketing, display advertising, social media et al.
Surely, if that’s the analogy they’re looking at, then mobile is a wheel within the digital wheel? With the channels – search, display, social – being the spokes through both the digital and mobile wheels that make up this marketing unicycle?
Now at the risk of getting lost in a semantic minefield, if clients do see mobile as a separate channel, then they are forcing themselves to make a ‘choice’ – both budgetary and strategic – and then the marketeer will be spending their pocket money on mobile (because it’s the ‘future’!) and hoping that their Mum will pick up some search, social and display as an extra special treat!
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Take a look at this great new video we have produced with Castrol and the BMW Motorsport Team. As an ‘ultimate test of team strength’ it shows why teamwork is everything in motor racing.
We were given exclusive access to the BMW team as they honed their pit lane skills for the DTM series.
With slow motion footage and driver commentary we show you the split-second decisions that can make or break a pit stop… and ultimately the entire race.
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This Enchilada recipe has been requested by an old 2020 Agency colleague who contacted us as they missed eating it! It combines the chilli con carne recipe with a fresh tomato salsa recipe as a sauce. Once cooked you basically wrap both in a flour tortilla cover with cheddar cheese and bake in the oven till the…
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All too often in these self-depreciating times we are afraid to say we are good at something or challenge an accepted belief that blowing your own trumpet is the sign of a presumptuous peacock type with no real substance.
But isn’t false modesty also a form of false advertising? If we think we are good at something shouldn’t we in fact shout it from the nearest roof top?
Yesterday I came across a book about Chiat/Day: The First Twenty years. The work that presented itself inside by this agency from the early seventies through to the late eighties felt amazingly refreshing and honest.
One thing that really shone out in the book was their own press adverts where they actively touted for new accounts. Their own unashamed self-promotion unmistakably sets out the opinion that as far as they are concerned they were the best in the business.
The adverts are just black and white with one image representing the type of client they are looking for. It showcases their experience and promotes their abilities almost to the point of arrogance. But do you know what – it really works.
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Well we positively racked our brains here yesterday trying to remember which car manufacturer had done the skydiving CGI style advert that had stuck in our heads. Thankfully one of our Creative Heads the lovely Dee Atkin has put us out of our misery and told us it is the Nissan Juke.
I’ve just found the video as below and it confirms what I wrote about HONDA being a pioneer yesterday – the advent of the thrill seeker is very much the order of the day when it comes to marketing your car it would seem.
The great thing about Nissan’s advert is it leaves you with so many questions afterwards.
◦Did they really build the car mid air when sky diving?
◦Is it a mix of real footage and CGI?
◦Could you really spray a car on the move and get a good finish?
◦Is the car semi aquatic because it ends up underwater?
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Car campaigns just jeep getting our attention at the moment (sorry I found that funny) so along with MINI reading our minds and Volkswagen leaving us weak at the knees we have been trying to rack our brains to find a recent advert that’s stuck in our heads where one brand has done a CGI style sky dive whilst building the car mid-air and ending up underwater.
Well we couldn’t find that video but it sparked the memory of the original car manufacturer that introduced a skydiving video in one of the most impressive displays of Keeping Brands Human ever and that was HONDA.
It seems hard to believe that the original ‘Difficult Is Worth Doing’ live video by Honda was almost four years ago now.
As it states on You Tube the video as shown below contains a team of elite skydivers who jump simultaneously from two aeroplanes and form the letters H, O, N, D and A in sequence, within a three minute time limit to advertise the Honda Accord. It was all done live on Channel 4 and was in fact the first live advert in the UK.
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Dee recently laid to rest the myth that women hate beautiful women, which reminded me of another myth within the worlds of beauty and female culture – and lets face it, the beauty industry is tied up with how women collectively feel about themselves, like it or not. Another time I’ll share some thoughts on why how they look isn’t the issue, it’s what they are allowed to say and do that’s the issue, but let’s leave that for another day.
This other recieved wisdom is that the worlds of fashion and beauty are run by cunning, evil ogres hell bent on seducing women into neverending hamster wheels, where they are always made to feel out of date, where there’s always another trick to made them believe they can be more beautiful, dragging them onto a neverending quest for physical and sartorial perfection. It’s simply not like that.
To be precise, the owners of the fashion houses and beauty brands MIGHT think like this, but they would be horribly misguided if they do.
You cannot follow this line of argument without agreeing that women are a bit daft. Mindless drones subsceptible to every whim and commandment from the Fashion Police and Beauty’s Big Brother. That’s not the women I know and not the hundreds I met researching hair care and make-up stuff.
The need to dress up and paint your face has been endemic to societies from the times we were doing human sacrifices and racing chariots. The need to show your place in the pecking order, to demonstrate you identity (and construct it for that matter) and what group you’re in are basic human needs. What you wear and how you look are all part of that. Women know they won’t transform their lives with a dress or shampoo, but it’s a little bit of fantasy and release. It’s not serious, it’s fun, it’s a game, it’s being allowed to dream, it’s an escape from the humdrum of everyday life.
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Last week I went to hear Mark Schaefer talk in London at a Return on Influence event, hosted by Bloom and Brandwatch. Mark’s talk focused on how to find influencers and use them to move content quickly, citing some great case studies from Audi and ‘crisis management talks’ within an International PR company. One of the biggest issues in identifying influencers is of course the mass of content that exists on the Internet. We all know that Twitter has over 500 million users, Facebook has topped 900 million users and bloggers create no less than 2 billion posts per day… how do you cut through all that noise?
Early on in Mark’s talk, all eyes turned to Klout & Klout scores – a somewhat contentious subject in the marketing world. Personally, before I heard Mark talk I sat in the ‘what the heck does Klout know’ camp, seeing it as a potentially useful benchmarking tool with no other tangible value. Following Mark’s talk, it’s safe to say that my eyes have been opened up to the potential that Klout has to offer – but at the same time I still believe that a common sense and cautious approach should be taken when using Klout to identify influencers.
What does a ‘Klout score’ mean?
Klout calls their scoring system ‘The Standard for Influence’ and uses an algorithm to assess how influential you are on a scale of 1-100, based on reach, amplification and network impact. That’s about as far as my Klout score knowledge goes, but I can also add that the average score is 19, so if you’re above 50, you’re doing pretty good. By using Klout scores you can identify powerful people to move content for you and engage with them in a creative way. This sounds easy, but in reality it’s not. Some may see through your cunning plans, whilst others will publicly slate you for luring them in with cheap bribes… you need to identify influencers and plan your approach carefully.
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