Adjoke

YouTube Ad of the Year – Embrace Life

tyturnbull — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 13:33:00 +0000

Many of you have probably already seen this spot before, but it has just won a new award from YouTube – Ad of the Year. As the winner, YouTube provides the brand with a one-day takeover of the site to ‘air’ the spot (with about $75K US). Check out the spot here and be sure to let us know what you think of the work.

The Elephant in the Room

tyturnbull — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 22:08:00 +0000

The promise of organic growth as a part of any social media initiative is something that’s very appealing. The simple belief that ‘if you build it, they will come’ is an idea that has been around long before the dawn of social media. In fact, early websites followed this logic: spend enough on something special, and people will find their way to it. Create something – no matter how good – and most people will at least take a second to check it out (even though they might never return).

Over the last few years, brands, agencies and marketers have learned the hard way. The number of orphan Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, YouTube channels and Blogs speaks volumes about the failed strategies and focus that many have had over the years. Despite the fact that the pages were likely started with good intentions, something about them didn’t seem to connect – or so we thought. Months after they didn’t acheive a following, they’d be evaluated (mostly on the ‘quality’ of the content) and new ideas would be hatched.

But here is the problem. It’s just simply about the content of the page or the ‘engagement strategy’. It’s not just about the apps, promotions and customer service outlets.

It’s about this – do people actually know it exists?

Or more to the point – did you save any investment for, you know, advertising?

It’s easy in the above-the-line world. We have reference points. Spend 80-90% of your budget on buying the media and the rest of it on producing it. Getting airtime on top TV networks is expensive. Shooting spots from a production standpoint are expensive as well, but minimal in comparrision to the actual cost of airing them.

And here lies the digital issue. Getting your ideas published doesn’t really cost anything. If you want to launch a page, a blog or a site quickly, you can get it up in an hour or two. As the site becomes more complex and the requirements get larger, costs go up. But again, actually getting a domain and putting it out on the world-wide-web isn’t an expensive process – especially when you compare launching that to TV spot.

Media, as a result, becomes an after-thought. Contact the ‘hyper-influencers’. Do some outreach. The advices mounts – and it’s not wrong, it’s just missing a critical component – media.

Believe me, I love social and I’m a big advocate of earned media. But countless studies have shown that paid media leads to a greater share of earned. That the idea of something just ‘going viral’ without a smart seeding strategy or big TV buy just isn’t accurate anymore – there is just to much content out there.

Sure, some of it gets through and we see it (and then share it). But most of the stuff that’s not supported in some way, goes nowhere.

The next time you’re discussing your social initiative, site or application, just remember that if you do end up actually building it, they won’t come unless they know about it

The Future of News…

tyturnbull — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 20:19:00 +0000

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the shift in the newspaper industry also mimics the shift in the traditional ad industry. There is a long post brewing on this topic in the coming weeks but to help show you what inspired it, I wanted to link to this article by James Fallows called How To Save The News.

If you work in a creative industry, especially media, this is a must-read. It’s a good look at how Google is trying to help the industry that it up-ended and keep news alive (in some form). It’s longer than most content you’d read on the web but it’s worth it and I think you’ll find it has some excellent reference points to anyone working at an ad agency.

More to come…

Is this the Worst Commercial of All-Time?

tyturnbull — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 22:09:00 +0000

I think that this commercial, which is on-air literally every break during NFL Sunday on Sky, may be the worst TV spot ever made. If anyone knows anything about this spot – the Agency, the Creatives, the Production Company – please let me know so we can publicly shame them.

Don’t think this is the worst? Let’s get this conversation going. Send some links in the comments and we’ll get a top 5 worst-all time list made up.

Believe in what you do

tyturnbull — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:33:00 +0000

You’ve got to hand it to Steve Jobs – he believes in everything that Apple makes and he knows, exactly, what he wants his company to be. He designs in a closed way – his rules, his products. He doesn’t crowdsource his ideas or his campaigns and I highly doubt that he listening to conversations in the space to try and guess what people want from him.

He knows. And he’s passionate.

Yesterday, on a quarterly call with investors, he went on a 5 minute rant about why Apple is the OS of choice vs. Android. I’ve got to say that I love the passion here and that he makes a ton of great points. While I still believe that their is validity in the ‘open vs. closed’ argument, you cannot argue for a second that Apple makes products that just work. No trouble. No problems.

Here is the rant:

Passion. Conviction. Vision. Would you defend what you to this extent?

Storify: The Future of Content Curation

tyturnbull — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 22:22:00 +0000

Over the last few months, I’ve been exploring a number of content curation services. Many are in the early Alpha stages and it’s been tough to get access but one that I’ve been really impressed with so far is Storify.

As anyone in digital knows, the amount of content that is being created on a daily basis is immense. Billions of bits of content created on a daily basis which makes the amount of information to sift through impossible. In a way, our stories are now made out of disparate bits of information – Tweets, Videos, Flickr shots, Status Updates, etc – and the only way we consolidate them is when we tie them together in our minds as we view them (or someone creates a list for us and posts it on Digg).

Storify is hoping to change all that. Created by a former AP editor, the site allows users to create stories by pulling related-content together into one stream. Think of the stories as large articles with the different content bits actually embedded within them. For the iPad users out there, it’s sort of like creating your own flipboard channel.

I’ve been using the service for a few days and have been pretty empressed. It’s easier to pull the content together than a blog post would be and more comprehensive than simply linking to a post or video that you like.

I’ve created a Storify link that I’ve embedded in this post about Bill O’Reilly on the View. It took about 5 minutes to create and, to be an extreme nerd, was pretty fun. Here it is:

What do you think? Do you think you could get used to curating and consuming content in the way that Storify provides it?

Lexus: Most Advanced Driving Simulator in the World

tyturnbull — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 10:30:00 +0000

I love it when companies don’t just talk about how innovative they are, but they actually prove it. We’ve seen this from BMW and IBM and many others, but this Lexus demo video is pretty impressive. What do you think?

Google Instant just made SEM more important

tyturnbull — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:05:00 +0000

Watch this video (again if you’ve seen it) or just go to Google and start to search. With the addition of instant I’ve noticed how much more my eye is drawn to the top paid search result.

The clamshell predictive text box literally pulls your eye directly down to the first result.

Brands time to own that top spot – if you haven’t already.

A Good, Creative Minute

tyturnbull — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 22:39:00 +0000

http://player.vimeo.com/video/2537115

Bars & Tones from André Chocron on Vimeo.

Simple stuff. But pretty cool what you can do with a couple tones and bars.

McCain Fries: Same Brand, Different Country

tyturnbull — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 21:30:00 +0000

McCain recently launched a new campaign in the UK. I’ve got to say that when I first saw this spot I thought it was for a camera / printer / photo brand. I was pretty surprised that this was from McCain (especially considering that I’m used to their Canadian ads). The re-watch factor isn’t that bad and it’s starting to grow on me. Thoughts?