whizdumb

Retail stunt circa 1918

Is this the great, great grandmother of those fancy cars parked in the hotel roundabout?  The glamorous people in line at that club? 

Not that I'm at all fond of marketing subterfuge, but this does help make the case that there are no new ideas.

Goodbye 2007, Goodbye Planner 1.0

Time for the New Year post.  A tidy wrap-up of eight significant things for 2008.  I thought I'd avoid adding to the slew of top-10 ads of the year and the like.  Instead I'd like to focus on planning and where I see things going.

I've been a planner now for nearly a decade but this last year has seemed so different from previous years. I feel the role of the traditional agency planner is irreversibly altered.  Why?

1. Millennial talent
Like a lot of other fields, the influx of new talent is coming from Millennials - the twentysomethings who have been steeped in technology their whole lives.  And as planners, they are bringing the same sentiment to work everyday.  Their comfort with design and technology means they don't have to unlearn many bad habits; they haven't become jaded or beaten by spending years cranking out :30's.  They are people like Daniel, Courtney and Erin, among the new breed of planning voices.  They are curious, broadly talented, less inhibited, and they blog about it all. (Incidentally, I've never met Daniel, Courtney or Erin.  But isn't that just a greater testament to the changes afoot?)

If you'd like to read more check out Daniel's compilation of Advertising's Young Minds: The top 27 blogs of people under 27. 

2. Open-source exchange
This was truly the year of the planning blogs.  As I write this there are 138 planning blogs listed on Plannersphere and the list seems to be growing by the week.  Planners are melding open-source thinking with technology and it's making us all smarter.  And the open planner mentality is growing slowly but steadily.  I think the planner's approach to the web will move from simple sharing of ideas (blogging) to greater collaboration on problems and idea-strengthening (forums like plannersphere and Planning for Good). We're realizing that sharing wisdom and ideas - everything short of proprietary client knowledge - can only strengthen our discipline and ourselves.

3. Doing stuff
As a group we're damn good at chewing over things.  We provide context, analyze, research, ask big questions and so on.  But this year we took strides to connect differently.  Coffee Mornings grew around the world thanks to nudges by a slew of planners and likemind, which currently has over 40 coffee events attended by 2,000 people a month around the world (Anomaly pays for the coffee). 

And the guys over at Planning For Good started something truly wonderful by putting some structure around a simple idea: As long as planners are getting together over coffee and online, why not solve some problems at the same time?  The result has been fantastic with three high profile PFG assignments in the last 5 months and a year-end event with GOOD magazine.

4. Underwear-changing dialogue
While I only attended the Account Planning Conference last year, reading about the Polygamous Marriage and experiencing the dialogue at APG, it seems that the yearly gathering of planners has moved from navel-gazing to pants-wetting (as a result of both gleeful change and fear of being irrelevant). 

There is a sobering realization that the traditional planning-in-agency model is broken and new insight & strategy models are developing.

5. Outsourcing execution
A surgical separation of the ideators and the executors.  Lowe, Leo Burnett, Saatchi, McCann, Ogilvy and Grey are starting to do it by experimenting with places like The Department of Doing. 

Scott Goodson at Strawberry Frog has made a strong case for its importance, arguing that agencies can't define their true value until they decide what business they're in: the idea business or the execution business.   

The shift in outsourcing execution has implications for planning. Because when creatives don't have to spend 80% of their jobs executing ideas they can spend more time with planners exploring new ones.

6. New agency models
Emerging and established nontraditional shops like Naked, Anomaly, Zeus Jones, Space 150, Strawberry Frog, ITO Partnership, Poke, and Mother are redrawing the role of strategy and it's often at the center or blurred with creative as a source of value (we're starting to walk a similar path at Integer).

Perhaps even more dramatic is the fact that most of these shops simply expect creative thinking from planners and strategic thinking from creatives.  Therein lies their strength: They have internalized a way of working good thinking into their cultures instead of seeing it as an issue to be solved organizationally.

