Es ist wieder soweit. Die neuen Superbowl TV Spots kursieren im Netz. Hier ist einer von Honda, die Mathew “Ferris Bueller” Broderick als ihn selbst casten und einen Tag Auszeit mit dem neuen Honda CRV nehmen lassen:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Auch eine schöne Idee: Für Firstbank ist Customer Service ist Priorität Nr. 1. Daher ein “Service Commercial” – die Ansage: wir geben dir mit dieser Werbung Zeit für eine Toilettenpause.

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Danach erscheinen die eigene Fratze plus einige Infos von Facebook an mehreren Stellen im Film. Wie gesagt. Nicht neu, aber schön gemacht.

Ach ja, für die Damen: Natürlich erscheint im Clip auch George Clooney

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Wie das geht? Die User können Charaktere und Handlung ein wenig mitbestimmen, können sogar selbst in der Story auftauchen.

Hier ist ein Video dazu:

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Auf dem YouTube Kanal können die User schon jetzt darüber abstimmen, welches Mädel die Hauptrolle spielt und in welcher Stadt, etc. das ganze stattfinden soll.

Natürlich gibt es auch einer “Trailer” für die Story:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Fascinating in terms of selection of sites and interaction with these sites. Not very sticking, though. Once you have visited a few sites, it does get a little boring, since the game play is not very special.

Just wondering: did they really get permission from all those brands to use their site-screenshots in a game? Respect to the account manager arranging all these deals.

Try it yourself: the Magnum Site-to-Site Travel Game.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(disclosure: my agency works for Volkswagen, but this particular clip is made by another agency)

Click here to view the embedded video.

And we also like youtube advertising, that plays with the layout of the page, as in the movie promo for the Expendables.

Now, Tipp-Ex has combined those three and came up with a nice advertising Campaign:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can choose – or shall I say it looks like you can choose – one of two endings. Warning, here is a spoiler:

You don’t have a choice. The bear won’t be shot, in both options the ad changes, the youtube special ad format kicks in and the guy grabs the Tipp-Ex from the box on the righthand side, deletes the word “shoots” and tells you to tell him, what to do with the bear instead. From then on, it feels like the subservient chicken. You can tell him, for example, to dance with the bear:

Of course, many people tried other commands with the subservient chicken, so I had to try this, too:

Nice combination of stuff that has been seen before… Of course, you can share it on Facebook and Twitter…

the ad industry should work to improve the quality of their product to a point where people want to watch it.

Well, isn’t that what creative agencies are trying to do anyway? It’s a problem of targeting. The best ad is wasted on someone who doesn’t care or even hate the brand. And once an ad is well targeted, it’s message should be relevant, and there should be no question about acceptance. A good creative targeted at the right audience should never fall into the trap of being annoying.

However, the world isn’t perfect, and in mass distributed media, there will always be a spillover – i.e. ads delivered to people who don’t care about the brand, the message, the offer. And it’s not only a question of entertainment, as Simon Sinek suggests:

The quality of advertising should always be measured based on how entertaining or engaging it is. They should stop measuring how many people are forced to watch (reach and frequency) and start measuring how many people choose to watch.

The main factor is not entertainment, it’s relevance. An ad can be highly successfull, if relevant, even if it’s not in the least entertaining. Given the right context, a fitting message and good targeting, you might also want to call advertising “information”.

Of course, if neither of that is true, you should call it “spam” or simply annoyance.

The main point of Sinek is, however, that ad agencies produce their creative having a different target audience in mind: the client. For that matter, we might even add another target audience that sometimes play an important role: jurys of advertising award shows. Much of what is created serves to satisfy individual client needs, or may be even simply client internal political structures.

So Sinek argues, that ad agencies should instead again focus on their main target audience: the end customer.

Producing a product for the consumers who are the ones actually consuming the product makes more business sense, too.  Clients would be able to spend less on media because the work would be more memorable.  Plus, if people CHOOSE to watch the ads, they are more likely to like the brands, products and companies featured in those ads. In other words, if advertising was made for consumers and not clients the ultimate benefactor would actually be the client…and isn’t that supposed to be the job of good advertising?

