That people keep taking the dialogue of this Old Spice ad, and interpreting it the way they like, is a tribute to the work's contagious quality and the brand's success in reinventing itself for a weirdly diverse new audience. (Who'd've guessed? And VO5, are you paying attention?)
Old Spice deserves credit for being willing to let its brand navigate uncharted waters, and for not punishing users for their enthusiasm. It's kind of sad that we're still at a point where we actually have to thank brands for behaving like that, but I'm hoping we're moving in a direction where companies are less reluctant to trust their most powerful salespeople.
At the invitation of the PDMA, I'll be speaking on Thursday of next week at the Stephens Institute of Technology. Here's what I will cover:
The current social media environment. There will be a specific focus on Twitter's role here: why it is used, how it is relevant to brands and innovators, pros and the cons
How do you decide what social media outlets are right for you? We go over the benefits and demands in terms of time, maintenance and user expectations.
How do you respond in a social media/PR crisis?
How do you choose your brand voice? A quick exercise on honing in on your brand DNA.
It's a lot of stuff, but I don't plan to dwell long and will keep lamesauce jokes to a minimum. Bring your iPads so I can watch you try taking notes on them.
Registration link. Cost is $15 for students, $30 for members and $40 for non-members. Maybe we can all kick a ball around after.
It’s crisis time. Midlife. Quarterlife. We lead off there and only go scarier places. From tampon ad positioning (ouch) to journalistic ethos, nobody unturns a stone and beats its subject to death quite like us. (This would be the ongoing Gizmodo vs. iPad daddy iGod saga.)
Along the way, we factoid yo ass with stuff even we didn’t know. The prize in the cereal box is Five Minutes With...™ guest Chapin Clark of @rga Twitter fame. From there, we create new agency job descriptions —- just because we can.
All in all, it’s just another day in the AdVervehood.
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With a system of sliding walls on tracks (tactfully camouflaged with panels of mirrors), Hong Kong architect Gary Chang makes the most of his family's 330 square-foot apartment.
The idea is attractive because most major metropolitan capitols now suffer from a dearth of space. Living in small apartments in Paris and Berkeley, for example, taught me to be neater and more strategic in my organization than I am naturally inclined to be; every square foot counts, and after using one given area you have to clean it up -- at risk of suffocation.
Everything you own works hard to merit remaining in your ownership. By necessity you become more particular about the furniture you choose, the clothes you buy (many Parisian apartments don't have closets, and decisions about a proper armoire makes things more complicated) and where things fit. On top of that, everything must function in such a way, and be organized in a welcoming enough fashion, that you actually want to be there: day in, day out, living your life, reading alone or entertaining friends.
Embedded in all this are lessons about sustainability and teaching yourself to be more efficient, as opposed to simply buying more efficient machines (which pile up). Those lessons are priceless: they spread into all other facets of your life, creating efficiencies where none previously existed.
What you find is, while lack of space may be purely a matter of circumstance, lack of time is something we all have in common. You learn to make time work harder too: maximizing your pleasure, your benefits, the wealth of your life that can't be measured by having acquired people, things or money in large quantities (all of which, left untended, yield inefficiencies in some form).
Well, if we didn’t anger the gods last show, Where’s My Jetpack’s Dave Wilke helps us bat clean-up. This time out, we collectively diss the failed promise that was supposed to be a greener, cleaner Jetpack in every home. Oh, and we give Jack Bauer a little what for too. French politics and marble countertops? Well, ya just hafta listen to find out! More Dave on Twitter as well as a lottaplaceselse!
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Last night a friend introduced me to a site she uses to stream shows. She even gave a quick demo, glossing over the flaws as they appeared. Most of the videos are hosted on Megavideo, which makes you wait 50 minutes after watching 72 minutes of footage; and the quality isn't great, but this is for hardcore show-watchers that follow for plot, not pretty. Despite the misgivings, I was sold on her enthusiasm and the idea of the site's consistency. I'm down to try it.
The curious thing about being a user: When we're super into something, and we discover someone we know could use it, we become hardcore evangelists. And an evangelist powers through the pitch, however glaring the drawbacks might be.
It's a real-life sales job -- one most of us wouldn't wanna be paid to do, but one we readily slip into anyway when the conviction arises. That's a huge thing: we won't take a 40% commission to sell cars to survive, but we'll punt our favourite whatever to a friend for free, in the best contextual moment, out of the kindness of our hearts...?
My friend Bertrand, who corrects my French and runs the blog VOTW, recently divulged his Master Scheme™ of surreptitiously loading his blog on an iPad and then taking a picture that wouldn't make it super obvious that he was in the Apple Store. I laughed at him and, with crystalline calm, he assuaged my bitter jealousy by promising to take a picture of my blog on the iPad too.
And he did!
You can read his review of the iPad ovah heah: he makes small complaints about its weight, but apart from that it's a "beautiful instrument" that surfs fast and boasts exceptional image quality. The part I consider most worth remembering, though, is when he concludes by saying, "I impatiently await the versions to come."
