Huxley Quayle von Blog

This is what creativity is all about.

I came across Ferenc Cako a while ago. Here is a live performance from Seoul. Spellbinding video to watch. This should get just about anybody's creative juices flowing.

Enjoy.

Good article about people shopping. Online versus offline.

Read this today in Ad Age. Not horribly new thinking, but a good read nonetheless.

Getting Shoppers From Search to Store
How to Capitalize on the Online-Offline Connection

By Greg Sterling

Published: August 25, 2008

Greg Sterling
What's the difference between national and local advertising? Draw two columns on a piece of paper, and you can probably list quite a few differences. But online they start to disappear.

Sure, the original assumption about how the internet would affect brands -- that e-commerce would triumph over traditional retailing -- hasn't exactly panned out. But don't let the failure of e-commerce to replace local bricks-and-mortar shops obscure a more important trend: the impact of the internet on in-store sales.

In the mid- to late '90s, there was considerable hype and speculation that e-commerce would drive many traditional stores out of business, as well as provide a platform for smaller retailers to extend their reach nationally or internationally.

Fast-forward a decade, and reality has turned out quite differently.

Less than 4%
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos optimistically predicted in early 2005 that online buying would "ultimately [be] 10% to 15% of retail." We're still years away from that, if it ever happens at all. The U.S. Commerce Department says e-commerce sales are less than 4% of total U.S. retail sales and have been flat for several quarters. While e-commerce has outpaced growth in traditional retail stores in a bad economy, offline consumer buying is as important as ever.

JupiterResearch and Forrester (now one company) predict that the internet will affect roughly $1 trillion dollars in offline consumer spending in the next five years. Forget about whether it's a trillion or $800 billion; the prediction is directionally accurate in terms of consumer behavior. This online-offline connection is a profound trend that marketers and brands have largely failed to understand, let alone capitalize on.

The internet has evolved into a primary research tool for consumers who go on to buy offline. Nielsen found in May that among "a representative group of people" who had recently bought consumer electronics at bricks-and-mortar stores, 80% had bought from stores whose websites they had visited first. And two years ago BigResearch released data showing that 89% of consumers who made in-store purchases in key categories conducted online research beforehand. There is much more data from ComScore, Yahoo and others that validates the pattern: Consumers research online but buy offline.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Greg Sterling is the founding principal of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm focused on the internet's influence on offline consumer purchase behavior. He also is a senior analyst for Local Mobile Search, an advisory service from Opus Research tracking the evolution of the mobile internet.

In the consideration phase
Empirical evidence also increasingly shows that the internet is used most heavily during the so-called "consideration phase" of consumer purchase behavior. Traditional media such as TV, print magazines or newspapers often stimulate online research, which in turn leads to offline purchases in local retail outlets.

Most brands and marketers have been slow to integrate traditional media campaigns with the internet, beyond adding their URLs to ads. And their online campaigns have generally failed to leverage location or lead people to a point of sale where they can buy the advertised product (or service).

All of the Ad Age top-25 advertisers, from Procter & Gamble to Berkshire Hathaway, sell products or services in local stores or through local distributors. In this sense, they should thus be considered "local advertisers." Yet most brands bring a national TV mentality to online advertising.

After consumers determine what they want to buy, they typically want to know where they can buy it. Second only to search functionality, store locators are the most popular feature on retailer websites, according to the E-tailing Group. But we're just now starting to see more dealer and product locators in online advertising campaigns.

Where to buy
Online, branding and direct response can be connected in ways that help build awareness and simultaneously provide consumers with desired "where to buy" information. Specific tactics are beyond the scope of this article, but locally targeted search and display advertising are key parts of such a campaign.

In fairness to marketers and agencies, online-to-offline tracking is imperfect, and good geotargeting tools are only now being developed. However, brands and national marketers that aren't using geotargeting or building local messaging into their online campaigns are missing an important strategic opportunity to capitalize on consumer research and lead online shoppers from search to store.

HQvB featured in National Post story.

Back To The Future
Ad agencies delve into the past to seek new inspiration

Hollie Shaw, Financial Post
Published: Friday, August 22, 2008

In an era of change and uncertainty in the advertising industry, some agencies are fondly embracing -- and in some cases, overtly mimicking -- the style and ethos of the profession's golden era espoused in the sleeper TV hit Mad Men.

The critically lauded show, which chronicles the exploits at a 1960s' Madison Avenue ad agency, began clearly influencing designer runways last spring. But its depiction of the industry at a time of excitement, passion and bold ideas has also clearly struck a chord in the ad community itself.

