Diesel turns 30!

With a trackrecord of creating a certain hype and attention around everything they do, a birthday giving the roman numbers XXX couldn’t pass by without a controversial campaign. 

This is dirty, fun and intriguing in an absurd way. So if anybody haven’t seen it yet, here is the viral campaign kickstarting the event follow by a huge facebook driven campaign inviting to the world’s biggest party.

This moment the facebook event has 6.440 confirmed guests, and the events will be broadcasted live on www.diesel.com

Wrapping up a perfect week I had the pleasure of attending TV2s Winners Day at Teglholmen, and was to give a short speech on the learnings on competing in the Young Media Lions category in Cannes. So before heading to meetings in the afternoon I had the pleasure of hearing a lot of inspiring people. Most of the cases were well known, but nice to see them presented by the real people involved. I was there with Katrine Riis Andersen from DIST who also joined me in the Cannes Lions competition. 

First Steve Latham, Content Director from the Cannes Lions presented the concepts of Cannes and how it is developing and this development especially driven by the content richness of the program. Steve also has the Young Lions dear at heart, so we spoke to him a few times down at the competition, and it was really nice seeing him again. He is really a nice guy and feels so passionate about continuously improving the Cannes Lions offer. Later on he was asked a quite relevant question from Jesper von Wieding from Scandinavian DesignLab about the challenges within the naming of the festival as an advertising festival, traditional advertising having a declining role to play at the festival, suggesting Creative festival to perhaps being a more appropriate name. Steve earlier noted that the traditional categories still takes the heavy load of the entries, but welcomed the discussion.     

Then Lars Bastholm, Co-Chief Creative Officer, AKQA made a presentation about the Halo 3 case

and then spoke on the Future Lions program, and showed cases on how incredible talent this program reveals. A case on ideas for a MagLite campaign was incredible – both the ideas and the bold presentation. Lars commented that farfar already took the talented guys in. Which I’m happy to hear, knowing that fresh creative blood is the once again added to our family..

Last Michael Lebowitz, founder and CEO, Big Spaceship talked on the HBO Voyeur Campaign which I will not comment on since it is earlier covered in this blog. But interesting was that the audience being asked about awareness on the campaign, almost nobody did know it. That was really kind of sad, the audience being a really good agency crowd. Asking Michael about the conflicts on creating the actual center-piece of the campaign and BBDO being rewarded the credits, Michael talked briefly on this emerging conflict in the market being which agencies to be lead on projects. I think this is a very interesting discussion.   

After this the danish jury talked on learnings and then Katrine and I talked on learnings from the young lions competition. The day ended with guided tours in the exhibition.

The appstore opens a whole new world for branding. Easy to use, easy accessible and highly relevant connections with the consumer. The apps create a space for engaging the consumers on their terms and a new race has opened. The race for developing the most inviting, intriguing, innovative and involving app. So I will kickstart the race here and ask everybody to send comments with branded apps they have seen or heard about. Also ideas for cool apps that could have had a perfect sponsor or sender on it. Please participate. This could be quite fun and interesting .

For numeral reasons I’m soo glad I went to this masterclass in the Young LIons Zone. 

1. It was 1 minute after our presentation so a reason for sitting thinking and no-one asking “hoooow did it goooo in a screaming tone-of-voice”

2. I love the filosophy of Naked and Paul  Woolmington is a wonderful speaker. My heartbeat after have the most stressed 5 minutes of my career fell down listening to his calm, confident and clear voice. 

3. I get the change for tagging this blog “Naked” which will give our little Cannes blog so much more google-juice. (Perhaps it wont be the most relevant hits, but giving the facts that googling porn and still end up clicking on a communications planning blog, proofs that marketing people also surfs for porn as well as everybody else.)

This post was actually dedicated to an ode for Naked, but sometimes things do not end up as we thought. Thank god for that.

But still two words about the masterclass:

It was great! Basic intro of the heart of independency.

I was very interested in how to sell ideas and how to make so many external partners work together. But this was more inspiration and cases of how the solutions will look if thinking concepts over “were do we make money”. 

And once again – go see Noah Briers Brand Tag feature… I commented on it on my own blog channel8000 a while ago – it is really interesting. 

