We‘ve just done this.
The 'Floyd' on Primrose Hill
Why? To publicise the fact that Sky Arts 1 HD were screening the Floyd’s 1994 Earl’s Court ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ performance , we recreating the ‘Dark side of the moon’ album cover on Primrose Hill on Thursday evening.
The Primrose version of the prism has graced the pages of The Telegraph, Guardian, Sun, Daily Record and Evening Standard over the past few days, not to mention in various places and guises online.
And this is how we did it.
Oh, and it’s caused quite a stir in the online Floyd community too… make of that what you will if you’re one of these.
These ads have caused a bit of a stir within the industry over the last few days. I saw them for the first time on Friday night on the way home after four pints of the black stuff. It made me smile and compelled me even to lean over the bloke below this photo and take a photo of the ad (at this point, I think most people on the carriage thought I was a bit simple) and eventually write a blog post on it.
The ads have been devised by the clever folk at M&C Saatchi and Creative Review err reviewed the creative here. Ruth Mortimer from Marketing Week then had a wee pop at the strategy and today it got a bit of coverage in the Telegraph.
So I thought I’d wade in too.
I like the tone of these ads because they are based around the thought that the brand is honest enough to acknowledge it’s current perception and place within people’s lives. It’s brutally honest… and clever. Because it’s honest, it’s credible. And because it’s credible I’m just that little bit more likely to listen to them or at least not turn the page quite so quickly the next time they try to speak to me.
Our whole industry is based on exaggeration, hyperbole, claim, dramatisation, one-up-manship and amplifying/creating propositions. So how bloody marvellous is this rather understated campaign born out of an acknowledgement of true consumer behaviour; generally, we shop around. The brand and client’s business does not operate in a vacuum. People are not that loyal. Particularly when in the market for consumer electronics.
Ruth Mortimer worries about the long term brand equity given that the ad compares Dixons to other electronic retailers. She is concerned that Dixons may come across cheap however I think it speaks value and shows a true understanding for who their customer is and how they differ from those of the retailers they mock. It says, we know you’re canny, we know you’re savvy, so we’re not going to try to bullshit you. For sure, they’ll never have the customer service of an offline retailer but that’s not Dixons business and it’s not what makes a sale for Dixons.co.uk at present.
This self deprecation and acknowledgement of the savvy shopper is a nice juxtaposition to what the rest of the market is saying to people. As a result, it’s cutting through. I hope also, there are a bundle of stunt ideas and quirky advertising that will lead from this strategy and this tone of voice. There’s plenty to play with. And, already the campaign has generated a fair bit of coverage because of this starkly honest view on their and their customer’s world.
Working in a PR environment, you occasionally hear of the odd ‘horror story’ anecdote from a colleague who had to try and “PR an ad”. However, the honesty in this campaign means you could potentially pitch this as a legitimate story successfully. To journalists and a bloke on the tube.
It seems now, honesty is pretty much the only policy.
From Bud Caddell who works at ‘digital thinktank’ Undercurrent. I’ll let him take it away. Cracking.
Evening.
So it’s been a bit quiet around here of late. A direct correlation with it all kicking off outside of blogland. A quick update;
1) I now work here instead of here. It’s cracking. If you’re interested enough to want to know why I left and what I do now, please feel free to get in touch.
2) I drove from Calais to Rome in a £150 20 year old Volvo 480 in an organised rally. That again, was a good thing that happened. Here is Scarlet in action. (By action, I mean on the side of the road with one of us topping up the radiator. A familiar scene on the trip).
3) I got invited to go to Butlin’s in Bognor Regis on an organised ‘tweetup’.
This is a bit of a weird story.But probably one with a few lessons.
A few months ago, I signed up to a site called Fuelmyblog out of curosity as to what it could offer potential clients. It’s run by a chap called Kevin Dixie who I was lucky enough to meet at said tweetup. He knows his apples. I’m not entirely sure how I managed to get invited to this, as the majority of my readership is marketing folk and the majority of Butlin’s core market probably aren’t. Moleskine wielding types, not the first association you would make with Butlins really.
When I got there, it appeared the others who had been invited were a pretty mixed bag but all had their routes in tech blogging and web 2.0 start-ups; contributing tech editor at the Telegraph and now Techcrunch Europe and also of Michael Jackson flashmob tribute fame Milo, Paul Carr, a guardian and Techcrunch columnist and about ten other bloggers working in various fields, all of whom very nice.
However, media planning wise, not very, err, Butlins.
Perhaps that’s what the brief was? Let’s do a familiarisation trip with some guys who would never consider Butlins? To tap into a bit of Butlins redcoat post-modern nostalgia? To broaden Butlins to a wider market, to reintroduce the staycation to the ‘burbs and the Nathan Barleys? To generate some online chatter; get the link love going… maybe.
Here is a resulting piece of coverage from Paul’s column. A must read. Hmmm.
And here is a nice video that Milo put together.
Our particular highlight was having a giant inflatable penis thrust in my friend’s face by some lovely ladies from Romford. Luckily, Bradley from S Club 7 was on hand to deal with the large member- he autographed it… Magic.
In all, perhaps not the ‘key messaging’ that the guys at Butlins were after.
Finally, here is the tweet a few weeks later from the lovely Sara-Jane, then of Butlin’s PR team;
(Thankfully, it now looks like she’s got a great new job.)
