This is our ad campaign for Bookmarket - an open air multimedia festival in Gorky Park. The Park where it is being held has undergone many changes recently having previously been known as the place where the boarder patrol guards get drunk during public holidays. The Park now is comparable to the great parks across Europe. Bookmarket is testimony to how far Gorky Park has come. The boarder guards are reading from a Boris Pasternak work.
As such, productivity is not about how efficient you are at work. Instead, your productivity is really about how well you are able to make an impact in what matters most to you.
Client service in a new agency: The transition from people to processes
In a new agency there may be a small number of founders / shareholders who club together and do all the work themselves. Most of the clients they have are a result of relationships forged by the founders. In order for the business to progress I have understood that it is key to make sure that the business that you get from a client is not forever dependent on the relationship with an agency founder. A transition has to take place from a single project relationship to a steady flow of projects or service/fee agreement where the client can be relied on as a long term source of business.
This transition is one where the values projected by the founder members as a result of both personality and the agency’s chosen niche are translated into processes.
Why should an agency define its processes?
1. Processes are an agency’s key asset. If you consistently produce great work as a result of a process, the process can be touted to clients as the key to success of the project or client/agency relationship. Client’s come back to you and no matter who is managing the project, the client knows the way things work and that way….works.
2. The processes defined by the founders are a guarantee that the original values of the agency are carried forward and the founder’s vision for the agency lives on. The reason most agencies come into existence is because the founders believe they can do a better job than anyone else. So, why not write down how a better job can be done and replicate throughout the organisation.
3. Agency founders do not have to be involved in every project in order to guarantee good work. This means an agency can grow without stretching the founders until they snap. This also means that the agency now is a functioning breathing entity with an instilled culture because recently employed creatives, accounts and planners are independently following and improving on the processes and passing this knowledge on to those that come after them.
Conclusions
Make the process awesome
Get people excited about the process
Train every new person in the process
Make sure the process is being used
Don’t mention the word process as many times as I have in this post
GET PAID FOR YOUR WORK
In your contracts it’s important to have CLEAR DEFINITIONS and CLEAR EXPECTATIONS
If the client says “you can trust us” WALK AWAY
Top 6 things you need to know about contracts:
1. Contracts protect both parties
2. Don’t start work without a contract
3. Don’t blindly accept their terms
4. Anticipate negotion but don’t back down on the important stuff
don’t back down on TERMINATION FREE, IP TRANSFER ON FULL PAYMENT, LIABILITY
5. Lawyers talk to lawyers
6. Be confident talking about money
3 point winning strategy
Contracts up front
Internal allies
Advisors / use a lawyer
Russian Effectiveness Awards anyone?
I think it may be time to set up an award for effectiveness in advertising on the Russian market. Why?
1. To give agencies something to strive for that coincides with client aims. (clients do not see the correlation between creative awards and business success)
2. To develop a database of case studies that act as benchmarks for future campaigns and their effectiveness.
3. To encourage a transparent and honest feedback loop based on actual results to improve future campaigns and to recognise the value that agencies provide.
There may be hurdles that can be overcome
- In effectiveness awards in the UK for example advertisers should have spent 2.5 million pounds in total on Media and Creative services on their campaigns. Large advertisers are reluctant to reveal how much they have spent on media because of the large discounts they get - that are not necessarily the same for everyone.
- The size of Russia means that it is difficult to judge, in a short space of time, the results as a result of an advertising campaign because of distribution lead times and lag times.
Here is the judging criteria for the case studies submitted to the Jury from the IPA website:
Clarity of case: How well written, structured and presented is the case? Scale of task: How difficult is the task communication the entrant was asked to undertake? Strength of solution: How imaginative or impressive is the strategic, creative or media solution? Scale of effect: How impressive is the return from communication investment? Strength of proof: How convincingly and credibly does the paper establish the link between communication activity and commercial performance? How difficult is the measurement task? Use of channels: How well have the communication channels been exploited and evaluated? New learning: Has the case taught us anything new about how communications work (e.g. ‘longer and broader’ effects, interactions between channels), or about how to evaluate them?
