ad:tech New York: the digital strategies of IBM

Telling the IBM story
The idea of online "mini-mentaries" providing support for more traditional media is at play in a new Ogilvy effort for IBM. "IBM solves some of the world's toughest, most significant problems. And that's not something that's told easily in 30 seconds," Lazarus said. "Digital media is not constrained by pre-determined commercial lengths."
The IBM series includes work in support of the New York Police Department, pandemics, mapping DNA, and "Hollywood Comes to Galway," the tale of one-to-one entrepreneurial intelligence told on a global stage:

IBM's business of innovation now plays out on iTunes, in podcasts, and on YouTube. Some 23 million people have come to the IBM web site to hear the tales. "In the context of what you usually find on the web site of a technology company, it's refreshing," Lazarus said. "We're using story-telling in its most wonderful form."
Ogilvy, Lazarus continued, was the agency that was intuitive enough to use Craig's List (cost $0.00) when the client asked the agency to produce a series of newspaper and radio ads to support an anniversary ticket give-away of 45,000 free passes. The ticket supply was exhausted in just 45 minutes and the cost? $0.00. Almost as cost-efficient was a Hellman's mayonnaise "real food" consumer-centric series that appeared on Yahoo Food. "The program more than doubled sales coast to coast," Lazarus claimed, "and offered Unilever the highest ROI [250%] in its history."
And, of course, Ogilvy most likely will be globally famous forever for the $50,000 "Evolution" video it shot for Dove.
To date, more than 500 million viewers have witnessed the aging sequence that was inspired by a workshop for 12-year-old Canadian girls and became the first Cannes double-winner for film and interactive video.
"When he shot it, the creative director used his girlfriend," Lazarus said. "He told her, 'No one's going to see it. It's just going on the Internet.'
"They're not together anymore."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBr5clzbCYU

ad:tech New York: the digital strategies of Louis Vuitton

Louis Vuitton: digitizing luxury
Digital media, of course, are not just a bunch of stunts and tricks that can revive fading products - a case Lazarus made with new Ogilvy/Paris work for Louis Vuitton. "Ten years ago, we would have come up with the most gorgeous print ads you've ever seen," the Ogilvy chairman/ceo noted. And, so they did with the most recent execution for the brand, with lush, engaging, evocative Annie Liebowitz photographs of Catherine Deneuve, Keith Richards, Mikhail Gorbachev, Andre Agassi/Steffi Graf, and this one - two-filmaking Copploas-in-one-image: Francis Ford and Sofia:
In each case, Louis Vuitton products - featured ever-so-elegantly - somehow eased their transit as, said Lazarus, "we offered a deeper exploration of their personal journeys."
But unlike the print programs of just a decade ago, Ogilvy built the new campaign to last, to reinforce, and to build the brand even more powerfully. Gorbachev takes YouTubers on a visit of Moscow. Deneuve does Paris. And Keith Richards goes inside his London in a series of nine videos, including this trailer:

"Each of the Louis Vuitton people take us to places they love," Lazarus said. Keith Richards' love for Shepherd's Pie may not play to an association with one of the world's great luxury brands, but, Lazarus explained, "You experience life the way celebrities find it." Consumers who come to the Louis Vuitton site spend an average of 16 minutes viewing different video executions.
"The brand turns to experience," she added. "And that translates to public-relations impressions and blog impressions" that never could have been part of a pure-print campaign in the 1990s. "And we're driving double-digit growth in shop visits and growth."
While Lazarus recognized "it's impossible to know what will happen in the face of an economic downturn," the campaign will continue, with the next subject 78-year-old Sean Connery featured over the copyline, "There are journeys that turn into legends."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54QslBU1bK0

