A few clever/funny OOH executions for a Tuesday afternoon

Who's car did they borrow?!

Say no more

Clever placement

Just love this one. Simple but brilliant

Fake dead pigeons - interesting (or genius) way of communicating a USP! 

The ad campaign is only half the battle

I was in my local supermarket last weekend and something caught my eye. No, not the gentleman kind enough to expose half his backside crouching down to the bottom shelf - but the point of purchase display and packaging for Old Spice. What stood out for me was that it looked as tired and old as it always has done. Which begs the question, why go to so much effort of producing the grandest of grand repositioning campaigns if you’re not going to follow it through all the way to the point of sale? No one can deny the multi award winning creativity of the ‘man your man could smell like’ campaign. It is simply one of the best campaigns of the last few years. But I have read conflicting reports on the impact it actually had on sales. And judging by what I saw in my local Sainsbury’s, this does not surprise me. 

A similar thing could be said for TK Maxx. I was pleasantly surprised by the creative for their recent TV campaign, positioning the brand as a provider of all things classy and fashionable. Yet walking into one of their stores resembles something closer to the dole queue at the local job centre. Scruffy and disinterested sales staff, cheap looking, messy display units and clothes flung all over the place.

A great ad campaign, together with an effective media plan is only half the battle in this game. More thought and time needs to be allocated to overall business aspects. And the responsibility of this does fall with media agencies. In partnership with the client, they should be thinking about such things as retail environments, packaging, what can be done to smooth the buying process, etc etc.

*I have to point out that these thoughts are my own and in no way represent those of Mediacom or the WPP network

Sports journalism at it's best and worst

For those people who are both Twitter users and sports press readers, you will have noticed many examples of journalism at its laziest since the increasing take up of Twitter by top flight professional footballers. You will have also been within a click of journalism at its best.

You see Twitter is acting as a platform for players to have a voice. They can speak directly to the public, albeit in their often primary school standard grammar. This must frustrate some print media as they are taking potential headlines away from them. They are struggling (or at least failing to recognise that their readers are also quite possibly Twitter members) because they can’t get away with misquoting footballers anymore. Some of the tabloids are that bad now it’s embarrassing. For example, ‘publications’ such as the Metro often just take player’s off the cuff Twitter comments or exchanges and try to make stories out of them. When you have read the actual feed as it unfolded and then read the Metro’s version of it hours or days later it is embarrassing for them. Journalism at its laziest.

However, this is forcing the better sports journalists to up their game, and spend more time as ‘sports writers’ than reporters. I have noticed an increase in blogs and opinion articles as well as just reporting news. We have so many instant news sources now that the real journalistic skill for me is not putting a headline on a Twitter comment that has already been read by thousands of people, but adding some value or insight - taking a current issue within sport and writing about it. These guys spend a lot of time around footballers, managers, coaches and clubs so more often than not we are interested in their opinion. The likes of Oliver Kay (The Times), Henry Winter (The Telegraph) and Ollie Holt (The Mirror), to name just a few, offer some insightful and thought provoking articles.

Twitter is a fantastic platform for these guys to share their writing. It can also be entertaining to view the direct exchanges they have with footballers; past clashes between Ollie Holt and Joey Barton have been particularly interesting to say the least, although they seem to have settled down somewhat lately.

When they aren't trying in vain to get a rise out of footballers (cough cough…Mike Parry) but are using Twitter to either engage with footballers on a public forum, or share each other’s better articles, you can find some great nuggets of information by following these guys. Sports writing at its best.

The fall and fall of the QR code

Let’s be honest, outside of agency walls the QR code has never taken off. The idea is great – add code to ad, everyone who sees it gets as excited as us and in a mad scramble they grab their smartphones, hover them over and are treated to a world beyond their wildest dreams that an ad could ever offer. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe of the advertising world if you will. Not only that, but they will also share it with their friends, their friends will share it with their friends, their friends will share it with their friends, their….. well I think you get my drift. Failing that, at least they might be able to engage with the brand in some mobile coupon offer that they will be forever thankful to the brand for giving them.

The reality is the average consumer goes a little like this: ‘what the f*ck is that weird bar code thing on that ad?’

The problem isn’t the QR code function; it’s the lack of awareness, and perhaps interest, of the viewing public. Ask yourself this – how many brands would you go out of your way to, not just notice and read their ads, but make the effort to find out even more information about them? People still say ‘yeah but they’re huge in Asia’. That may be the case but us Brits tend to be a lazy nation, it would take something pretty special, or rewarding, to make us go out of our way to actively engage with an advert. Especially through a medium over half of us don’t even know exists. And there lies the problem; we need a mass reach advertising campaign to advertise that QR codes advertise for advertisers. Hmmm.

Now there are a few developments of the general QR code function that are getting me excited. The Blippar app offers exciting, endless creative solutions. The marmite example springs to mind - you hover your smartphone in front of the actual product and are presented with various recipes. Cadburys have implemented it on to chocolate bars with interactive games you can play on your smartphone by hovering it over the wrapper. The opportunities are endless and idea sessions on the platform are sure to bring up many creative ideas that are easy to keep on brand. These will all make an exciting client presentation and it is easy to get the Brand Manager excited – but to get their autograph on the plan is going to take more than a few fancy creative ideas. They need to know that people apart from media and advertising professionals know the app exists. Now I hope that Blippar doesn’t suffer the same fate as the QR code.

Another one to keep an eye on in 2012 is Yahoo’s television tagging app ‘IntoNow’. I suppose the best way to describe it is ‘like Shazam for TV’. By holding your smartphone or tablet device up in front of the TV it tags live and time-shifted broadcast television content, highlights related content, and recommends television shows and movies based on your tagging behaviours and preferences. The app’s most compelling feature, however, is its ability to discover and feature real-time content — in the form of tweets, news headlines or play-by-play sports updates — related to what the user is watching. I understand this has been a pretty big hit in the US, and with it being released in the UK any time now, it is sure to bring up conversations on how we as advertisers can make the most of it.