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.
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.
Yahoo's new campaign focuses on the site as a central online destination for users who want news and information along with social networking, rather than simply a search engine. It has been widely regarded as a ill-conceived and executed campaign.
One interesting, and negative, post says about the campaign:
The problem is Yahoo are trying to present a "new" ideal, that isn't new at all. The core idea behind the campaign - that the internet is now a place more controlled by each user's tastes and interests than by any media or technology company - is just not original. There is a danger web users could have their intelligence insulted by Yahoo parading this well established idea as a new creation, and Yahoo's creation at that. What's more, surely promoting the web as something of wondrous and limitless choice, and then telling consumers to choose Yahoo, is somewhat hypocritical. Mixed messages do not make for good ad campaigns.
What do you think?
Turducken consists of a partially de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. Crazy.
Turducken reminds me of some digital marketing I've seen lately, where different and unlikely combinations of technologies and tactics merge to create one experience. Some have been interesting and usable, others not at all.
There's a great blog post by Patricia McDonald on BBHLabs' blog discussing the role of campaigns in today's conversation and platform-led digital world. Here are three important/salient points:
Campaigns start conversations: Campaigns are the jokes, the chat-up lines, the anecdotes that get conversations started...Campaigns bring people to platforms.
Campaigns refresh and expand conversations: ...1. to give those people something new to talk about and 2. to draw more people into that deeper relationship.
Campaigns amplify conversations: Campaigns can give [passionate] users and their content a much broader stage to play on.
Love this. And not just because he used my tweet...
