An invisible problem

Directory is delighted to have been invited to showcase the 2011 Danish Direct Marketing Awards sponsored by Post Danmark.What we have on the next pages are the eight Gold winners.

The Royal Mail’s Mail Media Centre is both virtual and real. It’s an incredible online archive of facts, figures and case histories assembled in just one website to provide information and inspiration in equal measure.

I spend a lot of my time training marketing people in different parts of the world. “What to do about social media” is a hot topic of conversation- more so in the past 18 months - and many companies are not sure how to approach it.

When you’re deciding what app will best serve the needs of your customers, it’s imperative that you consider when and how they’ll be using it.

In the world of communications we have seen convergence between technologies and the ways we can use them. With the arrival of digital communications we have seen a dramatic decline in the quality of copy and design not to mention a decline in the quality of the ideas.

I was asked recently, ‘Why do you seem to like direct mail so much?’ And it’s true that most of my awards were for TV. But then I started doing my own thing and over the last six years have clawed my way up from an impossible overdraft to being a small business. Hey, Directory even has staff! We wouldn’t be here today without the humble letter. I have written hundreds of them and every one an appeal for help. Subscribe to my magazine or we go under!

In the past decade, some of the world’s most innovative direct ideas have come out of New Zealand. A relatively small country, it punches far above its weight at international awards shows. The reasons for this are to do with attitude – Kiwis are rarely passive. They like to ‘give it a go’.

Ten years ago, if someone had told me that the most garlanded campaigns of 2010 would include a signpost, a telephone box and a staircase I would have thought they were on drugs. But that’s what has happened. The No.1 campaign in The Directory Big Won creative rankings across all media is Farfar’s ‘World’s Biggest Signpost’ for Nokia.

The MAA Worldwide is a global self-help group run by the senior managers of the world’s leading marketing services agencies for the world’s leading marketing services agencies. It’s a social network that uses its bi-annual conferences to share information and stimulate innovation.

Few would think of France as the home of cutting-edge marketing. But perhaps the world’s marketers ought to look more closely at France. And wonder why so many New Yorkers insist on drinking French mineral water.

Global Chief Creative Officer, Young & Rubicam

For some reason, the marketing sector has always been awash with gurus ready (for a fee) to predict what the world of tomorrow will look like.

In both the spoken and the written word, most sentences in Arabic are constructed using a male vocative. In other words, it is assumed that the listener or reader is male. This can be changed to a female vocative simply by adding an accent line or ‘kasra’ below the words.

Directory has been going for four years now and has amassed an archive of well over 600 of the world’s most interesting and most innovative direct campaigns.

The Directory Big Won has been tracking awards across all media categories since 2006. Prior to that, as The Won Report, it was an annual analysis of awards won specifically in the field of Direct Marketing. The Directory Big Won rankings are different to other awards league tables in that they include ‘below the line’ awards shows, which, increasingly, ‘above the line’ agencies are entering as they seek to prove the effectiveness of their work.

Without really noticing, we have evolved our product away from digital advertising, banners, microsites and the like, and even away from web design which we think of as visible creativity, towards invisible creativity. In fact, go to most of the sites we have designed and you won’t notice anything special about them. Why? Because you will be too busy using the product or service.

Talking of awards, in Issue 17 we bring you Directory's very own awards showcase, the best work published in the magazine since we started publishing four years ago. Do please look at pages 14 to 29 for the winners in our 8 categories, judged for us by the students at the School of Communication Arts.

David Ogilvy is quoted as saying, “the consumer is not a moron, she's your wife.” And yet for years the majority of advertising has patronised, flattered and shouted its way to our attention from its protected position within a closed and arrogant media.

To demonstrate how much you can cram into three days in LA, print, radio and online ads set out to find three energetic Aussies who would fly to LA for 72 hours of non-stop action. The catch was, they had to twitter every minute of their trip. 4,320 tweets per Aussie.

An email interview with Jonathan Harries, Chief Creative Officer for DraftFCB Worldwide. I first came across the 6.5 Seconds That Matter idea when I ambled into DraftFCB London and began reading some of the posters they had up on the walls there to tell their own people what it was all about.

The annual report was turned into music. The most important parts were interpreted and sung by a leading opera company in Germany. Facts and figures were turned into arias, overtures and chorales.

The most popular add-on for Firefox gets downloaded 851,121 times per week.[1] It’s a simple program, written in the spare time of a software developer named Vladimir Palant. It’s called AdBlock Plus and it essentially throws a switch on your browser that turns off all the ads on all the web pages you visit. And it works really, really well. You never even have to turn it on. As soon as you install it, the ads just disappear.

Everything vinyl represents seemed to fit GGRP perfectly. From that creative leap emerged a new brand identity and website. To promote the changes, the original plan was to send out vinyl records but nobody has a gramophone any longer.

21 films were shot and put up on Youtube. Social media, search media, in-game posters, blogs and radio and TV steered the target audience towards these. Each put the viewer in the position of a teenage boy on a London estate. Each film ended with an invitation to choose what happens next. Once a viewer has concluded the path they have chosen, they’re invited to ‘Choose a Different Ending.’ An ending both for the film, and for their life.

The idea was to give a good script to an inexperienced director and then put it up on Youtube and seed it in blogs read by production companies and film-school students, where it could inspire other equally inexperienced young film-makers to give the competition a go.

By offering Michael Jackson fans a platform to create their own memorial, Studio Brussels hoped to strengthen their position as a music station that really cared about music.

Using Facebook as a platform, the creative leap was to take advantage of one of the site’s most popular functions, photo-taggng. A Facebook profile was created for the new store’s manager, Gordon Gustavsson.

Zoo Records embedded the songs and profiles of 14 indie bands into 14 different QR Codes, shaped like the animals that live hidden in the city. These were posted all over Hong Kong.

By staging a live rescue event, the New Zealand Coastguard hoped to give the country a wake-up call – to behave more sensibly when at sea and to encourage greater funding from Government.

In a nutshell, Toyota set out to remind country-people in Australia only Toyotas are as tough as they are.