The Seduction of Cool
It’s a little disconcerting to see how easily marketers and ad agency snakes get seduced by the latest cool director, or thing.
It’s a little disconcerting to see how easily marketers and ad agency snakes get seduced by the latest cool director, or thing.
Adam Ferrier is a Consumer Psychologist and Founding Partner at Naked Communications. Adam can be seen, read or heard at; The Gruen Transfer, ABC Radio (Sunday nights), Adnews columnist, as well as The Australian, Cleo, Mumbrella, Shop Till You Drop and so on. He speaks at numerous conferences on marketing, ideas, contemporary culture, and consumer behaviour. Adam has degress in clinical psychology and commerce (marketing). A registered psychologist and has worked in private practice, forensic settings, advertising (Saatchi & Saatchi) and marketing consultancy (Added Value). He was also state under 12 chess champion on WA, and has a board game called The Analyst selling well in the Benelux countries.
Comments
Daniel Jeanes
Jul 12th, 2010Definately agree content relevant to the message and audience is more important than looking extravegant. Most creatives are guilty of making work over "cool" without taking into account the purpose of the work, which is where the company should reign tighter control in the brief and of the finished article.
Justin Polites
Jul 18th, 2010A lot of people have seen this but most of the coverage was b/w Jan – Mar 2010. Branded content works for me with vbs.tv (Spike Jonze is CD) changing my perceptions of Intel & Dell. Absolut aren't trying to be cool they are showing a collaboration of art & advertising that they been doing for 30 years. They are also trying to get to an audience impervious to traditional advertising such as their content partnerships on http://www.pedestrian.tv/
Adam Ferrier
Jul 18th, 2010Daniel, thanks for your comments. Agree.
Justin, thanks for your comments but think you've drunk the 'Branded content have to hide the message in a cool-Aid way'. This audience isn't impervious to traditional advertising. In fact they lap it up (see the blog entry under this one).
Further, I'm not saying the Spike Jonze thing didnt work (most things in adveritsing eventually work) it's jsut for 9 million USD TBWA could have done something far more creative and effective to help their client. The short movie is lazy and helps no one (except for Spike Jonze who got to practice all of the cinematography techniques he used to make 'Where the wild things are'.
Marek
Jul 30th, 2010Adam,
Great post. Finally got to it in my overwhelming Friday reading list.
I have been thinking about branded content and these kinds of films for a while now. (I wrote a few posts on my notebook about it, http://throughthetrees.tumblr.com/post/141124229/thought-brand-entertainment-most-often-does-not-create and http://throughthetrees.tumblr.com/post/136714342/lesson-4-the-art-of-storytelling).
I don't think the medium is particularly to fault nor the idea of branded content, but rather the strategic direction that gives birth to the execution.
It seems that the logic for doing what Absolut did is to follow the hollywood model. For example, seeing Inception recently, I noticed everyone said "Chris Nolan is a genius" rather than saying the star Leo was brilliant.
In the same way, perhaps the plan was to create an amazing film that is 'bought to you by Absolut' so it would get the same credo as that attributed to film directors.
It seems that it doesn't work like that for brands. Perhaps because of consumer cynicism or perhaps because the brand is not a reputable film director but rather a brand selling a product.
Ultimately, some branded content and long-format TVCs/short films are an extremely powerful way of storytelling. What is missing in the Absolut film, is a story that makes you feel something for the brand.
(The long comment was inspired by your post on something I often think about).
Seduction
Sep 8th, 2010You have interesting posts. I will visit your blog.
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