Less is More with Transparent Billboards

I love great marketing, particularly when it’s someone who does something both new and elegant and creates an attention grabbing campaign. The marketing idea behind this is brilliant. Amnesty International must have considered (rightly, I suspect) that people would care more about things happening around the world if they could imagine them happening where they live.

The marketers then had a brilliant production idea. Make the billboards transparent, other than the central image. By doing that simple thing, it would look like the activity was happening right on the street in that neighborhood. Genius. Take a look at this campaign, called “It’s not happening here, but it is happening.”

I originally put this post on my company blog, at Brogan.com.

Why GPS will change advertising

GPS units are becoming cheaper and cheaper, which means more than saving a hundred bucks on a Christmas present. Since GPS units are essentially just receivers that can do math (to triangulate your position, basically), when the chips' cost falls that's a big share of the cost of the unit.

But what happens when the chips move out of the GPS units and into cell phones (obvious applications), cameras (Flickr geo-tagged pics), and of course advertising. Business Week points out that a company named Yell.com is putting GPS-enabled ads on the sides of London buses. This lets them serve ads based on where they are.

Look for 2008 to be the year that we started to see GPS technology really change our lives as it moves out of the car and into a lot of unusual places. The marketing implications are huge.

4 Fun Ads for a Friday

Sorry for the fewer postings recently, but I've been swamped the last couple weeks. I did want to do a quick post showing four fun print ads for you to enjoy on a Friday morning, to make up for the four horrible TV ads we looked at last week. Here goes:Full credit to Technospot, who collected all of these and 11 more. Check them out. Have a great Friday.

~Jim Tobin
Life Is Marketing

Revenge of the Media Buyers

In a lot of agencies, the creative team gets all the glory. They create the spots that make people cry, make them laugh, make them buy... They write the ads that win at Cannes, that win Addys, that win Tellys.

But often it's the media buyers who have the real power. If they buy the right shows, the right space, the right type of media, the great creative gets its chance to shine. But now the website Oddee shared these examples of ads where the media buying was probably not as careful as it could've been. And the creative message definitely changed as a result.










So remember, be nice to your media team... Or your creative might end up licking a garbage can... You can see more of these at Oddee.

~Jim Tobin
Life Is Marketing

Interactive Advertising Without A Computer

The advertising community has been excited for years about interactive advertising--online advertising that can engage the consumer. The theory is that engaging people in your brand is the single best way to built brand equity.

Today I stumbled across some great examples of truly interactive advertising that take place offline--out in the real world. Good fun stuff. The first campaign is for Quicksilver, a maker of surf and skate wear.

This Quicksilver campaign is a good example of really thinking about what your target audience wants , particularly right when they are seeing your ad. In an urban environment, skateboarders are looking for some place to ride and rails they can grind on.

This next example is for an undetermined brand, but it's funny and gets people to spend time with the ad. And it made me laugh, so it's in the post. Enjoy...Credit to Boredstop for the finds.

~Jim Tobin
Life Is Marketing

Guerilla Marketing And Great Targeting Combined

Yesterday's post on guerilla marketing left some folks wanting some more. I've long believed that the more you know about your target audience and how they live their lives, the better your marketing campaigns are going to be.

I don't know anything about this campaign other than the pictures, but I'm assuming the folks at this Chilean beer company did their homework and found that their targets had a high propensity to ride the bus. If so, what a great idea.Makes me thirsty...

Jim Tobin
Life Is Marketing

More Great Guerilla Advertising from Mini

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about a great outdoor ad from the folks at Mini involving a subway stop. That one was about the car's surprising interior room.

Today a colleague sent me this bathroom advertising campaign for the Mini. This one focuses on the exceptional handling of the Mini around curves. I'm not sure what kind of person came up with this campaign, but they are both twisted and brilliant.The agency I work for invented urinal mat advertising in the 1980s, for an anti-AIDS campaign. That involved printing a clever message ("Use a Condom: Your Life is In Your Hands") directly after on a urinal mat. But this takes it to a brilliant new level.

And while we're on the subject, here's another fun bit of urinal mat advertising, this one for ESPN Brazil.
One of the guys in my office was jealous of this last one. He indicated he'd drink a lot more water if we had it here. I don't think I'll be putting that on my to-do list, although I appreciate how clever these ads are. More importantly, I think the target audiences in both cases will appreciate them.

~Jim Tobin
Life is Marketing

Wii: Today's Hot Game Console Pays Homage to Old School Game Favorites

I continue to love playing the Wii. We're starting to amass a number of games, which makes it more fun, of course. And I've been a fan of their mix of traditional and social media marketing for a while.

Now, the Coolhunter points us to an ad in Italy for the Wii that pays homage to the old games, like Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. This ad is made of Post-It notes, which create a great visual for those old pixelated characters.And if you make an ad out of Post-It notes, people are going to take notes off of it over time, effectively destroying the ad (or spreading the word, depending on your perspective).

These notes talk about the classic video games and how fun they are to play new versions on the Wii. The headline: "Wii'll not forget."

Good stuff.

Jim Tobin
Life is Marketing



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Mini-Creative is Maxi-Idea

I can almost see the creative brief that was written for this one. "We want to demonstrate the fact that the Mini, despite it's small size, is actually rather roomy on the inside."

