The BeanCast 198: Specifically Targeted

Listen to the show.

Yesterday I joined The BeanCast for its 198th episode alongside some illustrious and fun folks: social media/digital director Chris Baccus of AT&T, vp marketing/social Jeremy Epstein of Sprinklr, and founder Joe Jaffe of Evol8tion. We covered a lot of ground, including:

• The value of earned media (versus paid)
• Advertising on The Olympics
• Mid-roll advertising's video virtues
• Geofencing: is this THE YEAR?
• Crowdsourcing with Starbucks

If you're familiar with the show, you'll know that at the end we also share the topics we'll be watching this week. I'm watching the technology coming out of AT&T's research department, which could make a lot of people happy but also pose a lot of problems for privacy to those being watched at a given point in time.

A prime example of this is the The Drive Safely iPad app, developed in tandem with AT&T and some Israeli developers (a lot of incredible tracking and identification tech is coming out of Israel right now). This pretty little beast enables parents to track their teens' driving in real-time -- great for parents, not so good for teens (although what do they know, their frontal lobes aren't even fully formed yet).

Take a listen! You'll dig it, I promise.

EASTPAK Play: Making an Accessory of Man

...and if your life is defined by your backpack, which it often is in high school, that's basically what you are, right? As subject to whimsy as the vermillion knapsack that matches your baby tee.

I didn't really get this ad at first, and my head mostly filled with evil ideas of people with Eastpaks flinging themselves off rooftops and summits. But then I was like "OMG IT'S TETRIS," and my pupils expanded to about 8 times the size of my head. Mariachis and the wolf mask gave it an extra special something, too: Eastpak going into slightly deranged, but still strangely titillating, Burger King territory.

Here's the Facebook, where the vid's being propagated:



110,805 lovers already! And just for Eastpak France. NAHCE. But the whole thing would be cooler still if we really could play human Tetris on the page: as it stands, we're baited into thinking we can (joue le jeu! They even made me Like to get this far!), but really all it does is re-play the ad. Booooo.

Nice work by WE ARE FROM LA and production company Caviar.

The Prius Goes Plural, and Toyota Gets Wordly

I once told Bill Green, my podcastin' partner on AdVerve and publisher of Make the Logo Bigger, that I like a good car ad, and he quipped back, "Let me know when you find one!"

HAR. But I stand by what I said. Car ads are among the most common we see (beside the abjectly bland perfume ad), which is a blessing if you ever score one with a mildly open-minded client. Because they look the same and boast similar features, they're the perfect palette with which to experiment (with plen'y of airtime, natch!).

But to the point of this post: this ad for Toyota's fresh new fleet of Priusses (Prii, rather?)* is catchy as hell, and I favour anything that resembles a Sesame Street segment in style, spark and efficacy. (Come on. When was the last time you had a grammar lesson that made you do the metronome head-sway thing? And this is a very good grammar lesson!)

Humor me ››

Sometimes You Just Want to Build Something.

I like to play with things, to forget what they're meant for and give them other purposes. It's a zen activity; you get lost in the process of transformation, destruction and creation. That's one reason why I dig this Staples Australia execution.

The other reason is that instead of wasting office supplies doing some stop-motion cutesy paper doll crap, they actually put something together that was impressive and absorbing, something that people will want to keep around for awhile.

Via @LaPetiteGrosse.

It's Scrabble ... on 'Shrooms.

This Ogilvy & Mather/Paris ad for the launch of Scrabble Délire brings to mind a tenement-based Alice in Wonderland, sprinkled with the spirit of the voyeuristic dinner parties Diesel threw for its Five on Fifth opening.

Scrabble Délire is basically an unhinged version of ordinary Scrabble: at the draw of a card you can write words in reverse, use proper nouns or place a word anywhere you want on the board.

The ad's objective was to manifest the havoc that can ensue when words take on lives and motivations of their own, disconnected from the rigidity and form of the original Scrabble game.

Mainly I'm pleased it doesn't fall too far from grace: the ending ties back nicely to the purpose. And to be honest, the freewheeling noirish mayhem of it is so un-Mattel-like that it's refreshing, very nearly shocking. (Well, maybe not in France, where this beautiful piece of work came out for Scrabble Classic last year.)

Big ups to Le Publigeekaire bringing it to my attention. If you can read in French and you're not reading that guy, by gad, what are you thinking...?

Every Cigarette Smoked in Mad Men

That's a lot of puff-puff, and nice work by Whirled.

The drinking and smoking are integral to Mad Men, and not just because it's a gesture of fidelity to a period. There's a close association between creatives and artists. In those two camps, you've always got this tragic notion of burning on both ends: being constantly hopped up on something and doing your job anyway - maybe even needing the former for the latter.

Also, still fresh out of Cannes, I can attest that this attitude, this lifestyle, is still alive and well in the industry. (The hyperlinked post is about people discussing ways to quit, but that's also part of the mantle of smoking.) The world may have moved on, but the lone creative still gets something out of lighting one up. It's a legacy, nicotine-laced shackles of genius and suffering that bind us not just to Don Draper but to Mark Twain and Sartre.*

Humor me ››

The Birth of a Great Violinist

Expect to see a lot of gratuitous hair-swishing action at climax -- after all, this is an ad for Pantene -- but this Thai piece circa 2008 about the struggles of a deaf/mute violinist still made me cry.

