Adcademy

What’s with Direct in Denmark?

2009-09-22T00:45:00.000-07:00

The Big Won (www.thebigwon.com) is an online database that ranks agencies and campaigns around the world by the quantity and the quality of awards they win.
A quick poke around the data reveals that there are some outstanding agencies in Denmark. Hjaltelin, Stahl & Co, for instance, won a fair number of Direct awards in 2008 for City Post with ‘Log Cabin’.

In 2009, however, only Robert Boisen and Saatchi & Saatchi Copenhagen feature in The Big Won’s rankings of the best of Direct. Robert Boisen’s “Gas Station” idea for Suzuki won Bronze at Cannes but it could win so much more – if they entered it.

Has the recession hit Danish agencies so hard they can’t afford to enter international shows? Or is it simply that you Danes just don’t care about awards? Or maybe it’s because no-one knows what is direct any longer? Selling fuel at a 30% discount, for instance. It’s not an ad, it hasn’t got a coupon, but it directly helped increase sales of Suzuki cars by 12.5%.

So, take a look at your recent work. It may be more Direct than you think. And enter it for The Caples Awards because Direct is no longer just 'shit that folds' and goes in an envelope. It’s anything that provokes a response.

/Patrick Collister/

Buying humour

2009-08-24T02:50:00.000-07:00

David Ogilvy did not like funny television commercials. He said, “No-one buys from a clown.”
He liked to construct rational messages which drew people in with charm and wit, yes, but which persuaded them to part with their hard-earned cash by giving darned good reasons for doing so.

The trouble is, human beings aren’t really rational.
Ask any husband about his wife. Or any wife about her husband.
People do things for reasons they often can’t explain even to themselves. Often this is because there has been a huge emotional response to a situation; to a person; hey, even to an advertising message.

Coca-Cola was the first mega-brand to tap into this when it got a United Nations of teenagers to sing “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” way back in the 1970’s.
That was advertising with a big mushy heart.

But advertising can work just as effectively when it’s just plain funny.
A commercial that makes you laugh out loud is a brand saying, “We’d like you to like us. And we know we are interrupting you here so we’ll try to be as neighbourly about it as possible.”

So here are a couple of recent neighbourly ads. One from Doug Agency Toronto for the Canadian Short Film Festival and one from Forsman and Bodenfors, Stockholm, for Tele-2.

Spam on the pavement

2009-08-24T02:46:00.000-07:00

We’ve seen more and more advertising take to the streets in recent years. Literally. Guerilla marketing, experiential communications, call it what you will, it is basically what happens when you create some sort of a branded stunt which, you hope, will get the punters to notice you, talk about you and maybe even try you.

Few products come as far down the scale of ‘important to my life’ than kitchen towel. Is it possible to establish a brand in such a low-interest category?

Brawny, another big US kitchen towel maker, had a damn good go with brawnyacademy.com, a series of reality TV documentaries which aired online. And now here’s Bounty trying to create a bit of a stir in New York with a giant cup of coffee spilled and in Los Angeles with a massive melting ice-lolly.

There’s a terrible danger that as agencies pursue what are now called ‘engagement strategies’, all they really do is make a nuisance of themselves.
Even if it’s intended to be playful and fun, if an idea isn’t both relevant and branded it is no more than street spam.

Anyone for tennis?

2009-08-24T02:39:00.000-07:00

Technology isn’t just making possible completely new ways of communicating with people, but new ways of making brands become useful friends at the same time.
Take the iPhone app.

Kraft’s iFood application got into Apple’s Top 10 apps at the beginning of the year. Not bad, given that they were charging 99c for it in the USA.
Imagine that, people actually paying to interact with your brand?!

Okay, it’s true that the iPhone has 98% penetration among advertising creative directors and only 4% penetration of the total American mobile market but what Apple did was to force the other cellphone manufacturers into seeing that apps are going to be as important to their businesses going forward as texting was.

So here’s IBM and their agency Ogilvy London creating a stunning new app for visitors to this year’s Wimbledon to download to their mobiles.
As you wander through the crowds, you hear a noise. Point your phone and IBM Seer tells you why the crowd roared, what’s happening, who’s dropped a set etc.
Want to know where the toilets are? Seer shows you the way, helpfully telling you there’s a half-hour queue at the ladies’.

It pulls in all the twittering of the players and the pundits so you can join the debates. Is Federer on his last legs? (No) Has Andy Murray got what it takes? (No) Is this a really cool tool for tennis nuts to use, which will make them think both admiringly and fondly of Big Blue? (Yes)

What do they know in Cannes?

2009-08-24T02:23:00.000-07:00

TV may be fragmenting but it is still capable of delivering massive audiences. Sport, for instance, still gets millions of us tuning in for the big (and even the not-so-big) matches.

Rather than buy an expensive 30-second spot in any of the major Euro 2008 soccer games, what Robert Boisen did for Puma sportswear was to steal those audiences to sell Puma’s X-Ray collection.

Four top players – Mauro Camoranesi, Freddy Ljunberg, Nicholas Anelka and Alexander Frei – were given ‘tattoos’ to wear when they went out to play. Curiosity did the rest. Fans began to notice the tattoos of bones and started searching online for explanations.

Soon they found xrayplayers.com where they were able to get under the players’ skins, literally, finding out hidden stories about their lives and their careers.

Just as the X-Ray range was designed with the inside on the outside, so the idea was to do the same with the stars. Get to know them inside out. More than just a nice bit of brand building, the website was also transactional. You could click on any item the stars were wearing and get a price for it – and buy it online.

