Tetris game::: TVC's case study"Happy 25th birthday!"

Tetris is 25 years old today!

Google have changed their home page logo in honour of the Tetris birthday:

and other sites are running retrospectives - check out the Telegraph's Tetris gallery here.

There is no doubting the impact that Tetris had on driving the gaming market. Created by Russian computer engineer Alexey Pajitnov, Tetris has sold more than 70 million copies and been systematically re-worked and re-released for almost every video-game platform of the past 20 years.

Over time the influence of Tetris has also reached into popular culture in a number of areas - the Telegraph gallery showcases Tetris fashion and Tetris furniture too:

Tetris fashion

Tetris Kitchen

and Tetris was so popular that it even resulted in Doctor Spin having a UK hit record with a dance version of the Tetris theme music, seen here on Top Of The Pops in October 1992 (!):

Happy birthday Tetris!

It's been 25 years since Alexey Pajitnov, then a 29-year-old artificial intelligence researcher, came up with Tetris while working at the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow. "A quarter of a century later," the Guardianreports, "it has a legitimate claim to being the videogame that has truly conquered the world. In all its forms, Tetris has sold more than 70 million copies around the globe; it has spawned architecture, art and music; it has earned multiple Guinness World Records; and is regularly voted one of the top games of all time." It's also enjoyed its share of goofy ads. .

Nissin Ufo Noodles website

Nissin Ufo Noodles

It's also interesting to see such an unusual artistic approach to food marketing. No fancy perfect pictures of the food, but rather a colorful chaotic browsing through illustrations and animations.

Maybe because the only way to make instant yakisoba noodles appealing is to avoid showing the product and rather focus on the aesthetics of the digital experience :-)

via

[Agencies] Small Vs. Big

1. Nimble. Because we don’t have a lot of people to get in the way of progress, we can turn on a dime for a client. They like that.

2. Loyal. Genuinely and to a fault. We need our precious clients to be successful, or else we’ll we’ll cease to exist. So we tend to act like we’re their partner. And really, we are.

3. Honest. Maybe too much at times. The rest of my team jokes about how “blunt” I can be with a client. Hey, if their hours suck, their staff is surly, the inventory dated, or the prices too high, someone needs to tell them…might as well be a “partner”. I care. (See Number 2.)

4. Efficient. Time is money. We’re small and don’t have the luxury of waxing poetic about a piece of creative for months. We study the issues and then work hard to sell something. Isn’t that what advertising is supposed to do, after all?

5. Hungry. We don’t eat till someone sells something. And we all know it, so we take nothing for granted.

6. Cost-conscious. Small agencies “feel the pain” of our small clients. We have to make money, but we don’t nickle and dime a client for every breath we take on their behalf.

7. Ego-less. Well, somewhat. If you think you’re the smartest one in the group, then you can’t work in a small shop. Arrogance just doesn’t work. Collaboration does.

Doritos Loves Love 2009

Augmented Reality and social networking have been fused together in a lovefest for Doritos Brazil. Packs of Doritos Sweet Chilli - the latest flavour - bear a QR code directing users online to ‘release’ aDoritos Lover, a sweet and unique little cartoon like monster. The campaign, created by Cubocc, Sao Paulo has seen some fantastic results so far with 23,000 lovers already being freed in a week.http://www.doritos.com.br/sweetchili/

Upon being released, the Lovers are added to their owner’s Orkutprofile - the largest social network in Brasil - as a special app. Owners can take pictures of their Lover, create birth certificates or even put the unwanted Lovers up for adoption!

The most exiting part though is that the Lovers have a mind of their own... with built in AI, Lovers will interact with others online and can randomly ‘introduce’ their owners to other Doritos Lovers owners... amazingly, there are over 18 trillion possible Doritos Lovers combinations!

This follows news this week that the hugely successful and equally love driven ‘Bring slow dancing back’ Doritos campaign created by BBDO Argentina has been awarded a Platinum Sol, the highest acclaim of the Iberoamerican Festival of Advertising Communication. BBDO’s win marks the first time in the history of the festival that an Argentinean agency has been awarded the acclaim. Look out for the campaign at this year’s Cannes festival too.

Wataniya Telecom:::Open your mind

Published in Epica Book Twenty One, Europe’s Best Advertising. ISBN 13: 978 2-88479-106-9.

