Peter Levitan & Co.
The New Business of Advertising
I’ve been surprised at how few advertising agencies use Twitter’s Vine for agency promotion. What gives? It fits in well… ad guys have smart phones, have ADD which works for Vine’s 6 second videos and the ECD’s all want to be movie directors.
While a lot of brands have Vine accounts, a relatively small percentage of them have been using them particularly effectively, if at all. Here are 5 brands that have made an effort; attempting to d…
Read more from the source: theawsc.com
The fabulous Advertising Week Social Club blog asked, “Do You Think Alcohol Makes You More Creative? We’re Putting It To The Test.” As Dave Birss writes…
There’s lots of anecdotal evidence that indicates a couple of drinks can help you creatively. For example, the first piece of copy I ever wrote was produced with the assistance of several pints of Guinness. It ran without any client amends and ended up winning a best copy award. (Conversely, a journey along the Absinth shelf almost got me fired for starting a fight with an Account Director!)
Then in the late 90s a spirit of temperance swept across adland in the UK. And at the same time creative standards seemed to drop. A lot of people suspect there’s some connection there.
As someone who went to art school, started in the New York advertising business in the fueled 1980’s, worked with dozens of creatives around the world and now lives in Oregon, home of craft beers and legalized drugs, I’d have to say that creatives…. Well, I won’t. But watch this video and stay tuned for the results.
Did you hear the one about the ad agency? Probably not. There isn’t much humor in the ad biz. An advertising (or digital or PR) agency with a sense of humor is as rare as a Sasquatch sighting. Believe me. I’ve looked at hundreds of agency websites. But, but, check out the Wexley School For Girls.
FYI: This was written in 2013. Sadly Wexley School For Girls closed. Word on the street is that most of the Wexleyittes moved to Panama. I have not changed the post’s tense (as in today vs. yesterday to protect the innocent).
But, Seattle’s Wexley School For Girls has delightfully stared down the idea that dull is a positive agency attribute. Wexley has built a strong business around the idea of quirky plus sound strategic thinking plus compelling execution. This formula has netted them a very sweet client roster that recognizes that boring is boring and boring doesn’t cut it in a world where consumers / viewers now control the advertising experience.
Lets start with the name Wexley School For Girls. In a world of agency initials, founder names, cute names (I admit to this, my agency was called Citrus) and names that are so random and universal that it takes five minutes to find the agency on Google (go find Breakfast.) In me-too name-land, Wexley stands way out.
As Seattle Weekly reported in 2007:
“The name,” jokes the 40-year-old Ian Cohen, “came from a group of nuns in Wexleyshire, England. They were cantaloupe farmers with a holistic approach to their garden.” Advertising Age put Wexley first on its 2006 list of favorite agency names; the company beat out Tokyo Plastic, 86 the Onions, and Acne.”
“We really kind of want to be ridiculous, and it seems ridiculous that you could actually do business in this building,” says Cal McAllister, whose company does business with Nike, Microsoft and ESPN and others. “I think overall that Wexley is funny, but it’s not a joke.”
Agree, Wexley is funny / different in a world of ad agencies that barely register any sense of brand differentiation.
This attitude is carried across all the agency’s brand messaging.
Here are some shots of Wexley’s Seattle office.
Wexley’s Twitter profile reads like an effective online dating profile and why not? Even prospective clients are looking for an “interesting date.”
@Wexley Advertising agency filled to the brim with incredibly creative, attractive, cut, cut, buff, ridiculously gifted, yet humble and gorgeous people. Everywhere. And in Seattle.
On to the agency’s LinkedIn profile, which now adds a strong direct / social sales proposition (other than their buffness) by introducing the idea of Fan Factory.
Wexley is a fan factory. We take your money and turn it into thousands, tens of thousands, millions of thousands of crazy people. We can create them. We can reinvigorate them. We will deliver them. Fans that stay for a lifetime of loyalty, with the spending and championing that comes with it.
Our biggest value as an advertising agency is not just getting fans in the door, but earning and sustaining their fanship over the long haul by entertaining them time and time again. As they hold you in their hearts and minds and on the tips of their tongues, we engage them in ways you can imagine and others you cannot. It’s pretty simple, really.
