Last week Warc Asia held its inaugural Warc Conversation event in Singapore. The goal of these informal, after-work events is to share some best practice and get people talking about some of the emerging issues in Asia’s marketing industry.
And we were lucky enough in our first session to have two particularly outspoken (and, needless to say, very experienced) panellists to help: Charles Wigley, Chairman of BBH Asia and also chair of the 2012 Warc Prize for Asian Strategy; and Tim Broadbent, Global Effectiveness Director at Ogilvy.
Coffee and croissants on the lawn was off the agenda: a May downpour put paid to that notion. 'We can't even predict the weather,' noted Flamingo director David Burrows ruefully as he introduced Addiction to Prediction, the latest in a London-based series of Big Ideas Breakfasts from the brand and insight consultancy.
The weather is but one of the many forecasting activities people undertake every day, pointed out the event's main speaker, Daniel Franklin, The Economist's executive editor, responsible for its annual 'World In…' reports and editor of the 2012 book Megachange: The World in 2050. Predictions are an essential part of life: consider the setting of government, corporate and household budgets, infrastructure planning and political punditry, to say nothing of entire industries built around trend spotting and futurology. 'We're condemned to be addicted to prediction,' Franklin observed.
Despite the From Silicon Valley to Silicon Roundabout tag the IPA’s Creative Pioneers conference showed that creativity has no post code. London and California are influential not because they’re where stuff gets made, but because their products and platforms reach a global audience. Eager to learn the secrets of this success, 300-odd delegates from the marketing and advertising industry gathered at The Venue at Shoreditch Village to guzzle over-proof coffee, listen to talks from the likes of Facebook, Yelp, PlayGen, LinkedIn and Double Negative, and multi-task at the behest of IPA president Nicola Mendelsohn who urged delegates to: “Tweet. Blog. Make noise”.
Presentations ranged from a succinct plea for better technical education to a two-handed account of the history of Shoreditch, but the key ideas of the day can be summarised in five words.
The Warc/AA Advertising Expenditure report shows that UK advertising spend (excluding direct mail) grew by 2.8% in 2011 reaching £14.4 billion in total. Growth is expected to continue in 2012 with new forecasts predicting a 3.8% increase, well ahead of growth across the rest of the UK economy. 2012 growth forecasts identify internet (up 8.9%) and out-of-home (up 5.0%) as the strongest contributors during the Olympic year.
These forecasts show renewed optimism for the UK and for our leadership in the digital economy. Our latest infographic gives you an invaluable snapshot of what happened and what's to come. Click below to see the full image.
Okay, so Amazon has the largest slice of the digital bookselling pie. And for the next decade, Ian Fleming's legendary Bond novels will be exclusively available from Amazon publishing. How did they beat the spectre of Apple and other online publishers? Says Corinne Turner, Managing Director of Ian Fleming Publications, "The reason we're going with Amazon is we believe that their online abilities will bring our books to a much broader audience than we've had before." Turns out sometimes bigger is better.
This is obviously quite a coup for Amazon, who has more than one horse in this race. Not only will Amazon use Bond to power book sales and brand cred; Amazon also happens to currently sell the crowd-favorite device for the digital viewing of that content: the Kindle e-reader.
This week Warc is reporting from the Asian Marketing Effectiveness festival in Shanghai. Warc will be running a full conference report on the event. But as a taster, it’s worth highlighting the entertaining talk by Charles Wigley, Chairman of BBH Asia and the chairman of this year’s Warc Prize for Asian Strategy, and Rob Campbell, Regional Head of Strategy at Wieden & Kennedy.
Their theme? Five wrongheaded ideas that simply won’t go away.
It was just announced that Donald Trump lent his name to a new luxury skyscraper project. Yawn, yawn? Not surprised? Well you might be if you knew where the building is going to be located.
It turns out that the planned building is in ex-Soviet Georgia. Yes, that ex-Soviet Georgia. The one that just emerged from a four-year war with Russia. They used to have a regular flow of tourists, but with most of the hotels and resorts turned into shelters for displaced persons, the country is now having to rebuild in order to attract Western tourists with Western cash. So a luxury skyscraper sounds like just the thing.
Once in too-great a while (if the mega-money spent on creating television advertising is considered) a brand message comes along that deserves high praise. As brand communication researchers, ads worthy of glory, to our minds, are those that do the job advertising is actually hired to do: both get noticed, and – crass as this may sound – move the viewer to give the advertiser priority when it comes to choosing a brand. That's why advertising is harder than simply making entertainment, and why P&G's effort for Mother's Day deserves this public shout out.
Since BMW blew the tires off the branded entertainment vehicle with their mini-movies, brands have been trying to use longer-format pieces to tell their story, trying to access the emotion they know builds brand meaning – and loyalty. Yet, what seems to happen far too often is one of two things: the message is a mini-movie that is disconnected from the brand and its strategy, or the product placement is so heavy-handed that viewers click out with a long audible sigh.
Tiffany & Co. celebrates its 175th anniversary this year with a little brand alchemy. Press releases trumpeting Tiffany's posh "new jeweler's metal," coined and trademarked Rubedo (Latin for "red"), continues unabated. But many specialists have taken umbrage with both the "new" and the "metal" portions of Tiffany's claim.
Rubedo, a beautiful blush-gold, is actually composed of small parts silver and zinc, 55% copper, and only 31% gold; in fact, Rubedo has no actual karat value, or too low as to not matter. As specialists point out, it's an alloy, not a new metal, and it turns out it's not all that valuable (despite the $7,500 price tag attached to their "Ultrawide Rubedo Cuff"). From a brand whose sumptuous tagline was "diamonds by the yard," Rubedo might seem like the tarnish on a once-gilded brand.
How emotionally intelligent is the marketing and MR community? I recently ran a workshop on Why Emotions Matter with a large group of UK clients. One of their tasks was to come up with an elevator speech that would convince a sceptical CEO (say, Lord Sugar of Apprentice fame) of the benefits of researching emotional response to his brand or advertising. Whilst the task was accepted enthusiastically by all, when it came to the crunch no one volunteered to deliver the speech. What became clear was that few felt they had the ammunition to (metaphorically) gun down an aggressive or powerful sceptic. One (not particularly shy) lady even suggested that she wouldn't get in the elevator at all! It seems then that the case for emotion still has yet to be made and won conclusively.
So what arguments might convince a sceptical CEO to become "emotionally intelligent" about his brand?