Catvertising. Brilliant! (via @BrandDNA)

A designer is trying to create order out of chaos, while an art director is trying to disrupt: competing for attention and empathy. John Hegarty, Hegarty on Advertising: Turning intelligence into magic. (via nextness)
Cite Arrow reblogged from nextness
If you talked to a Harvard Business School graduate about brand archetypes, they would look at you the same way a surgeon would look at you if you talked to them about the healing powers of crystal. Rory Sutherland

Those of you who follow such things will remember that a few months ago Crispin Porter & Bogusky and Burger King announced that they will be parting ways. This brings to a sad end nearly a decade of some of the best advertising in history.

Today CP+B launched their final campaign for Burger King. It is ABSOLUTE GENIUS.

The second part of my interview with Rory Sutherland for www.nextness.com.au is now up. Don’t miss it!
I worry that after you’ve been in advertising for 20 years and you’ve been reasonably materially successful, I no longer feel that same fear buying a flat screen TV – “oh god, what if I make the wrong decision” - that 90% of consumers do. Because if I cock up and the thing goes bad, it doesn’t cheer me up much, but I can go and buy another one.
Whereas for 70% of the population that isn’t even an option. If my TV goes bang, I’m screwed. And I think we sometimes misunderstand a lot of consumer behaviour once you become a little too prosperous. So I think there’s quite a bit there – try never to lose that, even if you become more prosperous as things go on. Never forget what it’s like to be frightened of making a bad purchase.

The second part of my interview with Rory Sutherland for www.nextness.com.au is now up. Don’t miss it!

I worry that after you’ve been in advertising for 20 years and you’ve been reasonably materially successful, I no longer feel that same fear buying a flat screen TV – “oh god, what if I make the wrong decision” - that 90% of consumers do. Because if I cock up and the thing goes bad, it doesn’t cheer me up much, but I can go and buy another one.

Whereas for 70% of the population that isn’t even an option. If my TV goes bang, I’m screwed. And I think we sometimes misunderstand a lot of consumer behaviour once you become a little too prosperous. So I think there’s quite a bit there – try never to lose that, even if you become more prosperous as things go on. Never forget what it’s like to be frightened of making a bad purchase.

Long before social media existed, the proto-tweets of advertising had penetrated American popular culture: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” “Where’s the beef?” “A diamond is forever.” “Think different.” You’d be hard pressed to find a writer’s craft that has more directly influenced the vernacular. But for every iconic line like these, there are a hundred failures. Writing bad copy is easy, which is why the majority of advertising feels disposable. David Droga on copywriting, in the Wall Street Journal
A few weeks ago I was at the Asian Marketing Effectiveness awards in Shanghai. While there I was lucky enough to interview the one and only Rory Sutherland for www.nextness.com.au.
Rory is an esteemed TED talker, vice chairman and executive creative director of OgilvyOne UK, and president of the IPA.
Read part one of the interview here. Part two to come tomorrow.
And here’s an extra bonus part of the interview that we couldn’t quite squeeze into the Nextness post:

So you’ve talked about how the English speaking world is grossly over-supplied with media. How do you think this is playing out in our culture?
The thing that frightens me is really a by-product of globalisation as much as anything - as much as digitisation - which is what you might call the disappearance of the middle class.
Twenty years ago it was perfectly possible to make a decent living as say the 25th most successful writer in Denmark. You could probably make a living as the 200th most successful writer in Britain. Now, you’re either J.K. Rowling or you’re starving in a garage. Digital trends seem not to be doing any favours in terms of distribution of wealth.
Tyler Cowan talks about this in his book The Great Stagnation. One of his points that really interests me is that when Henry Ford invented the automobile, he effectively created ten million blue collar jobs - for gas station attendants to change the the oil, for people to build the roads, for people to do all this stuff.
So everybody in the United States got much richer from about 1900 to about 1974. Things that were once luxuries in 1900 became ubiquitous - like the refrigerator went from being a rich man’s ludicrous luxury to something most households had.
What we’re seeing now is that Facebook creates six billionaires, it has 800 employees, and that’s about it. There’s an extent to which we’re not actually creating worthwhile employment. We’re creating value, but whether we’re creating really worthwhile, rewarding employment and distributing the wealth in a reasonably (or at least recognisably) egalitarian way is really up for debate.
Yes, and the idea of the Great Stagnation is that we’ve picked all the low hanging fruit in Western economies…
Given the general perception that innovation is proceeding exponentially, I agree that Tyler Cowan is right to sound a warning note about that. His arguments are that:
1) there isn’t anything obvious in the pipeline that you can democratise
2) consumer goods in Western nations are so cheap that more and more money goes into things like property, which are to a great extent economically useless
In the West, I think evidence of this is things like 3D TV, which is evidence you’re slightly scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Here in China it’s much easier, because there are probably 500 or 600 million people with no toilets, so plan A is pretty easy. Install them. So they have all this low-hanging fruit still to harvest.

