Morning Update: Adland Adventures: a comedy; ads made in minutes for $100; museums out, Instagram in; how to go from chimp to champ
Ad Week: Agency Life Is Cruel and Unforgiving in These Beastly Comic Parodies of Nature Videos
Ever feel like the advertising business is just a bunch of animals driven by a Darwinian code of kill or be killed? Yeah, you’re not alone.
The Variable, an agency in Winston-Salem, N.C., has taken that somewhat depressing insight and turned it into comedy with a new online video series called Adland Adventures.Six videos so far feature scenes from typical nature videos, with David Attenborough-style voiceovers describing the action as though it were happening in an agency. The series is described as “a mostly comedic expedition through the wild advertising wilderness.” And some of the videos are pretty amusing. Check out all six here:
The CEO of a video creation platform on which ads can be made in minutes for less than US$100 has said that advertising agencies are his biggest customers, and that Australia is the young firm’s fastest growing market.
After giving a talk about his business and the growth of video at the Tech in Asia conference in Singapore last week, Lee, who is CEO of San Francisco and Seoul-based Shakr, a platform for making simple videos from material made by a network of video designers using a drag and drop function, was asked what he thinks advertising agencies make of businesses such as his own.
Ad Week: Millennials Are Discovering Art by Ditching Museums for Instagram and Pinterest
For the first time, social media has nudged museums aside as the primary venue by which American consumers discover works of art.
According to a survey released this week by online auction site Invaluable, nearly 23 percent of Americans find artwork that appeals to them on social media channels such as Instagram or Pinterest. By contrast, 20 percent discover artwork by going to museums and nearly 16 percent by visiting brick-and-mortar galleries.
The findings are significant not just because Americans drop an estimated $150 billion on arts and entertainment each year, but because it suggests that millennial buyers seem far more comfortable buying art online as opposed to the staid and starchy world of galleries and auction houses.
The Drum: From Chimp to Champ: a neuroscientist’s advice to marketers
Ad Week: The Management Battle Between Brands and Freelancers Just Got Easier
Traditionally, brands and agencies rely on a network of freelancers for their creative work. But antiquated management processes can make keeping track of independent professionals a nightmare: Assignments and feedback are reluctantly dragged out over email, singular relationships create a lack of talent visibility and legal contracts are processed manually—risking human error and misclassification. Today, these inefficiencies have reached a tipping point. Publishers and brands such as Forbes, Vox Media and The Washington Post are so fed up that they’re creating on-demand talent networks—highly transparent freelancer databases that provide the tools for engaging the right freelancer at the right place and time—to help alleviate the management headache.
Campaign Live: Sharing widgets: how something so small can be so powerful
The buttons that appear around articles so you can share them are a veritable goldmine to marketers but remain scandalously under-employed by brands, says the UK sales director of RadiumOne. Sharing widgets can be anything from a simple button linking to a Facebook or Twitter page or something enabling site visitors to comment, tweet, like, share and bookmark content across a wide variety of platforms.
What most marketers have missed is that these buttons deliver online behaviour that generates hugely valuable audience insight about what people share and engage with, who with, on what devices, and how often. A data goldmine!
Ad Age: Brands, Talk With People – Not to Them
Alan Siegel discusses Ad Campaigns by Rhode Island and Sweden Show What Works and What Doesn’t
We live in a time when people just don’t trust government, whether it is federal, state or foreign. So what do people trust? They trust each other. Before they buy something on Amazon, or rent something on Airbnb, they look to see what other people think. So at a time when people have zero trust in government, what is a country like Sweden or a state like Rhode Island supposed to do to attract tourism and new biz? Recently, The New York Times ran separate stories about marketing campaigns for both those places; one campaign was brilliant and the other, not so much. First, the not-so-much one…
Campaign Live: Mindfulness and agency life: A how-to guide
Forever Beta strategist, Marcelo Peretti Kuhn, explains how over-stressed agency staffers can benefit from applying mindfulness at work.
We all know agency life can, at times, feel overwhelming, filled with deadlines and daily pressures. That is why mindfulness is exactly what we agency folk should all be practising. After all, it’s clear why mindfulness is the buzzword du jour. It is a backlash against a distracted, technology-driven lifestyle that we have all come to accept is part and parcel of living in 2016 and being ‘progressive’.
How ironic then, that when we are juggling a million things, we are not actually more productive. We may appear to achieve many things at once but research proves that when you multi-task the quality of your output and ability to make sensible judgements are significantly reduced. Not so progressive then.
No sooner had the new issue of Private Eye gone on sale this week, carrying a detailed article questioning the motives of national newspapers in spiking a story about culture secretary John Whittingdale (full text below), than Whittingdale himself took the initiative, issuing a statement that was widely seized on by the BBC’s Newsnight, Fleet Street, opposition MPs and press privacy campaigners. The rest, as they say, is histrionics…
ON 10 November 2013 the Tory MP John Whittingdale flew to Amsterdam for the MTV Europe awards. His flights, hotel and tickets were all paid for by MTV. Yet he has never declared the hospitality in the register of members’ interests.