And the boundaries of planning and the agency continue to be explored as Leland and the folks at Collins are set to play with yet a new approach.

7. Changing role of research
Market research - long the tool of the planner - is entering a midlife crisis. Today's environment demands anticipation over measurement.  Nimbleness over norms.  It's not that planners don't get it; we do.  It's just become more important than ever for us to make the case that rigorous learning is different from the dreaded T-word: testing. 

Because in a climate that requires innovation it's no longer sufficient to talk to consumers to find answers.  The role of research is becoming more about knowing your consumers but not letting them lead you.  One emergent example that recognizes this is peep, an Anomaly backed research boutique.
 

8. The flatlining 'line'
The traditional agency caste system, separating those above and those below, is a dying concept.  DraftFCB is the most obvious example of a macro merger experiment, and R/GA's establishment of a retail offering to "bring dynamic interactive shopping to the retail environment" has certainly broken a few molds.  And the passion to erase the line is felt abroad too.

For the planner this obviously pushes things into interesting territories.  Do you focus your strengths to be a 'retail planner', an 'interactive strategist' or simply a strategic generalist?  Who knows for sure.  But what is certain is that the Planner 1.0 will be a dying breed. Because the landscape is all at once fracturing and coalescing into a lovely strategic swamp, and we all must learn to swim.  Or at least to float.

I couldn't be more excited about it all.

Planning For Good entry: UNICEF

We used our Coffee Morning last Friday to chew over the Planning For Good assignment.  It was based on an interesting brief for UNICEF's holiday period giving drive. 

Many thanks to Ameet, Elizabeth, Eric, Sarah, Erin, Ralph, David and Tom for their energy and ideas. Sarah even wrote a follow-up about the coffee.

I've done my best, in a very short time, to bring it all together in our idea submission.  Already when I read it I see some things I'd do differently but such is the nature of short timelines. 

You can download our submission here.  What do you think?

Can't wait to see what other groups have submitted.

The emergence of 'shopper culture'

One of my favorite marketing metaphors ever is from Advertising Age, which termed the retail promotion / below the line space as "the fanny-pack of marketing: not pretty, and sort of embarrassing, but really functional."

Well the fanny-pack may be undergoing a bit of a makeover.  At least that's what you're left to conclude from a few developments of late:

- RGA is "aiming to bring dynamic interactive shopping to the retail environment," opening a retail unit to bring their interactive brains to bear on the signage world

- Quotes like this are popping up around retail circles:

"Increasingly success at retail is less about what the retailer has to sell and more about how they sell it.  This is the new experiential paradigm shift in shopping.  This shift toward the shopping experience marks the biggest change to occur in the retailing landscape over the past century."

     - Pam Danziger

- Retail, media and CPG heavyweights are aiming to monetize the shopping environment and are seeing it as the next marketing frontier.  The new PRISM initiative is all about the 'In-Store GRP'.  They will ultimately put in-store in the media plan.  But it raises the question, what is the 'art' that will complement the reach/frequency 'science'?

- And lastly, Integer, where I work, has created a blog called Shopper Culture around all things shopper culture.  It's meant to create a dialogue around all these things.   

Join us.  And bring your fanny-pack.

Best call to action ever

I know Philips Bodygroom's shaveeverywhere.com has been around for awhile but I just heard a nugget I hadn't heard before.  When you go to 'the basics' then leave your computer idle for a minute the guy prods you by saying "The longer you wait, the longer your pubes get."

I'm a skeptic about calls to action in general.  I think they are a blunt instrument, overused and interruptive.  But this is a great exception to the rule.

Relevance?  Check. This is a body shaving product. 

Attention getting?  Uh, check!
Ownable?  Check.  Where does a competitor go from here?

Kudos to Philips for manning up on this one.

Live Earth off and running

Live Earth just kicked off earlier today.  I'm really hopeful for this effort.

I've been poking around some of the content lately and found these fantastic videos that each offer bite sized arguments for becoming climate savvy.  My favorite has to be the 15-minute Reunion of Spinal Tap.  Derek Smalls and the band getting back together for climate change?  Now that is rich in comedic potential right there.