A cool idea that turned four players into mobile posters in front of an audience of at least 100 million at a fraction of the cost of a standard TV ad.

So why didn’t it win an award at the Cannes International Advertising Festival last week? It certainly deserved to.

Probably because, these days, to get a Gold at a major advertising show, your submission has to be a brilliant bit of advertising in its own right. At Cannes, you now have to provide a short video explaining the problem, the idea and giving some indication of the results.

Robert Boisen seem to have put all their effort into producing a great campaign for their client rather than into producing a great video for themselves.

T-Mobile. T-ranscending media.

2009-02-05T06:28:00.001-08:00

What we see increasingly in the world of marcomms is the rise and rise of the branded event. It’s advertising that transcends media.

Take the HBO ‘Voyeur’ campaign from BBDO New York. It was a film projected onto a wall which drew people into an online experience, which then got fed back to a wider audience through TV advertising.

It was difficult for awards juries to say exactly what sort of an idea it was so they gave it prizes for Outdoor, Digital, Direct Marketing, TV advertising and Media Innovation.
Other similar ideas were Shackleton’s ‘Monument’ for the Spanish Association of Gynaecologists and Fallon’s ‘Foam’ for Sony cameras. These are ideas that start with live events which become online content, inviting people in to both share and grow the experience.

The first campaign of this sort that we’ve seen this year is from the UK, the T-Mobile Liverpool Street extravaganza. On Monday January 19th, 316 actors and T-Mobile staff sprang into life at the railway station and began a Fame Academy routine that startled and entertained the few legitimate train passengers who were milling around. The whole flashmob routine was filmed and broadcast as a commercial the next day, taking over an entire break on Channel 4.

Already on Youtube the movie has had over 1 million views. There are also clips captured by punters who were there on their camera-phones. And now at Liverpool Street station the digital poster sites there are playing those clips back to the people who created them. What’s more, the new campaign theme of ‘Life’s for sharing’ has now been sold into their own people, who were actively encouraged to be a part of the event.

Clever stuff from Paul Silburn, the creative tyro at Saatchi & Saatchi, London.

How observant are you?

2009-02-05T06:26:00.000-08:00

No-one is entirely sure what makes a piece of video go viral. Some agencies think it’s got to be a bit naughty (the boys behind the Fleggaard video) and some think it’s got to be entertaining:

Most, however, simply can’t predict what will happen. Russell Davies, the brilliant commentator on all things cyber (russelldavies.typead.com) has written that many companies would be better off hiring more people to talk to consumers one to one than running ad campaigns on TV.

And Transport for London seem to have been listening. They seem to have someone on the payroll whose job it is to surf the net, plugging TfL’s latest video wherever he goes. His job is to go out and make audiences. Which is interesting.

He’s cheaper than a network spot and he seems to be doing his job pretty well. So on his behalf, have a look at the video here and then go to www.dothetest.com.
Here you will find a piece of film that has gone wildly viral not just thanks to Martin Uttley but because it is amazing.

The joy of shaving

2009-02-05T06:24:00.000-08:00

Recently we were working on a project that involved shaving. A casual search in Youtube came up with this gem made by Lee Rubenstein.

Compare and contrast with Gillette’s recent TV ad. Roger Federer, Tiger Woods and Thierry Henry poncing around in black suits. Campaign Magazine in the UK voted it Turkey of the Year.
The amateur film has more wit, more surprise and more point than the spot that cost a million.
If an ad is rubbish, there’s every chance people will believe the product is rubbish too.

We are getting used to what used to be trusted brands becoming untrustworthy. Mercedes make cars that fall over, Ford make cars that have to be recalled because they crash, Nestle milk substitutes turn out to be harmful to babies. Cadbury’s CEO, Todd Stitzer, really thought that salmonella in his chocolate was not a problem.

What saved his brand from ruin was a gorilla on drums. Gillette need to find some charm as well. At the moment, every ad they run reveals the heartlessness of the organisation. In response, people are turning to brands that appear to have some sort of integrity. King of Shaves, for instance.

Last year, around $470 billion was spent on advertising that was somewhere between okay and appalling. That’s $470 billion which might actually be undermining the very brands that have been investing in communications.

At Adcademy we applaud creativity. Not because it’s nice to have but because
In these times of consumer opt-out it is essential. Creative brands want to touch people by sharing stuff – even if it’s just sharing a laugh.

Lee Rubenstein is a giver. Gillette, however, are on the take.

AKQA's genius jingle

2009-02-05T06:23:00.000-08:00

Most agency Christmas cards are crap.

This is usually because the approval process is unbelievably painful. More people get involved than would do on the client side buying even a major TV campaign.

For agencies desperate to show what they can do, it’s a creative opportunity wasted.
Last year, Shackleton, Madrid, managed to win awards around the world with their card.
They figured that their clients would either want a traditional ham or they’d like something shiny and tecchy. So they decided to give them both. The i-Ham, a brilliant pastiche of Apple design and finest Spanish porker.

This year, the one electronic card that stands out above a largely disappointing inbox, is AKQA’s offering. I hope it leads to some nice presents at The Big Awards, Cannes, etc.

Suck on this from Orange

2009-02-05T06:17:00.000-08:00

How do you get guys who are into football to sign up for your results service? Turn to a rugby player, obviously.

Orange in France, through agency Buzzman, created a viral film in which French rugby legend Sebastian Chabal lines up to kick a goal. As you watch the video, suddenly Chabal stops and reaches into his pocket for his mobile ‘phone. To your amazement, it is YOUR mobile that he is calling.

“I have doubts,” Chabal tells you. “Help me by telling me where I should direct my kick.” You are shown how to use the numbers on your phone to direct him. Kapow.

