Pepsi Max - From Youtube To A 30-second Spot

This is a bit old and I meant to post it a month or so ago, but it's still relevant as we see more and more brands working from the inside out.  That is, starting with a digital execution and then translating that to traditional media or into a 30-second spot.  This example comes from Pepsi Max.  In the video, we see Uncle Drew going to attend a pickup basketball game with his nephew.  When one of the other players goes down with an injury, Uncle Drew steps in.  After a slow start Uncle Drew starts dominating and talking trash while the  other players try to figure out how the hell this old guy has such ridiculous game. At the end of the video we see NBA rookie of the year, Kylie Irving, being transformed by Hollywood makeup artists into an old man, 'Uncle Drew.'  The stunt actually relates nicely back to the brand as Pepsi Max is 'the zero calorie cola in disguise.'

The five-minute video is fantastic.  It's compelling enough that 80% of the viewers were still watching at the 4 minute mark.  Pepsi could've considered the 10 million views the video over the course of a month success in it's own right.  This was never intended to be a 30-second spot or to have a presence on TV, but as a Pepsi spokesman says "Once we started looking at the metrics, it became clear that we couldn’t miss the opportunity to bring Uncle Drew to the sport’s biggest stage."  Pepsi decided to run a cut-down version, basically just a teaser for the full video, during the first three games of the NBA finals.  That in turn drove further viewership of the YouTube video, creating a nice virtuous cycle.





Additional Articles: MediaPost | AdAge

Coca-Cola Security Cameras

Damn you Coca-Cola and your continuous ability to evoke emotion through video.  Coca-Cola Latin America, Young & Rubicam and Landia created this delightful 90-second spot to remind people that acts of kindness and bravery are taking constantly taking place.  The video shows off the warm fuzzy side of security camera /CCTV footage.  'People tend to associate security cameras with negative events, but we wanted to disprove that assumption by demonstrating the abundance of happy events and actions they capture,' said Creative Director Martin Mercado.


via Yoram Cisinski

McDonald's Gets Transparency Right (after getting it wrong)

Here's a nice effort by McDonald's Canada to be transparent and respond to questions/concerns from customers.  This comes a few months after the Twitter #McDStories fiasco.  The #McDStories was promoted tweet centered around the idea that 'when you make something with pride, people can taste it' and invited Twitter users to submit their stories.  No doubt they expected stories of love, laughter and general culinary delight.  Within minutes it'd been highjacked by such lovely recollections as 'Watching a classmate projectile vomit his food all over the restaurant during a 6th grade trip.' (@jfsmith23).  Needless to say McDonald's pulled the plug on the campaign very quickly.


Now McDonald's Canada (and their agency Tribal DDB Toronto) has taken the lessons learned and launched the McDonald's Canada 'Your Questions website and Youtube channel.  The premise is simple:  'Ever wanted to ask us about the food in our Canadian restaurants?  Now's your chance! We'll answer any questions about our food - even  the tough ones - then post a personal reply from McDonald's Canada.'  


In an extreme act of transparency, they're committed to answering each and every question.  Certain handpicked questions such are being answered with an in-depth behind the scenes video.  A great behind the scenes video answering the question 'Why does your food look different in the advertising than in the store?' has racked up million of views and is an incredibly interesting look at what goes on during a food photo shoot.  Check it out below or head on over to the McDonald's Canada Youtube channel to see more video response videos.


Again, this is a really nice effort to actually engage in meaningful dialogue with customers in a completely transparent manner.  This is increasingly important in light of the recent customer satisfaction index that ranked McDonald's last in satisfaction amongst fast food chains (though those results may just be for the US).  Then again McDonald's was just named the most effective global brand for the second year running at the Effie awards.

via Leon Bayliss

Refuge - Don't Cover It Up

Does something happening twice make it a trend?  Well I'm calling it one.  If you recall, a couple months back I posted about VW & DDB enlisting Youtube Star, Nikkie of Nikkie Tutorials, to create a PSA highlighting the dangers of applying makeup and driving.  That video recently took a gold for viral advertising Cannes.

Now YouTube star Lauren Luke and BBH have teamed up to create a video on behalf of domestic violence charity, Refuge.  The video offers tips on how to cover up bruises, with Lauren Luke indicating that her bruises are the result of domestic violence ('if you got some bruises from a jealous type of partner, etc.).  The video abruptly ends with the sound of someone entering the house and closes with '65% of women who suffer domestic violence keep it hidden.  Don't cover it up.'  This is part of the wider Don't Cover It Up anti-violence campaign from Refuge.  More information can be found here.

It's a great way to reach Lauren Luke's nearly 500,000 regular subscribers and to highlight the silence that too often accompanies domestic abuse. The video feels particularly authentic as Lauren Luke has talked about her past experience with domestic abuse.  Contagious Magazine has a more in-depth write up with additional background and insight.

Cannes 2012 Roundup & Trends

Regardless of what you think of the annual advertising boondoggle festival that is the Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity, the fact is that it remains the most prominent showcase of advertising excellence.  This year saw Mobile and Branded Content get their own categories.  I highly encourage everyone to spend at least an hour going through the Cannes Lions site and reviewing the case studies for the winners in each category.  Without going into too much detail, the macro trend from this year's Cannes seemed to be awarding work that provided utility or gave something back to the user/customer.  As James Hilton aptly said during one of the Lightning Talks at the Google Sandbox 'the best advertising isn't advertising at all.'  Rather than try to recap the festival, I'll rely on the efforts of people more talented than myself.  See below for some nice round ups/highlights from the winners this year.