There is a lot of buzz about Live Earth and plenty of talented people involved raising awareness for it.  Among them are the guys at North who are behind the messaging strategy and are driving interest in the thing without spending a dollar on media.

The Alliance For Climate Protection, the home base for Al Gore and Live Earth, has loads of content and things to explore on their site.  Included there is their first official ad, called Black Balloons.  I really like this spot because of how it brings 'bad air' to life in a personal way.  While you're there join the pledge and help make a difference. 

Before we all fry.

(If that does happen let's at least go out in style). 

International showcase

I just stumbled on the showcase for the International Advertising Awards.  There are loads of categories and a lot of new creative content there.  Categories range from Best Typography to Promotion for Peace and Human Rights.  Some gems like a radio spot for the Guinness Book of World Records that set a record itself for the shortest radio commercial, and this Swiffer spot from Germany (part of the Low Budget category of great spots produced for under $35k) which takes a central product attribute and has some fun with it. 

Ditto with this Renault ad.

Guerilla scare

The folks over at Adult Swim promoted their show by pasting a bunch of these LED-lit versions of the character Err around Boston and nine other cities (the show's website describes Err as one who "may come across as angry and rebellious to some.  But everything he says and does is right.")

A couple artists got arrested for installing them.  They said they worked for the NY based guerilla agency Interference. I found this interview with Sam Ewen, Interference CEO, from 2001.  He talks about other stunts that have gone wrong.

There's a YouTube video of the installation.

And apparently Duracell batteries truly are Trusted Everywhere.

I can only hope that one day a piece of marketing that I've worked on ends up being labeled as a 'suspicious device' and gets blown up by a bomb squad. 

Dust off your fanny pack

Meg Kinney has written a much needed piece about the Art of Shopping.  Her premise is that "If everything around Shopper Marketing is evolving, then so, too, must our approach to its creative."

I hope this is a catalyst for some great discussion in "the fanny pack of the marketing world" (as AdAge once termed the below-the-line space). It's about time this space got some more attention publicly from plannerly folks, as it is really a new frontier for planning.  I work in the space everyday.  We talk a lot about shoppers, not just consumers.  Of course they're the same people; but a lot of marketers don't tend to think of them that way.  As more opportunities open up for planners, I think in the coming months and couple years there will be a lot more heard from this space creatively.

Especially rich in potential is the opportunity not just to be noticed, but to be interesting in a shopping environment.  At the moment the retailers - not the brands - are the source of interest to people as they shop.  They're creating experiences and spaces that amount to something.  In some ways the brands are just part of the bigger picture.  When you acknowledge that the retail environment is now simply another medium - albeit one where people are in a certain mode (shopping) - then it sits on the same playing field as other means of contact.  It should be just as interesting.  Russell posted a video by Jeffre Jackson that explores interestingness quite well.

Logo tinkering

This is a nice new campaign from Perrier via Ogilvy in New York. This new trend around using the brand logo space is a great way to cut through in a cluttered environment. Hell it's one stop shopping - look in one place for messaging and brand logo. The campaign is being brough to life by on-premise themed events that have things like sword swallowers under the Riskier theme, beach themes under Sunnier, etc. So far I believe this is only being used on the logo in ads, not on actual product in store.

Primary packaging is the next place to go, and it takes real courage for brand management. Heinz's "Say Something Ketchuppy" promotion from a few years back did a great job of that by replacing the venerable TOMATO KETCHUP in the logo with sayings such as WILL WORK FOR FOOD and HIDES GRILL MARKS. The campaign is now on a customized label thing but that's another story.

Few brands have taken the on-product step. Snickers is one, though the SATISFIES message that replaces the brand name is on the reverse of the primary packaging. Its campaign includes a lot of outdoor with copy that replaces the logo altogether. Here is one of their recent bus wraps that says HUNGERECTOMY. Talk about unintended (?) innuendo. HUNG-ERECT-O-MY.