Thanks to Paul for setting my mind free…

Early next morning we got our 5 minutes to present the assignment. This was really tough. We really looked at the competition brief to find out how to solve it, but little did it help. It said that we needed to present insights, strategy and solution – with everything explained why chosen. This was really a hard job – and we didn’t really succeed with this part. In the after light we perhaps shouldn´t have focussed so much on was we were told to explain but focused on explaining out ideas instead. We had only 5 minutes but we reached the ideas at 4.30 which was horrible because we didn´t feel at all that we had time to explain what, how and why… and we didn’t even have time to present it all.  

So it was really a hard and learning experience… 

This really felt like bad sex. Great expectation, too short time and a strange unfulfilled feeling afterwards.

But bad sex is better than none, so after an hour or so we started smiling a bit again And we were still satisfied with the work – but would have died for 17 minutes instead of 5.

In the perspective of going to Cannes and participating in the Young Lions Competition I did a bit of thinking on why we see this need for a new approach to planning.

I did an article on the subject for our monthly Aegis Media Danmark newsletter called zoom news. Here it is – still in danish though… You can subscribe to it on this page too….

I have to blog about this special innovation, which just went live 72 meters from the agency in Aarhus. In a world where we are hunting down new connections with our precious consumers, the shop and the experiences there, play a key part in the communication process. CAVI in Aarhus has been working on a solution for three years where the shop window interacts with the people passing by.

Here is the description of the Dynamically Transparent Window from CAVI’s website:  

A Dynamically Transparent Window responds to the movements of people passing by. Using a camera, passers-by are tracked, and the data is processed by a system that controls custom-built interactive windows on the facade. The windows are fitted with so-called electro-chromatic foil that can change from opaque to transparent when an electric current runs through it. By using thin strips of the foil, narrow bands on the facade change in order to reveal what is on display in the store when people walk by the window. The facade uses various interaction modes in order to lure the by-passers near and make them explore the display. 

And here the Youtube video explaining the details:

Reminds me a bit about a Tomato project I saw at an evening inspiration session at LYNfabrikken where they did some work interacting with the passing by’s. I think it was with Asahi TV and with another project working with air to flow to giant sculptures when passing them. (If anybody remembers exactly – please help )

But this is interesting and I just held a focusgroup working with a pitch for H&M in Denmark where all the young women talked about how important the shopping window were for them. So this is interesting. Hope they will tell more about the results and reactions afterwards. 

The word Nimby seems to accelerate its meanings these days, so I will hereby join the choir and extent its reach to the planning sphere. So I’ll introduce the concept of Nimby planning. Everybody working with advertising know the  situations in which  co-workers or clients agree fully on the strategy. They nood at the insights on the need for a digital strategy or a creative media plan. You feel that the meeting was beneficial and that we all moved a step further into a bright future. You sleep well that night.

Next morning the “nimpy” feel steps in. You get a call; “Ohh we just talked about the strategy for next year and about blogging we don’t think we have the ressources. And by the way the creative outdoor campaign; It’s really great, but can we get the same reach as TV gave us last year?, and the thing about activation the social networks; our chief of sales says trade won’t accept it”

Ten days later you take last years strategy and copy paste it to 2008. That’s really a nimpy feel. We all know what’s right; but not in my backyard (or with my marketing budget) . Nobody ever get fired for recommending TV. (But they will in the future!)

So this is Nimpy planning. Here is wikipedias explanation of NIMBY:

NIMBY (an acronym of Not In My Back Yard) describes the phenomenon in which

residents designate a development as inappropriate or unwanted for their local area, even if the development is clearly a benefit for many.

NIMBY and its derivative terms NIMBYism, NIMBYs, and NIMBYists, refer implicitly to debates of development generally or a specific case, and as such their use is inherently contentious. Also, it is a relatively recent term, the first printed usage of which the Oxford English Dictionary identifies as being in 1980 in the Christian Science Monitor, and the nuances of which are still disputed. The term is usually applied to opponents by advocates of a development, implying that those opposing the debated development, or at least their viewpoint in such regards, is narrow, selfish, myopic, hypocritical or otherwise limited.