El Cielo Agulla & Baccetti, Santo, VegaOlmosPonce, CraveroLanis, Madre, Mix, La Negra. Those names may not mean anything to you, but those names are written along with JWT, BBDO, Saatchi & Saatchi, Euro RSCG, McCann Erickson, Leo Burnett, Ogilvy & Mather and DDB in the hall of fame of Argentina´s advertising industry.

As I talked earlier to Tiffany, those agencies have created for the past 20 years the most amazing advertising ever made in Latin America. The secret: they created an argentinean way of doing advertising. Argentina is pretty strong in creating films, but not the traditional :30 spot, they create engaging and interesting stories of 2 maybe 3 minutes, where they bring their storytelling abilities and deep consumer insights together. I could go on and on telling you why I love argentinean creativity so much, but that´s not why I wrote this post.

The reason I started talking about Argentina is because they have became the role model to the rest of the latinamerican advertising industry. Every single country is trying desperately to find their “inner voice”, a local but yet very global way of expressing their ideas. In all the spanish-speaking countries (Brazil has a their own approach to creativity, but I´d talk about it in another post), people dream of travelling to Argentina to learn how to do great advertising, reason why Buenos Aires is full of creativity schools and foreign copywriters/art directors.

In this quest for a local voice, Colombia and Peru are the ones in my opinion that are doing the biggest efforts. Today I´m going to make a little review of some of the best jobs (and by best I mean awarded) made in Colombia in the past few years, as an attempt to find a pattern that show us how our creativity is going.

The Lions

The first Gold in Cannes. A campaign of the national government against drug consumption. Made by Leo Burnett. It´s quite clear and powerful I think.

This was the beginning of a series of awards for innovation in media category. DDB and OMD created this TV format (sorry I don´t know how is it called), where just seconds before the end of the show the color fade away turning the image black and white. Then the color returned as we see a product shot of the Clorox detergent.

Another Gold. This was an activation of a new TV show called “Los Reyes”. It was made by Sancho BBDO and OMD. The strategy was to mark different places of Bogota as owned by Los Reyes (The Kings)

A bronze lion. This time for innovation in media category. The client was Motorola, the agency Ogilvy&Mather, the point: hold the magazine between the pages where both ads are and you´ll see how thin the new Motorola´s mobile is.

In the next post, I´ll be showing the winners for Colombia in the regional festivals (FIAP and Ojo de Iberoamerica) and local festivals (EFFIE and NOVA). Until later then…

Hey, just for you know, I´ve started a new project called Colectivo Planner. The original idea started in Facebook and now has it´s own blog. Most of it´s content is in spanish but we hope that people all over the world start to participate. For the moment me and a friend from TBWA Colombia are the only contributors, but if you want to join just leave me a comment and I´ll add you to the list.

You all know that I didn´t like the gorilla spot, so what can I say about “Trucks”? Perhaps that´s every kid fantasy come true (come on, who didn´t made races with toy trucks when was little… I totally can relate to that), perhaps that Fallon is becoming more a videoclip producer than an advertising agency (if I didn´t knew better, I´d think they search for a song and then create the ad around it) or that YouTube is to advertising what MTV was to music industry (an opportunity to become more popular, even if that mean to sacrifice a little bit of quality so every one accept it), etc.

But in the end I must confess I really enjoyed this one, that I have watched it like ten times, that I can´t get the song out of my head and because of that every time I remember the ad, that it´s a shame that you can´t find a Cadbury chocolate here in Colombia. So for all that, I think that, as I said in the title, we all should shut up and just have some fun with this great piece of creative and effective advertising.

Well, the plannersphere keeps growing in a healthy way, even here in Latam. As you all know, planners have been blogging for a while know, some of them for 3 or more years. Those early adopters, such as Russell and Richard, are responsible in my opinion of shapping a whole new interest in discipline.