Client: Wataniya Telecom.

Agency: Impact & Echo BBDO

Country: Kuwait – 2009

New Media:::Movistar

GM ReBirth

GM is filing for bankruptcy and guess what? They owe a ton of money to the ad industry and are probably responsible for tons of Detroit ad folk losing their jobs. Way to go, gas-guzzlers. Maybe the Hummer brand should have seemed like a bad idea sooner?

Here's B|Net's breakdown;

• Starcom MediaVest Group: $121 million
• Publicis Groupe: $25 million.
• Interpublic: $16 million
• McCann Erickson: $4.6 million

Total: $167 million

Source: http://industry.bnet.com/advertising/10002410/publicis-interpublic-owed-167-million-in-gm-bankruptcy/

Why GM Failed

Why do you think GM collapsed? A company which was started in 1909 went on to stay well ahead in the automobile industry for 100 years collapsed. I understand it is not all of sudden. What happened to their financial management?

GM is a very interesting case. Yes, it is certainly one of the great titans of U.S. industry and it's not any fun to see them go into bankruptcy.

There have been several opinions put forward at to why this all happened:

• GM makes cars people don't want


• GM is too slow to innovate because of its size


• GM is too bureaucratic and unable to adjust to changing markets


• GM's dealer network is too large


• GM sold off its formerly profitable financing business GMAC

GM stopped making a profit. The reason any company exists is to make a profit. When companies stop making a profit they fail. We measure profit using the income statement.

GM stopped making profit in 2005. Since that time GM lost more than $90 billion through the 1st quarter of 2009.

"why did those losses happen?" the key to GM's losses has to do with sales and fixed costs..

The problem for GM was that when the sales slowed down, they had trouble cutting costs because most of their costs were fixed. In other words, a lot of their costs did not go down as their sales went down. In most manufacturing companies, when sales go down, some of the bigger costs go down as well ,GM has tremendous fixed costs related to their union contract. Closing a plant, for example, did not necessarily mean the workers lost their jobs. Company pensions and legacy health care costs were fixed as well. So when sales went down, many costs stayed fairly constant. And that led to losses.

As the losses mounted and the economy struggled, these losses became so significant that GM could not survive as a viable business. In spite of billions of dollars of government support, the only solution for GM is to declare bankruptcy and try to lower those fixed costs through a court process.

Job 1 at GM

With the declaration of Chapter 11, GM is poised to enter a new era. The core of the transformation strategy is a separation of "New GM" from "Old GM." Essentially the company will be split in two with the assets of the old being sold or otherwise liquidated. So far, we know that several smaller units such as Hummer and Saturn will be disposed of, as well as one long-time GM brand — Pontiac. Up to 20 factories also will be sold or closed. More than a 1000 dealerships are likely to shut their doors.

In the auto industry the term "Job 1" is used to denote the first car of a new model that comes off the assembly line. It's a time when all the work to create the right product and the right process either comes together or doesn't.

So it seems fitting to use the idea of Job 1 as a metaphor for what the new leadership team at GM needs to get right during the transition period. What is Job 1 at GM? They need the right brand and platform architecture to drive the company forward. Because what has hobbled GM for a decade or more was an outdated architecture that was the legacy of the founding and growth of the company.

When GM was founded in 1908, it was a startup seeking to compete with a behemoth, the Ford Motor Company. Ford had changed the game in automobile manufacturing by introducing mass production techniques, notably the assembly line, supported by a fully integrated supply chain (Ford owned forests and coal mines). But Ford lacked the desire to customize its products to meet the needs of its customers, offering the Model T in, as Henry Ford famously put it, "any color as long as it's black."

Following a near collapse during the 1921 recession, GM was reorganized under CEO Alfred Sloan in 1923. Rather than meet Ford head on, Alfred Sloan and his team created a brand architecture, a five-model product line that ranged from the inexpensive Chevrolet to the premium Cadillac. Customers that bought a Chevy as their first car traded up as they became more affluent. To support this strategy, GM focused on styling and increased apparent customization through trim options that kept the core platform the same, but made the varieties built on it seem very different. (They also out-sourced much more component production to suppliers than did Ford and built dealer networks).

By the late 1920's, GM had become the dominant automaker in the US, forcing Ford to completely change the way it did business. GM became so successful that it virtually had to start competing with itself, ultimately leading to a proliferation of brands and a separation of the production networks and dealer networks for the company's various offerings.

