I have been asked by Carlos Henrique Vilela, Brazilian planner, what my favourite campaign is. You can find my answer below.
My favourite campaign it is a French one from the mid 90’s for Kiss Cool (Cadbury).
You can read about the campaign and see some ads here. (In French)
I have tried very hard to look for the best campaign with a great strategy and a great execution and then I though it maybe wasn’t a perfect way to find one. I digged in my personal memories and remembered this campaign I loved as a teenager. I may be trusting my guts than my brain here but it feels like the right thing to do!
Although the brand just died this year, this is the typical example of a brand built mainly by communication. No only the ads were funny but they entered popular culture in a very deep way in a time where the Internet wasn’t really developed. Some people are still using the tag line from the campaign: “Kisscool, c’est frais mais c’est pas grave”.
This is for me what good advertising should tend to be: a brilliant piece of content tapping into common references.
I guess they will have the opportunity to relaunch the brand in a little while a la Wispa, an other Cadbury brand…
Here is a rant I’ve been wanting to write for quite a while and today I’ve decided to stick it on the blog and see if it makes any sense.
We may have much more digital tools available to our fingertips these days but are we more knowledgeable? I am not talking about the whole ‘Google making us stupid’ thing here, I am talking about finding genuine and interesting content that could make us more knowledgeable.
The more the Internet is growing the more difficulties we have to find new and interesting content. Google ranking works in such ways that it is now very hard to look for information beyond Wikipedia for instance. I have nothing against Wikipedia, it is an amazing and very reliable way to look for information however it is only one way to look for knowledge.
By creating hubs like Wikipedia and RSS feeds, we are easing the process of looking for information but we are to a certain extend creating an illusion of knowledge. Looking for a Wikipedia entry isn’t enough, it is only giving you some surface knowledge.
This is quite paradoxical for a planner but I am now operating in a vacuum online. I have spent so much time building my Netvibes page over the years that I am now doing 80% of my browsing on it. It is becoming increasingly difficult to fight against laziness and browse beyond the RSS feed.
To fight against my digital routine I try to post one interesting link/idea a day on my Twitter. Most of the time I try not to use any content from my Netvibes to post these links and it hasn’t been an easy task so far.
Balance between efficiency and discovery, that’s what it is all about!
A while ago I wrote a post called French Planning. As I have been interviewed, together with a few other French planners working in London to give our perspectives on British planning by Stratégies magazine, I have decided to write a second one.
Overall I am pretty happy with the article, as the major points I wanted to make have been landed properly, however I just have one small concern about the title of the article.
“La recette du (vrai) planning a l’anglaise” could be translated like this ‘The (true) recipe of English planning’. The problem I have with this title is that planning can’t be summarised by right or wrong as every planner will have his very own definition of the discipline. And the truth is, there is no magical recipe as every briefs and contexts are different. It is even truer for the digital environment as sometimes you will have to lead and sometimes you will have to work on a very small piece of the business.
Anyway, sorry to be picky but I thought I had to precise this last point!
You can have a read of the article here (in French) and make up your own mind.
You properly understand things when you get stuck into them. This is one of the most important things to understand when it comes to digital. I’ve been using Twitter for about two years now, however I am only using it as a link provider tool to look at other people and inspirations.
I have truly experienced Twitter as an alternative way to look for information during Le tour de France this year. Although I knew the immediacy of the site allows you get a snapshot of the news quite swiftly, following professional riders has been a very interesting experience.
The Herd and Tipping Point effects are interesting to follow. A famous rider starts twitting: Lance Armstrong and then you can follow half of the peloton and a few team manager.
But the most interesting thing to look at is the way they are using Twitter. Digital blurs the borders between virtual and real and by reading some of the twitts I was wondering if the riders realise they are talking in a public environment. Have a look at some of the samples below; we are miles away from the traditional, consensual post effort interviews.
Following Le tour on Twitter has been far more exciting than on the press. Even sport newspapers were using Twitter as a source for information anyway! I am obviously not saying media are dead or something like that. There is of course a role for media in the future. As they can’t compete for the immediacy of the news anymore they should focus on the quality, taking the time to go one step back and having a look at the bigger picture in order to add value.
Seeding is increasingly important in today’s digital world. However, seeding isn’t working. Good seeding is rare and most of time treated like media buying.
If things aren’t done in a right way from a seeders perspective, it is the same from a bloggers perspective as some saw here the opportunity to participate in a vicious business model. As Paul Boutin from Wired puts it, “The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge.”
Of course you could argue that good content will always spread, the reality of things is that you will need some solid seeding thoughts beyond the send to a friend button.
Here is the main issue: ‘Industrial seeding’ isn’t talking to the real actors of the web anymore. It is talking to people that transformed their blogs into magazines. These aren’t the genuine actors of the blogosphere, all they are interested in are financial deals not content. By doing so these bloggers have lost their only real power: credibility. The problem isn’t therefore about the blogosphere not being right to spread new ideas but more about finding the genuine actors of the web.
Indeed finding the right persons or groups take a lot of time and often require people with connections within these communities not a media buying agency. Moving forward, seeding should be considered earlier in the process to allow enough time for research, making the right connections. If you are short on time anyway, sources like the Social Media Library (for the UK) are interesting and will give you an idea of the persons to contact.
Of course the two main things to remember are: great content is paramount and be transparent and collaborative when contacting bloggers.
The recent French law called Hadopi bill is a total nonsense. The law is supposed to resolve piracy by canceling the users Internet access after three illegal downloads. Have a read at this article from the Guardian if you want to have a better understanding of the law.
The law is wrong on many levels but mainly because it doesn’t take into consideration the reality of things, it is only made to solve problems on a short-term basis. It is focused on the causes and isn’t answering the real issue: the business models used by the music and film industries aren’t working anymore.
And as Philippe Maltere wrote, P2P may well disappear in France, however illegal downloads will still exit with Rapidshare, Megaupload and likes.
This law is just smoke and mirrors and meant to please a few people in the French media industry. After all the next presidential elections is just happening in 3 years time.
Happy New Year to everyone that read and/or commented on the blog in 2008. I don’t have any predictions for 2009, I’ll leave that to Paco Rabanne, I only have a personal one. 2009 is going to be about making stuff happen that I can promise.
To celebrate the New Year you can enjoy some great French flair tries from the last 30 years!