Senior planners, junior planners and wannabe planners (like me) jumped in the wagon and started blogging, sharing their thoughts and creating the whole plannersphere thing. But until recently, this only could be described as an underground movement, something that the industry, specially the advertising/marketing/branding magazines, wasn´t very aware of.

Gladly, things seems to be a little different lately. First was Brand Republic which hosted the blog of Rory Sutherland, planning VP at Ogilvy UK . But in the last couple of weeks I have discovered 3 planning blogs in specialized magazines, which clearly show how far the long tail (or should we talk of hype cycles?) of this “counterculture“ have come.

For those of you interested, this is the list of those blogs:

1. Jen Patterson, planning director at La Comunidad, started to blog in Advertising Age´s Small Agency Diary, where she writes along with other bunch of ad people.

2. Mariana Hernandez, planning VP at DraftFCB Mexico, recently started to write a weekly column in Adlatina, the main advertising magazine in Latam.

3. Juan Luis Isaza, planning VP at DDB Colombia, writes in The Insight Point, a blog hosted by Portafolio, one of the leading business publications here in Colombia.

Hi everyone. Is there still anyone out there?

This year has been quite busy for me, since two of my coworkers left the company in January and they haven´t been replaced. Because of this I had to return to being a full-time creative (I was already working in some planning projects, but because the circumstances the projects have been postponed)

It´s kind of cool being able to be in the two sides of the fence, but I must admit that miss doing planning a lot. At least for me it´s a more enriching and liberating experience and having this blog is by far the most fullfilling thing I have done in my professional live for a while. So here I am, once again, trying to put my thoughts into words and hopefully I´ll keep making my way into the plannersphere.

For now, I´ll leave you with this pic someone send me in Facebook, that in my opinion has a great insight into our actual world. The phrase says: “Videogames hasn´t any influence in our children. What I meant is that if Pac-Man would been of any influence into our generation, we´d be in dark rooms running around, chewing magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music” Kristian Wilson, Nintendo Inc, 1989 

20 years later we definetly could say that Mr. Wilson didn´t get it at all. Don´t you think?

Last month, Neil tagged me to put my vision about the Media Snackers meme that was going around. (Sorry for the late response Neil, I was kind of busy…)

The whole assumption that the media revolution is only being lead by (and for) the youth is something I really don´t agree with. For example, the blog “A mis 95″ (a blog made by a 95 year old lady) won the BOB award for the best blog in spanish. That´s a clear example of how this whole myth of Internet = Youth is simply wrong. If you check the studies made recently you´ll find that some of the hottest properties in the web (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc…) aren´t an exclusive domain of young people anymore.

For a global perspective as Neil asked to, I think that latinamericans (I´m not talking here about the latinos in the US) are growing in an interesting pace the way they consume media, but we´re far, far, far away from the levels in Europe, Asia or North America.Why? Because while some of the most advanced societies of our planet have a very post-modern lifestyle, Latam is barely living a late modernity and is desperately trying to keep up the rhythm of their postmodernist counterparts. In the case of the changes in media landscape, we do know the technology that is shaping it and transforming it but I think that we aren´t using it to it´s fullest.

To give you a little context, in Colombia 70% of the population has a mobile phone, but only around a 10% of them have Internet access through it and while there´s a good amount of people using SMS (an average of 40 messages per person in a month), the MMS usage is still very low. In the country there are around 5 millions IM accounts, but only 1 million of houses have an internet connection and just 30% of them have band-width now, which makes a little bit difficult to the average person to access many of the usual “media snackers” feeds in the web (like video and photo sharing sites, podcasts, virtual worlds, etc). We don´t have digital TV yet, but 60% of the population has cable TV in their homes and there are 17 colombian channels through IPTV network JumpTV but I think they are mainly watched by colombians out of Colombia, although I could be wrong…

Now, that doesn´t mean that we don´t have an emerging media snacking culture going on. There are almost 4,000 blogs and just 7 podcasts registered at blogscolombia.com (the main blog directory in the country). There are 370,000 profiles in the Colombia network at Facebook and almost 9,000 active users in Second Life (sadly I couldn´t find any statistics of MySpace and Flickr, but there are a great ammount of users on those places too…)

As you see, the digital revolution has obviously landed in our countries but may I say that we aren´t living the “total digital life” that media snackers do just yet.