And therein lies the heart of the problem that has laid GM low today — lack of a rational brand and platform architecture that would allow the company to compete with the likes of Toyota and Honda. The success of Toyota is founded on many factors, notably, its excellence in product design and manufacturing. But the heart of its success really rests on its simple brand architecture. You have Toyota cars for the masses, Scion for the young-and-hip, and Lexus for luxury buyers. And that's it. Toyota vehicles are built on a relatively small number of "platforms" — the chassis, suspension and drive train on which the shell is placed — that permit the company to offer a wide array of seemingly "different" vehicles. And the company pays a lot of attention to sharing parts between platforms to keep production volumes up and costs down.

The upshot? Brand and platform architecture are Job 1 for the new leadership team. Unless the New GM emerges with a simple, rational brand architecture, supported by the right approach to platform design and parts sharing, the company simply will not be able to compete with world class competitors, and we will continue to witness the decline and fall of a Giant

Mysterious bug invasion

Spanish travel and leisure site Atrapalo.com (meaning “catch it”) offers a range of products including restaurant discounts, theatre tickets, flights, hotels, tours and car rentals. It had a strong track record of effective marketing campaigns, and its challenge for 2008 was to generate awareness and buzz, engage with tech-savvy consumers and drive traffic to Atrapalo.com.
Atrapalo’s solution was “The Invasion”. The internet was invaded by strange, red bulbous creatures which looked similar to leeches. The innovative new ad format appeared to be “stuck” on websites outside of conventional banner space and did not disappear when users navigated to another page. People didn’t know what they were, who was behind them or even if they were dangerous their computer. The worms were spread throughout the most popular sites and blogs, including realistic photographic “evidence” portraying the creatures. As soon as a person was brave enough to “touch” one of the creatures with their cursor, a jar appeared, giving the user the opportunity to catch and save it. Meanwhile warning banners were spread throughout the web and this was supported by outdoor and radio activity which looked like public health announcements. The message was sent out that the creatures could come out of your computer and invade your house. Jars with models of the creatures were placed on the shelves of electrical goods chain, FNAC. The next phase saw the introduction of the exterminators (Los Atrapadores), with the leak of a video on YouTube and the launch of a site www.losatrapadores.com. Finally it was revealed that Atrapalo was behind the invasion and that users could catch the creatures to win prizes including holidays to Australia and South Africa.
As a result, brand awareness increased by 61% and there were 1million captured worms, with some users catching more than 400. Atrapalo received 60,000 new registered users.

BRAND:Atrapalo

BRAND OWNER:Atrapalo.com

CATEGORY:Travel/Airlines

REGION:Spain

DATE:May 2008 - Jun 2008

MEDIA AGENCY:Havas

MEDIA CHANNEL

BEST CAMPAIGNS TARGETING KIDS

Key take away facts

- Brand loyalty begins as early as age 2. The average 3-year-old recognizes 100 different brand logos.

- Toddlers cannot distinguish a commercial from a television show.

- It isn’t until age 8 that kids begin to realise advertising can be misleading.

- In 2000, $2 billion was spent on advertising to children in America. Today, that figure has increased to $15 billion.

- In a study of more than 1,000 U.S. families, researchers found that 40 percent of 3-month-olds and 90 percent of kids aged 2 years old and younger regularly watch television, DVDs or videos.

- In 2008 Coca-Cola and PepsiCo announced plans to stop -targeting under-12s in response to rising worries over child obesity.

Children have long been a desirable target for advertisers – reaching them at an early age helps build brand loyalty that will last for life. From the age of around three, children can identify brand logos, and basic forms of brand loyalty can start as early as two.

Kids' spending ability doesn’t stop at pocket money – advertisers can benefit from the influence of pester power, where children can actively have an effect on their parents' purchase decisions. Traditionally, campaigns that aim to harness pester power have been limited to those for purchases including breakfast cereal, drinks and toys, but smart marketers can expand their horizons to bigger purchases.

With the rise of tweens with more influence and more disposable income, kids are getting older younger. No longer content with dolls and teddy bears, children under 12 are choosing video games, MP3 players and mobile phones. This type of sophistication means that marketers must use more sophisticated techniques to communicate with them.