Philadelphia-based agency Red Tettemer redesigned its Web site in homage to the show, which premiered its second season on specialty network AMC last month, and dressed up its entire staff in the fashions of the era: skinny ties, slick hair, cinch-waist dresses and ubiquitous lit cigarettes.

Closer to home, veteran independent Axmith McIntyre Wicht Ltd. recently rebranded itself as Agency59 (after 1959, the year in which the Toronto agency was founded), sending out a glossy booklet waxing nostalgic about the year, which also marked the launch of the powdered breakfast drink Tang, birth control pills and colour TV.

Agencies market themselves in the way they market a brand, so it's not surprising that when a formula gets tired (or confusing: founders Axmith and Wicht had been gone for years), it's time for reinvention.

But such back-to-the-future branding is on the rise in an industry undergoing unprecedented change.

In 1959, there was "optimism, and a sense of possibilities," the booklet from Agency59 notes. That's something many professionals in the industry seem to feel is in short supply today.

In June, market researcher TNS Media Intelligence reported spending fell by 1.4% in the first quarter among the top 50 North American advertisers from the same period in 2007.

Companies such as Starbucks Corp. and AT&T Inc. have reined in advertising spending amid a dwindling economy. But there is also a collective yearning among many industry professionals for the golden era in which agencies were not gigantic corporations and had a more open and trusting relationship with clients. "I think what was happening then, and what we'd like to see more of, was that the agency was truly a partner with clients," said John McIntyre, executive creative director of Agency59. "It's a response not so much specifically to nostalgia, but a response to the complexity," said Mr. McIntyre.

Toronto agency Huxley Quayle von Bismark Inc. also has more than a whiff of nostalgia in its brand, which opened late last year with a vow to simplify the agency/client relationship, offering a flat fee for core services.

"Whatever happened to unwavering accountability? ... It came to a point where we didn't even recognize ourselves any more," read a manifesto from the agency's founders. The corporate blog added: "The current model in Canada sees agencies spending the energy on award-show freebies, dogwalkers, while doing the bare minimum on their paying clients' businesses. We became increasingly uneasy with this, as we find it unethical and immoral."

The success of Mad Men was a "happy coincidence" for Huxley Quayle von Bismark, says partner Chris Hall. "I think you are seeing a business cycle where people are rejecting [the ad industry's] fragmentation. There is now [a desire] to get to where everybody started in the business before it fragmented. In that 'golden age of advertising' when the show [is set], there was a philosophy of getting things done."

The trend has also been visible in advertising; close to the series debut of Mad Men, an Energy BBDO campaign for Canadian Club whisky raised eyebrows and won critical plaudits for running a nostalgic print campaign pointing to the saucy escapades of Baby Boomers back in the 1960s, with the tag line "Damn right your dad drank it." The print ads featured actual photos from the archives of Beam Global Spirits employees with such provocative copy as "Your Mom Wasn't Your Dad's First," and "Your Dad Was Not a Metrosexual."

HQvB takes on the dinosaurs! Who will win?

This upcoming Wednesday HQvB will once again pit our new vision, passion and lean-mean-fighting-machine model up against three traditional agencies. The prize? Appleton Rum's national account.

Even though there are four agencies in the running, we think our chances are 50-50. Why? Because essentially what we have here is three shops that basically represent the same old thing, and then our new thinking.

It's a clear choice for any client. You either want the traditional set-up, with it's armies of account people, it's departmentalized structure and hourly billing, or you want something new.

In our case, what's new is a belief that ideas that get people involved are more powerful than ideas that engage people "at multiple contact points". What's new is a model truly without departments where senior-only, equal partners come together to offer different perspectives and skills, but all pulling in the same direction. And it's our belief that traditional agencies waste too much of a client's resources on low-value administration, insane studio charges and unsightly mark-ups.

Lastly, we think it's kind of funny that agencies say they can help clients navigate through a new 2.0 world that they themselves don't live in, or truly understand. The HQvB brand lives in advertising, it lives online, it lives in social media, it lives in PR. And we cross these media seamlessly.

Last time we checked of the four remaining agencies, we're the only ones who do this.

Here's hoping our pitch arrow is big enough to take down the dinosaurs.

Sorry we've been away for a week or so.

The team here has been working furiously on a couple of pitches. We're down to the short strokes on our pitch for Appleton Rum. We're sure they'll see a great presentation from our team that makes them sit up and really think about their business and ours.

We've also been working hard on our campaign for Travel Alberta, set to launch this fall in Australia. The client is so happy with the thinking and creative that they're looking into launching the idea in several international markets next year.

And, along with our media partner, Genesis Vizeum, we've been working with Alliance Films to help them promote upcoming movies.