Oh, and I almost forgot. The original question of the meme was if I was doing enough as “media publisher” to pay my respect to the media snackers generation. Well, I must say that NO. First of all because I´m not a media, so I don´t have nothing to lose really. And second, the main purpose of this blog (and any blog I think) is to help me to shape my thinking about planning, consumers and brands. This means that sometimes my thoughts could be a little bit elaborated and (as this post) quite long, that is a mayor reason why my blog isn´t Media Snacker friendly (they like to consume tiny bits, while what you should find here is a proper banquet)

Thanks to Alphafish for the pic. The usual applies.

Today, AdStructure is turning one year old.

It has been a wonderful experience to share my thoughts with all of you guys, and most of all to see how well received they have been. That´s why the only thing I have to say is THANKS!

Thanks to Richard, Russell, John, Adrian, Faris, Antonio, Ramon and Jordi. They pretty much have shaped my way of thinking about brands (even withouth knowing).

Thanks to Will, Clay, Neil, Johanna, Tiffany, Diana, Juanjo and Asier, Luiz and Felipe for being friends of this blog along the way.

Thanks to all the people who have check this blog. ´til this day, there have been 24500 page views (although I must confess, many of them have come because of this picture of Eva Green and Daniel Craig with a boat of my company behind them)

A very special thanks to my subscribers: 42 using Google Reader, 28 using Bloglines and the many more out there that use another feed reader.

And most of all, thanks for each one of you that have commented in this blog. 216 comments so far. A blog is nothing if there isn´t people out there expressing their opinion about it and helping to co-create it.

I really hope that all of you will excuse me for not posting very often now, but it seems like parenting doesn´t match blogging to much. But I expect to return to the daily-posting routine very soon. And again, THANKS!

Once again is time for the Advertising´s Young Minds: The Top 27 blogs of people under 27.

Since the last time I made a couple of changes to the methodology:

1. I decided to not count the Google PageRank anymore, because as someone pointed me the objective of this rank was the same of the Technorati Authority: to measure the amount of websites linking to that specific site. As my intention with this has always been to keep it as transparent as possible I choose to keep the simple Technorati option instead of the complex Google one.

2. I switched from Bloglines subscribers measure to the Google Reader subscribers, as they finally make to see how many subscriber a feed has. And I think everyone will be pretty happy with that choice as Google Reader is by far the most used feed reader actually.

The rules remains pretty much the same, with just a couple of changes:

1. Your blog must be written in english
2. Your blog must have been active for the past 3 months
3. Your blog must show some original thinking, it´s not enough to have a blog with ads to be in this list.
4. You must be 27 years old or under
5. You must work or want to work in advertising or any other marketing communications specialty, it doesn´t matter if you´re a planner, copywriter, art director, account executive or else.
6. You can only have one blog in the rank.

With that clear, here´s November edition of the Advertising´s Young Minds:

#

Blog Name

Country

And other blogs that are being analyzed are:

#

Blog Name

Country

My little daugther has born. Her name is Abril.

I´ll be out this week taking care of her and my wife.

See you all next week.

If there any award show in the advertising industry that could be called as “The Planning Awards”, those are the Effies. Since a couple of years back, the franchise has begun its expansion through Latinamerica, opening branches in Argentina, Mexico, Brasil, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala and Uruguay.

For me there´s no doubt of the value and importance of this awards in our context, since it has become the best way to motivate agencies to develop better and more focused strategies for their clients, but also because it´s the living proof that being strategic doesn´t mean to sacrifice the execution or viceversa.

