Rejoice ad people. You can now get your own Mad Men (the Tv series) avatar at MadMenYourself.com.
A classy way for AMC to promote the third season, which starts Aug. 16., letting you customize your character from body to accessories (a bow ties for the gents, a fur stole for the ladies) with lovely illustrations by Dyna Moe.
UPDATE 2: It’s now [June, 30] live at beta.cpbgroup.com UPDATE: CP+B has kindly let me know that they’ve temporarily cloaked the site, as it’s not quite ready for prime time. Stay tuned the next few hours.
When @boguskyannounced CP+B was about to release their new site, the curious Armando had to sneak at the rather obvious url beta.cpbgroup.com, thus finding the new version of the agency’s Internet presence.
Crispin, Porter + Bogusky is now aggregating all the content related to the agency, from employees tweets to references on blogs (let’s see if they pick this post), from Flickr accounts to their Wikipedia entry, and huge doses of Youtube commercials by the agency.
The agency applies the same principle to their client work. Here’s the page screenshot for Microsoft (shame for not having a permalink):
For now they released only 8 client pages, but i got curious again and peeked at the source code and a few more are planned . Props for massive jQuery usage.
Nothing really groundbreaking, kind like PopUrls, but a reminder that the days of “immersive” Flash experiences are almost ending, at least in digital agencies land (see also Barbarian, Juxt Interactive, EVB and Big Spaceship). It’s all about multiple digital touchpoints and real time, these days.
With Cannes Lions Advertising Festival starting to roll, maybe the ad people enjoying the sun and booze take a few minutes out of their time to reflect on a better way to spend their talents and convince the organization and rest of the industry on creating advertising that does make a difference, instead of using it as an excuse to get a piece of metal.
Last year, on a short Twitter exchange with Marc from Osocio on the subject of awards and social marketing, i replied:
We’re in the business of changing behaviours, not winning awards.
Fast forward to Cannes 2009, and on a great collaboration with the duo from StealOurIdeas.com, Osocio presents their draft concepts on how your brand should be used for the right reasons,
Every year hundreds of PSAs are done for the wrong reasons.
Help us to create social advertising that actually makes a difference.
The next time you catch a creative doing spoof work just to win awards, forward these concepts so he or she could get a few really noble ideas.
Since Cannes doesn’t matter anymore, we’d better start thinking about a new kind of awards, that are somehow different from the usual creative masturbation, more in tune with the future of advertising.
Lisbon Ad School and Torke are announcing the first Guerrilla Advertising Awards, showcasing works in categories as diverse as ambush marketing, urban intervention, PR Stunt, ambient media or viral and interactive. And just to make sure guerrilla is for everyone, there’s an Old Croquette Awards, for senior creatives.
You can submit your work for FREE, as a team or on behalf of your agency, with winners announced the next July, 24th.
Disclaimer: I’ll be one of the online categories jurors
by Armando Alves.
Following my last post where i mentioned your mom as a metaphor for the way Data Portability should be made easy, here’s a series of mom videos that have been making the rounds lately on the latin-american advertising community. Considering the hit that Mad Men was, we do love to look at ourselves, don’t we?
The videos, in spanish, show the mothers of creatives trying to figure out what the fancy advertising jargon really means.
Created to promote the IMAN awards, LaMadreQueTePario.com has also some serious take on our profession, and is based, whatelse, on PowerPoint presentations. Because, if your mother can’t figure it out, it’s impossible she’s proud of you.
Todd Andrlik created the Power150 Ranking, now run by Advertising Age, featuring the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world. With ranking and authority in Twitter causing quite a discussion a few weeks back, i decided nonetheless to have a shot and create the Twitter Power 150, based on the original ranking.