Captivating kids and targeting tweens

Don’t underestimate the sophistication of children’s taste

Parc Asterix (FREE)

Parc Asterix entices new visitors through a branded content strategy that attracts children to engage with the characters from the park.

Parc Asterix, the number-two theme park in France, aimed to engage parents and children with a TV campaign that could compete with market leader Disneyland Paris, but without Disney’s marketing budget.

Parc Asterix felt that the perfect children’s programme did not exist on French television so it decided to create one. The highest-rated show among kids was Intervilles, an adult programme that matches towns against each other in a series of games and sporting events.

In partnership with TV channel Gulli, Parc Asterix created Intervilles Junior, a new, prime-time programme that followed the format of Intervilles, this time with children and parents competing at Parc Asterix. The park got the kind of exposure no ad spot could provide and the fit with Parc Asterix’s brand positioning – The Gallic Mood – could be tailored to perfection.

The campaign received massive press coverage and the programme achieved 425,176 viewers. Some 374,208 of them were children aged 4-14. Channel Gulli is now the No 1 television channel for kids. The show has since been aired on other TV channels in France and beyond.

BRAND

Parc Asterix

BRAND OWNER

Parc Asterix Groupe Compagnie des Alpes

CATEGORY

Entertainment

REGION

France

DATE

Apr 2007 - Jun 2007

MEDIA CHANNEL

Think laterally to evade restrictions

Cheetos

Cheetos makes a cartoon cheetah the focus of a campaign and overcomes a big barrier to advertising on children's television channels.

Create long term engagement with appealing cartoon characters

Kajeet

Kajeet kids' cell-phone service targeted tweens through interactive animated webisodes starring cartoon characters who used kajeet phones.

Arrange family-friendly events

Happy Feet

Movie Happy Feet reignited the hype for the DVD following a successful cinema launch with family tap-dancing events near major retailers.

Pester power = purchase power

Make traditionally boring purchases child friendly

Pedrigree (Free)

A smart insight about pet ownership get kids to engage with a dog food brand.

Use children carefully to influence large family purchases

Renault

Renault increases brand consideration for its new Scénic model by engaging children in a design competition.

Tackle any parental worries about your brand

McDonald's

McDonald's raises awareness about some of the healthier options for kids on the menu and challenges parents' perceptions about the brand.

Use children’s marketing techniques to explain very adult issues

Windows Home Server

Microsoft creates a children's book to promote the concept of the home server.

Oman Airbus

Client: Iberia Airlines.

The above ad is featured in the following book.

Client: Airbus.

Published in the Economist “The world in 2009″. Inside front cover – DPS.

Client: Alargan Towell Investment Co.

Country: Oman

Cadbury Creme Egg Twisted | Goo On The Loose

Have a look: www.cremeeggtwisted.com

CMW unveils its new ‘Goo on the Loose’ campaign for the Creme Egg Twisted bar – the chaotic brother to the Cadbury Creme Egg.

The website, also created by CMW, www.cremeeggtwisted.com is the online home of the CIA. Visitors to the site can sign up as agents and are then tasked to track down Twisted bars as they create mischief country-wide. CMW uses a Google Maps mash-up and clues via a Twitter feed to the website to help CIA agents locate up to 16 targets, which have been ear-marked for a ‘gooing’. Up for grabs is a luxury holiday in Morocco, and for the top ten agents, a cash prize of £20,000.

Advertising Agency: CMW, London, UK
Art Director: Will Miles
Copywriter: George Leaney
Designer: Elliot Wright
Account Director: Matt Smith
Account Manager: Anna Pinckernelle
Planner: Steve Taylor
Technical Director: Matt Klippel
Game Production: Skive
Media Planning/Buying: PHD
Released: May 2009

Have a look: www.cremeeggtwisted.com

CMW unveils its new ‘Goo on the Loose’ campaign for the Creme Egg Twisted bar – the chaotic brother to the Cadbury Creme Egg.

Activity begins with a direct mail ‘security strongbox’ sent to hardcore ‘Goo’ fans – who talk about the brand on social networking sites. The strongbox carries Twisted bars, however the recipient will spot an empty wrapper amongst the bars and a hole in the bottom where one has escaped. The recipient is then challenged to become an agent of the CIA (Cadbury’s Intelligence Agency) and track down the escaped bars. Online advertising of the Twisted bar creating mayhem will also direct potential agents to the site.