Only a few moments after the ad was aired, it has already its parody. Now this is what I call success!

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…

On top of the usual entertainment devices and tools for travel such as podcasts, PSPs, DVDs… they have developed a service that enable people to find out who is going to be in their train. A kind of modern and legal version of toothing really! Users can create a profile, fill in some basic information and catch up with like-minded people during their journey.  I know that sites like Dopplr offer a similar service to people, however when you know how popular and convenient train is in France it definitely makes sense for the SNCF to develop their own platform.

After a successful launch of these new kinds of trains, the SNCF have launched idNight (night trains). Built around the idea that travel is a crucial part of the holidays, idNight enable people to relax at a proper lounge bar or to party with some well known Djs and bands. It is such a great idea re-energizing a dusty brand. You can have a look at the first gig in a SNCF train below, the band is Hocus Pocus.

“As a response to a fan video from Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 08, Tiger Woods and EA SPORTS demonstrate that the “glitch” Levinator25 thought he found in the game, is not a glitch at all”

When I received the email above I knew the name sounded familiar but I couldn’t remember how I knew this person! Then after a couple of seconds I realized it was Don Drapper, the main character from the TV series Mad Men following me on Twitter! I really liked the idea of following him and working in the industry I even imagine meeting him at a random industry event!

Checking the Twitter feed was great as well, posts like “Looking at my newly monogrammed watch and thinking that I should do something nice for Betty soon” are into the spirit of the series!

Then I saw that the website of Don’s agency (Sterling Cooper) URL! I thought great, what a site of an advertising agency in the late 50′s would have looked like if the Internet existed!! And then everything fell apart! No fake website to continue the great stortelling they started but the landing page of AMC…

They’ve ruined my experience! Maybe I’m being picky but they did the hardest part, they got my attention… and I wanted more. Attention to details my friends, that’s what is lacking there! (Great idea anyway!)

I wrote a few lines on the subject a while ago and I have decided to continue this post after I saw the rather interesting ‘Know your limits’ campaign from the NHS. This campaign will definitely have an impact on binge drinking and on people’s perception of the different measures however I am still sceptical that this kind of communication can have an impact on the roots of the problem in the UK: ‘casual drinking’.
By ‘casual drinking’ I mean consuming alcohol on a regular basis and necessarily in enormous quantity. “In England in 2005, 73% of men and 58% of women reported drinking an alcoholic drink on at least one day in the week.” (Source NHS)
Another problem comes from the fact that notions such as fun or entertainment are, in a way, being assimilated to alcohol. To plagiarize Polaroid, alcohol serves, as a social lubricant in the UK and this is the main problem communication should try to tackle.

If you look at the recent London Underground drinking party, what struck me was that people went into the street (or tube) and fought for their ‘freedom’ in the name of alcohol! You haven’t that many recent demonstrations examples in the UK apart from the war in Iraq so it gives you an understanding of what alcohol means for people!

Just to clarify, I am not saying that I have all the answers and that changing people behaviour on this subject is easy but from what I’ve witnessed they are two main problems: a short term and a long term one and only the first one is on the radar at the moment.
Anyway I am going to do more research on the subject and start to think how to answer this problem. If any of you is interested in the subject, you can drop me an email and we’ll go for a coffee!

[Pic via]

Just a thought I had when I saw this campaign!

Activism defending our universal right of information? Or a marketing campaign trying to promote a Google competitor?

I am generally not a cynic but the second option is my favourite because of the money spent on promotion. So it wasn’t really a surprise when I checked the URL this morning…and I discovered that Profero has registered the website. The agency is working for both Ask and Yahoo…

Too many marketing campaigns are using the revolution theme to promote their not so innovative service or products (I will write a full article about this soon).

This is made worse because they have tapped into a real problem: Google hegemony. Whichever way you look at it, this is just wrong! Trying to entertain people and play with the audience is fine, but when we claim it is objective, this is untrue. They are claiming a false revolution in a desperate attempt to engage people without realizing that when people discover the pathetic truth they will be pissed off and have negative feelings about the brand. (Just have a look at the comments section)