So pretty busy here a HQvB, and we've got more coming up. One of the major breweries called us to meet and talk to them about how they can become more innovative with their advertising.

Lastly, we've got a new campaign for the Ontario College of Art & Design that we're readying for launch soon. The last campaign received international media attention for them, so the bar is high. We're sure we've got the campaign to jump over it.

There's lots to talk about with the new world of advertising, so there'll be lots of new posts coming up soon.

How to use online games to build involvement in your brand.

I came across this article on the Marketing and Innovation Blog. It's a good guide for marketers and agencies alike about how to properly use advergaming to involve your audience in your brand.

10 Ways Your Company Can Use Advergames (Part I)

by: Alex Eperjessy via Business and Games Blog

So what about them advergames? Some people simply ignore/dismiss them, other swear by them. Then there's that category of people/companies who figure that all they have to do is buy some silly casual game, slap their logo all over it, put it on their website and voila, mission accomplished, budget well spent. The only problem with that approach is that it's the least interesting thing you could do. It's so boring and uninspired that most people don't even notice the company's game, despite the PR flood that comes with it.

That being said, let's look at some ways to make it more likely that people will talk about your company's advergame, should you decide to get one. (Five ideas today, five in the next installment).

1. As a way to give people some casual insight into what is it that your company actually does and how it does it. This is simple - say you're a delivery company. The game you can comission is one where the player is put in charge of managing a part of the delivery network. Keep it simple and fun but do keep one final goal in mind. Once I'm done playing the game, I need to have learned something about the way you go about your business. Although this is quite intuitive, it's still surprising to see how many companies release games where you have to get a frog across the street.

Read the rest here.

A great article about the principles of advertising

I came across this article about how David Ogilvy's 10 principles of advertising have not really changed in 50 years. Totally agree. 

It seems that these days people are too caught up in techniques and new media, when the core of advertising hasn't changed at all. It's a bout great ideas that get people involved in brands. Not coincidentally, that's the mission of HQvB. 

Some Ad Tactics Don't Age 

Why 9 Out of 11 Ogilvy Commandments Still Ring True Four Decades 

Later By John Sweeney Published: August 04, 2008

 I am one of those struggling veterans trying to keep up with all the changes hitting the advertising world. I'm trying, on the one hand, to keep up with the latest fashions in TV writing while understanding the revolutions in social media, search and other forms of interactive. 

Even though my current challenge is the classroom, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff of everything new is numbing, to say the least. Why that sent me thumbing through David Ogilvy's "Confessions of an Advertising Man," I'm not sure. The book is a classic. John Kennedy was president then, and the Beatles had not yet arrived in America. Reading it should be an experience in nostalgia for a simpler time, like thumbing through a 1963 book on computers that boldly shows the advantages of transistors over vacuum tubes. 

I expected it to be fascinating but hopelessly dated. It's the thought that counts: Adidas campaign relied on a great idea. Instead I found Mr. Ogilvy's 11 commandments on "How to build great campaigns" as clear today as then. Well, two are debatable, but nine out of 11 is a pretty remarkable percentage. So here's a quick take on Chapter Five from "Confessions," complete with examples from current agencies other than his own to show that this is not a promotional piece. 

1. 'WHAT YOU SAY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN HOW YOU SAY IT' 

Witness Chiat/Day's introductory advertising for the iPhone. Yes, it is clever how the finger directs music, e-mail and the web and then answers a call in front of our eyes. But the commercial is also 100% focused on the amazing things the phone does.

Read the whole article here. 

http://adage.com/cmostrategy/article?article_id=129996

Why is it that the Institute of Communications Agencies makes such bad ads?

Just look at the ad below, it's abysmally bad. It's like they let some junior designer from the 1995 Matchbook School of Advertising take a crack at the Canadian Advertising Week ad.

One would think that the ICA, which is supposed to represent the best agencies in Canada, could, nay should, be able to do a better ad themselves. And for the very first Advertising Week in Canada of all things. Yikes!

I know there are some decent folks at the ICA, but this ad gives the impression that either they have no idea what good advertising is, or they just don't care. Neither impression is great when you consider that these people are supposed to representing the industry and are consulting with advertisers on agency selection.

HQvB short-listed for Appleton Rum account.

We're working hard on our pitch for Appleton Rum in a couple of weeks. An ICA pitch with over 30 submissions, our bold new approach and innovative thinking got us down to the final selection. Now we're excited to take it all the way home by showing the fine folks at Appleton how HQvB marries smart business thinking with the unmatched passion that comes from people chasing their dream with their own company.