And then you think it’s so cool you mail it on to a dozen of your friends, thus allowing Orange to capture over 1 million names, e-mail addresses and ‘phone numbers.

Incidentally, if you press the number 5 to help Chabal score, he doesn’t do what you might expect him to. This really intriguing use of mobile marketing to sell a mobile service was a worthy winner of the Grand Cristal du Marketing at the Meribel Advertising Festival and is a pointer to things to come. Respect to Buzzman.

The plan is we have no plan

2008-12-15T03:05:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-15T03:03:00.001-08:00

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

2008-12-11T01:55:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-11T01:45:00.000-08:00

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

2008-12-11T01:40:00.000-08:00

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.

Obama's Changing Advertising

2008-11-17T01:57:00.000-08:00

At most of the awards shows, the stuff that wins prizes in the digital categories is very often video material of one sort or another. It’s high quality entertainment designed first and foremost to raise awareness. Think of campaigns like Win Nick’s Life for Steinlager. It’s a good old-fashioned TV commercial given a new form online.

We tend to forget that digital is a great direct marketing medium allowing brands not just to talk one-to-one about their products or their offers but to get people to do something.
The Obama campaign hasn’t forgotten. There are some brilliant marketers helping get a Kenyan into the White House and this viral is just one among many inspired ideas. Sooner rather than later someone is going to write a book about it. But not only is Obama going to change the world, we hope, but he is already changing advertising.

The art of DM is in making the message personal and this takes personalisation to extraordinary lengths. Here’s the link if you want to send personalised videos to your friends:
http://www.cnnbcvideo.com/taf.shtml?hp=1

/Patrick Collister/

Out of the box advertising

2008-11-17T01:56:00.000-08:00

There is still a role for good old-fashioned flag-waving advertising on the web. You know, the sort of messaging that simply demands your attention.

So, while the more eye-catching ideas these days are the big experiential campaigns, every now and then it’s a pleasure to see nothing more complicated than a banner ad done well.
Here are a couple for you, one for Nintendo’s Wario Land and the other for France’s T-Net.
When writing press ads, young creatives were always taught to try to use the medium to best effect.

Get the reader to turn the page upside down. Or look through it. Or refer to the editorial around it. In other words, do something to engage as well as to inform. That principle has been taken online with these two ads.

Have a look and you’ll see. In both the rules of webpage design have been flouted with the help of a flash overlay. In both, the ad spills out of the box it’s supposed to belong to.

Both have acquired lives of their own beyond the pages they were originally placed on and are reaching hundreds of thousands of new viewers by virtue of nothing more than their creativity.

/Patrick Collister/

Schlepping to the White House

2008-11-17T01:55:00.000-08:00

One of the new rules of communication is we are in a business about communities. How can you get people to come together in groups discuss your brand, to contribute to it and, actually, to become a part of it? What makes it hard for brand owners is to do this successfully you have to stop being control freaks.

Here’s an example. The accountants Deloittes wanted to recruit the brightest young grads to join their firm after university. So, they gave camcorders to some of their own staff and got them to make films about their jobs. What resulted were some charming, funny, interesting little movies which were charming, funny and interesting precisely because the powers-that-be did not lay down guidelines, make rules or tell their people what to do or say.

This isn’t only getting students talking to each other about what a very different sort of firm Deloittes must be, it’s getting people at Deloittes talking to themselves about what a different sort of firm it must be. And there’s a chance that soon it really will be.
Another current example of an online community being created to effect change is at www.thegreatschlep.com.

Because the last US election hinged on Florida, where Al Gore lost (or was robbed, depending on your point of view) of the White House by just 586 votes, Democrats are taking the state very seriously indeed. The idea, in both the viral and the website, is to get young Jews to fly to Florida to persuade their grandparents to vote for Obama.

The campaign uses comedienne Sarah Silverman whose views in the vid are definitely not politically correct. Watch the young black guy sitting beside her. Best line?

“Yes, Barack Hussein Obama is a shitty name but you would expect someone named Manischewitz. Guberman might understand that..”

What’s making this both effective and famous communication is it isn’t filtered.
So it is acquiring a life of its own, helping to create a community large enough to make sure that the one man who might possibly help recalibrate the world gets elected.

/Patrick Collister/

Metropolitan Republic

2008-11-17T01:54:00.000-08:00

MTN is a telecoms company in South Africa. They had the idea of reaffirming their right-on values with their young and liberal target audience by declaring that they would contribute 10 Rand for every phone sold on National Women’s Day to POWA, a charity supportive of abused women.

Someone at the agency must have thought, “Hmmm. 10 Rand? That’s only 6.5DKK. Peanuts.”

Then that someone looked at the production budget. Around 82,000 DKK. Not large but equivalent to selling 12,500 phones. And he or she then thought, “Well why don’t we get all the ads done for as little as possible so we can pass on the savings to the people who need the money most.”

That became the idea. To do home-made ads while still billing the client for a more polished product.

So the TV commercial was made in Powerpoint with the music track recorded on a mobile phone (a Samsung, we hope) by the art director, who fancied himself as a musician.

The money saved on camera hire is now paying the healthcare costs of 22 young Mums. And the money saved on actors is paying to help educate 35 girls.

The same principle was extended to all the other marketing activity. Instead of posters on the street, volunteers wandered around with the message on cardboard sheets. The window displays of MTNs shops were similarly hand-drawn.

