You Can't Help It!

This ad just makes me smile:)

Beyond Advertising..The BMW way

We have video iPods, internet TV, easy access to downloadable shows, TiVo in the US and Sky+ in the UK, multimedia on our mobile phones, PDAs, ... and the list will go on. Media is only developing and our sweet sweet gadgets are only increasing for our convenience. As much as this is grrreat how will traditional advertising handle this. Well, brand content is one possible way. A guest speaker who owns a company that does band content came to tell us all about it today. He was talking about how with all this new technology viewers can easily avoid watching commercials that interupt whatever their watching and therefore advertisers have to find more effective ways to reach these viewers. For example, i watch more shows on my laptop than on TV these days and with them i dont get to see any commercials at all. So he was saying that brand content is the way of the future. He says brand content in shows is more than sponsorships its much deeper and more subtle. It's kinda like product placement in movies but its something that the brand itself produces. One example he told us about were these films BMW made for their Z4.
They are basically 3 8 minute short films, which are directed by and star top Hollywood people. The films are amazing! They're intriguing, entertaining and they give the car perfect character. The car ads I like are ones that show the cars features in an intersting way and these movies do it very well. You watch the movie and on some level your thinking if it werent for the car he wouldnt have got their on time. Their are some shots of the car where you will go 'Waahaaaw' or as one of my friends would say 'Goobbshh'!
I absolutely love what BMW have done.. pure genius. They have also done a series of comic books with that same concept...Amazing.
Watch the films here.

Creative Frustration...

So im trying to put a book together with my creative partner in the course. We need a portfolio of our work by the end of the course plus we have to get it together if we want to go on work placement. We've been working on it for a while now. We have a good amount of working campaigns but for some reason we can't get them completed. We have good ideas, working ideas, a couple of sketches and pieces of copy here and there. Everytime we think we have completed a set of ads someone comes along with another comment. I dont mind the comments, I find them really helpful but they only mean its one more campaign to complete. Probably one with a better outcome. With a couple of campaigns hanging and starting new campaigns in the same time, i have reached a new level of creative frustration.
So im trying to solve this problem. For the past two days I decided not to think. Not to think about any work at all. Now tomorrow is another day and by early afternoon I will have to start using the greatest gift God gave us and hopefully be able to get something done.

Just writing whats on my mind

Your Happiness Versus Your Creativity

For a while now I've been wondering if creativity depended on happiness. Whether or not a person is more creative if you he or she is happy. Happiness here is very difficult to define. It depends on the person really. So, I googled it. I found a lot of sites that say that creativity can lead to happiness but that didn't really answer my question. I, then, found this site that quotes a Yale professor. He explains in an average day people "slide along a spectrum of thought processes". From "high focus" when you are consciously trying to think about something, for example, in the work place to "low focus" when you daze of or daydream, for example, when someone is in love. According to him, neither of these thought processes is when a person's creativity is at its peak. It is when a person is in "middle focus" when he or she is most creative. During that point a person is the most relaxed. The mind is not distracted by any "obligatory, occupational concerns and mind-numbing, un-reasoning emotions". The person here is not really concentrating on anything and is the most calm and relaxed therefore the person can make unusal connections that turn into creative sparks. He gives an example of Newton and the apple. Newton was resting under a tree and therefore was in "middle focus" when he thought of gravity. Archemides discovered the principles of density and buoyancy when he was in his bath tub taking a bath. Eureka!
So in "middle focus" because you're relaxed and not thinking about anything really you can say that a person can't be depressed. If you're not depressed then to an extent you are happy. So it can be said that to some degree a person is more creative if he or she is happy. Maybe it is more correct to say that a person is more creative if he or she is not depressed. Yeah it makes sense.

The street we all lived in at some point..

Sesame street. The show we all grew up with. If you live in the Arab world the other option was " ifta7 ya simsim" with the neckless brown camel No3maan and the talkative parrot Malsoon.

My personal favorites from Sesame Street were Bert and Ernie. We all lived among these characters, some of us more than others. I just found out the origins of two of our Sesame characters, Big Bird and The Cookie Monster.


Interestingly, they both came from advertising. Jim Henson the creater of these muppets had created a muppet for La Choy, a brand that sold chinese food. He created a Dragon as their mascot. When he went along to make the big Big Bird for Sesame Street the 7 foot La Choy Dragon was his inspiration.

As for the Cookie Monster, he really started as the "Wheel-Stealer", a muppet Henson had created for a snack commercial for General Foods but unfortunately it never got made. In 1967, Henson then used the "Wheel-Stealer" for an IBM Training video and finally two years later he used the puppet again for three commericals for Munchos, a Frito-Lay Potato chip before he became the Monster we all know.
A still from the IBM Training Video.. imagine if they used the cookie monster in a training video those days..



Just a fun fact I thought I'd share.

Reach, Relate & Speak..

An obvious advertising rule: to reach ur audience u need to relate to them. Common sense: to relate to them u have to speak their language. Yes when I say language I don't mean just Arabic or English or the beautiful language of that boot-shaped country. I mean the dialect, the vernacular, the lingo.
For the english language I guess its easier. Let alone that the ad industry is very much established in UK or the US but as a language they pretty much speak what they write. Yes they have their dialects and their slang words which, at least in the UK, weren't used in ads until the late 70's or 80's. Before that great copywriter came along and decided to break the boundaries the language used in British ads was the proper standard english spoken only by the elites of the society.
The Arabic language is very different in that sense. I dont know anyone that goes around speaking in the classical written Arabic - except the Arabic teachers we all came across in school who we have to give credit to for trying to teach us something. But unfortunately, we all speak our dialects which are not purely arabic- some english words, some indian, maybe some iranian all muddled up together.
I've seen an increase of ads in the region where the copy was in the vernacular. Two I can think of are our Ramadan specials "Yabeela" and "Nigooshi". Very noticable but they probably made more money for MTC as targets to forwarded jokes than themselves. The campaign that I liked to a certian extent was the for Villa Moda Kuwait a couple of years back that was plastered all over the streets of Kuwait. If i remember it correctly they were copy only ads with a plain backround. The copy was in the Kuwaiti dialect.
I love the Arabic language, the richest language there is but advertising is not literature its about connecting to the people and eventually selling. Dialectal ads connect more and hopefully sell more.
But this is just one opinion..

are there any original ideas?

As much as i would love to believe that there are, i am not very sure. To get an idea u need inspiration. You see or read something, a little bit of lateral thinking and 'pop' - an idea. So if your idea was rooted from something that already exists is it really original?

Consider the ads in the middle east, where the market is still developing. Many ads might look like imitations of American or British ads. Some probably are but can it be possible that through the same process of thought they have reached the same conclusion? from personal experience i know that it is. working on a campaign just last month my group and I have gone through many ideas that we had to abandon cuz they have been done before.

Hienz and KFC two huge brands. Leo Burnett and BBDO two huge ad agencies. In two different sides of the world they have very similar ads with the exact same idea. Hienz hot ketchup in Portugal and KFC Hot devil drumlets in Singapore.


1st thought: who copied the other? 2nd: did they?