Here are the winners of the Grand Effie in Mexico, Colombia and Argentina.

“Salvo las Salva” (Salvo saves them), made by Grey Mexico for Procter & Gamble. The brand Salvo is leading a cause for saving the pelicans of oil disasters in the sea. The spot is very touching, as shows how people made a chain to help Salvo to get where the endangered pelican was trying to be saved by specialists. The message it´s definetly is a disruption in the category where we´ve always seen those products in the kitchen saying to us how many dishes they can wash. And as many of the great campaigns lately, it seems that it´s part of a CSR campaign.

“Todo Heroe merece una recompensa” (Every heroe deserves a reward). When last year SAB Miller bought Bavaria (the major brewing company in Latinamerica), they started a plan to revamp all their local brands. This was how Pilsen, one of the most traditional beers passed from being available only in Medellín to being distributed nationally, and from being related to party and joy (as many beer brands does) to being repositionated to the after job consumption. This was how Lowe/SSP3 Colombia created this very campaign emotive campaign that reinforces the values of the hard workers and everyday heroes of our country. (NB: Personally I believe it would be a much better campaign if instead of using a song in english they created a new one in spanish, but hey… what do I know, right?)

“Las cosas como son” (The things the way they are), produced by Ogilvy Argentina for Sprite. With the entry of several new beverages (bottled waters, energy drinks, etc.) to the argentine market, Sprite was losing part of their share. They needed to do an extreme makeover to the brand and they decided to shift their communications from the “transparent as freshness” to the “transparent as brutally honest” territory. The agency came up with those wonderful ads that simply say the naked truth to people: Girl, your best friend only wants to have sex with you; Boy, girls can smell your fear from miles away and that´s not attractive to them; dudes, don´t worry. “Everyone” enjoys seeing other people suffering. I mean, who wouldn´t relate to some of those situations?

And finally, although not part of the EFFIE franchise, I´d like to show you the winner of the EFICACIA awards in Spain. A campaign made by SCPF for the BMW X3. What can I say? Bruce Lee may know more of branding that us anyway. Simply genius.

I have been kind of busy lately trying to set up the whole Colectivo Planner thing and I have abandoned a little this blog. So, to start again the activity around and with the hope to spark some conversation I´ll give some thoughts I have been “cooking” for a while…

Back in July I found this video about conditioned response. In that moment I didn´t knew what to do with it, but now I think is a great way to start this post: Ideas depends on the stimuli we have. Two or more people when exposed to similar stimuli, could end having the same idea (even planners, art directors or copywriters).

In an industry that it´s whole foundations goes around the search of “The Big Idea”, guaranteeing the originality and exclusiveness of their product is a must. But in a flattening world like ours, where basically everything and everyone is online now and where we share the same resources and spent time around the same places, do the same rules apply?

I began to thinking about this subject while checking some new posts in Ads of the World, which I think is the closest think to a “creativesphere” you could get. If you check the comments in each ad you´ll probably find that more than once, someone has said that the idea has been done so many times before or that someone else done a better execution of it. Those afirmations makes you wonder if it´s really a plagiarism case or is simply a mere coincidence. Personally, I think what happens there is an incredible contradiction, since most of the people that visit AOW are looking for the best advertisements made around the world and even if they aren´t concious of it, the ideas they saw in there may remain in their head and may pop up later in their jobs reproducing that idea. But can you really own an idea in marketingland?

Not anymore. Creativity language is changing. We´re inviting people to be part of the creative process, we´re talking about co-creation and mashable content, we are witnessing an open source and crowdsourcing society, capable not only of generating in a short lapse of time what would take years to a single person to do but that also has created a way to make more flexible the Intelectuall Property Rights “fallacy”.

“Overprotecting intellectual property is as dangerous as underprotecting it. Creativity is impossible without a rich public domain. Nothing today, likely nothing since we tamed fire, is genuinely new: Culture, like science and technology, grows by accretion, each new creator building on the works of those who came before. Overprotection stifles the very creative forces it’s supposed to nurture.”

