Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

There’s something I noticed at Cannes.

And I’ve noticed it looking through everything recently submitted to Creative Works.

No laughs. Plenty of grit.

Under Armour from Droga5 New York. Strong women and gritty poems.

New Balance from BMB. Callum Hawkins grits his teeth and runs – 120 miles a week. “There are no short cuts to anywhere worth going."

Performance bike brand Specialized have made a film about kids with ADHD. From the gritmeisters at Goodby Silverstein.

Then there are the brands that want us to cry....

So let’s do the math. Ten years is 3,650 days. Multiply that by 5,000 ads per day, and you get an unbelievable number: 18,250,000.

My jaw dropped when I realized that. I’ve seen over 18 million ads in the last decade.

In all that time, I’ve learned a lot, especially about conversions.And that’s what I want to talk about today. I’m going to distil everything I’ve learned from those 18 million ads and break it down into bite-sized, actionable tips for you.

To make things as relevant as possible, I’m going to address display ads specifically. Display ads are among the most popular and widely used digital advertising methods today....

Advertisers have found ways to bombard us with promotions no matter what we’re doing: watching TV, checking social media, and even when streaming music. But the future of advertising could be even more invasive when the next public event you attend is full of flying video drones projecting inescapable video everywhere you look.

NTT Docomo, one of Japan’s largest wireless carriers, created this unique flying sphere that’s surrounded by eight curved LED strips that can spin at high speed while it’s flying. (As light and thin as LCD displays have become, they’re still relatively heavy for a battery-powered drone to hoist into the air.) This approach can create what is essentially a flying video screen with minimal weight to improve battery life and flight times. The design also allows the drone’s propellers to be hidden inside, so as not to obstruct images or videos being displayed.

The image resolution on this 35-inch-wide prototype is limited to just 144 x 136 pixels—lower resolution than even the Apple Watch’s tiny screen. So if you were hoping one of these drones could follow you around letting you binge on Netflix all day, you won’t have the best experience. But as the technology improves, eventually this flying video drone could reach HD resolutions, and maybe even 4K....

Alec Baldwin has been killing it as President Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live.

iPhone ads are about to get a lot funnier.

Apple is reportedly planning to inject some much-needed humor into a few of its upcoming commercials after striking a deal with NBC that will see the team behind Saturday Night Live write a few ads for the iPhone-maker.

The partnership between Apple and NBC will result in a series of commercials slated to appear during Saturday Night Live in a couple of weeks, according to Variety. SNL also scored a deal with Verizon that will result in two ad spots being shown on April 8 and April 15.

If there’s one thing that wins me over in an advertisement, it’s effective use of humor. I mean, who doesn’t love a funny ad? I for one have been known to spend the better part of a Friday night looking up my favorite funny ads of all time and showing them to my husband for what’s probably the twentieth time. (It’s always funnier the twentieth time, right?)

Knowing that some funny ads might make your day a little brighter or serve as inspiration for your next project, the HOW team couldn’t help but curate a little collection below, including some old favorites, some we’ve recently discovered and some so weird you can’t help but laugh, plus a couple of vintage ads for good measure....

Blockchain, best known so far in the financial space as the technology underpinning bitcoin, is essentially a massive, shared Excel sheet that can have many uses. These range from figuring out whether tuna is sustainably fished to whether the handbag you bought is counterfeit. But in advertising, the theory is turning into practice thanks to a host of different companies all using it to track ad impressions in digital media.

The key is that blockchain, and adchain, theoretically lets multiple parts of the industry work together with no dependency on one party’s data. “If it’s immutable and decentralized, then you can align incentives,” said Brook. Right now, adchain will embed a tracker in the xml of a creative asset — and in real time, show you who is watching it or if viewability standards aren’t being met.

Here’s what that theoretically looks like in the adchain if it’s about figuring out if an impression was real: A buyer buys an impression, which is encrypted in a block, and then broadcasted to every single participant on the chain. The impression is verified by the publisher, then added to the ledger. Everyone in the blockchain gets to see the impression event and approve it.

Last week, adtech company MetaX launched “adchain,” a use of the blockchain ledger to essentially tag a piece of creative and then follow it on the internet to figure out whether it was seen, who saw it, where it actually ran, conversion rates and how budget was spent along the chain....

