Cool Marketing Thoughts

You gotta love the daring plan the South African branch of Ogilvy came up with for the Audi RS6. Those are things you couldn’t do in this country without having some tickets on your ass and a few nasty phone calls from ‘los coppers’. This placement is quite amusing. Not only does it alert people of the traffic cam behind the billboard, it also gives Audi a bit of a ‘helping you out’ status. On the other hand, the ad might also indicate something completely different. Those who can afford the RS6 will probably not feel bad about being flashed for speeding. RS means ‘Racing Speed’, so I imagine some of the Audi RS6 drivers will just put their head out of the window and put up a huge smile for the picture, making fun of the entire ’speeding camera thing’. Also, in my country the cameras are placed in the direction the traffic is heading for, in this case it’s the opposite, so it might be less daring as it seems, given the fact the camera might be ‘flashing’ cars that come from the other direction as the one you’re driving in whilst seeing the billboard. I might be wrong here, I’m just comparing it to the situation in my country. Fact is: on this picture there are no cars coming from the other direction. That would indicate that the camera is scanning and taking pictures from approaching speeding drivers. I didn’t know they could do that. Would the camera be part of the execution as well?

Agency: Ogilvy, Johannesburg, South Africa
Executive Creative Director: Gerry Human
Creative Director: James Daniels
Art Director: Tetteh Botchway
Copywriter: Mahle Kwababa
Via AdsOfTheWorld

Funny campaign from Duval Guillaume Antwerp. They’ve worked for Schweppes before (remember the fountains). With this campaign they’ve tried to communicate the fact that the new Schweppes flavors are nothing for ordinary people, but for people who have a sophisticated place inside their mind. The fruity lemonade, for fruitcakes ‘fruity’ people. I think the images they’ve used are really funny to look at. They illustrate very well what the message is trying to say.

Client: Cadbury (Schweppes)
Agency: Duval Guillaume Antwerp
Account Team: Katia Strauwen, Patrick Clymans
Creative Directors: Geoffrey Hantson, Dirk Domen
Copy: Geoffrey Hantson
Art Director: Dirk Domen
Photographer: Björn Tagemose
Media: Magazines, posters (Scandinavia)

Sporza is a Flemish television station which specializes in sports. It’s not a solid station, it’s not 24/7 available, but when there’s something happening in the world of ’sports’ in general (national or international), the station gets airtime. It’s in fact a theme channel from the national (government supported) VRT television station. I don’t know how it’s determined but it appears on the channel where you normally have an overview of all the stations, the so-called ‘mosaic’. Sporza is really passionate and tries to deliver high quality reports and interviews with current and past sport stars. To create an image campaign for the station, Duval Guillaume Antwerp came up with three really nice ads. The style refers to classical Flemish painters from the likes of Rubens or Van Dyck, and I suppose the paintings also refer to some biblical event (the setup and position of the characters), turning sports into something holy or divine in one way or another.

Copy: “Share The Passion”

Client: Sporza
Agency: Duval Guillaume Antwerp
Account: Alex Stergialis
Creative Directors: Geoffrey Hantson, Dirk Domen
Copy: Manuel Ostyn, Pieter Staes
Art Directors: Pieter Staes, Manuel Ostyn
Illustration: Ward Nijs

More buzz for Mini coming up, with an exclusive ‘owner-only’ campaign and a “we’re in, you’re out” oriented communication. It could work, if the benefits of being ‘in’ are larger than ownership of the car. Interesting to see where this will be going. I’m not really convinced that it’s going to be enough to communicate a secret message to the owners. It has to be exciting enough for the owners, so that they will be encouraged and (in one way or the other) rewarded for spreading the buzz of this exclusivity, and it has to be a message that’s strong enough for not-owners to be convinced to join the ownership group.

From BusinessWeek:

The strategy is to get owners buzzing about the brand while piquing the curiosity of potential buyers. “It’s a covert and an overt campaign almost simultaneously,” says John Butler, a creative director at Butler, Shine, Stern & Partners, Mini’s new ad agency. “If you get the kit, you’re rewarded. If not, you get the gist that owning a Mini is like being in a club.”

From MediaBuyerPlanner:

Over the next few weeks, Mini Cooper will be launching a new ad campaign targeted at the 150,000 people across the U.S. who already own the car.

The ad campaign will run in magazines such as The New Yorker and Maxim, and will only be available for current owners to read. The ads will be encrypted. Mini owners are being sent a book stocked with special glasses, a decoder and a “magic window decryptor,” Business Week reports. Owners will use the decoder tools to find Web addresses in the ads that point them towards free prizes or invitations to events.

Thanks for this interesting pointer, Chris!

Two campaigns from Axe for the archive. The first one is actually a campaign from a few years ago for Lynx, which is in fact the same as Axe, but then branded for specific countries. This is a pretty typical campaign for the famous deodorant. A lot of ‘unspoken’ messages and nice graphics. Nothing too impressive, but more than good enough. The second campaign might look not too daring but the details reveal something different. The ‘bus campaign’ was executed Dubai, right in the in heart of a conservative muslim country. The bus has been used to show a house full of girls having fun with an AXE guy. This execution from Lowe, Dubai, gives a different twist to the ‘bus medium’. It turns the bus into one of those Las Vegas strip limos, and that’s not very ‘regular’ in a country where being sexy is ok, as long as it’s covered with a burka.

First Campaign

Second Campaign

via 24 | AdsOfTheWorld

Playboy is always celebrating something. I don’t think there’s actually any day left for mister Heffner that isn’t a celebration day of something. Ah. Who cares? There’s always a reason to party. This time it’s because of the 31st anniversary on the Brasilian market, and this day is illustrated by agency Neogama (BBH Brasil) in a very simple way. It’s like a trip through history on a one-page ad, covering 30+ years of Playboy. Funny, but very true:

Left: 1975 | Right: 2006 [via BriefBlog]

Ah. Thank God for feminism and free-fought women. Of course, not all of them are happy with a man that buys and enjoys Playboy. Which is understandable.

These ads for Strepsils, a throat-ache softener, are really cool. They make a very good point because you talk less when your throat hurts. Some people have no voice left at all, which is where the product kicks in. You’re not only tempted to try and create your own comic, the message is in fact that Strepsils is the remedy for empty text bubbles. Nice work from McCann-Erickson Singapore. I’m really fond of the first ad, where the hero is getting bored on the rooftop because he doesn’t hear anyone scream. I don’t really understand the second one. It seems to be a basketball game, and the ‘Falcons’ lost. Maybe because they couldn’t communicate? I’m not sure.

via 24