Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Pretty Cool Ad takeover by Tipp-Ex

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I was just made me aware of a pretty awesome site called Everynone. If you don’t know it check it out. Artfully crafted videos and storytelling await.

This is just one of them entitled “Moments”

Moments from Everynone on Vimeo.

via Florian

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There’s been a massive campaign in Germany for a new type of Insurance company called ERGO. The campaign shows a guys talking about what went wrong between people and insurance companies. It’s a well executed sentiment that everyone can easily understand.

Now there is a viral going around that is claiming that 60% of the copy for the Ergo TV commerical comes from a Hollywood movie “High Fidelity” starring John Cusack. In fact, not only the copy but also the scenes are exactly the same. Also the voiceover of the commerical seems to be spoken by the same guy who dubbed the movie in German.

Is this what happens when you run out of ideas, or is this (as some one suggested on Youtube), a matter of the agency bringing in High Fidelity as a mood film, and the client “wanting it exactly like that”. We’ll never know.

To be honest, I haven’t been able to verify if the spoken text is in fact the original text in the movie. But if it is, what a crass blunder!

via Matthias Lauten

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Nmap just created a visualization engine based on Alexis.com data which lets you navigate the web’s most trafficked websites. Definitely worth a look even though the servers seems to be over capacity right now, due to all the traffic from Mashable.

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A while back I wrote about Barry Schwartz and his “Paradox of choice”. Sheena Iyengar now takes a multi-cultural view on this. In some comparative studies, she shows how the American dogma of choice, i.e. the belief that having many options is good, isn’t all it is cracked up to be. Not just abroad, but even in the US.

First she presents results about social context of choice, i.e. how the results of choosing can be different depending on if it is an individual choice or not. Then she explains difference in perceptions of what is actually a choice and what isn’t and then uses a very heart-wrenching example how far the belief in the choice dogma can affect people who have to make tough decisions.

I believe what we can learn from this that choice, just like everything else, can become a paralytic when it is turned into a dogma. When choice has an individual or collective purpose it can be catalyst.

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As with all articles containing the words “x success criteria…” use this with caution. However, the report, while not earth shattering should help you with your next argumentation.

Via DavaiDavai

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… they use a social networking phenomenon to say that aliens are contacting us.

Granted, Mail online isn’t exactly known for Pulitzer material, but still:

While any ‘lost in space’ messages wouldn’t exactly be restricted to 140 characters, as on the website, a study suggests ET is more likely to send out short, directed messages than continuous signals beamed in all directions.

The reason?

Because alien civilisations are likely to strive to limit waste and make their signalling technology efficient.

Thank god for Twitter. We have finally found a medium for aliens!

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1296574/Is-ET-using-Twitter-Scientists-claim-aliens-likely-sending-short-messages-space.html#ixzz0usS7TO5h

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Recently, I’ve come across some articles about the ad industry having a sort of midlife-crisis. This is an interesting notion, as this would premise that advertising as such has a natural life that has to come to an end at some point. And after so many people already having screamed “Advertising is dead,” I am now confused it isn’t. It’s just a mid-life crisis? Folks, get our vital signs right! Also, to follow the metaphor, what exactly is the proverbial “Porsche” in Advertising’s “mid-life crisis”?

Joking aside, just 2 weeks ago Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung painted a critical picture of the industry and mentioned that ad professionals have hard time reinventing themselves and their business model.

Just like a balding 45 year old in a track-suit with disposable income looking for a souped-up convertible to feel better about himself, advertising lacks purpose.

Today, I read Warren Berger’s take on the Bogusky situation “Maybe the Midlife Crisis Isn’t Bogusky’s?“.  Being American and a bit less cynical that his German counterpart, and using the crisis as an opportunity, Warren states that agency professionals (just like Bogusky, but without the massive payout) have been looking for deeper social meaning and context for their work ever since digital technologies have put public opinion (and advertising itself) in the hands of the people. But more interestingly, Berger also makes some nice observations that in fact remind us what the real story is:

The second part of the story suggests to me that some client companies are perhaps still a bit thin-skinned when it comes to having any kind of candid discussion about serious issues. Which in turn suggests that these companies are living in the past — in a pre-social networking era when they could actually still control the public debate.

Ok. To anyone working in an ad agency, this is a pretty shared (even though somewhat of a subjective) sentiment; still, thanks for saying it on Adweek, Warren! And, by the way, this answers my previous question of what the “Porsche” is in the “advertising mid-life crisis”: Affording yourself the irresponsible, ineffective and inefficient luxury of lolly-gagging around when it comes to changing your business model, dragging your heels on changing your creative product and pretending you still live in a brand era. However, I would say this is still true for clients and agencies alike. Dependency on short-term quarterly planning, lack of deeply thought-out foresight and interupted implementation of long-term vision apparently makes it hard to think about a more efficient, unsexy hybrid car when you can still afford the 911. You won’t be able to afford the gas in a couple of years, but hey, »Après nous le déluge«.