Good idea. Given what I notice in the industry, this is definitely the intention when creating new ideas. Within the realm of highly user-centric media such as social media, this thinking has already started to sink in. It just needs to permeate all the layers of “integrated” agencies, until even the most classically oriented teams are also familiar with this idea.

(via adverlab)

In this case, it’s a play on the fact that wheetabix as a breakfast gives you energy for the whole day. So they came up with a questions that is interesting for all of us: “What makes the worlds largest search engine work?”

The answer: a library lady who assembles all the information within 0.12 seconds (or so), you can take a peak behind the Google screen over here.

When you’re not typing search queries yourself, it seems like you can see queries of other people as live search. But somehow I don’t believe that…

The whole journey is being documented in many (partially live) video shows, blogs of each of the four and a Google map where you can check on their current position. Of course, the four travellers also have twitter profiles.

What I find puzzling is the fact that the blogs neither allow for comments, nor do they offer permalinks. Not really blog-like, if you ask me.

Quite well done is their strategy to reactivate people that were fans of a previous campaign they did almost a year ago: the main character of that campaign – Nils, who back then was “waiting for September” – started his Twitterfeed again, in order to point users who did not unfollow in the meantime (like yours truly) to the campaign.

The only thing that concerns me: it reminds me somehow of the Fake Walmart Blogger in 2006. Mind you, they do not conceil the fact that this is a campaign for Ikea, so you can’t really compare it…

Some interesting questions arise after the kick off presentation: 

• Should agencies rather focus on context of the target audience? Will context drive marketing (communicationss) in the future?
• Which type of agency will be best suited for this in the future? PR or ad agencies?
• What happens when companies piggyback contexts without honestly solving the problems relevant to these contexts – when the branding effect is purely placebo.
• How can you focus on certain contexts, for chocolate bars, for example? You can’t with the current system of target audience definition.
• If the goal is managing relationships with consumers in different contexts, who will do that in the future? The brand, the agency? Probably the brand in the long term, agencies will turn in to coaches.
• Will the time frame for communications programms change? The model of having “quarterly” campaigns can probably not be sustained in the future.

First panel: 

Trend Cocooning
Wie verändert die Krise das Verbraucherverhalten?

With Prof. Peter Wippermann and Roland Kühl v. Puttkammer (Organisator der remix09)

• First, Roland explains the trend cocooning. Prof. Wippermann expands on it. The trend was orifinally coined by Faith Popcorn, before the internet existed in it’s current version.
• Quote Wippermann: Freedom is being defined by technology…
• Prof. Wippermann about scouting the web via software for identifying trends and topics. Sounds reasonable.
• The below 20 year olds search for social connections preferrably online, instead of online. (?)
• Now the panel is extended by two people from the audience: a young guy living in London, and John Groves, one of the sponsors of the conference. They are now discussing their personal media usage.
• Especially younger people don’t have an internet presence such as a “homepage”, but rather facebook profiles, etc. Homepages are oldschool?
• Wippermann: “Die Mitte ist die neue Minderheit” (not sure how to translate that: the average German is a minority)
• People in gerneral are very slow in adopting new things. 34% still calculate prices in Deutsche Mark.
• Who has more knowledge about the consumer: the ad agency or the companies? Wippermann: the companies. Agencies are still busy being “creative”.
• it is an idea of the industrial age to separate everything: ad agencies from the companies. Originally, advertising was part of the companies. In the network age, everything will be connected (again). 
• The middlemen (media companies, agencies) will have to proof their added value. Companies can directly connect with their target audience and gain knowledge.
• Three Trends by Wipperman: freedom defined by technology, success defined by sharing, family as a “negative” trend, because people are afraid/don’t want it…

12:00 – next session is about Hinz&Kunzt, a street magazine sold by homeless people here in Hamburg.