U.S. Judge Alex Kozinski
(via Creative Generalist)

If you have read this brilliant article made by Lawrence Green (planning director at Fallon UK), the new creative idea in his opinion should be “original, appropriate, engaging and at least conceptually digital”, although he admits that actually our ideas could be sometimes either “original but unappropiate or appropiate but unoriginal”. For me, it´s like the whole Incremental vs Radical Innovation dichotomy, creative ideas sometimes are built over previous works and sometimes are a completely breakthrough. In advertising we have always lean on radical creativity (aka. original thinking) mainly as Scamp said because “originality is not a moral issue, it’s an effectiveness issue”, but perhaps it´s time to acknowledge that more often than we think we use incremental creativity (based in someone´s else previous thoughts) and as long as it´s made in a clever and strategic way we should be more cool about it. Otherwise we may end as Judge Kozinski said suppresing creativity.

To make this whole thing clearer, here are some examples:

Imitation

It has been said that “imitation is the best form of flattery” and I´m pretty sure you have heard around the plannersphere the quote of TS Elliot “Talent imitates, genius steals”, it´s even considered that imitation is a very important step in the learning and cognitive process. But this shouldn´t be the case in marketing communications, specially since the final result is so clearly a copy.

Inspiration

Waves of bunnies. Have you seen them somewhere else? Apparently there are some allegations that these is a rip-off, which frankly is kind of lame because even if Fallon saw this before presenting their idea, this is usually called Inspiration (it would be very different if this was a print ad and they did the same exact execution). Advertising has always seeked inspiration from many cultural forms, as artists seeks their inspiration in nature, for example. Perhaps next time God should make an scandal because they are using his creations to do their art without his permission.

Association

This spot made by Publicis Lisbon for the bottled water brand Pedras Salgadas was widely critiziced by people in AOW because they immediately associated the ad with Coca Cola. This could be a huge mistake for Pedras Salgadas. Or it isn´t? Perhaps they´re saying that even the Coca Cola bear (because apparently any 3D polar bear that appears in a beverage commercial is immediately related to Coke) likes Pedras Salgadas water. Perhaps they´re using the bear association with Coke to make their brand more visible. If you ask me, I think it´s very clever indeed.

Adaptation

Bouncy things going down hill? It worked in San Francisco, it worked in Gizah, it would work anywhere. The trick is to do a cultural relevant adaptation of the original idea. And definetly Y&R Singapore made a great job here, despite what some people in AOW were saying.

Response

Who said you can use your competence´s ideas to build your own? This series of ads are the best example that when you do think in a clever and strategic way, it doesn´t really matter from whom the initial idea came from, as long as you don´t use the same execution.

Este es mi primer post en español desde que empece este blog. La razón es simple: desde hace algun tiempo ya venia pensando en la necesidad de crear un espacio para que los planners de Iberoamerica (España, Portugal y America Latina) tuvieramos la oportunidad de crear una comunidad “global” que impulse el planning en nuestra región.

La idea fue tomando fuerza despues de algunas conversaciones con Ramón y Jordi, de BrandJazz, quienes junto a Antonio son sin ninguna duda los pioneros y líderes de la plannersfera española.

Solo quedaba resolver el como se crearia, a lo que la respuesta mas clara fue: Facebook. Muchos de los planners de nuestros paises aun no leen ni mucho menos escriben blogs, por ello esta solución fue descartada de momento. Pero la cantidad de colegas que se encuentran en el enmarañado mundo de esta red social sin duda tiene el potencial para hacer crecer esta iniciativa.

