Created
All the library geeks
We’re library geeks. (In grade school, we spent our lunch hours quizzing friends on the Dewey Decimal System.) But we’ve never thought of the dowdy houses of literary worship as hip, so we’re overjoyed to see the Edmonton Public Library’s re-branding effort. One low-budget YouTube spot features employees boasting of the library’s treasures, but we prefer the TV spots that riff on the library’s new iconography, developed by the city’s Donovan Creative, of five parallel colour bars which represent everything from books on a shelf to keys on a keyboard. In the first of four 15-second spots in the TV campaign, a hip-hop music sting blends into a sample of Beethoven’s Ninth, as the on-screen text reads: “Beyoncé’s Latest. Beethoven’s Greatest,” and then dissolves into the EPL’s proposition: “Endless entertainment. Show-stopping value.” It’s sharp and effective, even though the singer is actually a fake Beyoncé – a Faux-yoncé, if you will. Of course, if all the single ladies actually hung out at the library, we doubt there’d be much need for an ad campaign.
Noted
Big money’s on random Web video spots
The headlines were eye-popping: Reckitt Benckiser, the U.K.-based conglomerate behind hundreds of consumer products, from French’s mustard to the Mop & Glo you’ll need to make sure that mustard smear doesn’t stick to the kitchen floor, is plunking down $40 million (U.S.) for Web video this year, setting a new record after its previous record-setting buy of $20 million last year. That was the good news. The bad news, at least for mainstream sites, was found in the fine print, when AdAge reported that RB is only willing to pay in the range of $2 per thousand impressions (a measure known as CPMs), far off the usual $30-$40 CPM commanded by sites like Hulu.com in the U.S. It could be a risky strategy – AdAge noted that RB ads have been spotted on websites that most packaged goods companies would deem problematic, including ones discussing cocaine. But hey, creative directors need cleaning products too, right?
Quoted
Untweetable thoughts
“The baby’s getting thrown out with the bathwater.” – Grant McCracken, cultural anthropologist
We’d never say a bad thing about social media (We couldn’t; our ears would get tweeted off.) But when the cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken popped up in Toronto this week to speak at the annual general meeting of Advertising Standards Canada, he suggested that, for all its democratic tendencies, user-generated content might be causing us to lose something important if it eliminates great ad creative. Because television ads, for all their notorious coarsening effects, help shape our civilization. “The thing that concerns me is, if what advertising does in its best moments of brand creation and value creation, is make meanings for the brand and eventually the consumer – create culture for both parties – it’s very hard to do that with social media,” he said. “The real powerhouse here, the best vehicle we have at our disposals for this ‘meaning management’ is that 15-second spot, or 30-second spot.”
30-second spots : On rogue marketers stealing World Cup sponsor’s thunder
1. Now that the Olympic ambush marketing season is over, it’s time for the World Cup ambush marketing season. Even as the famous soccer trophy touched down in Toronto this week, brought in by Coca-Cola, which has paid millions to be the official sponsor of the competition, on the other side of the Atlantic, Pepsi was ramping up its soccer activities to try to steal some World Cup glory. Already, they’ve rolled out an Africa-themed marketing campaign featuring the Soweto Gospel Choir. No word yet from Coke, but we’re having fun imagining the screams in their boardroom. Sometimes the action off the field is more entertaining than the action on it.
