So I was cleaning out one of my old external hard drives last night in order to free up some much-needed space when lo-and-behold I came across this old favorite of mine. It’s a scan of an advertisement Ogilvy & Mather’s put out to promote themselves.
It is definitely something that you don’t see too often these days, especially in long-form copy.
For more great pearls of wisdom from some of advertising’s best, I’ve kept up an online storage of interesting articles that can be reached by following the “Knowledge Base” link on the right sidebar of my blog.
So what do you guys think, is self-promotion a thing of the past? Or have we just forgotten that every now and then, advertising does actually work…. even if you happen to be your own client?
Here’s the latest campaign from Wieden + Kennedy, London for Honda featuring an impressive display of “problems” solved by the resourceful Honda engineering team. So far this whole campaign is now my favorite for the year. From their entertaining interactive site found at ProblemPlayground.com to everything that went into the making of the spot itself. This piece is part of a campaign to introduce their new zero-emission hydrogen fuel cell car called the FCX Clarity. In order to do so, they decided to give us a little insight into what type of team Honda uses to come up with these “problem solving” machines. The car itself isn’t the only testament to the engineering prowess of their team, as the people you see in the spot are all real-life members of Honda’s engineering squad. It begins by displaying someone attempting to solve a Rubix cube only to pan out to an entire team working to build an abstract block MADE of solved Rubix cubes…not only that but it’s made to resemble the engine they designed for the car. Inspired after completing this task the team scurries off to then try and solve various other “seemingly impossible” challenges to represent what these poor folks had to go through in order to accomplish what they’ve done. Watch it for yourself and you’ll see… agree with me or not, i don’t mind, but I think it is a perfect example of using the brand itself to sell its products, rather than some cheap marketing ploys designed to entice consumer desire. This seems to be a definite follow-up to their somewhat controversial Honda – Cog commercial that involved a group of their engineers and 606 takes (no cgi, no special effects, just a bunch of nerds with a passion for whatever projects they’re assigned to).
I rarely do this, but in this case feel it is almost my duty to shower my compliments to whomever was in charge of the Information Architecture/User Experience for the website. It’s fast loading, clean, links are easy to read/navigate, and best of all it enables you to download the spot as well as the making of the commercial in a variety of formats. No typical text links either… decently sized icons align themselves with each download option making it simple to find the version you desire (it even includes an iPod version). Navigating back to the home page was a snap, and although the website includes sound effects, there was no annoying music/ongoing sounds playing if I were to temporarily stop using the site. Nothing is more annoying than opening a site in your browser with the intention of going through it later, only to become thoroughly annoyed by some auto-loading music/sound that emerges from the minimized browser. Read the rest of this entry »
Ogilvy Paris debut’s their first television commercial for luxury brand Louis Vuitton continuing with the theme of their recent print and interactive work for the brand. I’m not going to lie if I say I wasn’t hoping for a Scarlett Johansson cameo, who’s most recent appearance in LV’s print campaign can be viewed here, but instead we see a montage of journeys, asking us whether “the person create the journey, or does the journey create the person?” This is the same message from their now infamous Gorbachev print piece that resulted in a barrage of tin-foil-hat-wearing controversy surrounding the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. Turned out that the photographer for the shoot in question, Annie Leibovitz, was the culprit to blame, having purchased a handful of random magazines in order to make the bag appear to be full. More on that can be read here.
As for this spot, Laure Bayle was Agency Producer with Christian Reuilly as acting CD. Bruno Aveillan directed this piece for Quad Productions (Martin Coulais was the producer, Philippe Lesourd the DP, and Bruno himself managed all the camera work).
Manual Beard from WIZZ Paris did the post production with editing done by Fred Olszak (Bruno Maillard was the Flame Artist with the music credits going to none other than famous movie composer Gustavo-Santaolalla).
Interesting piece for a brand’s first foray into the realm of television commercials. This piece will air in 13 different languages in select theaters/cable/satellite channels throughout 2008. If you notice, it’s not your typical :30 second spot either, this one clocks in at around 90 seconds. The reason for that?
The choice of the exceptional 90-second format enables Louis Vuitton to take the time to convey the true and enriching essence of travel as a process of both discovery and self-discovery,” said Antoine Arnault, head of communications at Louis Vuitton. “Time is the ultimate luxury.”[source]
Nicely put, especially with the cost of each second of media time these days…… “Time IS the ultimate luxury.”
