The plan is we have no plan

A couple of months ago, the Italian fashion company Diesel decided to throw a 30th birthday party.

The idea was to hold the event in 17 different countries on the same day. And everyone was invited. You could apply for a ticket to a gig near where you live or you could join in online.

Bands lined up to play included N.E.R.D, Mark Ronson, Pedro Winter, Mr Oizo and M.I.A. Called The Dirty 30 Party, the invitation was a viral video which took old porn movies and animated over them to give a new and innocent meaning to the naughty scenes you see.

At exactly the same time the viral was pinging its way around the globe, so too was a rumour about a special limited edition pair of birthday jeans for just €30. So, Diesel didn’t forget product while supporting the brand. And the results? Well, Diesel are keeping those to themselves at the moment. Be warned, if you’re conservative, mature in outlook as well as years, this video can offend.

But altogether less controversial, though equally lovingly made, is another recent Diesel video which has just won a Gold at the EPICA awards. It’s an adventure story and shows off Diesel Kid’s range beautifully and appropriately. You can see the whole 7 minute film on Youtube if you key in Diesel Kids Explorers.

Ten years ago, Diesel made brilliant TV ads. Now they don’t make TV ads at all. They make videos like these, which their audiences actively seek out and pass on to their friends.

You can’t put together a traditional media plan when you think about advertising on the internet. You can’t do predictive sums about frequency and reach. But you know what? Diesel don’t do these online ads because they’re modern and they’re fun. They do them because they work.

A new form of search

The Won Report is an annual survey of the world’s top direct marketing campaigns as measured by the awards they win.

It has just published its 2008 rankings (www.thewonreport.com) and at No.14 among the Top 20 campaigns of the year is a little gem from Argentina.

Natural Servicios sells gas-powered heating systems for swimming pools. They wanted to talk to the owners of pools about their products. The only problem was, there are no handy off-the-shelf lists of pool-owners they could buy. So they made their own by turning to Google Earth and searching the suburbs of Buenos Aires by air. Then they linked the online evidence to an offline address, and sent a simple mailing of a rubber ring and a video showing a pool party celebrating the new warmer water.

Sales are up 70% on last year.

God is dead

Simon Veksner writes one of the most-viewed advertising blogs in the UK. He’s one of a relatively rare breed – an advertising creative whose interests go beyond the latest Nike commercial. When he’s not winning awards for BBH with art director Nick Allsop for (most recently) Levis (“Cheerleaders” – winner at the UK’s Big Awards, if you want to know) Simon looks at the world around him.

And what he saw very recently was a bus-side selling atheism. It turns out that Ariane Sherine has raised well over £100,000 to run a campaign expressing the simple view that by all rational criteria there cannot possibly be a God. Make that Gods, plural, come to think of it.

Simon invited readers of his blog (http://scampblog.blogspot.com) to help Ariane by creating some more advertising ideas promoting Godlessness.

Now, if you google ‘atheist bus campaign’, there is page after page of url’s. Tens of thousands of people are talking to each other about God. Or the lack of Him.

Ariane is raising money hand over fist. Simon is getting some very witty contributions from imaginative people from around the world. It is a perfect demonstration of social media at work and if I was God, I would be looking for an agency. Now.

Long Live The Insane Art Director

What’s happening to the humble poster? It used to be six, 12, 36 or sometimes 48 sheets of paper pasted up onto a billboard with a headline no longer than 10 words.

In May, The Partners won D&AD Gold when, to get more people to visit the National gallery, they created identical copies of several of its masterpieces and hung them on walls around London.

Leo Burnett, Chicago won a Clio with McDonald’s when they grew 16 types of lettuce on a soil-based poster site and BBDO New York took Gold from the London International Awards with their campaign for the BBC created out of cables strung from apartment windows.

Stretching the poster is something BBDO NY seem to be particularly keen on doing these days. They were the guys who won Outdoor Gold at Cannes with a five-minute film projected onto the side of an apartment block for HBO. Jung von Matt won at the Cresta Awards and at New York Festivals with Ravensburger. The idea was to take make city-centre building sites look like giant Ravensburger jigsaw puzzles.

Design Factory has found ways you can spray graffiti onto Ecko Foundation sites using your mobile ‘phone and AIM Proximity got Frank’s Ginger Beer onto Youtube simply by putting some ginger sheep in a field beside a poster.

Colenso BBDO in Auckland, New Zealand, put up a poster for Deadline Couriers with an electronic clock running down to the moment when it would self-destruct. The promise was ‘When we give a time, we mean it’ – and this poster got on telly. The national news covered the story.

Perhaps the most innovative idea of the lot, though, comes from Ogilvy Pristina , who won the Grand Prix for design at The Golden Drum Awards with an idea that was half-poster, half-event. They commemorated the independence of Kosovo as a state by creating a sculpture of the word ‘Newborn’ and getting the citizens of the new state to sign it, starting with the new President and his Prime Minister.

Long live the insane art-director – as a famous poster from yesteryear once proclaimed.

Stephen Fry's Twitters

Twitter has always left me cold. I mean, who on earth would want to post staccato sentences about where they are and what they’re doing? More to the point, who would want to read them?

Well, answering the first question, Stephen Fry. And a growing throng of punters intrigued by the polymath’s tour of Africa. Go on. See what he’s up to right now because he’s got me to reconsider my views.

http://twitter.com/stephenfry

The site says he has 30,840 followers, but believe me, many, many more are logging on to have a look. Why this is interesting is because Fry is in the middle of making a documentary called “Last Chance” and by the time it gets to your TV screen, it will have 16,000 ambassadors.

His twitter has a commercial purpose to it though it is well disguised by Fry’s charm and his enthusiasm for what he’s doing.

For brands, Twitter is another of these baffling new opportunities. Baffling because you can’t use it as a vehicle for your advertisements. You can’t plug a product or push out a message because people will simply ignore it.On the other hand, if you start talking about things that are interesting, well, then you might get a following.

BBC Entertainment are twittering pretty neatly. Little hooks about celebs (Robert de Niro joins Daniel Craig on the red carpet at Bond premiere) get you clicking onto the main BBC News site. They do a lot of tweeting, whereas British Airways haven’t cheeped since October 26th.

To Twitter well, brands have to tweet continuously. Stephen Fry’s posting his thoughts several times a day.

They have to have something to twitter about. It doesn’t necessarily have to be about what the brand or its employees are doing. Dell, for instance, use it to offer a stream of money-off promotions.

If they haven’t got anything to talk about, then maybe it’s time to look at the brand positioning.

Lastly, they can’t expect any sort of measurable ROI just as you can’t expect financial reward for every conversation you start.