THE CROSSED COW » Campaign

TED – talks that made us think

Dave — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:18:15 +0000

For about a year now, we’ve been screening some of the highlights from TED online (talks from remarkable people, spanning technology, education and design). On one occasion we recreated a live TED, when Rory Sutherland came in to recite his stand out talk from the Oxford conference. You can normally judge a talk’s success from how much discussion follows after the 18 minutes; these are some of our favourites:

Bjarke Ingels: 3 warp-speed architecture tales

Tim Brown: Creativity and play

Rory Sutherland: Life lessons from an ad man

Jamie Oliver: Teach every child about food

Willard Wigan: Hold your breath for micro-sculpture

An ill-informed post about b2c social media interactions and the legal issues therein

Kevin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:23:08 +0000

OK, so I say ill-informed as I’m not up to date on the latest UK legislation, my knowledge is a couple of years out of date, so please excuse me if this is utter guff, however something occurred to me on the commute to work this morning…

So yesterday via Twitter I received two identical tweets from the same ‘company’. Being a little more specific, one form the ‘official’ Twitter feed of that company, the other from the ‘personal’ Twitter account of the MD of that company. I say personal, however in the profile he states that he is MD of X…. so in my book, that counts as a representation of that company is a ‘pseudo corporate’ feed. So, two identical tweets, sent from the same ‘company’, to the same individual, me, in the space of a few seconds.

Now if that happened with email, to which I had subscribed, i.e. which is permission based, as is Twitter… I’d be annoyed and think ‘what a stupid company’. Well the same thing happened with those tweets, I thought ‘what a stupid company’. Just because they are short, possibly less intrusive than email, it’s still really dumb to send identical messages over different accounts when you have the same person subscribing to both accounts on the other end! We wouldn’t do that with email would we? And as the business that did this was, surprise surprise, a social media agency (ROFLMAO)… that makes it, as we say on the Internets, an EPIC FAIL.

So, to an extent you have to say ‘bless’, let’s face it a lot of people working in social media, on the face of it, aren’t that experienced in the grand scheme of things, email is for old people right? But more seriously it points to the fact that platforms such as Twitter, even when combined with some of the 3rd party corporate tools, are still massively lacking in maturity and functionality to run at the same level of ‘permission’ and accuracy as email or more traditional direct communications. To my knowledge, (I did say this was ill-informed) no tool exists to manage Twitter subscribes across a companies multiple accounts in the same way as email (i.e. with really thorough, get prosecuted if you mess up, list and subscriber management… yes I get that Twitter is a little less complex in that if you unsubscribe that’s that, to an extent). If it does I get the impression many companies aren’t using it. As far as legislation goes, again I’d welcome an update on this… however, if the law doesn’t hover channels such as Twitter in b2c communications, isn’t it about time it did?

True to its roots

Sofia — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:27:50 +0000

Manhattan is about to get its first-ever J.C. Penney store, and while the splashy ad campaign is decidedly New York in style, the middle-American retailer points out it’s maintaining its ‘we are who we are’ authenticity. Among the attributes it’s emphasizing: Trust. And as The Partners’ Steven Gilliatt points out in Stuart Elliott’s article about the J. C. Penney campaign in today’s New York Times, brands and products must communicate a certain authenticity. This is especially true given the fact that consumers’ trust in so many businesses today may be waning.

Missed opportunity

Kevin — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:54:41 +0000

So I love these new ads for Intel, having worked for them in the past agency side, these ads are certainly a move on from where they were, and I love the human ‘bong’ at the end, but why oh why didn’t you use the real Ajay Bhatt in the video?!?!?!

48 hours later

Dave — Tue, 19 May 2009 13:03:47 +0000

This weekend I entered the Young Lions 48 hours Ad Contest.

At midnight on Friday the brief was released: To make an advert for Oxfam and upload it onto YouTube before midnight Sunday. The ad had to highlight the growing problem of climate change, and make people want to sign a petition in time for the Copenhagen world leaders summit this December, rather than sit back and do nothing.

It was a frantic weekend to say the least, trying to find a location, finding a squat in Waterloo then settling on shooting it in my mates front room, working out how to connect a garden leaf blower to four meters of pipe work; among many other things. We ended up shooting the film, editing and uploading it all within the last six hours, the final film is a bit rough around the edges but we got it in!

