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How can you not help but smile when you watch this new tv spot for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. It debuts tonight in the UK and if you're a product of the '80's like me, you'll love it.
It's not yet on Youtube, so check it out here.
It was created by Juan Cabral who recently got a lot of attention for his "balls" spot for Sony Bravia. The agency is Fallon.
Well done, Gents.
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A very smart move by Joost this week to open up their widget API to outside developers.
Now anyone, not just Joost, can develop widgets for Joost's interactive television programming.
It'll be interesting to see if Joost allows third-party developers to monetize their apps as Facebook has.
For me, the Open API movement continues to be one of the most exciting and interesting developments to happen on the web in years.
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Terrific quote from Thurston Moore about how breaking up could have been a better career move for Sonic Youth:
"The Pixies reunion was a real success, and Dinosaur Jr. seems like a big success,
and both those bands play as good as they ever did. Mission Of Burma
blew my mind when they came back. But a band like us never did break
up. Which was to our own detriment. What would have happened if we did
break up after Daydream Nation - or even
after Dirty - and had gotten back together two years ago? You'd be interviewing me at the Chateau Marmont as I'm waiting for my
limousine. We probably would have made so much money. "This was our
biggest career faux-pas - not breaking up."
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(Image from Stig Nygaard's Flickr photostream)
A quick follow-up to Friday's post asking why first-run films are not being offered on pay-per-view the same week they open in the theaters.
Well, it turns out that IFC is actually doing it.
Over the weekend, I was happy to see that amongst the first-run films IFC is offering on demand on Time Warner Cable is Hannah Takes The Stairs, the critically acclaimed indie hit that is currently the posterchild for the current "mumblecore" movement.
Yesterday, Facebook made a very smart adjustment in how they rank the most popular apps in their user directory.
Now, rather than rank the most popular apps based on the total number of people who have added them to their personal pages, Facebook is ranking the apps based on the total level of user engagement of that specific app each day.
So how does Facebook calculate engagement?
Facebook is defining engagement as "the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight). The touch points are: Canvas Page Views, Link Clicks in FBML, Mock-Ajax Form Submission, Click-to-Play Flash"
It's these seemingly little things that Facebook does that continues to impress me. Moving away from putting the emphasis on installs, and shifting the focus to actual interactions means that developers can't hide behind deceiving numbers.
I can't help but smile every time I walk past these Soprano's spoof ads for Meerkat Manor on Animal Planet. Definately my favorite series of ads out there right now.
Some things take a bit of time before they start to hit their stride.
When I first heard that Tyler Brûlé, the absolutely brilliant creator of Wallpaper Magazine and Winkreative, was launching a new culture and politics magazine called Monocle, my hope was that Brûlé would create an Economist magazine for a new generation.
But the first few issues of Monocle left me scratching my head, completely unsatisfied. I wanted to like Monocle, but with each and every issue I found myself reading less then 20% of it. It just wasn't working for me.
But then, just when I was about to give up on Monocle all together, on Friday I purchased the most recent issue, #6 (September 2007).
In a phrase, the new issue is absolutely brilliant and unlike the others, readable from cover to cover. The central theme of every article is "nation branding", and from this lens, Brûlé weaves a terrific tapestry of stories, opinions, and perspectives of how countries can be defined as brands.
Finally Brûlé has found a theme that suites his skills and the magazine well.
It's funny, the things that will get you pissed off.
Sometimes they come from very unexpected places.
There's an interesting article in this morning's Wall Street Journal that talks about the growing market in "Relic" guitars - new guitars that are made to look like they were created in the '60's and then distressed, beat-up, gashed, and nicked over years and years of rock-and-roll touring.
It turns out that you can buy these faux guitars in high-end guitar shops. They aren't cheap. A handmade replica of a distressed '60's Stratocaster costs $3,600 with the money going to "powerful industrial solvents to create worn spots in the paint, and the subfreezing accelerant from aerosol cans to mimic the subtle "weather checking" cracks that spider across old lacquer surfaces."
The Journal story includes terrific details like - "With sandpaper, workers simulate finger wear on the fretboard. They dull the chrome plating on brass fittings in a vibrating electric "tumbler" normally used by lapidary artists to polish rocks, then further degrade the metal using nitric acid, which also is used to rust screws and other steel hardware. Furniture dye and grease pencil imbue exposed wood with the nightclub-appropriate hues of tobacco smoke and spilled whiskey."
So how big a business is relic guitars?
Fender's Relic line is pulling in more than 12% of the $5 million Fender makes each year in sales.