Of late and as buzz intensifies, I'm feeling more and more tempted to score one of these devices. And it's all I can do to say to myself, Calm the fuck down and at least wait for 2G.
In the meantime there's an iPhone, a Kindle and a clunky 4-year-old Macbook Pro at my disposal; what am I clamoring for? Chill, little nerves, chill. Now that it's here, there will be plenty to go around, and still more interesting things ahead.
Hokay, here's my wrapup post for MIPTV, which links to all the liveblogs I wrote for the conference over the course of the week. In terms of promise, creativity and where the future is, the last set of talks was my favourite -- and probably the least coherent in terms of post-session coverage.
One thing I got out of it was this data visualisation of SMSes sent in Paris when the New Year hit, courtesy of Orange and faberNovel!
Doesn't it make you happy to be alive right now, in a time when maps can share so much more than topography?
What's coming in terms of TV? More reality show fare, but the following three trends were cited as hot this year:
Family/emotainment. And I don't mean friendly family fare like Step by Step; I mean reality shows about family members. One involved taking a mass of people and finding which family members went with which, then matching the completed family to their living room. Another locked strangers with vague and unknown familial ties together in a house, where a series of terrible events lead to the discovery of how they're related. There is much screaming and crying.
Flashmobs.
Mobile. You'll be seeing a lot of reality shows that incorporate smartphones heavily in the plot; networks like the BBC have gotten more imaginative, with live quizzes you can take on your phone while watching EastEnders, for example. (The quiz loads on your phone while the episode kicks off on TV. A microphone indicates to the software where you are in the plot, then shoots you an appropriate question.)
After MIPTV, drama involving a certain volcano turned travel into an arms race. Most of my UK-based colleagues for the week got trapped in the south of France. Not a bad place to be stuck, all things considered, but annoying nonetheless.
One of my favourite quotes of the week came from the editor of a major industry newspaper, who exclaimed, "A stupid volcano is affecting the TV industry! It's bloody inconsiderate."
(This is in the event you ever wondered which industry is more insane than advertising.)
I got back to Paris easily enough but not unscathed: since my return, I've spent most of my time emptying the contents of a red nose into enough sheets of Kleenex to clear a small community park. Sorry, Greenpeace.
Hope you missed me. As always you can catch my ad reviews on Culture Buzz or via AdVerve. Bob Knorpp recently also had me on the 100th episode of The BeanCast, where me and a pile o' smart girls talked about Twitter and, appropriately enough, who deserves to die. If you miss it, your soul will cry.
There's a number of events I attended in the last few weeks that I wish I'd had time to mention earlier: Plugg Brussels, Marketing 2.0, TechCrunch Paris. But, deadlines being what they are and with the internet constantly throwing stuff like this at you, I never really got around to it.
Normally, we do a timeline breakdown of the topics, but that wasn’t happening this time out as we cover in no order the arrogance of Apple, child labor, Modernista!, Crispin, critics, lawsuits, Domino’s pizza, Microsoft, eBay, tag sales, iPad, Will it Blend, French things, cigarette penis envy, GoDaddy and a buncha other stuff.
And we even manage to drop a few F-bombs *here and there.*
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Quite possibly the cutest agency promo in all the land for the next half-hour. I love how Darryl Ohrt has this oh-please-not-me attitude and then, faced with having to rename his agency, he's like, "Oh! Humongo!"
The vid features "reactions to Humongo" by Alex Bogusky, Scott Monty and Ashton Kutcher. Kinda. (You can almost smell his hat hair.)
Can't wait to see the humongo work that'll come out and efface all this self-effacingness. (Can I say either of those words?) Also, if you feel like it, listen to Darryl talk about things he likes in AdVerve Episode 14: Music Madness.
Word on the street has it that, following the rise and fall of all those surreal ads that gave us Oasis Project nightmares, and consequently bungling the debut of a really awesome product, Palm has given agency Modernista the shaft.
Sucks for Modernista, given that Cadillac recently also cut it loose. A boutique shop can't afford the loss of too many big-label clients in succession. It also sucks for us, because the ad above, which launched last month, tells us Modernista finally found its Palm Pre stride.
Too little too late. It's not exceptional, but it should've been the launch work: anything, really, that showed how using multiple apps at once, on a nice clean interface, can bring method to a multi-tasker's life.
Better luck next product. And if you're an agency on the market for a flub to fix, here's your chance: Palm's looking.
Thanks to Atif, the haut-tech emperor of Ithaca, for passing this over to me.
Ad slave, wordsmith + co-founder of Hurrah and AdVerve (podcast and blog). French-American, Bay Area-born. My mission: Understanding how we make meaning. That seems important.
This is where my personal ditties come to die. To read the pro stuff, visit Muse by Clio.
To engage me in Jedi battle, shoot me a line at angela [dot] natividad [at] gmail [dot] com ... or just follow me on Twitter if you want to keep lurking. (It's okay, I lurk too.)