TV in Russia, still has the biggest reach, so advertisers still opt for the TV Commercial everytime. The resulting video assets should be put to work elsewhere. Eventually videos should be made specificaly for online use to run on ad networks like Yume’s. The targeted audience and resulting exposure can be massively improved using services like Yume’s.
Usher will be the face of the limited edition Belvedere vodka series that will see half the profits go to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa. It does seem as though it is a must in the vodka category to offset the fact that IT’S VODKA by donating to charity.
This follows on from last year’s the Louis Vuitton special edition bag co-designed by Bono and his wife. The proceeds from the bag went to TechnoServe, a nongovernmental organisation that fosters enterprise in the developing world; Conservation Cotton Initiative, which supports sustainable farming in Africa, and Chernobyl Children’s Project International.
Beluga Vodka have donated to the Raisa Gorbachev Fund over recent years as part of their. This is a trend that I really hope we can see lift off in Russia over this year.
Imported from Detroit. A great way to make the people of Detroit proud to be from there and to make people sit up and recognise what and who has been produced by the city. This is a city, written off by many, following the dramatic effect that the economic downturn had on the Detroit Car industry.
This is a ‘rallying cry’ (боевой клич) of a commercial. Inspiring everyone from the end consumer to the company employees, from the people of Detroit to newly rich rap stars. Go Chrysler
Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will himself sound the depths of his own being. For if we imagine this being of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it is obvious that most people come to know only one corner of their room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth. In this way they have a certain security.
And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.
How could we forget those ancient myths that stand at the beginning of all races, the myths about dragons that at the last moment are transformed into princesses? Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence something helpless that needs our love.
It helps to know the local language!
Я проверил свои знания русского языка и получил четверку.
Сходи, проверься?
WORDS, PICTURES AND EVERYTHING ELSE / THE CASE FOR EVOLVING CREATIVE DEVELOPMENT By John King, Chief Communications Officer, Fallon
Creative development must conform to the dominant media of the times. This has always been the case. When the world stared at glossies like Look and Life magazines and carried their Ovaltine decoder rings to the radio we made copywriters. And when television became the new American fireplace? Hello art directors.
And to be honest, art directors and copywriters were enough back when media had a visible panty line. But the Web changed everything. Marketing apertures, media need states, and appointment viewing have all been blurred together by the rise of smart phones, iPads, and the Web. It’s all fuzzy these days.
In a world of words, pictures, and everything else, the ‘everything else’ bits got way bigger. The ideas that are being celebrated aren’t for sale. Broad shouldered ideas like Pepsi Refresh, Best Buy Twelpforce, and Jay-Z’s Decoded launch are robust platforms, not mere messages.
Yet most agencies are still relying on the same people who made a career of fitting ideas into advertising to be the best at building ideas in the world. They’re asking art director and copywriter teams to design brand actions, fit a brand idea snugly into a status update, and create brand experiences. Which begs the question, ‘Is it enough to just send a craftsperson when what you really need is to connect?’
Facing this same question here at Fallon, we started to define the ideal recipe for the next creative person and interrogate the very creative process itself. We made a list of ingredients for the creative title that comes after copywriter and art director. For starters they’d have to be fluent in all forms of communication, or at least bilingual in brand and digital. They should major in pop culture, and have an entrepreneurial spirit. In our agency we found these traits in our most creative media people and in our broadcast producers… if we could just get them to mate.
Yes the demand for modern work and a creative output that is consistently more than paid media messages will likely give birth to the creative title that comes after copywriter and art director. Idea Producer? Development Director? Connection Producer? Truth is it doesn’t really matter what they’re called, it’s about the job. While most brand ideas will continue to be born out of the creative department, it’s become a full time job to raise these ideas in the real world. What does that mean? It means having the peripheral vision to see an idea through creative, digital, media and design. It means having the media knowledge to understand the best way to fit an idea into the big and small spaces online and offline. It requires a deep understanding of brand voice because the digital landscape doesn’t always have room for longhand brand ideas (It’s easier to tweet as Burger King’s ‘cool uncle’ than as BMW’s ‘ultimate driving machine’). It means truly embracing the fact that brand behaviour can do as much to build the idea as advertising can.