That's right! I cried! And boy was her hair amazing!

Un grand merci à @daedalium, the president and founder of hypios, for sending this over today.

Nostalgia Ravaged in Name of 'Anti-Retro'

The appearance of Citroën's DS3 at the end of each piece above is such anticlimax, especially as you feel yourself get drawn into the grit of the filming, the weight of the sounds. Icons this powerful, speech this rich, shouldn't be used for selling cars -- though to be fair, using them to sell anything is pretty much always a risk, riddled with critique. My heart breaks into a million little styrofoam pieces.

Humor me ››

'Every Search is a Quest. Every Quest is a Story.'

VOTW passed me this pretty video about an American expat finding love in Paris. Yeah, it's an old story; but in this case, it's told in the world's second language: Google search.

Embrace the warm fuzzies.* Or embrace the commenter who said:

I think one should be done on someone going vegan. Google definately played a big roll in me going vegan(along with peta)

...yeah.

See more search stories. Note the cinematic way in which new ones are presented. Doesn't it please you that Google and YouTube got hitched?

---

*Just so it's clear, I'm touched by this video. But that's because I'm living a cliché.

There's More than One Naughty Way to Go Blind

This revisit of a familiar parental scare tactic does a few things well:

• It draws attention
• It conveys useful information about its cause without being preachy or making you feel tricked
• The punchline -- which ties it all together -- is actually funnier than the gimmick (masturbate -> go blind)

Solid shit, comrades. Only question remains whether it'll "go viral!" as the marketing directors say. (Two days already -- an eternity in internet time -- and just 640 views so far. Le sigh.)

Video, "Son Caught in the ACT (NSFW)," seeded by Serve Marketing. Discovered via Le Publigeekaire.

'Spell-Check This: D-E-D.'

Office 2010: The Movie. Coming to an office near you.

Props to Microsoft for knowing how to laugh at itself, and for making Clippy seem like a stand-up dude, but all the throwback stuff that makes this camptastic "trailer" good also reminds me how every version of Office is more of the same. It's depressing.

Who the fuck uses Wingdings?

(v.)

A Tribute to the Abstract and Aesthetic

What's good about a crappy economy is that advertising takes on a neat evolution. At first you see more direct response stuff -- the result of marketers returning en masse to tactics they know to be sharp and sure, if a little blunt.

Then, as outlook slowly begins to improve, you start seeing well-thought-out pieces that speak to people's now-habitual compulsion to think harder about purchases than they used to. We hark back to discretion, and old tropes about a languid, less obnoxious form of luxury.

That's when you see lovely things like the spots below, which emit a kind of damaged, slightly warped innocence:

"Le Sens Propre" (Goodby, Silverstein & Partners and Blacklist's Cisma for Adobe's "Shortcut to Brilliant" Creative Suite 4 campaign):




"We Need a Change" (for H&M's Matthew Williamson line):




The Schweppes Coquette, featuring Nicole Kidman (I don't like this much, but it helps illustrate the point, sooooo...):




Welcome respite from the primary colours and hard typefaces that accompany the Constructivist style -- another communications approach that blossoms under ad mens' nimble fingers when the market gets dire.

My 2nd-Favourite Thing in the World Today.

By now you're thinking, "Your love, Angela, is cheap." Whether or not that's true is another story, but the crucial thing for you to do right now is push play (again, yes, again). Because this is Audrey Tautou and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, back together, reinterpreting Chanel No. 5.

See the making-of at Chanel No. 5's website, which rivals the above-embedded film in precious charm and mild laggage.

Oh, and love out to @angil for bestowing me with this 'net gem.

Because We Need More Camus in the Guns-a-Blazin' Genre.

Stella Artois reimagines Hollywood action flicks -- à la nouvelle vague:



"8 Kilomètres"






"Dial Hard"






"Vingt-Quatre Heures"






Effort's called Smooth Originals, premise follows thus:

Remember the days when men were strong and silent, women were chic and sophistiqué, and the action was as smooth as our 4% triple filtered beer? Formidable!

Godard, I'm sure, would blush prettily at the acknowledgment. Or at least Brigitte Bardot would.

Seeding Branded Videos

My friend Josh Warner of Feed Company wrote an awesome How-To for MarketingVOX this week. It provides tips for seeding branded videos. This isn't just a topic he knows well; it's one he's exhaustively passionate about. (Seriously. We'll be sitting over lunch, and he'll whip out his iPhone and go "Look at this, look at this, look at this." And it'll be wacky stuff, like ants doing battle, or breakdancing bees, or ... you know, some dude leaping into his own pants.)

The article provides useful examples of both successful and unsuccessful campaigns, in addition to a few handy guidelines for incorporating your brand in a web video.

I'm trying to make a point of publishing more material like this: helpful tools that don't just evangelize, but provide an actionable starting-point for marketers inexperienced in these areas. Let me know if you ever want to collabo, or if you have something you think we should syndicate.

