Living in London, you can see just how much history is bursting at the seams of each street. You can see the different generations of the past blend together from the shapes of the streets, the varying window styles on the buildings, and the distant tall peaks in the skyline.
Read More
In an industry full of nonsensical terminology, ‘immersion week’ is a relatively inoffensive term, but still one which manages to set eyeballs rolling. It suggests broken routine, novelty tasks and a range of sales decks hidden behind some smoke & mirrors. However, weeks such as the one we’ve just completed with Global (and, in the name of a fair playing field, the one Bauer ran earlier in the year) are vitally important to the quality of the agency’s work.
Read More
The Arena Planning Book Club don’t just sit around watching TV ads, discussing pure genius planning and destined to fail campaigns; we make the most of our bipedalism, and up ourselves and our books (there aren’t actually any books) beyond Tottenham Court Road. Today we went over to the painfully cool Wieden & Kennedy offices in Shoreditch, adorned with what I can only presume is overspill from those crazy creative heads – like the mannequin named blender head guy because he had a blender instead of a head.
We had the pleasure of talking to W&K’s head of planning Paul Colman, who explained to us media folk what goes on in the creative process (it’s all about chaos), what the role of the planner is and what the hell was behind the Cravendale adverts with those hyper-evolved kitties. What stood out for me the most however were the philosophies that appear to underpin every piece of work that came out of the office, and everyone that went in. Embracing failure and learning from it, and accepting and going with the chaotic nature of planning were the key values that from where I was sitting, formed the foundation of the agency’s all important culture.
Read more at W&K’s blog and Sonia’s blog
Every other Wednesday, a group of diverse media minds come together to form the Arena Planning Book Club, to discuss what’s hot in media and beyond. Last week we discussed Christmas supermarket campaigns: Who will be the profit winners and who will lose out in January 2013? Is there a dark horse amongst the clan?
Read More
If you picked up the Metro this morning, you’ve probably seen blinkbox’s response to the Di Matteo sacking:
This ad was not only featured in Metro but also The Guardian, The Times and The Independent – all under Di Matteo editorials.
This is a great example of tactical print as being reactive to current affairs will help brands maintain cultural relevance.
Contextual and agile planning is key to increasing the value of ad space.
Sports rights have long been a contentious issue for both broadcasters and advertisers. There is no doubt that the financial firepower of BT and Sky has inflated the price of broadcast rights, just look at BT Vision’s £738m English Premier League deal and its still eye-watering £152m payout for Rugby Football Union rights.
These bidding wars have long been a frustration to the free-to-air broadcasters, particularly the BBC which has seen its F1 rights snapped by Sky and horse racing make a new home at Channel 4.
While C4 was able to find the money for its longed for racing packages, it is now faced with the headache of ensuring it makes an excellent return on its heavy investment. The broadcaster has done this by instituting an auction process to the bookmaking fraternity, tendering its rights in five exclusive packages.
It makes commercial sense for C4, but this new process should act as a red flag to advertisers who, it seems, must bear the brunt of broadcasters’ investments.
It’s no use moaning about what seems like a punitive process. This is the new reality, and advertisers need to wake up. Understanding the strategic value of the rights is now more important than ever. Winning them at any cost must never be the goal for either advertisers or, for that matter, broadcasters.
Financial reward is of course a factor, but in any tie up there are many other considerations:
Read More
According to Google, YouTube is as effective as TV in building awareness for your business. *blinks*… Hard to believe, I know but in this post, I’ll try to outline the features and selling points of video for your search campaigns as well as explain how integrated YouTube videos that can be managed in Google Adwords may be the more efficient move for your client.
YouTube content and visitors are growing at a rate faster than one could possibly comprehend. With over 800 million unique users, it’s a channel opportunity hard to ignore. Using keyword, interest, demographic or topic targeting, we can basically manage TV ads on YouTube the way we would manage our paid search campaigns on Google Adwords, using the variety of various Ad formats at YouTube’s disposal. Move over TV buyers, digital and online is back with more for the media world!
Read More
At Arena we’re always looking to find new ways to display, manipulate and understand data and feed that into our planning process to create the best ideas and campaigns we can.
This is why we found the recent post by David McCandles on information is beautiful, the Taxonomy of Ideas. The Taxonomy which is shown below tries to put a framework around the language we use for ideas and display the difference between a nice and a brilliant idea.
Whenever planning a campaign or strategy everyone is.. or at least should be aiming for the holy grail of the top right corner. However I would say that most times ideas tend to end up the mirky middle ground of interesting, early and occasionally silly.
It would be interesting to follow a campaign from an initial idea through development and execution to see if people’s opinions of it change. How many times in agencies does an idea start out genius but on further investigation turn out to be impossible (at least within the budget or timeframe) and then get adjusted and end up being just good instead.
The one thing this doesn’t cover and we are all striving for is how to regularly come up with those moments of Genius, here’s hoping that is in the final version.
Seth Ball
Senior Analyst