What I can't imagine is personally making the leap to come up with this rather brilliant creative from a subway stop in Zurich, Switzerland.There's a growing trend toward "invasive advertising." The thinking, I guess, is that agencies should spend more time finding ads that can't be Tivo'd. That leads to a lot of junk. But everyone once in a while, it leads to a lot of creativity, like this. Nicely done. Credit to Hemmy.net for the find.

Tivo Pushes Ads Out of the House

MediaWeek reports that "alternative out of home" media is growing rapidly, up 27 percent in 2006 to $1.69 billion.

Alternative out of home is video advertising screens, digital billboards, and "place-based" media.

I think this comes from people trying to interrupt consumers when they least expect it. With Tivo and other DVRs causing commercials to be skipped. With consumers increasingly conditioned to flip over ads in 250-page magazines, the next idea is to surprise them, with either an ad in a place they don't expect or with an ad that has video when the consumer expects a single picture.

My thoughts: This trend will continue for years, before advertisers realize they are the victims of their own success. They've saturated the market to the point where everything is being ignored.

And then what happens next? Tell me what you think... I don't think it's industry salvation, even if it works in the short term...

Disgustingly Great Creative

I didn't expect to see a theme develop on this blog when I started it, but it's happening on its own. I love creative that comes out of looking at simple things and twisting them...

Here's another great piece of creative, developed when someone thought really far outside the proverbial box... Blank pieces of paper were hung in Vancouver. As bugs met their demise on the sticky sections, their bodies made the Orkin logo appear... How cool is that???


The agency that gets the credit is Rethink Communications, in Canada. Apparently, they are well named...

Creativity on Any Budget

The company I work for has been in business for 22+ years, yet we've never found a client with enough money to do what they want to do. Advertising is expensive. If they've got $200,000, they need $1 million. If they've got $1 million, they've got $5 million worth of needs, and so on. But these pictures here show that creativity is not a budget thing--it's a thinking thing.

Here are very creative outdoor executions on a tiny budget, a medium budget and a decent budget. The theme across all three is someone who saw things in a fresh way.

Tiny Budget: Brilliant Outdoor Medium Budget: Brilliant Outdoor
Decent Budget: Brilliant Outdoor

Cup-le of clever out-of-home campaigns

One my earliest posts on this blog was about a Starbucks campaign using magnetic cups attached to car roofs. Now it seems that others are using coffee cups in clever new ways.

DDB Canada has this design for their client Toronto Plastic Surgery. The coffee drinker, with the help of a mirror, can try on a new nose while they sip a latte. Clever clutter busting creative.

The folks at Wrigley's have a similar fun campaign, this time with stickers on the bottom of the coffee cups. Maybe more appropriate at Halloween, huh?


One of my favorite sites, the Coolhunter, found these...

Advertising on Second Life

"They paved paradise...and put up a parking lot."

There have been lots of articles written about Second Life. If you're into these kind of marketing, gaming, technology trends, you no doubt know about it. And, you may know that marketers like Virgin are already discovering it, opening stores in this virtual world, selling downloads, and making real money. (152 individual users made more than $5,000 in real money by doing business in Second Life in the month of March alone!)

The future of that world is crystal clear.

• Early adopters come in and create an economy;
• Some clever marketers see an opportunity to extend their brand into this world, many think it's funny, clever, good thinking;
• Less clever marketers start to come in. The humor of it all goes away;
• Every two-bit marketer finds a way to extend into Second Life, the users go away;
• The buzz fades, the "citizenry" shrinks but doesn't disappear. Marketers go away (mostly) and Second Life continues smaller, less hyped.

It seems a little sad to me on the one hand. On the other, it seems like the natural order of things. We find a new place and we all rush there, transforming it. Just a cautionary tale for those who would make millions in their alternative universe.

Powerful Social Marketing Message

The company I work for does a lot of social marketing, and I think we're pretty good at it. Done properly, social marketing uses the best practices of marketing to issues. In many cases, however, you can go well beyond traditional marketing, because building the "brand" isn't as important in most cases as raising awareness of the issue.

Here's a great campaign for the Traffic Police in Mumbai, India that uses a special invisible red ink that is only activated when it gets wet. Wow.

Found at Houtlust

Absolutely Brilliant Outdoor

The key to good creative is narrowing your message down to one simple thing. If you can do that, and you have a good team, you'll get good creative. (Those are, by the way, pretty big "ifs".)

Here's an example of a campaign where they got it right: done for the Red Cross and running in San Francisco:

It doesn't have to say much of anything. A really powerful reminder of why you give to the Red Cross. It just takes something most people don't have: a narrow focus and a willingness to get outside and think...

Props again to Coolhunter for finding this.

Clever Doesn't Always Equal Smart

So you own a bank in Turkey and you want to get your billboard noticed. How about putting a fake cop car under the billboard? That will surely get it noticed...


When you get to the fine print on the billboard (which you can now conveniently read because you slowed down), you realize that the payoff is: "Pay your traffic tickets on time without waiting in line."

Ok, that's clever. But it's a questionable strategy when the first thing each person thinks about your company is: "Oh, those asses..."

Props to Coolhunter for sniffing this out.

Keep Spinning Until The Idea Comes

What a fabulous idea for casino marketing. For a casino that is located (I believe) in Europe, came this great piece of out-of-home advertising:

What I really like about this is that the agency didn't just think of the standard tactics and choose among them. They invented a whole new tactic. I can imagine the fun of picking a number (or red/black, or even/odd) to guess for your luggage.

Great idea. Courtesy of disruption, which is written in some foreign tongue...