Capri Sun:::the digital strategies of,

Capri Sun: refreshing a refreshment brand
"It's what you can do with an idea that's different," Lazarus said. Yet another original idea centered around much the same challenge of breathing new life into a tired product. Capri Sun is a beverage with very different packaging - not a bottle, not a jar, but a 200 ml. foil/plastic pouch. The tropical-themed refreshment was popular in the '80s, Lazarus explained, but "had not done much since then."
It's original consumers had long since moved onto coffee, and there was a target audience of six-to-11-year-old children who were being underserved - a "buzzworthy and respectable group," Lazarus called them.
To start kids talking - and, more specifically, spreading the word about Capri Sun - Ogilvy created a series of 30-second spots with identical set-ups but different ends. "They were sort of irreverent commercials that showed what happened when children didn't respect the pouch. They had an element of suspense. And they invited parody.


http://www.kraftbrands.com/caprisun/ "Six-to-11-year-old boys love playing games," Lazarus reported. And, because Web 2.0 is as familiar to this demographic as tap water, they fulfilled their viral promise with a series of imitative spots:
The agency, in kind, returned the fire with video games and a "Rayman Raving Rabbids" Wii game planned for launch in time for the Christmas 2008 season.
Lazarus' bottom line to the campaign was the same she used to describe the Obama effort: "If you think it, you can do it."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SesasYdKVI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YRigdFPeLg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Gy0_ncqlM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGfS7zJ0ek0

ad:tech New York: the digital strategies of Shreddies

Shreddies: from one to many
Momentum, in fact, was a powerful driver in an Ogilvy/Toronto campaign that started with an intern in the creative department and ended up as a viral video with 800,000 views ("a lot for Canada," said Lazarus.)
Shreddies was a 67-year-old cereal that needed a brand refresher. "You've all heard it before and, in fact, you all can probably write the brief," Lazarus told the ad:tech audience. "We needed to do something interesting. And we had to do it in a fresh, unique way."
Enter a summer intern who was handed the assignment of taking a look at the box copy. And who, in fact, failed in that assignment by taking the assignment a step further by rotating the even-sided breakfast on its end - converting a square into a diamond.
"It became an immediate hit," Lazarus continued. The agency's creative team immediately recognized an idea bigger than box copy and ran with it. Diamond Shreddies were launched in much the same way that the agency would introduce a new product.
The agency posted a viral video of a supposed focus-group session (in fact, the moderator was a sponsor) while billboards echoed the idea of "Diamond Shreddies." The brand's president posted his own video addressing the controversy between the traditional square-shaped product and the upstart diamonds.
"Can you have more fun?" Lazarus asked. "It captured the imagination of the whole country. There were newspaper reviews of Diamond Shreddies. 81 Facebook groups popped up. The company got hundreds of letters, some of them asking how it managed to come up with such great new ideas. Someone actually wrote to complain that his box of Diamond Shreddies only contained 50 percent of the new design."
Supported by a word-of-mouth frenzy, sales for the brand jumped 20 percent in a matter of weeks. "A 67-year-old brand seemed an unlikely candidate for a viral campaign," Lazarus continued. "But this seemed to strike a chord. Or maybe a funny bone."
Digital tools brought to bear by a traditional agency resulted in a major marketing innovation for a brand that had held little consumer interest for decades. And, what about that unhappy customer who griped that he only got half his fair share of Diamond Shreddies? From the Ogilvy new-product development team, yet another launch: The Combo Pack.

ad:tech New York: the digital strategies of Lenova

Lenovo: going direct

Talking directly to consumers - and bypassing the intermediating mainstream media in the process - was a primary component of a largely digital "coming-coming out" program Ogilvy put together for Lenovo, the Chinese computer company that acquired IBM's PC Division in 2005.
The place was the 2008 Beijing Olympics. And the place was all over the world. "We asked ourselves, 'How can we use 21st-Century technology to make the Olympics come to life? How can we allow consumers to really feel the Olympics from the inside? And what would happen if we gave 100 Olympic athletes from all over the world laptops and video cameras and asked them to talk about their experiences online?"
The answer was 1.6 million unique visitors to a "Voices of the Olympic Games" web site that featured both written blogs from the participants as well as video diaries. "It was an unfiltered scoop, straight from the athletes," Lazarus recalled. "We reached 256 countries and 27 different sports."