In the old world, there was no effective way to target individuals searching for niche products, so the companies that succeeded — the household names, so to speak — offered products that appealed to broad swaths of people, and advertised by reaching thousands, and in many cases, millions of people at once (see: Super Bowl and radio ads). The companies who ran successful advertising campaigns through these mediums, then, tended to be of a certain ilk, whether restaurant chains, car brands, department stores, insurance agencies, or brands under the umbrella of a larger consumer goods company.

Enter the modern era, and the internet has flipped the traditional retail model — one characterized by massive investment into retail locations and brand advertising — on its head. Distance between buyer and seller no longer constrains sales — a consumer in Japan could just as easily obtain a watch manufactured in Detroit as a consumer in Detroit could obtain a Sake produced in Japan.

The internet has given buyers and sellers unprecedented access to one another; it has never been easier for a buyer to find a seller who has what they need, just as it has never been easier for a seller to find a user who needs what they have.Google and Facebook ads are a microcosm of this effect. No longer is the cost of individual consumer acquisition so high that reaching a million consumers at once is the only effective way to advertise. Now, through Google and Facebook, niche businesses can target specific individuals whose data determines that they are prime candidates for said niche product or service. ...

Political tensions have reached a point where some brands are perceiving mainstream news outlets as too controversial, leading media buyers to pull ads from those sites.

One campaign manager at a holding group media agency said a major automaker decided last month to stop serving ads in the news category in case the content didn’t align with the brand’s values. Then, after violence erupted in Charlottesville, Virginia, the agency blocked keywords including “Nazis” and “Charlottesville” in programmatic campaigns for the brand. This exec, like the other three media agency executives interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity due to political sensitivities.

The executive said the blocked news category contains hundreds of publishers, including foxnews.com, which also is the only mainstream news site that has been on the agency’s blacklist since March....

Japan prides itself on ludicrous advertising. But every year, a few commercials go beyond—transcending the market’s typical weirdness and reaching a state of truly inspired lunacy.

“Gravity Cat,” which won a silver Lion in Cannes, came close, but its oddness was relatively mild—and also wrapped in jaw-dropping craft. But thankfully, another silver Lion winner from Japan has stepped in to take the prize.

Check out the spot below, from agency Asatsu-DK and production company Spoon. It would be a spoiler to reveal the advertiser, so just sit back and soak up all the screaming and yelling from actors whose true character reveals itself only at the very end....

It seems like every few months a new buzzword gets thrown around and this month’s buzzword is MAdTech. “Have you heard about MAdTech? It’s going to be game changing!!” Oh really? While I appreciate the excitement that the buzz creates, the excitement seems to revolve more around the hopes of change than around utilizing a viable solution and innovative technique to get results.

So, what exactly is MAdtech? Well, to put it concisely:  it is the combination of Marketing technology and Advertising technology, hence “M+Ad = MAd”.1 Let’s examine what MAdtech means for the automotive industry, and how your dealership can smash the competition with this powerful capability....

One of Cinnabon’s most noteworthy, pop-culture-focused marketing campaigns and partnerships came about by chance. You might even say it was a bit of luck. When AMC aired one of its final episodes of Breaking Bad, Saul Goodman (played by Bob Odenkirk) said, “If I’m lucky, in a month from now, best-case scenario, I’m managing a Cinnabon in Omaha.”

The Cinnabon social team quickly capitalized on the mention and tweeted a link to the brand’s careers page to Odenkirk. Soon after that, Cinnabon and the AMC show partnered, with the brand creating a series of campaigns around new seasons as a way to keep itself at the forefront of pop culture and move away from being thought of as simply a mall-based chain.

“The organic nature of the partnership comes from such a good place, and to hear the creators of the show talk about why they were excited when that happened and how it made sense for the vision they had for the show—it just felt organic and therefore very authentic,” said Jill Thomas, vp of global marketing for Cinnabon....

As part of a tasty new tourism campaign, ad agency Lapiz just made Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs a reality. But instead of soup and juice, this futuristic cloud rains something altogether more buzzy—tequila.

Lapiz, a unit of Leo Burnett, used ultrasonic humidifiers to vibrate tequila at a frequency that actually turned it into visible mist. This mist was then condensed into liquid form, which fell as raindrops. All of this happened as a special exhibit in Berlin, Germany, during the rainiest month of the year—to promote Mexico as a vacation destination....