1. Extended Stay Hotels - Here's an equation for you: Cute girl + her tongue + hotel objects = my new favorite commercial.
   
   Please do yourself a favor and watch the rest of them here.
2. OfficeMax - There's nothing better than pissing people off in the name of marketing.
   
3. Air Jordan - If you don't follow basketball this one won't make sense to you, but this commercial brings back memories of the 80's 90's watching MJ in his prime. I can actually remember where I was and who I was with for some of the moments.
   
4. Nike US Soccer Women's National Team - From last year's Women's World Cup campaign.
   
5. Dove Evolution - It's a great commercial with a great concept.
   

Honorable mention goes to this Nike commercial.

List 5 commercials you like.

The following is an article published in the July issue of Mompreneur Magazine by Sharole Lawrence, President of Glow Marketing. And no, that's not me on the cover...

The Power of Viral Marketing

Did you "Elf Yourself" last Christmas? If you did, you experienced the power of viral marketing that brought 193 million visits to the Elf Yourself Office Max website. Did you sit in amazement at the Dove "Evolution" video that has received over 6.7 million views on YouTube? Viral marketing is the concept of creating something that is compelling and can easily be passed along to friends and colleagues. It can be an e-mail, a photo, a video, an e-card, even a text message.

The more compelling something is, and the easier it is to share, the more viral it becomes. The Elf Yourself website was compelling because it was personalized, letting you upload your own photos and record a voice message. Plus, it was really, really funny.

So how does this apply to us, Momprenuers without million dollar marketing budgets? The good news is, anyone with a great idea can create viral marketing. The bad news is, not everyone can come up with great ideas so you might need some help. YouTube videos are a great place to start. They're inexpensive to create if you have your own camera and you can probably edit yourself.

There are 2 main elements that seem to lead to "virability": Extremely funny and highly topical at the moment. When I say extreme, I mean extreme. It needs to be over the top funny in order to stand out. Get your craziest friends together and brainstorm ideas that almost scare you. Craft your one key message and make sure the viewer is left with that message, even if it's just a call to action to visit your website.

An example of being topical would be the best damn blender I have ever seen, pulverizing an iPhone into dust on YouTube. This of course was created and posted right when iPhones were released in the states. I could not help but think how clever it was and...what an amazing blender it was! iPhones are coming to Canada later this year, perhaps there is a way to tie in your company viral video with this craze that is sure to have people talking.

On a serious note, if your product or service is safety or health related, you might want to take a different tact, using the video as educational, but emotive enough to compel people to pass it along. I saw a great video demonstrating a swimming technique that can be taught to toddlers, to help them if they ever fell into water when no one was looking. I won't get into the details, it was hard to watch but compelled me to share it with other Moms because it was an amazing demonstration video that showed how to prevent drowning.

Like all marketing, viral marketing is a gamble. There is no guarantee that it will work, so you need to make sure it is not the only marketing you do. Very large companies that use viral marketing often create dozens of versions and then see which ones take off. There is little to lose in viral marketing because if no one watches, nothing is lost. So try it, take risks and have fun. You may be surprised how far your marketing efforts can go.

Sharole Lawrence, President of Glow Marketing

Sharole is President of Glow Marketing, Western Canada’s leading consultancy specializing in marketing to Moms.

Mompreneuer Magazine, July 2008 edition

If you watched ABC's The Gruen Transfer on Wednesday night you would have already seen this, but it's a clever advert made by Dove's Self-Esteem Fund to demonstrate the extent to which we are 'bombarded by hundreds- if not thousands- of airbrushed images of "beauty". These images have the power to affect how we see our bodies and ourselves". Dove have launched their Campaign for Real Beauty which includes educational programs for school-aged children.

Advertising experts on the show questioned whether Dove, a subsidiary of Unilever (owners of such brands as Lynx, Sunsilk and Rexona) had created the 'Real Beauty' Campaign purely as an advertising ploy. What do you think? Email us with your comments at comments@minifashionista.com.au

The ad has been extremely popular on YouTube with almost 7 million hits, and has fuelled a number of parodies, including this clever one above.

Et bien Evolution Dove a sans doute marqué les plus créatifs d'entre vous puisque certaines parodies ont dernièrement vues le jour :

Perché te li mostro ora?

Perché queste sono le conclusioni dello spot-parodia:

"Grazie a Dio, la nostra percezione della vita reale è distorta. Nessuno vuol guardare la gente brutta."

È dura da ammettere, vero? Ma chi può negare questa semplice verità?

Chi può negare che, in fondo, è solo questo bisogno elementare che la pubblicità soddisfa?

E che questo bisogno ha a che vedere anche con ciò che abbiamo discusso nei giorni scorsi?

Dove Evolution

Slob Evolution

As Thomas Disch would put it:

"Creativity is the ability to see relationships where none exist."

And that's what separates genius from average. This is not the ability to make up something totally new, but to find the right bit of stimulus and connect it to your project and brief. Excellent creative teams are always on the look-out for new things, curious about anything and eager to learn and understand what make compelling stories. Or just fascinating visual techniques.