The digital exercise continued with cellphone widgets that offered a link to the Voices site as well as up-to-the-minute results, photographs, records, and background stories. Lazarus called it "the largest social-media market campaign at the largest sporting event in the world… And it gave people a chance to feel Lenovo, to become familiar with the brand."
Perhaps the ultimate compliment came when the International Olympic Committee tried to stop the campaign, charging that Ogilvy and Lenovo were "stealing the content that they had sold exclusively to media outlets," Lazarus said. "What they didn't seem to understand was the true democratization of content. Once it starts, you cannot stop it."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4nNd1h52AI

ad:tech New York: the digital strategies of Obama

Drew Ianni, ad:tech advisory board chairman/programming, started off the Wednesday sessions with a technology-friendly introduction to Shelly Lazarus: "Ogilvy was the first major agency to believe in - and take an interest in - digital and integrating new kinds of advertising into programs for their clients."

But the chairman/ceo of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide had something else in mind: "As I stand before you, my daughter is in labor," Lazarus revealed. But that wasn't her punchline. She continued, "Remember how people used to save the front page of their daily newspaper to celebrate a child's birth? Well, I'm so happy. The front page of today's Times is a great page." The single word OBAMA - all caps, centered and splashed across the top of page 1 - will be the keeper for the Lazarus family. And, as luck would have it, the story beneath the banner was the first of a series of digital narratives that would ground the Ogilvy head's ad:tech presentation.
Digital comes of political age: the Obama campaign
"Team Obama brought their brand to life in ways that no candidate has ever done before," Lazarus declared. "They brought them directly to the people. He won and the world has changed forever."
"If you are uncomfortable with change and ambiguity," she cautioned the ad:tech gathering, "this is not your time. If you need to test something five times before you try a sixth, this is not your time. But, if you love to make it up as you go along, if you welcome the happy collision of advertising and technology, if you're really creative, if you want to try new tools, if you're looking to listen in on new conversations and respond instantly, your time has come.
"When I started in this business, direct-mail people used to say, 'Just try to imagine what is would be like if you could actually talk to a consumer or a prospect to find out if they really were interested. We don't have to imagine any more."
As brand builders and marketers, she continued, "We can conclude that the Obama team knew how to use the tools that are now available to us all." In fact, she added, it was fair to conclude that the candidate's "digital-ness" had helped drive his victorious campaign.
Indeed, the ultimate success of the new-media political effort "affords marketers with a way to use new opportunities for interactivity with their target audiences. Obama was in constant dialogue with his base without the interference of the established press. He took his messages directly to his missionaries.
"And here's a question," she continued. "He ran his campaign this way. Will he govern in the same way? Last night, around 11 p.m., I received a real-time email from Obama. 'I'm about to head to Grant Park to talk to everyone gathered there,' he wrote, 'but I wanted to write to you first. We just made history. We have a lot of work to do to get our country back on track, and I'll be in touch soon about what comes next.'"
"It was all part of the best CRM campaign that's ever been run," Lazarus said. "The Obama campaign had a state-of-the-art web site. Pages on social-media sites. Twitter to track the candidate from one moment to the next. They had their own 'Race to the White House' game, Xbox games, iPhone applications, free ringtones. More than 12 million downloads of a 'Yes We Can' You Tube video brought emotion and momentum to the campaign. Four million donors and volunteers got daily email updates. They used every trick in the marketers' book, right down to their own 'Front Row to History' that offered winners a trip to Chicago to watch the returns. It was just like Publisher's Clearing House.
"Their motto seemed to be, 'If you think it, you can do it.' They really were masters of CRM."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjXyqcx-mYY

Nielsen: Social Nets Overtake E-mail

As online paradigm shifts, advertisers must find a way to add value, rather than follow the 'push' model
March 9, 2009
-By Brian Morrissey