And everyone emerges from the campaign with a smile. POWA got a heck of a lot more money than they would have done otherwise; Samsung flogged plenty of phones; MTN got famous advertising and an undeserved reputation for being caring-sharing kinda guys (because, let’s face it, 10 Rand per phone is not generous); and the agency, The Jupiter Drawing Room, is winning awards.

Beer Widgets

2008-11-17T01:48:00.002-08:00

Since ad agencies discovered widgets they’ve been creating all sorts of digital bric-a-brac for the brands they manage.

The most useless of them all, in the current climate anyway, is the widget that keeps track on your investments at the bank. Designed in headier days, it was supposed to show you how your money was mounting up rather than draining way.

Those that have worked best have been the genuinely useful widgets. For instance, the Guinness ‘Cantonese Translator’ designed for visitors to the Hong Kong Rugby 7’s tournament. Lost? Need to find your way to a certain bar or hotel? The application lets you find the phrases you need on your mobile phone then translates them into Cantonese. Simply hold your phone to the ear of a native and await a flurry of hand movements to help you on your way. Clever, eh?

But here’s a completely useless widget from another beer brand, Carling. It’s very silly and very ‘sticky’.

It’s generated a lot of chat precisely because it is so pointless.
So, if you want to make friends with your consumers, here are two ways to do it. You can be thoughtful and helpful. Or just give them a laugh.

Good Old Yellow Pages

2008-11-17T01:48:00.001-08:00

Around the world anyone who claims to be remotely hip and cool has been devising his/her strategy for getting a hold on one of the new 3G iPhones.

In New Zealand, those clever little folk at Aim Proximity Auckland hit on the beezer wheeze of turning Apple’s hype into a bit of cheap PR for their own client, Yellow Pages.

What they did was to place their own man at the front of the queue outside the Vodafone store. Three days before the iPhone was made available to all those willing to sign up new, punishing contracts, smiling, friendly Jonny Gladwell established territorial rights to be the first Kiwi to get his mitts on one.

The clever part was, to help him get through his three days and three nights outside the store, Yellow Pages put him in touch with everyone who could supply him with what he needed.
From his fluffy jacket (from Kathmandu) to his food (Pizza Hut), the heater (First Party Hire) to the exercise cycle (Fitness Works), not forgetting his earplugs (Radius Pharmacy) when he wanted to sleep and caffeine (Esquires Coffee) when he wanted to keep awake, Yellow Pages were there to to make queuing comfy if not exactly fun.

The idea got huge PR and drove the punters to a website where they could win the ‘phone that Jonny bought –eventually.

Is it a media stunt? Is it a PR idea? Is it direct marketing? Is it just bloody great? The answer is yes.

Have a peep at the site at http://jonny.yellowpagesgroup.co.nz/

/Patrick Collister/

The band’s a brand

2008-11-17T01:46:00.000-08:00

If we think we’ve got problems in adland, pity the poor sods in the music industry.
Nine out of ten music lovers download their music free.

So, if your business model is based on the exchange of money for good old-fashioned vinyl, tape or disc, then the internet is your nemesis. Unless you are Radiohead.

Everyone knows the band broke new ground when they released ‘In Rainbows’ last year. They offered it as an online download in return for whatever their fans thought was a fair price.

It turned out that most thought a fair price was absolutely bugger all so the band had to revert to traditional methods of sale and distribution. But they’re nothing if not inventive, because next up they invited their fans to buy their song ‘Nude’ from iTunes in five separate bits. Bass, vocals, guitar, strings and drums, you could mix them any which way you fancy. (And if you do fancy, go to www.Radioheadremix.com/buy.)

A widget allows you to put your version up on your MySpace page, or any other page you run, for that matter, as well as uploading it to the radioheadremix site for others to vote for. Or not.

Now Radiohead’s most recent wheeze is to surrender all rights to the video for their latest single, ‘House of Cards’. 1.6 million people have had a butcher’s at it on Youtube alone and who knows how many have downloaded it for free from the band’s website, www.radiohead.com.

What they are encouraging everyone to do is not just download the vid but download the code behind it. Code because the whole thing’s digital. No camera, no lights, no bacon sarnie. All done on a desktop.

Once you’ve got the code, you can make your own mash-up. All a bit complicated for me but a few braver souls have gone to code.google.com/creative/radiohead and have had a stab at it. You can see some of the results at www.youtube.com/group/houseofcards.

The point is, Radiohead are shifting from band to brand simply by being interesting. And the relationships they are building with all those Radiohead heads out there will, one-day, be worth good money.

Marketers take note.

/Patrick Collister/

A Cunning Stunt

2008-11-17T01:45:00.000-08:00

Kiwi émigré in London, Tim Ellingham, did not think much of English beer and asked his mates back home in New Zealand to send him some Speight’s, NZ’s best-selling brew.

Learning of this, Speight’s decided to build a proper Kiwi pub and ship it over to the UK so Tim and his Earls Court buddies could have a decent piss-up.
Or, put another way, Publicis Mojo in Auckland wondered if they couldn’t do something a bit more involving than just make another TV commercial.

The story ran around the world of the five volunteers (among the thousands who applied) aboard the MV. Lida, bringing the ale-house to the mother country.
It’s even on the Motor Boats Monthly website, for heaven’s sake!

As the lads made their way from New Zealand to Samoa, on to Panama, the Bahamas, New York and then London, they blogged and vlogged their experiences. And opened up the pub every evening for an hour!

Okay, so it’s what media planners call ‘a stunt’ but a stunt that reached several million TV viewers when it made the news on both sides of the world; a stunt that has spawned a 60-min TV documentary; that was followed daily on national radio; that got people talking; that drove Speight’s back to number one in the market. A stunt that wouldn’t have worked as well without social media.