Here are a few examples. Please note it is only my opinion, it might not really have been what inspired the creative team. Only seems uncanny!

Balls tossed on the streets of San Fransisco for the Dave Letterman show:

The genius of Juan Cabral was to see the potential of such a stunt for Sony Bravia... and to execute it again close to perfection.

Another one that has caused some controversy, Sony Play-doh, was accused to be based on that piece of art.

Source: Creative Review blog
It is exactly similar but again his talent was to see the potential of this still picture and turn it into an epic ad.

Another one for Honda, Cog was, I believe, strongly inspired by the "the way things go", from the Swiss duo Peter Fischli & David Weiss.

Pretty identical eh? But again their talent was to spot the potential and find the perfect opportunity to adapt it for their clients.

Online, the pattern stays similar. Creative teams still look for art projects for inspiration. Look at the BK darth vader application that won a Cannes Lion in 2005.

It had cleverly used a popular web game called 20 questions, that has been played 60M times online.

Come clean

was, again hypotethically, inspired by group hug and all the confession websites that appeared at the time.

I wonder if the subservient chicken idea didn't come from interacting with someone on a webcam... and trying to automate that process.

Dove Evolution could have been inspired by these pictures that were circulating the web a couple of years before.

Etc. Etc.

That is why I don't think it's a waste of time when I spend one hour a day minimum browsing blog the web for new stuff. It's an investment. I just don't know how creative teams can do without it.

But there is a limit to it what Youtube can achieve. Just browsing the 10 most watched videos for inspiration is pretty limited.

Here are a couple of previous examples. Although I admit to really liking the World of Warcraft spoof.

http://digicynic.wordpress.com/2007/12/04/the-new-rules-of-creativity/

And wait until Corey Delaney, the kid who became an ultra pop star in 2 days, for being the biggest prick in Australia, to appear in some advertising for the brand that make his sunglasses. Or some other stuff I don't even want to think of...

I'm currently selling the labyrinth concept of my previous post to one of my client...

Deze spot was ook bij ons op tv, maar dan anderhalve minuut korter.  Via de blog Reclamewereld kwam ik een versie van 1:40 tegen, even surfen naar YouTube en daar vond ik deze versie die dus nog langer is.

Komische overdrijving is altijd al een dankbaar middel geweest. Bovendien is het een concept dat variabel genoeg is om uit te breiden naar andere media.

Een goed concept dus en ik vond het wel eens leuk om de volledige versie te zien. Dit spotje is trouwens van dezelfde hand als de bekende Dove Evolution en Dove Onslaught spots, namelijk dat van Tim Piper.

Thanks,
Buy a book called 'Pick Me' How to get in advertising and stay there.
By Janet Kestin and Nancy Vonk.
That will tell you everything you need to know. It's a must.
Good luck,
Tim.

Right away, I ordered the book off of Amazon and it's been helpful indeed. Janet and Nancy have a website that's a great free resource: www.ihaveanidea.org and even their book for free viewing online. Particularly famous is their "Ask Jancy" column. There's also a recent interview with 'Jancy' posted about the Dove campaign.

For those of you who haven't seem the commerials yet or need a refresher, here they are:

dove evolution

dove onslaught

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6FDAi4jmV6Q">

Parodia del Comercial

If I told you that your brand messaging could experience the impact of a Super Bowl ad without spending one single dime on media buys, that would be a good thing, right?

Jaffe Juice points us to this article discussing the viral effects of the "Dove Evolution" video. Added to YouTube just three short weeks ago, it's been viewed over 1.7 million times and as a result of the buzz has also seen "significant" airtime on traditional television talk shows. The end result: An online traffic spike triple the size of the one created by the brand's Super Bowl ad buy in February.

Does this mean that you can just place a video, any video, on YouTube and reap the rewards? Of course not. What it does mean is that a trend is developing that will allow organizations to spend the bulk of their dollars on the crafting and creativity of their messaging and not the actual ad inventory it has traditionally required to spread that messaging. Better work, spreading faster, being more effective, for less money. Unless your involved in a conversational medium (and thank God that talk radio is just that!), rethink your strategy.

If I told you that your brand messaging could experience the impact of a Super Bowl ad without spending one single dime on media buys, that would be a good thing, right?

Jaffe Juice points us to this article discussing the viral effects of the "Dove Evolution" video. Added to YouTube just three short weeks ago, it's been viewed over 1.7 million times and as a result of the buzz has also seen "significant" airtime on traditional television talk shows. The end result: An online traffic spike triple the size of the one created by the brand's Super Bowl ad buy in February.

Does this mean that you can just place a video, any video, on YouTube and reap the rewards? Of course not. What it does mean is that a trend is developing that will allow organizations to spend the bulk of their dollars on the crafting and creativity of their messaging and not the actual ad inventory it has traditionally required to spread that messaging. Better work, spreading faster, being more effective, for less money. Unless your involved in a conversational medium (and thank God that talk radio is just that!), rethink your strategy.