Wexley continues to drive their brand mantra across YouTube and supports it with work that would not come out of stodgyville. Wexley has 64 videos up. Well over the agency average (vs., just for the hell of it, Droga5’s 54.). Take a look at this video for otherwise stodgy Microsoft’s Window Phone. And, note that it’s close to 1 million views.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PitGqCeJF8c
Hello there. FYI: Facebook was our idea in the mid 90’s and even though Al Gore created the internet, we thought of the phrase, “Information Super Highway.” So, yeah, you’re welcome people of the internet.
Not a me-too site. Here is an early version. Simple, to put it mildly. The soundtrack made it — maybe. Well, it always made me need to click through. So, it acted as an audio CTTSTM thing (I just made that up… CTTSTM = click-through-to-stop-the-music.)
Today? Click around the golf balls (marketing directors like golf balls) to see work for: ESPN, Microsoft, Oberto, Rainier, Taco del Mar, and Wilson.
Once you’ve seen the work and heard the story, Wexley sends you to a contact page that actually seeks contact and makes the hard to resist offers of, “If you want to hire us and make yourself rich and famous call:” There is even a humorous message for job seekers if you want to move on from your not so funny agency.
A caveat… I mentioned Wexley to an agency friend. She thinks that they, and the way they talk about themselves, might register as being a bit too full of themselves. OK, I can see where she is coming from — and yes not being too full is a Northwest attitude red flag. But, ALL agencies are full of themselves. In this case, it’s nice to see an agency that at least knows how to express its ego and use it as a sales proposition.
Here is how to name an advertising agency.
I’ve been reading the mobile advertising tea leaves. Here are two cups of rather green tea that suggest that savvy advertising and digital agencies should be allocating some (a lot of?) staff time to understanding shifts and opportunities arising in the mobile advertising space. As you can see from the Gartner study below, mobile ad spend in North America is expected to rise by over 100% by 2016.
Mobile Advertising Revenue by Region, Worldwide, 2012-2016 (Millions of Dollars)
|
2012 |
2013 |
2014 |
2016 |
|
|
North America |
3,181.5 |
3,825.7 |
4,694.9 |
8,866.2 |
Source: Gartner (November 2012)
Different types of mobile advertising are evolving at a different pace and in different directions. Mobile search — including paid positioning on maps and various forms of augmented reality, all of which can be informed by location — will contribute to drive mobile ad spending across the forecast period, although it will diminish in strength as the period progresses.
Gartner believes that mobile display ad spending will grow and take over from mobile search. It will initially remain divided between in-app and mobile Web (in-browser) placements — reflecting consumer usage — although after several years of in-app dominance, Web display spending will take over in-app display from 2015.
Another tea leaf reading comes from Kliner Perkins via Tech Crunch, “Kleiner Perkins Has Now Put Over $450 Million In Nearly 40 Mobile Investments.”
Head over to Tech Crunch to hear Kliener Perkins partner Matt Murphy discuss the firm’s investment of $450 million in 40 mobile companies.
As Murphy explains, these investments include both the $200 million iFund (launched in 2008) and separate investments. So now the $450 million in mobile investments are part of the firm’s digital investing in both consumer and enterprise companies…
And Kleiner has built a pretty impressive collection of consumer-focused mobile investments including Shopkick, Path, Spotify, Pinger and Square. Of late, the focus has expanded to enterprise with companies like Apperian, Crittercism and Egnyte.
This is action that agencies of the future need to get into.
1. Hang out with your city’s mobile developers. for example, in Portland we have Mobile Portland which hosts monthly presentations. You could even tap into Portland’s vibrant mobile community by watching some of the presentation videos on the website.
2. Go to mobile conferences. Then write mobile advertising white papers to share with clients and prospects.
3. Offer some of your office space to mobile developers to get them into your ecosystem. Maybe start to work with local incubators and accelerators to nurture new mobile companies.
4. Drop some investment coin and buy or merge with a mobile advertising company.
Client case histories are probably as old as the advertising industry itself. So, how can an agency show its expertise and ROI chops without sounding like every other agency down the street?
Think different.
Canadian ad agency John St., which was just purchased by WPP, created this great video-driven case history of how they made Chelsea Bedano’s 8th birthday party a huge success. The agency employed direct mail, out-of-home media and social media to deliver the message. The results put smiles on everyone’s face.
In case you missed this case (which means you were not one of the 350,000 plus viewers of the YouTube video (!)….