A few weeks ago I was at the Asian Marketing Effectiveness awards in Shanghai. While there I was lucky enough to interview the one and only Rory Sutherland for www.nextness.com.au.

Rory is an esteemed TED talker, vice chairman and executive creative director of OgilvyOne UK, and president of the IPA.

Read part one of the interview here. Part two to come tomorrow.

And here’s an extra bonus part of the interview that we couldn’t quite squeeze into the Nextness post:

So you’ve talked about how the English speaking world is grossly over-supplied with media. How do you think this is playing out in our culture?

The thing that frightens me is really a by-product of globalisation as much as anything - as much as digitisation - which is what you might call the disappearance of the middle class.

Twenty years ago it was perfectly possible to make a decent living as say the 25th most successful writer in Denmark. You could probably make a living as the 200th most successful writer in Britain. Now, you’re either J.K. Rowling or you’re starving in a garage. Digital trends seem not to be doing any favours in terms of distribution of wealth.

Tyler Cowan talks about this in his book The Great Stagnation. One of his points that really interests me is that when Henry Ford invented the automobile, he effectively created ten million blue collar jobs - for gas station attendants to change the the oil, for people to build the roads, for people to do all this stuff.

So everybody in the United States got much richer from about 1900 to about 1974. Things that were once luxuries in 1900 became ubiquitous - like the refrigerator went from being a rich man’s ludicrous luxury to something most households had.

What we’re seeing now is that Facebook creates six billionaires, it has 800 employees, and that’s about it. There’s an extent to which we’re not actually creating worthwhile employment. We’re creating value, but whether we’re creating really worthwhile, rewarding employment and distributing the wealth in a reasonably (or at least recognisably) egalitarian way is really up for debate.

Yes, and the idea of the Great Stagnation is that we’ve picked all the low hanging fruit in Western economies…

Given the general perception that innovation is proceeding exponentially, I agree that Tyler Cowan is right to sound a warning note about that. His arguments are that:

1) there isn’t anything obvious in the pipeline that you can democratise

2) consumer goods in Western nations are so cheap that more and more money goes into things like property, which are to a great extent economically useless

In the West, I think evidence of this is things like 3D TV, which is evidence you’re slightly scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Here in China it’s much easier, because there are probably 500 or 600 million people with no toilets, so plan A is pretty easy. Install them. So they have all this low-hanging fruit still to harvest.

For all the talk of a global recovery, ‘Main Street’ U.S.A. is still feeling the pain. Today one in seven Americans are living in poverty. The reality of the American dream has not caught up with the ideal.

The latest campaign for Levi’s by Wieden+Kennedy tackles this head on by taking us to Braddock, Pensylvannia. It tells the heartbreaking story of an industrial town struck down by decades of economic decline - and the astoundingly resilient spirit of its people.

A classic ad for Amnesty International.

Simple formula: putting the word ‘hipster’ in an ad makes it about 1000x more likely to go viral (lovely work TBWA\Chiat)

Simple formula: putting the word ‘hipster’ in an ad makes it about 1000x more likely to go viral (lovely work TBWA\Chiat)

Advertising is based on one thing: happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of a road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is OK. You are OK. Don Draper, Mad Men Season 1 (via kcparis)
Cite Arrow reblogged from kcparis
This is great in so many different ways. ‘Super Fantastic, Powerfully Handle.’ (via tobedoit)

This is great in so many different ways. ‘Super Fantastic, Powerfully Handle.’ (via tobedoit)

Cite Arrow reblogged from tobedoit
My relationship with advertising was that I was not that fond of it. So mostly the way I approached it was to kind of mess with the form. So I was never a fan. I don’t watch commercials. I don’t, you know, say, ‘Hey, check this one out.’ I really don’t care about that stuff. Alex Bogusky, quoted in ‘A former rock star of the advertising world explains why he doesn’t watch commercials’ in The Boston Globe
Sometimes it seems like all the reblogging and reposting and retweeting is a bit of a Ponzi scheme: Someone at the top of the pyramid gets a lot of credit, and followers, for being the originator of a post or link, but as the content is passed along, the amount of social currency decreases sharply. By the time the link goes viral, everyone you might have forwarded it to already has seen it. Benjamin Palmer, CEO of Barbarian Group, “Why Facebook makes brands stupid” in Adweek
Love this ad in the November 2010 issue Monster Children mag (note that my reading this mag does not mean that I endorse being a hipster skater surfer wannabe douchebag)

Love this ad in the November 2010 issue Monster Children mag (note that my reading this mag does not mean that I endorse being a hipster skater surfer wannabe douchebag)