Es por ello que quiero invitarlos a todos ustedes a que se unan al Colectivo Planner, nombre del grupo en Facebook pero que tiene un significado mas alla de los limites digitales. La idea es que a partir de esta comunidad empecemos a programar una serie de actividades (coffee mornings, trabajo de campo, escuela de planning, blogs, wikis, etc…), que ayuden a impulsar el planning y el libre intercambio de ideas, la generación de conocimiento y el ejercicio de nuestras habilidades.

Y como actividad inaugural, aqui convoco a todos los que quieran participar de este grupo a que se den una pasadita también por algunos de los mejores blogs del “Colectivo Planner”:

BrandJazz, Estrategia de Comunicación, Yellowing, Chocolate4thinking, Estalo, Before and After Science, Everything Communicates, Insights, Barcelona´s Chiringito, Ideas sin motor, Smart Planning, Un Plan Brillante, Planner Sight, Impresiones, Janes, BrainStorm #9, OneBrand, Blog do GP, Redblog, Taller d3, The Hidden Persuader.

UPDATE: Sorry, I just found out that for some reason I don´t understand, the WordPress server didn´t published the whole post. Here is the rest of it, hope you read it again.

As I promised last week, here is my take on the most interesting bookmarks I had found during the last week. Is a little bit miscellaneous, but I´m sure you´ll like it (supposing you haven´t seen it before)

“We write ads or people die”I know you have seen this video everywhere, but it´s quite funny and I wanted to keep the track for it. I´m sure I will piss myself if I ever found a creative director as Jack Nicholson, poor account executive Tom Cruise, he simply didn´t know what he was asking for.

Yet another video you have seen everywhere, but definetly a piece of gold that any planner should see. I think it was Henry Ford who said once “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a better horse”. It´s quite difficult to ask them to criticize and suggest how they would like an advertisement because they just don´t know, not even in this prosumer era. Besides doing a “pre-test” of an ad that ran 23 years ago is not the right thing to do, because of how the culture and the background that originated that idea have totally changed.

Trendsspotting.com is an interesting blog I found via the Plannersphere in Facebook. Made by Taly Weiss, this blogs has a lot of interesting insights on internet users. I particulary like her last post about how people need to feel identified with a cause, and when the leader of that cause is a brand (like Dove´s Campaign for the Real Beauty) people will be willing to become brand evangelists. And she actually suggest that Coca Cola, although perceived sometimes as bad for a healthy lifestyle, should follow the example of Dove and fight a bigger evil: Alcohol…. Interesting indeed, but I think that strategy would work better for a smoothies brand like Innocent.

192021.org is a research project that is intending to understand the impact in culture, economics and human life of one of the biggest megatrends actually: Supercities. This kind of project it has become more relevant than ever now that more than half the people on Earth now lives and works in cities. I really hope they start blogging and sharing their findings soon.

Do the Green Thing is a clever social network site which pretends to make it easier to have a greener lifestyle. Is the ideal place if you´re like me, someone who wants to do it share part for the environment but doesn´t really know how. This month task couldn´t be easier, just walk. Please go to the site and check all the lovely things and interesting information that will help you to do the green thing.

5min Life Videopedia. If you are looking for a new insight source, this is the place to go. This isn´t just another YouTube like site, as they put it in their site: “5min’s basic philosophy is that everybody is an expert in something and has something to teach others, so why not share that knowledge for the better of the whole? That’s why we created a place to gather that collective knowledge onto one platform. “…. Ok, their main focus are DIY videos, but yet I think you can find some very interesting things if you watch carefully. For examplle , watch this video it will tell everything single step of one of the most common rituals of human kind: taking a shower….. Oh, and while you´re there check their video player possibilities, I think there are a couple of things there that YouTube should be jealous of.

Just one week after the release of Sony Bravia Play-Doh commercial in the UK, the Bravia´s invasion of colour to the biggest cities of the world continues with this amazing spot made by Y&R Egypt and filmed in the mythical pyramids of Gizah.

