Archive for May, 2008

Indiana Jones and the Outdoor Campaign

The entertainment industry has long been a staunch proponent of the outdoor advertising industry, creatively incorporating the medium to promote everything from movie premieres to Broadway openings. Hollywood’s “Man with the Midas Touch,” Steven Spielberg, continues the out-of-home legacy, once again calling on alternative out-of-home to promote the long-awaited return of Indiana Jones. Given the successful use of alternative media to promote Spielberg’s Transformers movie last year, Paramount decided to turn it up a notch for Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

According to the article from Reuters, the Indy campaign comprises about 2,000 billboards, wall messages, bus-side promos and other out-of-home messages nationwide. Talk about a glowing testimonial.

And the promoters of Indiana Jones like billboards so much, they’ve decided that two are better than one. In target areas such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, multiple billboards are being used for a single message for the blockbuster. (In fact, several dozen photos of just the billboards are already on Flickr.)

While it’s hard to say exactly what portion of the $126 million opening weekend can be directly attributed to outdoor, there’s no question that the tight integration of all the campaign’s channels helped deliver the hype studio execs were banking on.


Integrated HTC Campaign Sets Your Fingers Free

htc-tray-table.jpgFlying US Airways back from Boston yesterday, I lowered my flight tray table to reveal an interesting ad for HTC. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera handy (so unprepared for a former Girl Scout…), so I missed a shot of the dancing fingerprints in situ. Fortunately, MediaPost covered my faux pas by including the entire campaign elements in yesterday’s Out to Launch e-newsletter. From what I could tell, each of the three tray tables in my row demonstrated a different dance and featured different products.

Watching the TV effort definitely gives the tray table execution more context, although the in-flight advertising on its own is clever. It certainly made me want to learn more about the company and their products. Not bad, given that I had never heard of the company before.

Kudos to creative agency 180 Amsterdam and Work Tank Seattle (media buy) for giving my fingers something to do in-flight.


Creative OOH executions

As promised, here are a few of the creative examples from Jeremy Gutsche’s (trendhunter.com) opening presentation at the HOW Design Conference. You may have seen some of them before:

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This stop action viral film for MTN used 1,000,000 Post-It notes and 96,314 digital photographs. Check out the number of people watching the process…

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CBS used eggs to announce their upcoming Fall line-up last year… Yes, I know this is old news, but it’s just a reminder of the range of options out there.

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This campaign for Blush swimwear promoted it’s stand against nudism, dressing Berlin (Germany) statues in its latest collections.


Greetings from Boston: Part I

I’m writing this week from one of my favorite cities outside Ohio, Boston. I’ve made the trip east for this year’s HOW Design Conference…an amazing collection of designers and others associated with the business of being creative. For a few days, we get to disconnect (at least a little….full disconnection in an age of wireless internet and PDA’s seems virtually impossible, but that’s another topic) from the day-to-day tasks and learn new skills, refuel our creative tanks and think of our businesses in a while new way.

The event officially opened last night with a keynote presentation by Jeremy Gutsche, the brainchild behind TrendHunter (incidentally, if you haven’t paid the website a visit, I highly encourage it). As you might expect, Jeremy is in the business of scouring the globe, interpreting the trends and predicting what will be cool next. His topic to kick off the next few days was Creating a Culture of Innovation. I won’t even try to regurgitate his presentation here, but it covered a lot of the things we typically know, but rarely get around to implementing.

But one of the things that really struck me while I was listening to his presentation was the number of times he used out-of-home executions as examples of breakthrough ways to engage your customers, creating a memorable link to your brand’s message. While we all tend to hear so much about the power of the Internet to deliver highly targeted, personalized messages (which is absolutely true), viewing Jeremy’s examples last night reminded me of the power our physical medium possesses, when applied in a creative, relevant way.

I’ll post as many of the examples from last night as I’m able to find. Hopefully it will help drive some conversation, provide some creative inspiration and give us yet one more reason to be glad we’re in the business we’re in. Cheers!


Doc, I’m Hearing Voices…

face_night-shot-closeup-_2.jpgA while back I read about a number of interesting outdoor executions promoting the A&E original series Paranormal State…most notably a billboard where a face mechanically protrudes then fades away and a wallscape that incorporated sound that only passers-by could hear. In fact, this second execution won an OBIE this year for Special FX (the ghostly visage was a finalist in the same category). All really cool, creative ways to not just promote an upcoming show, but also captivate people in a pretty freakish way, totally in line with the brand offering.

whispering-wallscape.jpgBut other than the “very cool” factor, I really didn’t give either execution too much thought. Until, that is, I ran across this article that explains the technology behind the “ghostly voices” execution. Apparently the advertiser uses hypersonic sound technology to actually beam the message (or in this case, voices) right into your ear drum. According to the article,

The technology works by beaming waves of hypersonic sound at a pitch that is undetectable by the human ear. The waves continue until they smash into an object such as a person’s body. The waves then slow, mix and re-create the original audio broadcast. If the person steps out of the waves, they are no longer obstructed and are rendered inaudible.

For the A&E promotion, area New Yorkers “heard” voices whispering “Who’s there? What’s that? It’s not your imagination.” I can only imagine how anyone who had a few cocktails reacted… The campaign was an incredible success building buzz for the unreleased show and the shear novelty of the execution had people actively seeking it out so they could experience the “in your head” advertising themselves. According to A&E VP of Marketing, Lori Peterzell, “The technology really basically made it seem like the sounds were coming from inside your head…It was totally a freak-with-your-mind experience. It was a great way of building buzz about a show that didn’t exist yet.”

So, as I’m reading the article, I’m in awe of the technology and the incredibly brand-relevant application for a show about ghost hunters… Wait a minute! Did they just say advertisers can beam messages straight into your eardrum, so it seams like it’s all in your head? OK, that’s pretty freaky and a little scary. First we had billboards emitting odors, now we have marketers playing voices in our heads. While the hypersonic technology skirts any “sound pollution” ordinances, it feels a little invasive, even moving into that controversial “subliminal advertising” realm.

Right now, the novelty of the technology certainly lends a positive buzz appeal, but what happens as more marketers find a way to add hypersonic sound to their billboards, wallscapes, phone booths, subway installations, etc., etc., etc.? With no way to avoid hearing these messages, will we, as an industry, experience a backlash against this and other types of sensory assault in the name of brand promotion? As with any number of new technologies, the old rule holds true here: Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.