MORE THAN ADVERTISING

Well, its Christmas and the year about to end, time to take a look back on the last months and summarize.

It was on the 3rd of June when I wrote the first post on this blog, and at that time I didn´t know what to expect from it. Today, to be honest I don´t want to live without it anymore! I met so many interesting people around the world, soul mates with different backgrounds, planners, creatives, professors and students. People who inspired and motivated me, people who I would never have met without this blog.
Even if it´s sometimes hard to find enough time to write about everything you have in mind (like in the past weeks) it´s always a great feeling to share your thoughts and ideas and get feedback on them.

So I want to thank everybody for reading and participating. And next year, we will continue our fight against senseless advertising and old school marketing and change this industry for the better!

Merry X-Mas and a revolutionary year 2009

Steffen

“MINI CLUBMAN – THE OTHER TEST-DRIVE” scored again. We won Silver at the Epica Awards and Bronze at Eurobest 2008.

I want to thank everybody who believed in this idea and worked long hours to make this project possible and such a huge success. This was the first time for us to use this new technique for one of our advertising campaigns and due to Jacek Jonczyk and Tomas Sommer from DEON, everything worked out well.

And now I will open up a good bottle of red wine and enjoy this feeling

Here is the entry video again:

The brief is the beginning of every campaign. It contains facts, inspiration and necessary insights as well as a defined target group including all the information about their purchasing habits and how they are related to their media exposure etc.

The problem is, that most of the time the definition of the target group is something like this:

We want to reach all male between 31 and 42, with high incomes living in major cities etc. (bla bla bla)

Ähm…what…I mean how can we create an idea that reaches those people when we have no clue to whom we´re really talking to.

This demographic description fits Michael Balack as well as Dennis Rodman. And I´m pretty sure that those guys don´t share the same lifestyle, drive the same car or buy the same products.

So let´s think about a new way to describe the people we want to reach with our ideas:

Think of each one of your customers as a member of a tribe, the tribe you lead.

Seth Godin

I love this idea of thinking of a brand or product as a vital part of a tribe. A tribe consists of a social group, and members of this group express themselves with the brands and products they use, wear and buy.

So if we would try to define the particular tribe instead of a target group, we could talk directly to the people that buy our stuff and won´t waste our money to convince Michael Ballack to buy an Hummer in place of his Audi. (Because he never will!)

Let´s think of marketing as tribe management and that every brand is able to build and lead a tribe. Imagine that people are joining it and want to hear from your company because it helps them connect, it helps them find each other, it gives them a story to tell and something to talk about.

Apple for example does a great job on that and there are many more company’s out there.

Seth Godins new book “Tribes” is about how to manage, lead an market to a tribe.

And if you want to know more about it, watch his presentation on Mixergy.com or download the audio book for free.

Tribe management is a totally new way to see the world. And if we are using our marketing budget to be relevant to our tribe instead of bombarding them with ads they don´t wanna see, if we help them to connect to each other and if we give them something to talk about, we will reach and involve them and they will love to buy our products. And thats what good marketing is all about.

New Blood for the industry. This Saturday I gave the More Than Advertising presentation at the ADC Junior Seminar in Stuttgart.

In the audience: 30 young Art Directors and Copywriters who were hungry for new ideas and inspiration. After 161 charts and some questions they had to do a little exercise.

The challenge was to launch a new soft drink with the small marketing budget of only 200.000€. But most important, it was forbidden to spend any of this money on media. I wanted them to create ideas that attract an audience instead trying to buy attention through ads.

After 30min of group work every team presented their concepts. And what I heard really thrilled me! Every team came up with an innovative idea, they had created guerilla strategies, social media platforms, viral marketing, innovative promotions and some interesting collaboration concepts. Every one of it was a great new solution to this problem and I´m sure that if we had the time and the money (for real) these concepts would work.

That proofed me once more, that its not the lack of creative talent or ideas that avoids this new kind of advertising & marketing, it´s our old structure and the way we work. So we should think about ways to protect ideas like that and how we could sell them to our clients.

It was great to talk directly to this new generation of young creative, and I hope that they will go back in their agency and put it into practice.

And for all young creatives out there, who want to CREATE CHANGE INSTEAD OF ADs, join our More Than Advertising Facebook Group and continue to challenge the current status quo.

VIVA LA REVOLUTION

PS: @ Julia Stackmann and Norbert Herold, it was great to talk & work with you on this seminar.