Hence, Warren continues to point out that the ad agency’s deliverables should change: product design, launching community initiatives, revising corporate policies, etc.

Or, as we would tell our clients: We want to help you doing things, instead of just saying things. Things that create value exchange, not messaging.

For that to happen though, the role and creative product of agencies have to change. And right now, it’s a a bit of a chicken or egg problem: a) Agency leaders have to really put their money where their mouth is, and enable their shops to actually deliver a creative product that does things with people and instead of milking a defunct business model of creating messages, while b) clients have to become more confident in matters of understanding true human behavior and consequently need to start paying their agency partners for creating purpose-driven initiatives that create a qualitative difference in people’s lives. Result of this catch-22: if agencies don’t offer it, clients can’t buy it. If clients don’t buy it, agencies can’t build those competencies.

So instead of wondering what’s first, chicken or egg, all parties should focus on the chick everyone has been talking about hatching: people-driven brands that have a human purpose, not a promise. Experiences that are authentic, not tagged-on target-audience sentiments that muddy a brand’s expression more than enable a true value exchange. If both clients and agencies came together on this simple observation, Warren’s finishing paragraph would actually not be that utopian:

It might even allow the ad agency to claim some of the moral high ground as it plays a greater role in guiding companies to do the right thing — not just for themselves, but also for the world at large. Is that an overly ambitious and idealistic vision of the future of ad agencies? Maybe. But hey, when you’re having a midlife crisis, you’re allowed to dream big.

Damn right you are. It’s what you signed up for.

In fact, there are enough examples of behavior-based and purpose-driven brands out there that show it’s not utopian to steer clear of a type of cookie-cutter advertising that is either crass exhibitionsm or bland commercialism or teary-eyed sentimentalism, but rather enable human behavior in a way that works for brands and people alike.

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Our popular quarterly release of TechCheck is out again.

For the latest in marketing technology and applications, download it here.

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Within the pursuit of being students of human behavior, Leo Burnett researcher Carol Foley is developing a typology of human behavior, called Behavioral Archetypes (SM).

The Tool allows the classification of human behavior and the brands response behavior.
Our starting point for all explorations of behavior must be to identify and understand what people are doing right now with regard to our brand or product.

The psychological literature is full of references to specific types of behavior.

• Risk-taking
• Habit
• Altruism
• Status seeking.

Yet no one has sorted out all of these various types of behavior, nor created a schema of their relationships to one another.

Were we to be able to do this, we could begin with the behavior itself, rather than with a psychological perspective, and then allow the relevant perspectives to inform that behavior further.

Through over 10,000 interviews in multiple studies, we’ve been able to quantitatively map all of the major types of behavior into a paradigm.

• We gave people life situations as stimuli
• Asked them to rate how likely they would be to engage in a list of behaviors
• Factor analyzed the behaviors to establish archetypes
• Used correspondence analysis to map them, so as to understand dimensionality
• There are over 100 archetypes in the paradigm which collapse into 8 major groupings.

What is important about Behavioral Archetypes(SM), and what substantially validates it, is the degree to which it mirrors models of human motives and values. The model allows for spotting adjacent behaviors (e.g. the freedom behavior’s neighbours are self-interest and change) as well as opposite behaviors (e.g. the the change behavior’s opposite is preservation) as well as 40-50 sub-behaviors per behavior category. See below.

Further investigation into human behavior with this model also leads to insights (behavior tensions) regarding

1. the effects of exaggerating a behavior (e.g. an exaggerated behavior of self-interest leads to narcissism)
2. Resolving behaviors, i.e. which behaviors pop-up in situations where things don’t go as people had planned. E.g. (when exhibiting a Preservation behavior and things do not go as planned, preservation behaviors such as “Security Seeking” are replaced by opposite preservation behaviors, such as “Minimizing Impact”.
3. Defining Themes. i.e. we believe between in the tension within 2 behaviors often lie defining themes in peoples lives, i.e. the personal decision and influence over our own competing behaviors lead to defining themes, such as between Freedom and Conformity behaviors, we always seem to get the question “Who decides?”. When I am exhibiting Freedom behavior it is my will to decide by myself and reject all heteronymy. Therefore, I always battle external forces making the decisions for me.

The tool lends itself to a more structured approach to behavior investigation, spotting behavioral tensions within the people that are most important to a brand and to formulate a brand behavior response.

If you are interested in more information, please feel free to contact us.

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