The next creative job requires a different skill set. Clearly, agencies can draw from media and broadcast production - even project management - to find this talent, but they should also look elsewhere. The skill set required to ‘produce an idea’ has more in common with that of political campaign managers, Arcade Fire album drops, and event planning than it does with copy writing and art directing. Our newest media hire came out of game presentation at the Minnesota Timberwolves. This makes sense because if you’re building ’80s night in a basketball arena you need to consider everything, from the in-stadium menu to what gets displayed on the jumbotron, and whether or not to pull out the retro jerseys. It used to be enough to get to the idea, now we need someone to determine how an idea should live, feel, and act.
Increasingly producing an idea in the world is more ‘build it’ than ‘buy it,’ because today the best ideas aren’t for sale. To succeed in the future, agencies can’t just be filled with the copywriters and art directors who come up with the idea; agencies also need the people who can run with the idea once it’s been created. This new creative role will be filled with young, can-do employees who will run on beer and pizza. But make no mistake: it’s their dog-eared Rolodexes and working of the phones that will make ideas happen, grow them as big as they can be, and most importantly ensure that the work is right-sized for the world.
But awards or even changes in media don’t drive the real case to rethink idea production; a new role is necessary because quite frankly the consumer is already there. Ask anyone under the age of 30 about Pepsi, and their opinions will certainly be formed by the millions spent on the Refresh Project, not the hundreds of millions spent on paid media. Tomorrow’s consumers aren’t looking to buy; they’re looking to buy into something. This requires a more generous approach to advertising and the next evolution in creative development.
Evolving past paid media messages requires a complete rethink. With the traditional Media Moses out to another long rep lunch, the group at Fallon took it upon themselves to carve these 10 new communications commandments into the Minneapolis limestone:
1) START WITH AUDIENCE
With a deep understanding of your target audience’s lifestyle comes unique opportunities to reach them. Don’t settle for hollow demographics covered up with a clever name.
2) BE A MEDIA PERSON WHO SAYS ‘YES’
Media finally has a seat at the table, so let’s not mess it up. The best communications people are idea chasers who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Duct tape, spit, bungee cords… doesn’t matter how; remember, your job is to find a way to make ideas happen.
3) MAJOR IN POP CULTURE
Want to be a great communications thinker? Get busy living. Understanding the myriad of ways to connect today requires staying current on culture, sports, entertainment, and the arts.
4) BUILD IT, DON’T BUY IT
Increasingly, the best ideas aren’t for sale. So remember to start with the idea, and figure out how to build it, rather than starting with the media and figuring out what you need in order to fill it.
5) EMBRACE THEMATIC COMMUNICATIONS PLANS
If your media plan looks the same every year, you’re not doing enough. To avoid communications complacency, be sure your plan is unique enough to have a title, theme, or T-shirt tagline each year.
6) DON’T BE A BUTCHER, BE A CHOREOGRAPHER
Slicing up the media budget like a pie is a blue-collar sport. Higher value contributions like assigning channel roles top to bottom and staging rollouts left to right are the future of the craft.
7) LET THE CHERRY ON TOP BE THE MEDIA PLAN
Don’t relegate the bells and whistles to merchandising credits and the occasional PR stunt. Instead, find a way to have the most interesting bits lead the plan itself.
8) USE YOUR CENTRE BRAIN
There is real value to being an expert, a specialist. Media has its own language, numbers, and acronyms. But tomorrow’s media person will be as good with concept as they are with a calculator.
9) HAVE AMBITION BEYOND ADVERTISING
Too much time is wasted trying to alter campaign ideas that weren’t designed to be anything more than a TV script. For better results, identify a brand ambition beyond advertising and work to extend that.
10) BE GENEROUS
Modern branding is learning to give as much as we take. Does your plan create value for the target audience? Does it build an idea in the world? Does it leave something behind?
Who is Future Perfect’s Target Audience?
People who:
are proud of the product they represent
want long term greatness for their brands
want to earn a place for their brands in modern culture
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