The point is, it’s not easy to place messages in social media, but if an idea is intriguing enough, it’s where it gathers momentum through wob. (Word of blog.)

However, before we assume this is yet another death knell for TV advertising, the news in the UK is that spending on TV advertising is up. The good old-fashioned commercial still remains the single most important way to reach mass audiences.

Even though they are selling a console game, Halo 3, Microsoft used trad media to launch the game on September 12th last year.

The campaign won the Grand Prix at the Clios this year and more awards are coming.

/Patrick Collister/

My muthafuckin’ phone

2008-11-17T01:43:00.002-08:00

People have been talking up mobile marketing for years but there’s been little evidence of any genuinely engaging mobile content - until recently.

In January, Lynx launched their ‘Get in there’ campaign with a host of apps you can download to your phone to make it look like a harmonica, sound like a spray or, best of all, turn it into a ‘fit girl finder’.

You can make your phone click like a geiger counter and pretend it has been programmed to search out only really hot babes. This little bit of instant theatre gives you permission to start chatting up girls. In other words, it helps you ‘get in there’.

This interactivity means the brand has moved from simply telling angst-ridden teenagers it can help to becoming genuinely useful. The brand is repositioning itself as every teenager boy’s good mate.

The Royal Navy has been doing something similar, providing a useful, if unexpected, service with its ‘Get the Message’ viral. The way this works is, you go to www.getthemessage.net and write an e-mail to a friend which then gets delivered in video form. It’s funny to have a message about something completely trivial like ‘see you in the pub at 6’ delivered by a lantern-jawed helicopter pilot. It’s a neat way of telling teenagers that there is a greater breadth of careers in the Navy than they may have supposed but without actually lecturing them about it.

However, the most awarded idea in mobile marketing to date is the campaign for Volkswagen spare parts in Germany. The message sets out to warn teenagers that if they don’t use VW-manufactured parts for their ageing Golfs, then they must expect to pay the consequences.
A viral film was seeded in a number of sites showing an elderly couple having dinner. The cuckoo clock whirrs into action but instead of a cuckoo, out pops a little black rapper who sings ‘Yo muthafuckah, yo.’

The viral sent viewers on to a microsite where they could download the rap as a ringtone. You could argue that that is being useful. Now, when the nation’s youth talk to each other, on buses, trams and trains, around 100,000 phones start muttering ‘yo muthafuckah’ daily.

This is progress.

/Patrick Collister/

Where P&G lead, will Reckitt Benckiser follow?

2008-11-17T01:43:00.001-08:00

For years P&G relentlessly applied their formula of advertising to each and all their brands.
They found a benefit, turned it into a message and repeated it endlessly. The phrase ‘interruption advertising’ was coined to describe how Ariel, Lenor, Tide, Head and Shoulders and scores more all ran TV commercials that were witless, irritating and which worked.

Why, then, five years ago, did P&G decide to take creativity seriously? The answer is in the speech P.G.Lafley gave to his assembled marketers in 2006 when he said, “We must learn to let go.” The dilemma for the modern marketer, he observed, is that the more in touch you are with your customers, the less control you actually have over your brands. In urging his people to get in touch, he went on to say that P&G must also learn to apply the same principles of R&D to its communications as it does to improving the performance of its products.

“We must experiment”, he said.

The result of all this is that in all the awards shows we monitor at The Big Won, agencies are winning prizes with P&G. So many prizes, in fact, that P&G was Advertiser of the Year at Cannes.

This would have been inconceivable not long ago. It is further evidence that in the new order of media, you have to do more than give people good reasons for buying your products, you have to get them to like what you do as well.

One day Reckitt Benckiser will learn this lesson. But after another year of record sales driven by advertising modelled on the P&G methods of the 1960’s, their top brass will pooh-pooh the notion. The first downturn in their sales figures may see a change of heart.

Inconceivable as it may seem now, perhaps Reckitt’s Cillit Bang will be winning Golds as P&G’s Crest is.

/Patrick Collister/

Terminator

2008-11-17T01:41:00.000-08:00

Recently, I’ve been pondering this whole business of ‘the line’ in advertising.
A lot of below-the-line agencies insist that there is no line any longer and they claim to be as able to create brand communications as well as any above-the-line bunch.
It’s a pride thing. It grates to be considered below the salt. Beneath contempt. The underlings of advertising.

It’s also a money thing. There is still a lot of budget sloshing around in advertising and direct marketing agencies would like to get their hands on some of it, especially now the Bellweather Report suggests that as the credit crunch extends out into the world beyond banking and real estate, investment in DM is dropping.
It occurs to me that there most definitely is still a line. But it’s not horizontal. It’s vertical.

What this means is that the line does not separate brand advertising from acquisition and retention strategies, as it used to, it connects them.

The point being, depending on the nature of the task, the line slides. It moves from the strictly rational sort of offer-based message, which has traditionally been the preserve of direct marketing agencies, across to the more engaging sort of video-based content which ad agencies specialise in making.

If you buy the vertical line theory, then agencies are either left-of-line or right of it.
Two of the most interesting beside-the-line agencies in the world are BBDO, New York, which is doing remarkable work across all channels – but building brands. And 20:20 London, which is doing equally remarkable work across all channels but left-of-line, creating, analysing and re-using the data it captures.

This campaign for the TV series ‘Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles’ drives visitors from media-rich banners to http://www.terminate-a-mate.com. Key in a friend’s mobile number and they get sent a video message warning them the terminator knows who they are and where they are.

This idea is based on a thorough understanding of the core target audience and how digital cleverness like this turns them on.

