The Stop/Start 10 Commandments
via youtube.com
Five things we should stop doing and five things we should start doing.
My name is Conrad Lisco, and this is my blog, where I post odds and ends, things and thoughts.
I work at R/GA in the Mobile & Emerging Platforms group. I'm most interested in the intersection of technology and culture. Addicted to location-based services. Live in Chinatown and love sneakers and street art.
Opinions are my own.
Five things we should stop doing and five things we should start doing.
According to eMarketer, Facebook “will surpass its former rival, MySpace, in ad revenues in 2010, when marketers worldwide will spend $605 million on Facebook versus $385 million on MySpace”.
AdLocal targets mobile ads based on users’ location. Currently, most mobile advertising is contextually targeted but not geotargeted beyond city level. This has huge implications for advertisers looking to deliver relevant ads.
The mobile ad platform is self-service and has an interface similar to Google AdWords’ dashboard.
According to TechCrunch, there are already a few companies poised for the location-based advertising game - Acuity Mobile (recently acquired by geo giant NAVTEQ), AppLoop for the iPhone (deadpooled earlier this year), Placecast (which raised $5 million last month for its opt-in solution), AdInfuse (with adInMotion) and Yowza (which is a popular geo-aware iPhone app for coupons).
This is one of the worst ads on Pandora ever. I completely get the “AVATAR” radio station and think that would be killer. The soundtrack for the movie is epic. But what puts this squarely in the #fail category is McDonald’s need to add Big Mac to the mix – or at least the way they did it. They turned what could have been a generous act – curating an AVATAR radio station for interested listeners – into gratuitous and irrelevant Big Mac ad. This is the kind of stuff that turns me off [of advertising]. Micky D’s could have just included a logo and some aspirational copy. Or maybe James Cameron’s indigenous people, the Navi, are Big Mac fans, and I’m just overreacting...
Then I went to McDonald's homepage, and here's what I found.
This commercial, created for the Your Amazon Ad Contest, shows us yet again that creativity can and does come from anywhere. As user generated production quality goes up and costs come down, we’ll likely start seeing more of this kind of work. It really comes down to quality thinking and production for a fraction of the cost - I think this Amazon contest winner received $20k. Agencies are going to have to find new ways of competing with this kind of production. Zappos just announced that they plan on increasing the number of product videos they make to 50,000 next year (+500%). According to Rico Nasol, Zappos content team senior manager, the videos are stripped down and cost anywhere from $17 to $50 per video to create, and will be shot in one of ten new studios in its Kentucky and Las Vegas offices.
What makes this commercial so great is also the fact that the creators made everything themselves. From costume and set design to music composition and recording.
"My boyfriend, Ithyle Griffiths, and I had just purchased Kindles and were doing a lot of traveling when we got the e-mail about the contest. We were constantly approached in airports with questions about them. The best thing about the Kindle was that we no longer had to each pack five books in our luggage, and could pick and choose what book to open every time we boarded a flight. We wanted our commercial to reflect all the different books you can carry around in one device. On a plane from Japan to Thailand, we brainstormed ideas and sketched out little stories that our character could fall into following different literary genres. We scribbled out pictures on napkins and made a flip-book, putting the little scenes in different orders. The day of the shoot, we gutted a pillow to make clouds and smoke (a last-minute addition) and did the commercial in one seven-hour take. Our friend Annie Little starred in the spot, Sharon Williams was in charge of the wardrobe, Rachel DeSimone did the hair and makeup and we all worked together moving the scene inch by inch between shots. After we assembled the 300 or so frames, Ithyle wrote some music to accompany the clip, and that same day Annie sent over some lyrics that just happened to fit perfectly. They recorded it together the next day. We are so thrilled to have won both prizes because it means our film resonates with both Amazon corporate and their customers. We are really looking forward to attending the Gen Art Film Festival, and having our video recognized at the event is definitely icing on the cake."
Since it was posted, the commercial has inspired new videos. People have really taken to the music. This is what most brands hope for, but very few actually get - organic and viral.
Man, you gotta love these videos! The series, created by BBHLabs, demonstrates the benefits of Google Chrome. Every creation is built by hand, filmed in camera, with no special effects added. Even the music is played and recoreded live on set.
BBH and BBHLabs are great storytellers, and the creators of “The Man Who Walked Around The World,” a killer video for Johnny Walker. This series for Chrome is another great example, showing us that it’s all about honesty, openness and invention. And as it should be (with Google), the product is the hero, and they’ve celebrated that in a very “Googley” way.
The films also work as a longer single film of around 4 minutes, where the 8 (7 films & an intro) films are merged together. And they’ve also designed "annotations" on into the experience. These are effectively hyperlinks to other films embedded into the film itself - like roll-over hotspots with links behind them. They make YouTube more interactive. So the transition device between films (the 'notice board') is based on annotations.
Needless to say, I love these.