Please have a watch, the second part of the brief is to get as many hits to your YouTube video as possible, (within the next two weeks), so watch it everyday if you can!

Created in collaboration with Alastair Leith.

Call to Arms

Helen — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 18:31:10 +0000

As The British Army, this week, launches a new interactive marketing campaign designed to allow potential recruits to see what life in the army would be like (whilst getting to play yet another Doom-style computer game), Marketing Magazine debated whether this was a clever move for The British Army to make in terms of increasing recruitment numbers or whether it’s just a flash in the pan marketing stunt. Jim Prior was contacted for his comment on the new campaign. Click here to read the article in full.

Down the tube

Jim Prior — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:39:54 +0000

The other day someone asked me where I’d got an obscure piece of information, about Bhutan, from. “Metro,” I said, “the source of all knowledge.” It was a tongue-in-cheek reply – I remembered later that I’d read it in Monocle — but it wasn’t made without some foundation. Metro is one of my favourite reads and a consistent source of brain fodder, sometimes trivial, sometimes not, that fuels the brand consultant within me. But what it is that makes Metro so good is something more profound than just news, sport and gossip; it’s not the content that makes it work so well, but the context. It works because it created a unique circumstance for itself, one that satisfied a latent need that many people had without necessarily even knowing it. It took the dead, do-nothing time of tube travel (or train/bus/etc) and made it into something useful instead. Something easy (it’s a simple read) yet something of intellectual and/or entertainment value. Whether by accident or pre-meditated design (and I’m always sceptical on such matters) it takes just about the same amount of time to read cover to cover as the average tube journey affords. It’s free, in every respect – no money and no extra time required. Perfect.

Maybe I’m just predisposed to Metro because the logic of it appeals to my own professional philosophy about thinking differently and inventing new opportunities rather than just iterating the same tired old ideas all the time. But in any case I’ve long considered Metro to be a great example of a brand that fundamentally understands its proposition and knows how to deliver it. Until now.

So this week I see that Metro has launched a campaign intended to persuade us to take our copies of the paper with us when we leave the train and put them in the recycling bin. It’s littering, apparently, if we leave them. And that shows me that Metro doesn’t understand its brand anywhere near as well as I had thought. You see Metro has established itself so firmly in the unique circumstance it created that it has transcended its functionality and become cultural. When you travel on the tube it is not littering to leave your copy of Metro on the shelf behind the seats, it is a public service to your fellow commuters. To take your paper with you, and to bin it, is to deny someone else the opportunity to pass their travel time productively. Pick a carriage of people and ask them, they’ll all agree, “please leave your copy of Metro behind in case one of us wants to read it”. In fact almost the only emotional interaction that ever takes place between non-acquainted human beings on a tube train is the brief smile and warm eye contact that is exchanged when one places a paper down and another immediately picks it up. It is that, dear Metro, that is your brand. And this advertising campaign undermines it.

As all discarded Metros get collected by LUL staff at the end of the line, and are presumably recycled, I’m not concerned about the environmental impact of my objections here. I just hate to see a good brand get it wrong.

Jim.

MTV EXPONENTIAL

Kevin — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:44:08 +0000

Dave Wood is our latest recruit and we’ve decided to show you why. In this excerpt from his portfolio, he shows his D&AD short listed MTV project, created with fellow students Jack Gilbey and Chris Syrett. Over to you Dave.

This is a project I did last year for the 2008 D&AD student awards. The brief asked if MTV were a virus, how would it behave? We decided to use the general public as virus carriers and created an exponential chain reaction…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Want it!

Greg — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:01:03 +0000

Fashion is all about timing. SAKS FIFTH AVENUE just launched this years ‘WANT IT!’ campaign with graphics created by Shepard Fairey (creator of The Obama Poster) on the day of Obama’s inauguration. We also know how long it takes to create a campaign like this for 75 stores across the states, it just proves what we always knew, that our good friend Terron Schaeffer (Saks’ marketing guru) is well ahead of mere mortals - God Bless Terron and Obama!

For more: http://theessentialist.blogspot.com/2009/01/saks-fifth-avenue-spring-2009-campaign.html

Compare the Meerkat

Kevin — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 09:53:48 +0000

Lovely little campaign by VCCP for Comparethemarket.com: CompareTheMeerkat, (even though the web site is a little Mahir / Borat shall we say)

Click here to view the embedded video.