Without all the expection generated by the bunnies spot, I think Pyramids is a nice addition to the campaign. Sure, many of you would say that is quite similar to Balls because all the bouncy things that go down-hill, but the fact is that you should acknowledged the magic of the location… It´s not the same the hills of San Francisco, an abandoned building in Glasgow or the streets of Manhattan, to the most marvelous location on Earth: the pyramids.

Frankly, I can actually hear the guys at Fallon shouting about why they didn´t came with this idea themselves….

Thanks to Happy.Phantom. The usual applies

Back in July I decided to post my daily del.icio.us bookmarks in the blog, a practice that was already popular around the plannersphere. My main motivation was to have something new to offer every day to my readers, even when I don´t have too much to say.

But as the days go by, I started to feeling that this wasn´t working for me. Sure, there was something new to “read” every day, but that was provoking two things:

a) I was becoming extremely lazy. One of the things that I´m actually good at is finding interesting things, making connections between unrelated things and making good analyzis about it. That was getting lost with the links.

b) The visits to my blog went down. People read blogs because they found their content interesting. If you´re anything like me, you probably won´t suscribe to a blog which mainly don´t seems to portrait any opinion at all, just a bunch of bookmarks.

Now, don´t get me wrong, I think that sharing my bookmarks is an interesting thing to do. In fact I think is an aggregated value to any blog, specially for your suscribers because they will keep interacting with you even when you´re silent. But posting them directly in your blog is not a good strategy for attracting new readers. So, that´s why I choose to move my bookmarks from the main page to the FeedBurner feed, where my suscribers will still have this aggregated value, but it will not affect my content production and the flow of readers into my blog.

Anyway, for the rest of you I´ll be starting a new series with the analyzis of the most interesting links I found during the week. I hope you´ll like the changes around here.

Definetly it´s an interesting time to work in advertising. Last year we all saw for the very first time (I think) the huge expectation and buzz that the Fallon´s Sony Bravia adverts created when they released the spot “Paint”, the second spot of the campaign. “Balls”, the first spot of the campaign, has become a truly masterpiece in brand comms, thanks mainly to it´s beatiful execution. Now, Fallon is preparing the release of “Play-Doh”, the third part of the campaign.

The guys at Fallon totally nailed it with this strategy, they treated the Bravia adverts like really blockbusters and have done a brilliant marketing for them, or in other words they made “advertising” for an ad….

On the other side, yesterday Ogilvy launched Dove´s Onslaught, or as many people are calling it: Evolution 2.

The sequel to this year Cannes winner continues the excellent work made by Dove in creating conscience about “The Real Beauty”. The video has spread quickly around the web, being watched almost 25.000 times in YouTube. The real bonus for this campaign is that has managed to create a community around it and the members of it were the first to know and spread the buzz about this vid.

This season seems like it´s going to be a very interesting one, with obviously two great ads that have managed to make us wait desperately for the next release of each campaign. The difference though, is that Bravia is “dream-like” entertainment while Dove stands for the search of deeper meaning.

UPDATE: Here´s the new spot for Bravia, which has been just released.

It´s a lovely  ad, not as powerful as Balls but a very good sequel to the Bravia saga. Please checkout the site to see it in high-res.

Thanks to Matt West for the picture. The usual applies. 

As an outsider (I´m from Latin America, where “traditional” advertising is still the king), I sometimes feel that advertising industry in the US and Europe is rushing so desperately into reinventing themselves and fit into the digital world and their rules, that sometimes they forgot everything that they had learned during many many years of “traditional” advertising (what works, what doesn´t, what people thinks about advertising, etc…)

Via Paul Isakson`s blog I found this post about the missing value of  the concept, the “Big Idea”:

“To be successful over the long haul, your career can’t be founded upon trendy epiphanies or shiny new executions. Just as a pun wasn’t a concept in the late 80s, a typographical treatment wasn’t a concept in the mid 90s and shock value wasn’t a concept in the late 90s, so does new media need a core idea in order to reach its full potential. Most new-media revelations will seem laughably quaint in a few years. But true human insight will never go out of style.”