This comes courtesy of Bridget Jung, Chief Creative Officer - Digitas

I'd also recommend this nice roundup from AdWeek of all the Grand Prix winners for 2012.

Adverblog has a nice article on the overall Macro trends among the winners that's quite nice.

Last but not least, Contagious Magazine has a nice breakdown which includes snippets/quotes from about the work in each category.

But again, it's really worth spending some time on the Cannes Lion site and checking out the various winners across categories and the corresponding case study videos.

Nike Football - My Time Is Now

Apologies that this blog has been radio silent for the past month due to a ridiculous amount of traveling around for work (and pleasure).  By now, most of you have have probably already seen this campaign, but if you haven't please set aside the next 30 minutes to play around with the Nike Football Youtube experience.  It's without a doubt one of my favorite all-time Youtube executions.  Kudos to W+K London & Stink Digital for an amazing piece of work. First a bit of background from the W+K London blog (they can certainly explain it better than I can):

Our innovative new Nike 'My Time Is Now' campaign celebrates this next wave of footballers, whether it's the participants in The Chance, Nike's worldwide hunt for football talent (with previous winners featured in the spot), or elite athletes looking to make an impact on the world stage. 


But more than simply reflecting the defining qualities of hunger and impatience, this new global campaign provokes and rewards these behaviours in the participating audience too.


To achieve this, the campaign flips the traditional AV model: rather than creating a film for TV and running it online, we created a film for the internet, a version of which runs on TV. Launched online first, with the TV edit following up in Saturday's Champions League Final, the film is driven by a variety of different types of content, interactions and experiences, as well as seamless extensions to the overall narrative flow of the campaign.

It all kicks off with another epic 3-minute, star laden spot below.  That's followed by a call to action to 'Follow The Tunnels' which are areas of content/interactive experiences throughout the film similar to easter eggs.  These include Ronaldo's training program, a Sonic video game, Football IQ test, etc.


I love the fact that Nike continues to put digital first and foremost and are committed to creating truly immersive experiences.  Far too many of these ambitious campaigns start with TV and treat digital as an adjunct or bolt on at the end.

Additional Articles: W+K London | Contagious

VW - The Original Click

Really clever use of Youtube advertising formats in this campaign for official Volkswagen auto parts (developed by AlmapBBDO).  The idea is simple, people shouldn't accept imitations auto parts.  Similarly, they discovered that on Youtube many of the most-popular videos have poor quality knock offs/imitation videos, some of which have millions of views.  So VW bought in-stream ads against these imitation videos with the message 'Don’t accept Imitations. Prefer Original Parts.'  Clicking on the ads redirected users from the imitation video to the original version.  Check out the brief case study/explanation video below.  According to this AdFreak article the campaign generated '125,000 views and 500 clicks for every $100 spent.'



via Sibylle Tretera

Additional Articles: Adverblog | Digital Buzz Blog

Paper Crows - Build

Here's another clever use of Youtube videos from the musicians, Paper Crows for their new album 'build.'  The site shows four separate YouTube videos which are then synchronized into one coherent visual track using the Youtube API.  Each of the videos is actually a different music track, so users can change the audio track by rolling over one of the videos.  Simple, but very clever.  Check it out here, or see the screen capture below.
via Bobby Nolla

Getty Images - From Love To Bingo

Another great piece of work from AlmapBBDO for Getty Images.  The challenge was to show that Getty Images has such an extensive archive that any story can be told through their photo collection.  The creative team spent more than 6 months culling through 5000 photographs to create this minute long film which contains 873 photos from the Getty Images archive and tells a wonderful story throughout.  Just beautiful.

Doubleclick Rich Media - Media Bridging Desktop & Mobile

As you may have noticed from previous posts, I'm a bit obsessed with the media bridging opportunities where mobile is the glue that connects all other forms of media.  There's still a long way to go until it's seamless and elegant, but there's been some really nice progress, especially over the past six months.

One of my favorite examples (logrolling alert) was developed by my talented colleagues at Doubleclick (Scott Harmes - creative, Roberto Stocco - dev) in conjunction with Toaster Ltd.  The tech is called 'Channel Connect' and basically creates a communications channel between a desktop advertisement (such as a Youtube masthead) and an HTML5 mobile site.  It's not just limited to one user, so you can actually create an ad experience with multiple users competing/collaborating on the experience at the same time.  I think it has a ton of potential and look forward to seeing how agencies push these executions going forward.

Have a play with the demo here or for more details read below (full post on Doubleclick Rich Media Gallery blog):

Dubbed ‘Channel Connect’, this new Rich Media feature enables you to create more ways for users to connect with your brand.

What is it?

Channel Connect is a new DoubleClick package of Flash components and JavaScript libraries used to establish a communication channel between a desktop advertisement and an HTML5 mobile site.  The opened channel can be used to send any kind of information in either direction between a user’s mobile device and their desktop.

How can I use it?

Channel Connect turns a smartphone or tablet into a new input device, allowing users to interact with brand content more tactilely than a simple mouse.  Any Rich Media ad can be enhanced by switching mouse-interactions to gestures: turn a user’s mobile into a game controller or graphics tablet for maximum active engagement.

On a separate note you'll notice that it uses a QR code to initiate the mobile part of the experience.  That's definitely where most of the media bridging stuff falls down, so it's interesting to see Layar's announcement a few days ago that they're creating an easy way for publishers to turn standard print content into a simple augmented reality experience.  Really interesting stuff...