Results – lots of buzz, lots of videos uploaded to Youtube, and Virgin’s best-ever audience for a TV show.
And big respect to 20:20, a top beside-the-line agency.

Let go of the Foam

2008-11-17T01:40:00.000-08:00

The trouble with being brilliant is that sustaining your brilliance gets harder and harder until, well, it just gets too hard. After “Citizen Kane” Orson Welles just gave up and concentrated on sherry commercials. After “Heart of Darkness” what did Francis Ford Coppola do? Well, go to www.ffcpresents.com and you’ll see. He’s taken up cooking.

What about Fallon? The London agency has had a phenomenal run of success, from Sony “Balls” through to “Paint” and “Rabbits” and on to Tate “Tracks”, Skoda “Cake” and the astonishing gorilla.

Now, however, they seem to be in danger of parodying their own ads. Their latest offering for Sony, this time for their cameras, is “Foam”. There is already a lot of blurb about it in cyberspace. When they made “Balls”, both client and agency were unprepared for the explosion of interest online in what they were doing. San Franciscans uploaded images and movies of bouncing balls and even edited their own Sony ads long before the official commercial was aired. Since then, client and agency have made sure their offline and their online communications dovetail in together.

So, we are already aware of the foaming ad, and tens of thousands will have seen it even though it isn’t ‘released’ here until the first week of May. But I’m disappointed in it, I’m afraid. It’s actually rather beautiful to watch – and is rather touching too, appealing to the child within. You can expect to see it at Cannes. But that word ‘it’ is the giveaway. It is one commercial, whereas what I expected from the hype was a more liberated kind of advertising.

I imagined that since Sony had handed out around 200 cameras of one sort or another to the citizens of Miami before releasing 4 millions gallons of fluff, they would all upload their movies and their stills and edit their own ads, hundreds of them. Rather than just one commercial, controlled by the agency creative team sitting in an edit suite in Soho, there would be many, put together by those who were there. And by those who weren’t.

Fallon have let balls, paint and rabbits loose on the street, creating magical events that drew in both real and virtual bystanders in their millions. But they still haven’t quite learned to let go completely. Yet.

/Patrick Collister/

Sony Play-Doh

2008-11-17T01:39:00.001-08:00

When Fallon London, filmed the Sony “Balls” commercial, they
were aghast when their ad was broadcast before they had even seen
the first edit. The citizens of San Francisco, watching half a million
balls bouncing down their streets, had used their camera phones
and camcorders to make their own ads for Sony.

When Fallon shot the second ad in the series, “Paint”, they were
better prepared and dripped a series of clues into the blogosphere
about what the idea was and where they planned to film it. So,
when they arrived at the Glasgow block they were about to blow
up, a crowd of 150 awaited them – and an enterprising guy in a van
selling beefburgers. With the third commercial, “Play-Doh”, Sony
are wised up to what marketers now call “social networking”. In
other words, online chat.

Long before “Play-Doh” aired last Friday, they had released plenty
of glimpses of plasticine bunnies hopping around New York.
Type in “Sony Balls” into Google and you get given ove 250,000
pages you can go to. Click in “Sony Bunnies” and there are
950,000. ‘Nuff said.

In the new order TV advertising simply drives viewers to another
medium where they can have a more immersive experience.
So, we aren’t allowed to show you the commercial itself but we can
direct you to www.colourlikenoother.com, where you can be
immersed. And, hey, it’s a good site.

Did you know that carrots were purple until 250 years ago? This
and other interesting colour-related trivia is all yours as and when
you click.

In the meantime, sales of Sony Bravia TV’s continue to soar. After
the “Balls” commercial had run four weeks, it was pulled from 13
markets – because they had run out of tellies to sell.

This campaign makes me proud to be in advertising. And green
with jealousy.

/Patrick Collister/

Smirnoff

2008-11-17T01:37:00.000-08:00

The digeratii say the great thing about the internet is it encourages
Everybody to be creative. Make a video and post it on YouTube and
you too can become a web-star for a day or two. Now sites like
revver.com are telling Everybody, if your vid is a corker, we’ll share
the advertising revenue from your page fifty/fifty. Be creative and
kerchinggg!

Everybody has recently made a commercial for Doritos that ran in
the middle of the Superbowl. She also made a commercial for Dove
that ran in the first break of the Oscars. The trouble with
Everybody is that in 99.9% of cases, he (and she) is utterly,
unredeemably talentless. Most of the home-made movies on
YouTube are dross.

It hasn’t put off the Department of Transport, though. Rather than
ask an agency to help them create noticeable advertising to warn
kids to look out when they cross the road, they’ve gone to a bunch
of teenagers. One has written an ad showing the ghosts of kids who
didn’t make it. Ghosts? Gosh. How original. Well, back in the 18th
century, maybe. Certainly something of a cliché by 1994 when the
DoT spent £2.5m on the same idea.

It’s mad. People don’t much like advertising at the best of times so
why serve them up commercials that are even tackier than the ones
the professionals make? It takes ten years at least for the best
people in the best agencies to acquire their skills.

Having the idea is only half the battle. Then it has to be executed in
such a way it impresses itself indelibly on the mind of the viewer.
Just to show you what adland’s finest can do, when encouraged to
do their best by those few clients who value their agencies, here’s a
Smirnoff commercial.

Everybody could not do this. Not ever.

/Patrick Collister/

Cadbury’s Gorilla

2008-11-17T01:36:00.000-08:00

If you're one of the few who hasn't yet seen Cadbury's gorilla viral,
here it is - the first interesting commercial to come out of
Bournville since the 1960s.