Reading the story in Journal, nothing about Relic guitars really bothered me all that much. I thought it was interesting. Kind of like buying torn jeans for hundreds of dollars.
But then I came to a section in the article that really got me pissed off.
It turns out that not only are wanna-be rock stars and hedge fund managers buying these fake guitars, but real rock stars are buying and using them too.
The article states that musicians like Sting and Andy Summers of The Police and Steve Perry of Aerosmith are actually using replica guitars on the road, not than the real ones from their past, when they come out on stage for their reunion tours that people are paying hundreds of dollars to see.
I know that this may sound silly to some but it absolutely infuriates me to think that the guitars these guys are playing, that look like they've been used for years, are actually fake.
As a fan of classic rock films like The Last Waltz, Gimme Shelter, Woodstock, and tons of others, there's something exciting about seeing that shot of the roadie handing the guitarist his classic weathered beat up Strat. The film then inevitably cuts to a close-up of the guitarist absolutely killing it on the gutar. It's what makes a rock concert a rock concert. For me seeing a shot of the guitar stand and thinking how many cities and concerts those guitars must have been played in, is part of the experience. There's an authenticity to knowing that when Keith Richards picks up his old beat up guitar that it's the one that he's been touring with for years.
It's guaranteed that there will be a concert DVD of The Police's current reunion tour. To know that when that roadie hands Sting and Andy Summers their old worn Strats and the camera cuts to a close up, that's the guitars are actually fakes just, well, pisses me off.
My response as I put down the article - "Fuck these guys"
At electricArtists we currently don't do any media buying for our clients, although some people say that we should.
Maybe one day we will, but right now there are two reasons why media buying as a business doesn't interest me all that much.
First, as a business owner I'm not crazy about the idea of building a business on something that's almost entirely based on fixed margins.
Second, all too often media buying leaves too many good opportunities on the table because on the whole, it's not very creative.
So that I don't get pummeled by all of the people who I respect and admire that buy and sell media, I should clarify by saying that I think media buying can be creative and sometimes it is. It's just that too often, it's not. And because it's not very creative, it's also often not very strategic as well. I'm a fan of media buying when it is used to it's fullest. But too often, media buyers can be lazy.
Here's a prime example:
Tonight in my Facebook News Feed I noticed the following sponsored ad for an upcoming movie called Good Luck Chuck.
Here's the ad:
The ad then links to a sponsored page on Facebook that looks like this:
So here's my problem with it:
It's a huge missed opportunity.
It took me two seconds to realize that this deal was most likely done between a relatively uninformed buyer who doesn't yet understand Facebook and most likely a relatively lazy seller who never explained how Facebook actually works and how to maximize it if you are going to purchase it.
At a minimum the studio paid a quarter of a million dollars for this media buy. And with the ad buy they received a sponsored page on Facebook as part of the deal. (If they had purchased banner ads it would have linked to the film's official website but because they paid a premium to be added to the News Feed, they got a sponsored page)
So what's wrong with the page?
For me, everything.
First, the page has nothing to do with Facebook and leverages absolutely zero of Facebook's platform. All of the features on the page link out to the web with not one element of the page leveraging any of the things that Facebook charges a premium for.
Here a quick run down of all the "cool" things you can do on the Good Luck Chuck Facebook page.
You can send your friend "a kiss".
Over email.
You can send your friend a Good Luck Chuck e-card.
Again. Over email.
You can add a Good Luck Chuck icon to your profile.
To your AOL IM profile, Not Facebook.
You can download Good Luck Chuck wallpaper.
To your computer desktop.
There's not one thing on the page that has anything to do with Facebook other than adding the obligatory user comments (which currently show an equal amount of negative comments to good ones),
But for less than $20,000 more, the studio could have developed a suite of terrific Facebook native apps that would have linked fans together, created ongoing buzz on Facebook, and developed a widespread presence on users profile pages. All of these things would have increased in value over time leading up to opening weekend. That extra time and effort to create something that was not only good, but native to Facebook, could have made the six figure ad buy worth a whole lot more than just another set of impressions to add to the media plan.
There's one thing that the ad buy did achieve though. It allowed the media buyer to tell the client with a smile:
"Hey, you're on Facebook"
It let them check off a box on their media plan.
For me, media buying on Facebook not only has it's place and it's value, it's also something that we recommend to our clients. Media buying allows you to reach people that viral distribution won't. But for me, it should be done in a manner that takes into account (a) where it is paced and (b) who it is that it's reaching.
This campaign did neither.