Now, it must be said, that although the media planning was pretty shaky which resulted in some pretty scathing coverage and a redundancy, personally I had a pretty good weekend. We were treated very well, accomodation good, food was half decent and the entertainment was err 911 and Sonia (which went down well though with us ironic ‘meeja’ lot). There appears to be some other good reviews coming in from the parenting blogger community too (though similar concerns as to who the activity was targeting).
However, I don’t believe Butlins needed to embark on this ‘blogger outreach strategy’.
Butlins to me are sitting on dynamite. And most of it is wearing a red jacket.
It’s a simple formula. Get people who are passionate about Butlins, talking to other people who are enthusiastic about Butlins and reward those who grow that enthusiasm in others. The web is good at that.
In this instance ‘blogger outreach’ perhaps isn’t the answer therefore. Empowering their employees to speak on behalf of the brand could be? In today’s transparent environment, having a workforce that wholeheartedly believes in the product they peddle, is really quite a powerful communication tool, especially online. Sometimes, the PR function has to focus on facilitation of the conversation, allowing the amplification to follow.
Very nice. Hat tip OgilvyOne massive.
Next question… can brands who finance this functionality, make it pay for itself by selling the application to local vendors to be featured? If I’m selling strawberries and ice cream just near Henman Hill, I’m sure it would be a great way to improve your chances of being found and chosen particularly if you ran a promotion. Incorporating a voucher incentive scheme (the voucher redeemable when you showed your IBM map on your phone for example) could tell you exactly how many strawberries and cream sales have been converted and driven by the ad I’ve placed within the IBM map.
Oh yes, and lest we forget, activity like this (with a story), google normally says ‘yes’ to:
Perhaps we obsess a little too readily with personalised media- the ‘information super highway right at our fingertips’… ‘twitter; the personalised newspaper’, ‘RSS feeds; the content YOU want anytime YOU want to have it’…. etc etc.
Maybe we are overlooking one of the lovely things about ‘broadcast’ media.
Because it is received in the knowledge that we weren’t the only ones to consume it at that time, an event and a moment in time has been created we know simultaneously has been shared with others.
With this comes two things;
i) when we consume content we like, part of the enjoyment in the consumption is the receiving of the content with others, after all, we laugh more when others laugh around us. To share a conversation over something becomes part of the joy in consuming it in the first place.
ii) Secondly, and maybe slightly more overlooked, is the pleasure we take in ‘group derision’ of content; to consume content which we know isn’t meant for us but we deride it within a group. Think students watching Jeremy Kyle- you probably wouldn’t choose to watch it on your ownn but it becomes an event to watch it with others and take the piss out of the programme participants.
Not sure entirely where this post is leading suffice to say that I think the idea of broadcasting a message or piece of content, although isn’t very ’social media’, I do believe has a role to play in combining and formulating groups of like minded individuals, in as much the same way that many social media campaign efforts seek to achieve. Although broadcast media is invariably not particularly targeted, it can on occasion have that same combining glue-like nature of people and communities akin to some of the best social media ideas out there.
PRCA ‘Positioning Digital’ event part two: Do the best online PR campaigns require offline activity?
I’m increasingly thinking they do.
It was born out of Mat Morrison’s excellent PRCA talk the other week on how to ‘position’ digital PR.
This was the second presentation of the morning after Fernando’s.
They both resonated but this one stuck out a bit as it was starting to say something different about the relationship between online and offline. Marketers are the only people who distinguish between the two. People don’t. In a few years, the web will be accessible everywhere too and ‘offline’ innate things will be trackable online through gizmos like RFID tags. Look at what Guinness are doing with balls as an example.
Does this become an online PR campaign now because there is some video content and online chatter about it? No. Our campaigns should enable us to engage the audience we’re trying to reach where they are and through the channels they are using, not dictated by our journalist relationships to guarantee a ‘hit’. And our campaigns should be born out of ideas that can work across the channels we need to reach the audience, on or offline.
Perhaps I’m asking the wrong question here… what about; is digital the way in which to reposition PR agencies?
This brings me onto one of Mat’s final observations in his talk; the best ‘online PR’ campaigns he uses as case studies in his deck are not actually done by PR agencies. And of course, if you work in PR, that’s a bit annoying.
But wait. Perhaps there is an answer. And maybe it’s more obvious than we thought?
How about flogging ideas, not process.
The advertising agencies who, back in the day, pioneered TV, for sure sold the process of getting visual images of branded images onto thousands of little boxes around the country to take a leadership position and become TV advertising gurus. But once TV advertising was commoditised and everyone was doing it, the pitch perhaps reverted back to ideas. If everyone is now arriving at traditionally acknowledged ‘PR’ ideas for communication solutions, and using social tools to tell the story (commoditised by every marketing discipline going), is there therefore an opportunity for PR agencies to be lean, mean, ideas obsessed, marketing G-units with no divisions of labour (or creative departments) and refocus their offering on ideas…(executed by the people who thought them up… flawlessly)?
The other process stuff; ‘menu PR’ and the apparatus to communicate and distribute the idea through earned (and paid for) media should be hygiene factors in the clients decision. I work in an integrated agency and the definition of being ‘creative’ is changing. Portfolios are increasingly filled with iphone apps, youtube contests, stunts, guerilla work, ARG, blog sites, Twitter feeds, content pieces and event ideas. And we have one of the most creative ad agencies on the planet right now (Crispin Porter Bogusky) supposedly using PR techniques to arrive at their ideas.
If public relations agencies execute our own ideas too, on and offline, engaging directly with the ‘public’, wouldn’t this be a great way for digital to reposition PR?
Very good.