NEW YORK Social networking has overtaken e-mail as the most popular Internet activity, according to a new study released by Nielsen. Active reach in what Nielsen defines as "member communities" now exceeds e-mail participation by 67 percent to 65 percent. What's more, the reach of social networking and blogging venues is growing at twice the rate of other large drivers of Internet use such as portals, e-mail and search. Nielsen, which is the parent company of Adweek, concluded that the shift to social activity online would have profound effects on marketers and publishers. For publishers, social networks are eating into time spent with other online activities, according to Nielsen.
For advertisers, the phenomenon at this stage represents mostly unfulfilled promise for a deeper connection with consumers who are more difficult to reach in social environments. The rise of social media coincides with the decline of portals. Social networking appears to be snatching away users' online time formerly spent with e-mail, traditionally a large draw to portals. Such fragmentation is decreasing portals' importance to advertisers. In a separate report, top digital shop Razorfish said its spending at portals declined from 24 percent in 2006 to 16 percent in 2008. Nielsen found that two-thirds of the world's Internet users visited a social networking site in 2008. All told, social media now accounts for almost 10 percent of Internet time. Facebook is leading the pack worldwide, with monthly visits by three out of 10 Internet users in nine global markets, per Nielsen. The growth in social media is not confined to the U.S. Nielsen charted comparable or higher growth for Australia, Spain, Italy and the United Kingdom. Yet for now, user growth at social sites is outpacing advertising increases, per Nielsen. This will likely change, Nielsen said, as models shift to value engagement over exposure. "As the online industry matures and the value of online real estate is increasingly measured by time spent, rather than pages viewed, a significant shift in advertising revenue from 'traditional' online media towards social media could be realized -- if the successful ad model can be found," the report stated. The search for a workable ad model is even more urgent now that social media has broken out of the youth demographic, Nielsen found. For example, Facebook's greatest growth has come from 35-49-year-olds, and it has added twice as many 50-64-year-olds as those under 18. Yet advertising and social media to date have mixed like oil and water. Part of that is a function of social media's communications role -- advertising has typically performed poorly in chat and e-mail. The larger challenge for advertising is to move from an interruptive role to joining conversations. That means advertisers need to find ways to add value to users' experiences, Nielsen found. "Whatever the successful ad model turns out to be, the messaging will have to be authentic and humble, and built on the principle of two-way conversation -- not a push model -- that adds value to the consumer," the report said.

Use Email Campaigns To Generate More Email Campaigns–And Conversions

March12th, 2009 by eydie

Some marketers have only recently realized the importance of email. Others think it’s old hat. But true forward-thinkers are already taking their campaigns to the next level.
A business blogger at the Sydney Morning Herald points out a particular email discussion that happened at the Adtech conference held in Sydney this week, regarding “trigger-based” messages. Trigger-based email is sent according to a consumer’s particular behavior or preferences. For example, in an emailed company newsletter, there might be a link about a particular product. When the reader clicks on that link, this then triggers another email sent to the customer, offering a special sales offer regarding that product. Such links don’t have to be about a company’s product; a consumer’s birthday or purchasing preferences are other types of triggers.
Trigger-based messages, then, ensure that a brand remains engaged with and relevant to consumers by giving them important updates. The Herald blog points to HSBC Bank in Australia, which used trigger-based email marketing “to keep consumers engaged and informed” during their loan application process. This was done because many loan applicants shop around with several banks, and HSBC did not want them to go elsewhere for their loans. The upshot? HSBC Bank saw an approximately 65 percent improvement in acceptance of home loans.
Think of trigger-based email as the master’s degree after getting a bachelor degree in email marketing: The rules of email marketing best practices must foremost be understood and used. The customer must be the one to subscribe to get email messages, and the company must explain what to expect in these messages–as well as how often to expect them. As always, relevance is the key–if you start sending messages of the type that were not expected, the consumer might ignore your email and/or cancel the subscription.
Of course, trigger-based messaging can only work if the marketer really knows the customer. So it’s important to use an email-sending platform that will gather certain information, both demographic and “psychographic,” into a user-friendly database. Once such a database is compiled, the marketer can start creating triggers based on consumers’ preferences and personal profiles. (And maybe this database creation can be accelerated by using a product-click triggered email campaign first.)
Clearly, marketers who aren’t yet in email had better get cracking. Their competitors have already mastered the basics!

M & M World