by Bill Sewell 05/14/09
If only the Clios had come before Digital Hollywood. On the surface, the Clios event schedule looks incredibly thin (lunch to 4) compared to the 9 to 6 wall-to-wall panels of Digital Hollywood. The Clios provided a missing ingredient to the dialogue of the present and future of advertising – the actual work.
The Clios Interactive Media Awards on Wednesday night awards showed the top integrated and experiential campaigns submitted from around the world. Most of the work had a cause-related message (Nike + gets people exercising, FIAT helps people drive more ecologically), matching with the common sentiment of today’s struggles. Droga5’s Million campaign incentivizes students to learn in NYC. Really powerful, meaningful advertising.
Most of these campaigns I saw for the first time at the Clios, making me wonder where does all the good work go? As advertising becomes more targeted, you are less likely to see it. The Whopper Sacrifice campaign (remove 10 friends on facebook to get a free Whopper), but it was shut down after 3 weeks by Facebook. The amazing Ecodrive campaign for FIAT doesn’t air in the US, because FIAT hasn’t sold cars stateside in years. The Obama Campaign won a Clio for turning disenchanted voters into an army of supporters. The campaign used many different social media tools to do this, most I never experienced.
Rob Reilly, Co-ECD at Crispin Porter & Bogustsky explained why it’s hard to find such good work. He pointed out that in order to incite involvement, you need to jam culture and create new experiences worth talking about. If you missed the video game they did for Burger King, you probably won’t see a sequel. The Flame full body spray – too bad, it’s sold out. CPB doesn’t intend on repeating these experiences. They move onto the next effort, always based on discovering what’s in the “tension box” of a brand’s superfan.
I began to appreciate how difficult it is for agencies to generate groundbreaking work - CPB and Burger King have two corporate cultures who take risks, see eye-to-eye and collaborate well, up and down the management structure. The two companies have grown together in their risk tolerance, based on a string of successes that resulted in significant revenue increase. Without such a strong agency-brand relationship, it’s incredibly difficult to produce inspired work. It makes sense why 90% of ads we see suck.
The Clios did a very cool tribute to the top viral videos, starting off with the Numa Numa guy, followed by Susan Boyle, and finishing off with The Evolution of Dance. 20 seconds into the dancing, the lights flashed and Judson Laipply came out to finish the rest of the routine in person. VERY cool – 119 million views were good for something!
After listening to Dan Wieden and seeing really meaningful work last night, I feel proud that Wiredrive sponsored this event. I loved listening to guys like Faris Yakob from McCann Erickson and Chris Kief from CPB talked passionately and eloquently about the craft of advertising and how it is being forced to return to the early days of smart business problem solving. In the hands of true communicators, new “ad” campaigns are really turning into tools for brands to provide useful services to us. Much more rewarding than the unsustainable interruptions we have learned to call Advertising.
Regards,
Bill