Grupo TEDx
TEDx
Issue 28 | September 2013
Agency
Ogilvy & Mather Argentina
Creative Team
Executive Creative Directors: Javier Mentasti, Maximiliano Maddalena Art Director: Daniel Correa Copywriters: Lucas Antunes, Belen Galiotti Head of Audiovisual Production: Valeria Pinto Agency Producers: Gaston Sueiro, Alejandro Travaglini Company: Rebolucion
Production Team
Photography Director: Marcos Hastrup, Mariano Benchimol, Max Ruggieri Executive Producer: Patricio Alvarez Cassado Producer: Mariano Fernandez Editor: Martin Olemberg, Ricardo Levaggi Head of Production: Adrian Matoso Costumes: Manuela Marti Director’s Assistant: Julieta Casalla, Matias Gutierrez Band Production and Music: Juan Martin Lutteral, Agustina Garcia Estrada
Date
May 2013
Background
TEDx Talks and events were planned and put on independently of TED Conferences on a community-by-community basis. In Argentina they supported the TED mission of ‘ideas worth spreading’ and set out to stimulate dialogue and debate through a series of locally-organised experiences.
Idea
TEDx in Argentina was a nonprofit organization, devoted to ideas worth spreading.
They wanted to inspire more people with ideas about how to make the world a better place to live than the intellectual elite who knew about and supported TED.
What could democratise TEDx better than a channel which cut across all distinctions of class and education. Music.
Grupo TEDx was a band that played ‘cumbia’, one of the most popular and enchanting forms of music in South America. The band took topics from the TEDx talks and turned them into song.
Brains were engaged as well as hips and waists.
Results
The band performed 30 gigs reaching 962,000 listeners in those audiences. That number does not take into account the additional listeners to the CDs and downloads from iTunes.
Our Thoughts
McCann Melbourne approached the problem of safety on the railways the same way. Let’s talk to people who would normally ignore our message through music. They went the route of making a music video to go with their song, ‘Dumb Ways To Die’, and Ogilvy Argentina went the way of live performance.
Turning some of the talks into lyrics cannot have been easy. ‘Incubators for babies entirely built out of automobile parts’, for instance, would have taxed even Cole Porter.
We talk of social media as if it’s just Facebook and Twitter, forgetting that music is the most social medium of them all.