With over 800 bloggers it would be really hard to track down all the twitter profiles, so i focused on the top 300 and with the help of Twitterank and Dapper, and partly inspired by Mack Collier’s Top 25 Marketing & Social Media Blogs, here’s the January 2009 list for the top 150 twitter users with advertising and marketing blogs:
The sweet irony is being left out of the list, with a close call at #156. So, you know the drill: if you appreciated the hard work (i had to visit each blog to get the usernames i didn’t follow already), start by following @armandoalves and help me reach the top 150.
The PHP script that parsed the Power150 OPML file was programmed in less than 1/10th of the time it took me to figure out all the twitter profiles, so feel free to comment if your blog is on AdAge’s Power 150 and you would like to be added to the remaining 700 profiles.
I had a few surprises along the way, with nearly 20% of the 300 parsed blogs not having a Twitter account and having to decide which profile to rank on multi-author blogs (i ended up choosing the user with most followers). Also worthy of notice is the inverted pyramid for SEO/SEM blogs. In the end, Twitter is more conversational and not very friendly for “get rich today” tweets, and that gets reflected on the top tweeple listed.
Update:
Seems the list is getting some buzz, and it starts to makes sense to build a live ranking.that hopefully will be at: http://www. twitterpower150.com
Today Russell Davies was at the 10th anniversary of CCP (the Creative Club of Portugal). His presentation was pretty much i was waiting for, but it’s always interesting to meet and hear someone you admire as a blogger and as a planner.
At the end, i realized that most of the things that were presented have been around for as much as the CCP has existed. As i shared with Russell, a substantial part of the future of advertising has been written 10 years ago, on the remarkable Cluetrain Manifesto.
For instance, on the four main topics discussed:
BlurryHow media and creativity are no longer clearly defined
Thesis #6, 19 and 39, are some examples of this blurriness. 11, 31 and 93 would fit also.
The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
People in networked markets have figured out that they get far better information and support from one another than from vendors. So much for corporate rhetoric about adding value to commoditized products.
Companies must ask themselves where their corporate cultures end.
Interesting (on creating engaging experiences)
This one’s easy: 75.
If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.
Useful (being useful to people and providing branded utilities)
Next one, #76:
We’ve got some ideas for you too: some new tools we need, some better service. Stuff we’d be willing to pay for. Got a minute?
or on a more lighter tone, #22:
Getting a sense of humor does not mean putting some jokes on the corporate web site. Rather, it requires big values, a little humility, straight talk, and a genuine point of view.
Always in Beta (and how software ethos is reinventing marketing and creativity)
Starting with #17 and ending with thesis #84:
Companies that assume online markets are the same markets that used to watch their ads on television are kidding themselves.
We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?
What really puzzles me is how 10 years have passed but companies still don’t get it? More worrisome, is that by looking at the audience of young creatives in the room, it really scared me that most of these folks aren’t immersed on the tools and new kind of dialog that will be their job for the next decade.
Let’s hope CCP and other industry groups have the courage to question traditional media and embrace networked markets and conversations. Once this happens, i’ll subscribe to their membership.
My friend Andre, and blogger at AdvertisingEtc, just directed a visual delicacy using a Phantom camera at 1000fps. The commercial announces the release of a new magazine: Relance.
On his own words “the concept of the ad is that the subjects are being compressed into the magazine“. And, boy, they look pretty good to me. Congrats Andre.
Credits
Agency: Uzina (Portugal)
Creative Director: Gustavo Suarez
Art Director: André Breda
Copywriter: Roberto Ferraz
Account Director: António Roquette
Production Company: Garage Films (Portugal)
Director: Enrique Escamilla
Photography Director: Carlos Lopes (Cácá)
Executive Producer: Miguel Varela
Editor: Marcos Castiel
Post-production Director: Marta Metrass
Phantom Operator: Raoul Rodriguez
Post-Production: Ingreme (Portugal)
Music Supervision: Level Two Music (Australia)
Song: QUA – Painting Monsters
Composer: Cornel Wilczek
Sound post-production: Ameba (Portugal)
This won’t be the usual retrospective on the most famous advertising festival, only a remark on the fact that this humble site featured (and even premiered) many of them.