advergirl

Could we move the line along, please?

It's just a burger, but, sometimes, it's the hardest decision a person makes in a day.

Fun POP at Burger King:

From MIT Advertising Lab

Yet another reason I'm glad to be an adverGIRL

Reason: I'm not targeted by nonsense ads like these. (On the other hand, the "do you ever have that not-so-fresh feeling" wasn't much to be proud of either.)

Agency: Oh, guess who. Come on, you know.

(CP&B - where men believe men are the sole purchasers of consumer products.)

Overheard: People with attitude never improve

Interesting chat with creative Lance Dooley today - talking about a few ad folks who seem to have tremendous potential but have taken no steps to reach it because they approach everything with either blame or disdain. Rather than leveraging the resources of the agency to improve their skills, they're just increasingly put off by every project, interaction, client, etc.

Lance's take: People with that kind of attitude will never improve their skills because it gives them a Teflon coating that says, "it wasn't my fault."

He went on to say:  I once saw an interview with Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, and John Elway and they said the reason they became the best ever in their respective fields is because they always blamed themselves. That people that exercise "blame-shifting" were people that would never improve their game.

Something to think about ... there's a little bit of "that guy" in most of us.

The Dreaded New Business Conference Call

Incredibly funny audio clip straight from ad hell: a creative presentation via conference call and PDF. Oh, and with a budget on the back page. Ouch.

If the creative credits were not on the page, I would swear this was written by Blogger Wrightoff. But, nonetheless, I'm sure this and many similar calls are followed up with a scenario like his brilliantly written, Death by a Thousand Cuts. 

Enjoy.

Submitted by: Mike Swainey, SBC Advertising
 

VM: Multiplying like Rabbits

Back-to-back auto spots at Advergirl. This one is much better - a fun take on an old cliche and a very memorable execution. Some of the "choreography" seems a little messy or off in some way, but overall a great spot by Crispin, Porter & Bogusky:

Oh, no worries, we'll make a better product SOMEDAY

Ok, humans can't fly. So, not a great example. We can get in machines that fly, but nothing like the freedom Da Vinci imagined. Unless, of course, you consider gliding flying, which would be a little silly, but, ok ...

So, thanks to BP, we will apparently be subjected to an endless number of these inane brand ads that gloss up the general environmental shittiness of their current products by saying "we're working on it." Super.

Agency: Nazca Saatchi & Saatchi

Brandspankin Good Laugh

Just a fun thought from Ad parody blog: BrandSpankin. Visit. Giggle. Try to convince your neighborhood art director to pitch one for real...

Sales vs. Marketing: The shared challenge of B2B

Clients always want potential agencies to demonstrate knowledge of their industry - do you have experience with my PRODUCTS? But, an equally valid measure of competence might be - do you have experience with my PROBLEMS?

Many, many B2B marketers seem to share the same struggles - and figuring out how to talk about their products generally isn't one of them. Much more challenging issues tend to grow from the battle between sales and marketing - for dollars, leadership and trust.

PROBLEMS to understand for marketers in traditional B2B sales organizations:

1. Teaching an army of sales guy to understand how marketing works / what to expect from it
2. Convincing leaders who grew up in sales to invest in marketing
3. Mining deeper information about the customer base - or, really anything beyond name, company, projection
4. And - in lieu of the budget to do lots of research - pushing the limits of the shared corporate assumptions about who those customers are
5. Successfully communicating the difference between branding, marketing and lead gen
6. Facing the unrealistic expectations for results with the ridiculously small budget challenge
7. Tracking results / getting information back from the sales team
8. More often than not - being the only woman at the table
9. Controlling the message in the field
10. Maintaining momentum

Attendees at DMA's DM Days identified these shared troubles:

• Eighty-seven percent of B2B marketers have little confidence in their customer data
• Fifty-four percent of B2B companies surveyed indicated that the lack of sales and marketing collaboration is their most important challenge.
• Fifty-two percent of companies surveyed claimed to have integration between their sales and marketing systems.
• Thirty-nine percent of respondents indicated that data-related issues were the next challenge facing their marketing efforts.

Survey source: Media Buyer Planner

Relieving Children's Pain

Great find on Peanuts - these Y&R ads could have been for the first martini in a sippy cup, but they work well for Bayer Kids' Pain Reliever, too:

Pharma marketing is for ad pussies

The agency I work for has a tough competitor in town for staff and reputation - a pharma ad giant that seems to sign a $30 million deal for every $3 million win of our own. My boss always kids that we wouldn't like working there anyway - too easy. Here's the value proposition for every product: you hurt. We can make you stop hurting. Bang, you're done.

Every time it makes me laugh. And, reading this article in NYT today really  brought it to mind:

An anti-addiction pill. Already have a propensity to solve your problems with a drug? Gotten out of hand? Ok, here's one to counteract it. Bam. Sold. Were it not for the legal nightmares, who wouldn't want an account like that?

Read the article.