Hinz & Kunzt
Ein gemeinnütziger Verlag im Überblick

• A monthly magazine, founded: 1993 by Dr. Reimers. A brand awareness of 94% The idea: helping people to help themselves. Financially and politically independent.
• Each homeless person is a single entrepreneur. They purchase the magazine in advance for 0,80€ and then sell it for 1,70€ When starting, each reseller gets 10 magazines for free. There are about 400 resellers in Hamburg.
• There also is a website, wich some of the magazine articles as a teaser. They even have a blog (because: you have to have one today…?)

Now I am sitting in this (last) session:

Agenturgezwitscher: Twittern zwischen Tratsch 2.0 und echtem Mehrwert

Bastian Scherbeck and Nicole Simon about twitter for agencies.

• One opportunity: internal communication instead of mail and IMs: it can reduce mail but doesn’t offer all functionalities needed.
• External Communications for clients: it’s all about transparency and trust. The agency needs empowerment when doing this, clients need “courage”.
• (missed the third scenario, as I had to answer an email for work)
• Interesting question from the audience: why should companies twitter? Answer: It depends. And: you can, you don’t have to. 
• A further discussion with lots of questions from the audience arose about why should you twitter, personal accounts vs corporate accounts, etc. Temporarily it was stated that you can do customer service well (not cheaper) – in the future I believe that. Currently twitter has around 60-80.000 users in Germany. That’s a bit small to be a relevant channel for customer service…

XING und die Klassiker
wahlfreie Informationen und Networking statt einfach nur Werbung

Oliver Nickels of IBM starts the session explaining how IBM uses WoM and direct networking to sell their solutions to the German Mittelstand, because it works better than pure advertising.

• Networking is extremely important in German Mittelstand – when it is based on trust. Advertising is too expensive because it’s too broad for this B2B segment.
• IBM created and advertised a “mittelstands”-group in Xing. IBM employees actively posts articles and comments, even distributes flyers during events, etc.
• Speaker changed: now it’s Dirk Reimers of FAT IT Solutions, speaking about benefits of the IBM Xing group. 

In total, it appears to be completely logical to build awareness and consideration via networking – isn’t that how B2B usually works best? Only difference: with Xing these networks expand over time and space…

14:45h Next up is Wolfgang Hünnekens talking about crowdsourcing:

Crowdsourcing
Funktioniert die Kreativität der Massen für das Agenturgeschäft?

The session runs with Markus Roder and Oliver Nickels, but first Wolfgang Hünnekens speaks about crowdsourcing.

• Hünnekens starts way at the beginning and tells the old tale of how crowdsourcing was first noticed and researched…
• The cases mentioned are the usual suspects: Tchibo, Dell, Fiat500… And now that he wants to show a clip, there are technical difficulties.
• The discussion starts with the question: what is creativity? That was a discussion during the last ADC awards.
• Markus Roder doesn’t believe in crowdsourcing, because even if a single person gets to estimate things several times in a row, his aggregated estimates are more on target than each individual estimate. Also: people quite often don’t know what they want from a brand. Cites Henry Ford: if he had asked people what they want, they would have said: faster horses.
• Oliver Nickels: the examples for advertising crowdsourcing were all “risk-free”. Crowdsourcing in product development is always possible. A brand should not be handed over to the “crowd”.
• Interesting question being debated: for which brands could crowdsourcing be relevant? Some brands need to uphold an illusion, a placebo effect to keep up their brand values (Markus Roder).
• Next question is: how do you manage consumer perception of a brand – how does crowdsourcing contribute, if a brand needs to be lived?
• Another fact: brands have to face an increasing lack of control.

The speakers of the first panel are already sitting on stage. First topic: 

Share Economy, Collaborative Marketing, Radical Individualism 
Markenführung im Spannungsfeld zwischen Klassik und Online, Stabilität und Individualisierung, Kontrolle und Partizipation

The first panel is with Bernd M. Michael, Gregor Stemmle and Dr. Stefan Tweraser, moderated by Mark Pohlmann.