There is a theory that if you're a brand leader you can't afford to
run risky advertising (for risky read interesting, entertaining,
witty). Certainly Cadbury have been massively risk averse until
now.

What sparked the change of direction? Was it, perhaps, that after
so much awful publicity they realised they had better start trying to
make friends, and quickly?

You will remember that as well as a glass-and-a-half of milk,
Cadbury's products were found also to contain salmonella. When
news of this seeped out, with supreme corporate arrogance, they
ignored the problem until the PR backlash persuaded senior
managers to start eating humble pie.

The real risk for Cadbury was that if they didn't do something
radical, their image might remain forever tarnished.
The viral was written and directed by a creative phenomenon
called Juan Cabral. A year ago he became the first person to win
two Grand Prix at Cannes, for television with Sony Balls, and for
posters with a campaign for the Tate Gallery. Almost everything he
touches turns to gold.

Hailing from Argentina, he's not yet 30. No doubt rival agencies
are already waving wads of cash at him, promising the earth should
he care to defect from Fallon London.

Perhaps the real star is the client who both briefed for and bought
this ad. While the brand risked little in trying to get beyond the
salmonella disaster, the individual who signed off on it risked
ridicule, even the sack. Fortunately, he or she is a glass-and-a-half
full type. Bravo.

/Patrick Collister/

Lynx - Get in There!

2008-11-17T01:34:00.000-08:00

At the centre of every teenager’s life is their mobile phone so it is
unsurprising that adland has been exploring new ways of using the
phone as an advertising platform. The trouble is, most mobile-based marketing has been creatively uninspiring. Until now.

BBH’s new campaign for Lynx is a brilliant example of how to use
the mobile phone to create and share brand experiences.
The premise is, a lot of lads need help chatting up girls and Lynx
can help them. The new website offers a series of helpful hints with
videos of guys demonstrating each.

So, one clip demonstrates ‘The Sympathy Fall’. Guy sees girl. Guy
walks into lamp-post, tree, any available solid object. Ouch. Girl is
sympathetic. Guy explains he was dazzled by her beauty. She gives
phone number. Thank you Lynx.

Key to the site are the free apps you can download. My favourite is
the ‘Fit Girl Finder’. It turns your phone into a Geiger counter.
Using the keys on the handset, you can make it click energetically
as you point it towards a girl or click falteringly when you point it
at the old geezer in the corner. Obviously, she’s hot and he’s not.
And that gives you the opportunity to, well, get in there.

The harmonica app makes it look as if you’re playing your phone or
there’s the spray sound effect. Waft your mobile under your arms,
between your legs etc, and it sounds as if you’re getting yourself
Lynxed up.
Silly, but it starts a conversation. At least, it did for BBH’s Head of
Mobile, Peter Sells, when he tried it in a Soho restaurant.
Did he pull? He would not say.

This is a great example of the agency redefining Lynx users not as
‘targets’ to aim messages at but as potential participants in the life
of the brand. Terrific.

/Patrick Collister/

Tele2 Dog

2008-11-17T01:33:00.001-08:00

Last week, CEO of Cadbury Schweppes Todd Stitzer revealed
better-than-expected financial results for the UK company.
Briefing the press, he said, "For the Chinese, 2007 was the year of
the pig. For Cadbury, it was the year of the gorilla.”

He went on to admit that he couldn’t quite fathom how the
drumming primate had done so much to revive the fortunes of his
ailing chocolate brand. "I am a 55-year-old person who has lived
through a different advertising experience ... In the end, I trusted
in the young and talented people who came up with the idea."

Sometimes we forget that brilliant advertising needs a bold client
to buy it. Full credit then to Cadbury marketing director Phil
Rumbol for (a) buying the idea from Fallon himself before (b)
having the bottle to sell it to his board.
No entirely rational human being could have done it. Which brings
me to the Tele2 dog.

Tele2 is a Swedish telecomms company, who have no obvious
reason for putting up a site such as this except that people will love
it – especially younger people, who comprise the bulk of their
audience.

The trouble is, there are just too many brands around today. As a
result, there’s been a rise in what you might call brand shagging.
Take a brand for everything it’s got and then dump it and move on
to another.

The fact remains, though, that if a brand is likeable, amusing, good
company, then when it does come down to expressing your
preferences, you’ll choose a friend. You might even be knowingly
irrational when you make that choice. For instance, Innocent
smoothies are about 60p more expensive than PJ’s but I could no
more drink PJ’s than I could sulphuric acid.

But I like Innocent. And you know what? I like Tele2 too.

/Patrick Collister/

The Triumph Rocket III

2008-11-17T01:32:00.001-08:00

The new Triumph Rocket III is ridiculous. Why not sit astride a
rhinosceros? It will provide the same sort of excitement. May even
be quieter too.

Triumph got the name right. This machine does exactly what it
says on the tin. Its 2.3 litre engine will propel you from 0 to
oblivion in seconds.

How do you set about advertising such a monster? If you tell
people anything about its insane power, the killjoys will come after
you with big sticks. Already the advertising code of practice forbids
car-makers from using speed as a selling point. And, on top of
that, there are rumblings in the European parliament about
banning all car advertising entirely. Nasty things that pollute and
kill.

Don’t forget, these are the people who also spend their time issuing
directives about the appropriate curvature of imported bananas.
What E3 Media, Triumph’s agency, have done in commissioning
the film from RubberRepublic is turn to positioning strategy No.
32, the Disarm Through Charm route.

You deflect your critics by poking fun at yourself. If the bike is over
the top then the advertising should be equally silly. It’s a ‘we know
that you know that we know’ sort of tactic. Bikers will get it
immediately and appreciate the irony. The message is cute though
the intentions behind it are anything but.

