The first time I read about BlackBerry in the media was when Al Gore was VP. Since then BB seems to always pop up in an article now and then in connection with one global leader or another. So much so that one has to wonder whether this isn't in fact the world's best product placement ever. BB certainly is benefiting from relevant visibility. I mean it's the brand for the most powerful people on the planet. The latest such person is none other than avid BB fan President Obama.
Obama said that in his first weeks as president, he has had to "engage in some of the toughest diplomacy of my life. And that was just to keep my BlackBerry," he said according to CNN.
The Economist this week has an extraordinary article about what it believes is the root cause of the world's economic collapse. China's export industry, they write, grew incredibly quickly, making extraordinary amounts of money. The Chinese put this money into American and UK banks. In order to generate interest for their Chinese clients, the banks developed new kinds of financial products. As the pressure to generate interest grew, those financial products got shakier and shakier. Until, it all came tumbling down. Fascinating read. Check it out.
In the book "The machine that changed the world," the authors wrote "In the simplest terms, this book tells the story of mass versus lean and shows why lean is superior."
It's 2009 and when it comes to global brand building, there is a new global brand-building model. It's adaptive to new client needs and wants. It's flexible and effective. It's being applied by a new kind of agency model, applied by a select group of global micro agencies. They are blessed with experience, sharp perception and steely resolve.
What might clients (who are responsible for building global brands) want?
Different things, though it's fair to say many of the following: The best talent. Senior talent. Attention. People with global experience. Strategic rigor. A team that can do paradigm-shifting work. Amazing traditional television ads, print, out of home. Got to be able to think beyond that. Do digital. Use new social media stuff out there. Pull it all together. With efficiency. You want to be sure the investment in the creative excellence delivers. And you want a partner that is agile as hell.
To build a global brand in the past, you really had only one option. One alternative. The corporate ad agency with offices in every city on the map.
If you wanted to build a global brand you really didn't have much choice but to go with one of the corporate agency networks or holding companies.
I think it is fair to say that this is no longer the case. It's been proven many times over that a small, seasoned globally minded team can deliver great results for a global brand by doing it differently than the huge corporate agencies.
How will this change the global ad scene? If a small group of companies start something special, it changes things. It creates the space for a lot of other people to think they can do it too.
As StrawberryFrog turns ten years old this year, it's fun to think back over all the work, the campaigns, the limitations that are no longer there. There are a lot of travel miles behind me. What we've done may seem not so comfortable, hard, difficult even, but it's actually been the opposite. There are a small group of modern agencies that have led many successful international campaigns. A small group at the vanguard of a blossoming new and inventive global advertising scene setting the world ablaze with new ways of doing things, energy and fragrant ideas. We are fortunate to be one of them.
Below is a film we did a few years ago to have some fun with the way we do it. Enjoy.
The beer world is a small world. The advertising world is even smaller.
Campaign magazine in the UK carries today a well-written story by Noel Bussey about Heineken moving its UK advertising business out of The Red Brick Road and into Bartle Bogle Hegarty without a pitch.
The article says that BBH forced its way on to the global roster in November last year, when it was briefed to bring all of Heineken's global marketing activity, including its main beer brand and football sponsorship, under one global idea and tagline. The Red Brick Road won its place on the global Heineken account in July 2006, seven months after the agency's launch, following a final pitch against StrawberryFrog - the incumbent on the business.More here >>>
The first piece of business StrawberryFrog started working on with Heineken was the development of their Beertender strategy, which I led out of Amsterdam. At the time Widen had their global brand responsibility and BBH was working on PerfectDraft, InBev's competitor to Beertender.
The Heineken client was impressed enough with our strategic and creative work to ask us to pitch for the global football Champions League AOR against Widen and Kennedy. We won and were given the responsibility of developing a global cultural movement, with one strategy, one global campaign and one tagline. The result of this work was "Welcome to Champion's Planet" an idea that was all about building out an idea that was broader than the hard core football fan.
Here is one of our ads (which we developed out of our New York office), led by my creative partner Kevin McKeon, which ran in over 155 countries, including here in the USA on ESPN (not bad for a country where football is a rising sport). As a side note, before joining StrawberryFrog as my partner and ECD four years ago, Kevin was previously ECD of BBH New York where he led the introduction of Johnny Walker Keep Walking, Axe and several other iconic campaigns and, before that, he was CD on the famous Heineken "It's all about the beer" campaign.
Out of Amsterdam, StrawberryFrog led the global Heineken brand work which was eventually taken over by Frank Lowe and Red Brick Road. Before that, we did a number of different campaigns all under the universal global tagline "Meet you there". Here is one of the many global ads.
The last push for Heineken which we led out of StrawberryFrog New York, was the global James Bond campaign. Here is the making of that spot and then the spot (BTW you can see Kevin in this documentary).
The notion of Creative Destruction is found in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and in Werner Sombart's Krieg und Kapitalismus (War and Capitalism), where he wrote: "again out of destruction a new spirit of creativity arises". The economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized and used the term to describe the process of transformation that accompanies radical innovation.
As the world turns, one can find beauty in decay. Smash mashed this up in a nice collage.
Everyone is talking about how amazing Slumdog is to the point of over-hype.
But where most see a masterwork of performances and direction, I also see an old stereotype of the past. Having worked in advertising for twenty years, I know how long it takes to change perceptions.
Current economic volatility aside, India today is a global powerhouse, on the verge of leading the world in a new economic direction.
So it comes as no surprise that Slumdog is more the showcase of the banal and not the platform for the new, the real, and the dynamism that is now India.
Time Magazine summed it up in this week's issue: "For many Indians, the film's subject and treatment are familiar to the point of being banal."
Jaspreet Dua, a New Delhi–based business manager with an international luxury brand told Time: "O.K., so there's filth and crime in India, but there's so much more too. What they've shown is not reality. There's a lot of exaggeration and harping on well-worn clichés about India."
The object of this game is to look at the pictures on this site and try to accurately guess the age of the person. You can submit your picture to find out how old people really think you look. Enjoy :-)
StrawberryFrog is almost ten years old. We've developed a lot creative work over the years. During the last economic recession, when I was running the creative out of StrawberryFrog Amsterdam, we did this spot. It still rings true.