• Adwords makes up 95% of Google’s revenue… after a small calculation Mark deducts that Google in Germany makes about 2 billion Euros.
• Question posted to the audience sparks the first discussion: can you separate between off- and online.
• Bernd Michael states: there are many experts in this room, but not much knowledge about the effectiveness of what we’re doing in terms of revenue. We are not able to give a 100% media recommendation for ROI.
• Dr. Tweraser:  The seach box mediates between attention and brand promise.
• Michael: The average German knows 3.000 words – how should they memorize 50k+ brands?
• Stemmle: there are examples of successful brands in this digital world – but not built on traditional principles. 
• Zara was mentioned as an example for brands that are successful without any advertising whatsoever. Instead it gew by WoM because of the subjective brand qualty. (Triggered a discussion about subjective vs objective benefits of brands)
• Good advice by Michael: collect casestudies of companies that were successful during the last crisis (2000-2003 or thereabouts). Show these to your clients when talking about facts.
• Stemmle: Use free content online to build your brand – then use the brand power to sell paid content offline.
• Michael: does not agree… calls it a huge strategic blunder, what happened a couple of years ago. Traditional media was to fat, to saturated, they didn’t take the internet serious enough.
• Stemmle: the business of the future for media: prioritization and weighting of content. Defining what’s “talk of the town”…
• Discussion is going back to the original topic: branding today. Tweraser: brand marketing is already a dialogue, some brands already admit that the brand has partially been taken out of their hands.
• Michael: the apple store in NY has a simple way of adding value for R&D: every question that the staff gets and has never heard before, they write down and send it to Cupertino… (Great, that’s what every company with direct customer interaction should do!)
• Markus Roder (in the audience): Viral Marketing can work, when brands give promises and then overdeliver: that triggers excitement and hence word of mouth. 
• Last question by Pohlmann: what’s in it for the future. Stemmle: network, interact. Tweraser: use the information available on the web (Google was able to predict the winner of the eurovision song contest, for esample). advertising is no longer art, it’s a science. Michael: We need experts. It’s still difficult to get experts. Offer more opportunities for knowledge gaining. 

This marks the end of the first session.

Fachleute aus dem klassischen Marketing-Umfeld treffen die Aktiven des Web 2.0 für einen professionellen und persönlichen interdisziplinären Austausch.
Feste Konferenzelemente treffen auf die adhoc-Strukturen von BarCamp und Open Space – Beim remix09 mischen sich Unternehmerinnen und Unternehmer, Vorstände, Freelancer und Angestellte. Von U-30 bis Ü-60. Eine breite Wissens- und Erfahrungsbasis aus klassischem Marketing und Web 2.0 – ganz ohne Peergroups, Selbstreferenzialität und Tunnelblick.

The agenda is up with a few fixed keynotes and speaches. The rest of the conference will be organised barcamp-style. Looking very much forward to this experiment, which also happens to take place in a really nice surrounding: the Museum of Hamburg History. Even the party in the evening will take place in those surroundings!

I shall be live blogging tomorrow. Well, as live as I can manage during the conference anyway

Fachleute aus dem klassischen Marketing-Umfeld treffen die Aktiven des Web 2.0 für einen professionellen und persönlichen interdisziplinären Austausch.

Feste Konferenzelemente treffen auf die adhoc-Strukturen von BarCamp und Open Space – Beim remix09 mischen sich Unternehmerinnen und Unternehmer, Vorstände, Freelancer und Angestellte. Von U-30 bis Ü-60. Eine breite Wissens- und Erfahrungsbasis aus klassischem Marketing und Web 2.0 – ganz ohne Peergroups, Selbstreferenzialität und Tunnelblick.

A few days ago, the agenda has been published. There will be two tracks. The first track is mostly with fixed slots and offers speaches and discussions by quite a few well-known people such as Bernd M. Michael (ex-CEO of Grey Germany), and Prof. Peter Wippermann of  Trendbüro.

Some of the other slots in track 1 plus most slots in track 2 can be filled by participants, in true barcamp style, I suppose.

Working in an advertising agency that offers both classic and online, I am particularly interested to see how the discussion between the two disciplines will develop. We’ll see. I shall be updating this blog shortly before and during the conference with more news on the ongoing discussions.