The film itself is a pastiche, taking the mickey out of countless
corporate videos with the oh so serious voice-over droning on
about how the Rocket is built and tested. But hang on a minute.
What are they doing spooning what looks like jam into the cylinder
heads? And why does every bike need to watch “Blackadder” before
going out onto the test track?

It’s how the engineers at Triumph give the Rocket its character.
English, eccentric and, I should imagine, at 160mph on the
Guildford bypass, fantastic fun.

/Patrick Collister/

Martin Scorsese & Freixenet

2008-11-17T01:30:00.000-08:00

I was in an agency earlier this week and mentioned this
entertaining idea for Freixenet to the creative director.
“We had an idea just like it,” he exclaimed, as if he’d been robbed.
The only trouble is his idea didn’t have a client to buy it whereas
somewhere in Spain, someone did say yes to the concept of Martin
Scorsese shooting the fragments of a Hitchcock movie script that
revolved, loosely, around a key and a bottle of cava. And it can’t
have been easy to buy, either.

For starters, Martin Scorsese wouldn’t have come cheap. And for
another thing, there are no guarantees that something like this will
actually work. Most clients rely on TV advertising because if you
take the size of the audiences and do various sums with the
number of times they will see the ad, then you can predict its
results. Which is a comfort.

Putting a film on the internet and hoping word of mouth will get
people to view it is altogether more risky.

So, whoever you are, Mr. Yes-Let’s-Run-With-It, I salute you for
briefing your agency to think differently and for then actually going
ahead with recommendation.

Coming just as 2007 is about to exit stage right, it is the year’s best
example of branded entertainment. I urge you to go
scorsesefilmfreixenet.com to view the whole 7-minute film.
Scorsese’s performance is terrific. I love his line, “We’re on a
mission”. And the filmic tributes to Hitchcock are a delight.
It’s tribute movie meets mockumentary meets advertising and it is
gloriously effervescent.

Will it win awards? I doubt it, because it doesn’t fit into any of the
categories of most awards shows. Still, I name the marketer who
inspired JWT Madrid to create this film The First Post’s Client of
the Year.

Someone, crack open a bottle of bubbly.

/Patrick Collister/

Nike & Kanye West

2008-11-17T01:27:00.000-08:00

Here's a new initiative from Nike in an attempt to influence and be particapatory in the street culture:

Rob Stone runs Cornerstone in New York, a company that
specialises in bringing music and marketing together so both profit
from the association.

“The record business is in trouble,” he says, “But music is thriving.”
The big problem is how to make money out of it, given that about
90% of all music is now downloaded or shared for free?

Well, the only people who seem to have any money these days are
brand owners so the music industry has been finding new and
interesting ways of relieving them of some of it.

Sting’s ‘Desert Rose’ video was a Jaguar ad; Fergie of the Blackeyed
Peas has been commissioned to write a song for a fashionwear
store and Puff Diddy sang ‘Pass the Courvoisier’ but never before
has a branded song been nominated for a Grammy.
Yet that’s what has just happened with ‘Better Than I’ve Ever
Been’. Art and commerce have met in a hip-hop song
masterminded by Cornerstone, featuring rap-meisters Kanye West,
Naz, Rakim and NRS-One, who take it in turns to push the song
along.

If you watch the vid, you may notice a pair of Nikes getting spray-
painted onto a wall and you may hear the lyric about Nike Air
Force Ones, “the hustler shoe/That I am accustomed to.”
The song celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of Air Force Ones
as well as promoting the new, improved versions.

Kanye West may well be “better than I’ve ever been”, but so too are
the shoes. Has this jingle in disguise done anything for Nike?
It’s already had over 3,000 plays on radio and a million Youtube
viewings.

As a result Nike are said to be considereing launching their own
record label. Clearly, bro’, they do think there’s some value to
creating their own audiences rather than buying someone else’s.

/Patrick Collister/

Barack Obama and The Black Eyed Peas

2008-11-17T01:25:00.000-08:00

“When you have the mo, you go.” That’s what Josh Lynam said in
one of the episodes of The West Wing and right now, in the fight
for presidential nomination, momentum is most definitely with
Barack Obama.

This video of a song written by will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and
directed by Jesse Dylan, son of Bob, is further evidence that Hillary
Clinton is falling off the pace. What i.am has done is to take
Obama’s speech, when, actually, he lost the New Hampshire
primary and make him sound like a winner. He’s turned a passage
of the speech into the lyrics of a simple song, which he, and several
others, then sing in synch with Obama’s spoken words.

It’s a powerful piece of communication for several reasons.
Firstly, it is one man’s personal idea about what Obama means for
the future of America. Obama himself had nothing to do with it.
The dead hand of a committee could not take the idea and mutilate
it. So, slick though it is, the film has both an artistic and political
integrity about it.

Secondly, it’s inclusive. It says nothing more complicated than
‘Together we can change things around here’ but says it in a way
that is non-confrontational. Thirdly, it is a powerful endorsement
of Obama by some pretty hip characters. True I only recognised
Scarlett Johansson but the more youthful of you will probably also
identify John Legend, Kate Walsh and basketball star Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar.

Compare and contrast these with Hillary Clinton’s ageing celebs,
Madonna, Steven Spielberg and Jack Nicholson.
One-day, Obama’s team will look back and see this video as the
nudge that toppled the vote their man’s way.
It is a triumph of style over substance, selling no more than a
feeling. But what a feeling. A feeling that this is the next President
of the United States.

/Patrick Collister/