Roll Your Smokes for a Treat

Explanation here.

Red Alert 3 Remix

"The only thing I can say about that is ... oh, snap."

Love this. 77,775 views and counting on YouTube, with an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars (665 ratings total). Find out why.

Microsoft Shafts Seinfeld Campaign

... in favor of a direct rebuttal to "Mac vs. PC." What's more, it claims this was its plan all along.

Ugh. Nobody knows how to commit anymore.

The Hunting of the Snark: Finding Value in Online Video Advertising

There are three types of ad:tech session:

• Roundtables, which look like opportunities for Socratic discussion but are actually ideal hostage scenarios for greedy salesmen.


• Polite affairs where a moderator, charged with exploring a given topic, poses questions in hopes of getting cotton-mouthed executives to divulge things they're not supposed to.


• The kind where a moderator -- contemptible creature -- invites panelists to pitch the audience one by one, and the topic be damned!

"The State of Online Video: Going Beyond the Pre-Roll" was the third type.

Things kick off with Josh Chasin of comScore mumbling figures into the mic, followed by Smith Forte of Current.TV. Then Rebecca Paoletti, director of video strategy at Yahoo, takes the stage.

Yahoo has two primary video ad methods:

1. Advertisers provide TV creative, which is immediately converted into a video ad. When a user mouses over it, he has the option of interacting with it in some way or visiting the website. The method is favored because it is simple and easy to execute on a whim.

2. Yahoo creates interactive (rich media) units for advertisers. "Anything you can do in a microsite you can do in the four corners of a video player," Paoletti explained. This model only comprises 10 percent of Yahoo's video ad revenue; the company looks at it as a "next step" and is pursuing ways to get clients more interested in "engagement metrics" (as opposed to gauging the quality of a campaign purely by click-through to a website).

"These are the basics -- what we sell day in and day out," says Paoletti.

But there's a wildcard in the mix: advertisers that want to be producers; that is, content contributors. To illustrate how Yahoo serves their needs, Paoletti shows us the homepage for Yahoo Sports Minute, sponsored by Dunkin' Donuts. See it for yourself: sports content shares slightly less-than-equal space with Dunkin' leaderboards, embedded TV spots and widgets.

Does this make Dunkin' Donuts a content producer? Because the method looks suspiciously like a page takeover. I doubt anyone would visit Sports Minute specifically to see Rachel Ray's controversial Dunkin' Donuts scarf spot.

I raise my hand.

"I don't understand the difference between the 'content producer' and the standard 'video advertising' model." Nobody would ever confuse Dunkin's presence on Sports Minute for content; they'd just perceive it as an overzealous ad buy.

"Good question," Paoletti begins. A pregnant pause develops before she explains that Yahoo also helps with amateur video-style deployments on video.yahoo.com -- think Ray Ban's "Guy Catches Sunglasses with Face" by Feed Company -- "but that's not something I wanted to get into today."

At that point, moderator Josh Chasin of comScore interjects to say he has questions for his fellow panelists, but would hate to take away from audience Q/A time. "How many of you plan to ask questions at the end of this?" he asks (and with a straight face!).

Tentative hands flutter up. Three panelists haven't even spoken yet; how can we know whether we'll have questions?

Chasin's burst of inquisitiveness yields one clear benefit: the evil plot to make us sit through elevator pitches gets totally derailed. For the next now-to-whenever, the panelists talk shop. It's nice to see them get on so well at the expense of everyone else's time.

A few scraps tossed out at random:

"There has to be a way to get beyond counting clicks, otherwise publishers won't get credit for their buying influence" over the long-term, says Simon Assaad of Heavy Corp.

Paoletti: there is no average CPM for video across the board, because any number of variables can change the cost of a buy. Video "needs to work, but just doesn't work" as a dependable ROI model.

Paoletti also says the future of digital video is mobile. Assaad, a contrarian at heart, confesses, "I'm actually not interested in mobile" and lamented embedded video was never really explored as an ROI platform.

"75-80 percent of video consumption online is not being taken advantage of by advertisers!" he says with feeling.

He goes on to say the recession drove advertisers into the arms of ad networks, whose company "would have made our skin crawl a few months ago."

Chasin wonders if there's a place for long-form video online. Forte points out Hulu's click-thrus for streaming shows is great. Plus, it doesn't cannibalize network TV. "This is catch-up viewing. It's a new industry," he beams.

Allen readily agreed, followed by Paoletti. Forte said short-form video isn't very good for ad click-thru because attention spans are shorter.

From a user perspective, I think pre- and post-roll ads should be confined to professional videos. People accept that a reasonable amount of advertising is a fair exchange for content that cost money to produce and is being provided at no cost. Nobody makes mental allowances for ads in amateur work.

I ask whether there's a practical benefit to putting amateur-style videos on YouTube. Forte calls them "mood setters" that help position the brand's vibe. No more, no less.

Chasin turns to the audience and asks if there are anymore questions. A random audience member quips, "Can we hold you hostage?"