The thing is that being Internet a “world” in itself many of the ideas are around creating new-media (widgets, blogs, podcasts, virtual worlds, IM, etc.) that let brands be where the people is.  And as in the real world this only means that brands will keep interrupting people in their activities. I think one insight that could go out of this is that people think of media (TV, Internet) as a mean of entertaining not as a mean of communication (which is why I think that Branded Utility and Marketing as a Service are so brilliant ideas)

Brands should be platforms more that anything else, something that enable people to obtain what they want (satisfaction, entertainment, whatever….). That´s how Google became the top brand in the world,
by being the epicenter of the “digital world”. And that´s why we should learn a thing or two of Google, maybe dedicating 70% of our time to do what we do best and 30% in exploring new ways of doing it too, because otherwise they could bury us all.

While searching through the blogosphere for the Young Minds of Advertising, I crossed with this video made by the talented Gwen Yip while she worked in Ogilvy Hong Kong (if you don´t know who Gwen is, let me say that she is an incredible art director who travelled to London seeking for an opportunity in the british ad scene and documented her experience in this blog, before landing in W+K Amsterdam)

The video was made to show to students in an Adschool in Hong Kong how advertising agencies work, and since many people come to this blog seeking for an explanation of the structure of advertising agencies I decided to post it.

Unfortunately the video is in chinese (I think), but you can pretty much understand what´s going on. Take this opportunity like an invitation to “co-create” and fill yourself  the blanks made by the lack of traslation.

You know how everybody loves ranks, right?… There´s Todd And´s Power 150 Blogs in Marketing, Scamp makes the Ad Blog Charts and lately, Scott Weisbrod started the Top 30 Canadian Marketing and Advertising Blogs rank

Anyway, those ranks only track the top blogs, the ones that are written by the experienced people in our industry and because of that are the ones that everyone already reads. So, one day while reading Clay´s analysis of his position in the Power 150 ranking, I sort of realized how difficult would be for any young mind in the advertising industry to actually make it in one of those list. So I decide to make our own niche rank, Advertising´s Young Minds: the Top 27 blogs of people under 27.

I guess it will be a nice thing to do and would bring a lot of attention to those blogs, letting people discover the new talents of our industry.

The methodology would be very similar to the Todd And´s Power 150 blogs, counting the Google PageRank and Bloglines suscribers, but it will have a couple of differences:

1. Instead of the Technorati Ranking I will count the Technorati Authority. This will show a more qualitative metric as it measure only the number of blogs that reacted to the content. (I see it like the ability to generate and engage in conversations)
2. Instead of personal points I will count how many times the content of the blog has been bookmarked in Del.icio.us, which I think shows how interesting the content produced in that blog actually is.
3. Instead of the complex algorhytms used in the Power 150 rank, I will sum the real numbers, not a “given scale value”, that way any of us could know really how to improve their ranks.

So, what you have to do to be in the Advertising´s Young Minds rank?

Here are the rules:

1. Your blog must be written in english
2. Your blog must have been active for the past 3 months
3. You must be under 27 years old
4. You must work or want to work in advertising
5. You can only have one blog in the rank.

Easy, right? Well, the idea is to do this ranking every two months, so if you know any blog that should be in this list, please leave a comment or drop me a line to dmejiag82@yahoo.com. I know there are thousands and thousands of blogs out there waiting to be found, so please help me to make this the more complete possible.

So, with no further things to be said, I present you the very first ranking of Advertising´s Young Minds

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Blog Name

UPDATE: And here you have a badge if you want to put it in your blog.

Every now and then is healthy to just forget about advertising and brands and admire the great things around us. Through the blog of the famous italian creativity school Fabrica I found this storytelling masterpiece called “The tale of how”, a production of the southafrican collective The Black Heart Gang.

To find more about it watch the “making of” or read this excellent review in Motiongrapher.