Came across this innovative new campaign on Instagram for Old Spice. We’ve seen brands conducive to great visuals (food, travel, fashion) place great looking visuals on Instagram. Here’s a campaign which not only places impactful visuals but cleverly uses the tagging function of Instagram. In the first image below, there are two accounts tagged; clicking on any one leads to another panel with the description acting as copy. You awaken in a dark cave. In…
Will stand alone digital agencies survive or continue to be bought over by the big network agencies or simply shut down? My two bits going by the trends and what clients are likely to look for in their creative partners.
Of late, there’s been a debate about the use of Adblockers, with some calling it immoral (see a rebuttal here). Needless to say, Adblockers are popular: 300m people in the world have downloaded an ad blocking extension and about half have actually installed it. The crux of the argument against their use is that Adblockers deprive the ‘content creators’ an earning and that it will eventually lead to content creation becoming unviable. Some have even argued that…
Quick. What is the best way to get a brand’s attention? Tweet something nasty about their product or service. This is what many of us believe for a variety of reasons: (a) it is true that when brands are publicly embarrassed, especially by ‘influencers’ they are shamed and feel the need to get into damage control mode (b) cribbing is natural Twitter behaviour; the platform seems to be ideal for complaining as one can get…
Rahul Gandhi’s Twitter account has been set up finally. I say ‘set up’ because to me (going by the two tweets thus far) it seems to be a medium to broadcast his activities, views (maybe). Nothing wrong in that – several politicians, national leaders and other celebrities are known to have a social media team who tweet on their behalf. Many Twitter folks commented on the handle (@OfficeofRG) as being too aloof & distant, while…
No advertising & marketing industry conference is complete without the mention of mobile being the ‘next big thing’. Everyone agrees that the platform offers great potential and speaks of the need for a ‘mobile-first’ approach. But is the potential of mobile fully exploited by brands?
Topical ads have been around for decades now and can be a marketer’s dream come true – but only if executed well. In my view, the hallmarks of a great topical ad are: (a) it should be about a genuinely big news…a topic that is truly creating buzz (b) it should be out lightning fast when the topic is still fresh in people’s mind (c) the creative message should be relevant to the product – link it to the brand’s proposition in a clever way and (d) executed with some subtlety and class. The last one is subjective of course, but one can easily spot an idea which is crass or trying-too-hard to find a fit. Amul’s topical hoardings have been hugely popular in India for these reasons.
We all have brand preferences – that intangible feeling of loving a brand so as to prefer it over competing brands in that category. Usually, such a preference evolves as a result of a lot of things the brand does, not just one. It could be a combination of things – the brand name, the logo, the messaging (advertising, PR), the activities a brand initiates or gets involved in and so on. But most commonly it is attributed to the quality of advertising – the core message and how it is executed. Airbnb’s latest advert on the occasion of the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is one such.
Wieden+Kennedy, London have done it again for Honda. The agency is known for some great work for the brand in the past, across media. According to the agency blog: we want to bring to life Honda’s other side, the side born from a racing heritage and thirst for innovation. The strategy was to showcase Civic Type R, the ‘wild child alter-ego of the Civic hatchback’. We all know of Honda Civic to be a ‘regular’…
I liked the central idea and the hashtag campaign of #BendTheRules for HP x360 as it is anchored on the product. Personally I thought the ‘stories’ of people who have achieved something extraordinary by ‘bending the rules’ was a tad disconnected as the product had nothing to do with those stories. Of course the benefit to the brand is through association but as a relatively new product this particular model had no role to play…