Big brands mix local, global approaches

By Elaine Wong

In today's increasingly digital age, big brands must learn to market both globally and locally. That was the key take-away from Friday's "Managing Global Brands in the 21st Century" panel.
  Scott Anderson, vp, customer communications for Hewlett-Packard, said one challenge is balancing a brand's global and corporate strategy with local nuances while ensuring that the overall message is not fragmented.
  "Consumers are creating the brand as much as you are," added Alex Roth, manager of global brand operations at ExxonMobil Fuels Marketing.
  The session, moderated by Rapp New York managing director Terry Young, offered tips for successfully walking the local-global tightrope.

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September 25, 2009 | Comments (0)

Wyclef unveils charity push, branding deals

By Evan Jones and Kelsey Payne

Wyclef Jean unveiled a new charitable partnership with clothing and footwear company Timberland during a Thursday Advertising Week Q&A session conducted by Billboard editorial director Bill Werde at the Times Center in New York.
  For every pair of Timberland boots sold, $2 will be donated to Jean's Yele Haiti Foundation, which will help aid reforestation in that country. "I really think that we're going to sell a whole lot of boots and I really think we're going to plant a whole lot of trees in Haiti," Jean said during the afternoon session.
  Jean touched on a number of other topics during the Q&A, including his next planned releases, upcoming deals with other mega-brands and the work he's doing to help Haitian students through his foundation.

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September 25, 2009 | Comments (0)

'Mad Women' talk about industry's evolution

By Elaine Wong

Mad Men, the hit AMC drama, shows advertising during its supposedly golden age of rampant alcohol abuse and sexism. The female panelists at Thursday's "Mad Women" event, part of Advertising Week, endeavored to show how far the industry has come since then.
  Speakers including Wenda Harris Millard (the former Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia co-CEO who is now president of consultancy Media Link) and Angela Courtin, svp of marketing at MySpace, discussed some of the trends and dynamics shaping marketing today. The rise of social media, brands' desire to join the conversation without being "disruptive," and clients' unwillingness to pay top dollar for agency work—when many can perform the same duties in-house—are all changing the way agencies and the creative business operate, the panelists said.
  The latter is clearly a risk, because "once you reduce your fees, you can never put them back up again, and once you give something away for free, you can never charge for it again," said former Bartle Bogle Hegarty U.S. chairman Cindy Gallop (shown here), now a marketing consultant.

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September 24, 2009 | Comments (0)

Tim Kring on 'Heroes' brands and platforms

By Eleftheria Parpis

We all know that necessity breeds invention, and it's no different for the creators of prime-time programming. Tim Kring, creator of NBC's Heroes, said at an Advertising Week event on branded entertainment that he was looking at the way TV audiences were migrating to other media when he decided to tell the Heroes story across multiple platforms. "It evolved out of necessity," he said. "It came out of a simple philosophy of trying to figure out how to fish where the fish are."
  Kring—appearing on a panel moderated by Mitch Kanner of 2 Degree Ventures and also featuring Rick Rosen, co-founder of Endeavor, and Mike Pilot, president of sales at NBC Universal—said he had previously tried to "shoe-horn" multiplatform storytelling into Crossing Jordan but found that "the idea of the show didn't lend itself to it, so it wasn't a natural fit." He created Heroes, which premiered in fall 2006, with the multiplatform delivery in mind, but in the beginning it was an experiment. In a matter of three weeks, however, the digital staff grew from three to 67 people.

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September 24, 2009 | Comments (0)

Alex Bogusky on the wonders of saliva-free CPR

By Eleftheria Parpis

Eight finalists competing for four 30-day agency internships had four minutes each to present ideas to a panel of judges in an American Idol-styled competition called "The Big Ad Gig" on Thursday, part of Advertising Week. The brief was to create a campaign for the American Heart Association promoting "Hands-Only CPR," an initiative designed to get bystanders involved in medical emergencies without requiring them to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. (Hands-Only CPR involves calling 911 and pushing hard and fast in the center of a victim's chest.)
  Avi Truzman, a copywriter from Florida, won the event with a presentation that positioned Hands-Only CPR as "100% saliva free." Truzman wins a monthlong job at Crispin Porter + Bogusky and will see his idea produced by the American Heart Association and the Ad Council. "It's a great opportunity to do great work, that's what I wanted more than anything," said Truzman, a Miami Ad School grad who has been looking for work for the past eight months. "I'm ready to work."
  CP+B co-chairman Alex Bogusky was one of the judges. We caught up with him after the competition to find out who he was channeling most—Paula or Simon. Read more about the other winners after the jump.

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September 24, 2009 | Comments (4)

Facebook's Mike Murphy on friending brands

By Brian Morrissey

Facebook vp, global media sales Mike Murphy has a simple pitch to brands: Ads on Facebook have a "significantly higher" engagement rate than ads elsewhere on the Internet. The Facebook advertising chief chatted about what the booming social network has learned when it comes to advertising on the site. The No. 1 thing: Its decision to limit ads and have them mimic the user experience has worked out well, considering the site recently said it passed 300 million users and is cash flow positive. "We want to make Facebook as fun for brands as it is for users," he said.
  Facebook is now focusing on building tools for marketers to measure their performance beyond clicks. It struck a deal with Nielsen (the parent company of Adweek) to address advertisers' branding goals and who is engaging with them. It is testing a new ad product called Learned Targeting, which displays engagement ads to people Facebook has determined are more likely to be fans of the brand based on its existing fan base on Facebook. It is also encouraging brands to set up pages on the site. (They're free.)

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September 24, 2009 | Comments (5)

More F*ing Cowbell brings down the house

The McCann Erickson band More F*ing Cowbell repeated as winners of the Battle of the Ad Bands this year. Here they are performing Van Halen's "Jump."

September 24, 2009 | Comments (0)