Curated by Stuart Fogarty stuart@admaticallycom for AFAO'Meara Advertising, Streamabout The Video Agency and Admatic Ireland.
All comments will be posted - promise!
Really lovely piece of work from Honda. "Let's see what curiosity can do" is an online video rather than a TV commercial per se and shows the heritage of Honda starting with The Honda 50. It's a lovely piece of work given the massive difficulties this type of transitional video causes. It is tricky in the extreme. It comes as no surprise to me that it was produced by Wieden + Kennedy London http://wklondon.com/work having produced the original "domino" Honda commercial. I was going to say that they're a traditional Advertising Agency but of course, they're not. They're a creative Agency which understand that good work is good work no matter where it is.
They also created the incredible Honda "grrr" idea which you can see on the link below.
"Hate something, change something, make something better....." Inspired voice over/singer choice by American writer, Garrison Keillor ('Lake Wobegon Days' etc). http://wklondon.com/work/view/honda_grrr#!prettyPhoto. Inspired copywriting too. Ridiculously good. Nevermind their work on Nike, Tesco and others. What makes this great though is its simplicity. Honda have a story to tell about where they've come from and where they're going and this tells that story in a visually interesting and entertaining way. Magnificent really.
Mashable, the once great Techy site, has run another ridiculous story today about 'Do Consumers believe in advertising?' http://mashable.com/2013/07/03/infographic-advertising-do-you-buy-it/ It's up there with their other stories today about a woman building a prosthetic leg from Lego and the 12 penny pinching cats. It all went wrong when it was bought for 200 million usd by CNN. Anyway... However the story has a point in one way. Of course Advertising works. Of course it sells, but one interesting piece from the article is an infographic. What it shows is that people mostly trust "recommendations from people I know" over other forms of advertising. Of course too, word-of-mouth has always been the most powerful marketing tool. Advertising's first job is to inform - tell people that the product is available and then try to make them like it. Often referred to usefully as 'I see it, I like it, I buy it'. Without advertising, you simply wouldn't know the product exists. And if you don't know it exists, it can't go on your shopping list. The olden days, the golden days of advertising were based on 'demonstration' where live commercials interrupted programmes and showed the product. Consequently, the role of recommendation or word-of-mouth is now more key than ever. And Social Media fits into this part of advertising, perfectly. Perfectly for example, through Facebook posts encouraging followers to comment/recommend; through Twitter by starting a hashtag and a conversation; through Instagram and Vine Video by showing the product and sharing it; through website video explaining it. And so on. Skype has a role as does Google hangouts to have brands go online and talk to potential customers. So it's this Social Media element that fits WITH advertising to encourage recommendation. Not that we didn't really know that..... but because it's becoming the most important feature (as the Mashable story points out), it's not getting the push it needs. Not getting the budget as traditional agencies continue to rubbish it and not getting the strategy because planners don't understand it. It should be part of any mainstream activity - if not central to it. Advertise the product but in tandem, encourage recommendation through Social Media activity. People always think you Ad is "selling to me" - which it is - but if the brand offering stands up, get in deeper with purchasers. Show them how the brand helps and get them to tell their friends not through continuous, mindless, Advertising but through on-the-ground social media activity. An online fashion show will help to sell the dress; Twitter tips on "how to" will sell the beauty products; Facebook pics and fact sheets will help show off the car; Skype programmes will help answer consumer questions on the new Financial product..... Traditional and Digital are not mutually exclusive. They are in tandem and more powerful when they are. Ad Agencies still ignore it substantially and live in the dream that it will go away. Stopping digital is like standing on Dollymount Beach and trying to push out the tide. If advertising and agencies don't become more engaged, they will lose. It is after all, what the client wants. And more importantly, what the consumer buys. Recommendation. Your job is simply to encourage that.
