People like stories.

Adidas recently launched House Party, a new campaign celebrating 60 years of decking the world out out in triple stripe.

Directed by Nima Nourizadeh, the centrepiece is a 160 second long spot shot at a (you guessed it) house party where everyone’s dressed in adidas. In amongst the beautiful plebs are celebs like David Beckahm, Missy Elliot, Katy Perry, and behind the bar shaking Martinis a very unlikely Ilie Nastase.

For a campaign that ends with the line 'Celebrate Originality', it's not a terrifically original idea. (Check out this Coke ad from the 70s; instead of Becks, they've got Brocky!) But it is a nice vehicle that uses online and offline spaces to build the idea nicely.

As well as the Big Telly execution, there's a YouTube channel packed with extra content like the invitations going out, Becks and Kevin Garnett killing time before the party and a paint fight at a Ting-Tings gig. Even a Simpsons parody. Naturally, there's a website where you can buy all the gear.

It's all hopelessly self-conscious and tries a bit too hard. But the track's infectious and there's a lazy, veging-on-the-couch kind of charm about it. Best of all, it all fits and there's a story that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It piques the curiousity, egging you onto further exploration, unlike Smart Energy's 'Zoetrope' spot which starts with a nice positioning before undoing all its good work.

Genius or accident? Cadbury Gorilla meet Johnny Farnham.

Last night, while watching the gyrating mammary parade that is 'Underbelly' my wife and I saw the Cadbury 'Gorilla' ad, local version. Instead of Phil Collins' 'In The Air Tonight', the popular primate twirls the sticks to Johnny Farhham's 'You're the Voice'. From it's launch in the UK in 2007, this ad has caused controversy, and the result was no different in our household. "What's that got to do with chocolate?" chocolate-loving Mrs Baker said from the sofa, "What rubbish!" The truth is, it has everything everything and nothing to do with the stuff. Chocolate is of course, all about chocolate. But it is also about joy and sharing, and this ad is nothing if not all about these two qualities. YouTube proliferates with home-made remixes (check out the Deep Purple cover), the Gorilla facebook page has more than 100,00 friends, while the old-school broadcast version is still provocative enough to generate discussion on the Baker family couch. But did it work? In the UK, sales were up after a bleak year for the company, while the campaign scooped the pool at all the creative award shows. Working in advertising agencies, we sell our clients on process and rigour, as if funding enough focus groups and territory boards was a guarantee for market success. Sometimes it does, often it doesn't. But this campaign works, just because it does. Rather than telling you what to feel about the product, it simply makes you feel it. And that's rather nice, isn't it?

Joy. What else do you want?

There's not enough joy in the world. Here's a little more. If I was with this phone company, I'd feel a lot better about it.

The power of posters?

There's an outdoor site where they hang 24-sheet posters just around from where we work in Melbourne. It's on a busy corner, and there's room for about 5 diferent posters.
Now, due to the GFC, the outdoor advertising market is having a bit of a tough time, and the same posters, presumably on a 2-3 month buy have been up for 6 months or more.
Last week they were torn down, presumably because the bean counters frothed at the mouth about clients getting something for free.
So now, instead of a corner of five well-produced posters, there's a wall of scrappy half-torn, half-glued paper.
Now, presumably when the sales team are out there trying to sell outdoor to their cash-strapped clients, they talk of visibility and passing traffic and brand impressions.
Let's then presume that the half-convinced client then drives past this highly visible site...hmmmmm.
If you spend your life trying to convince others of the persuasive powers of outdoor, use the medium to sell itself.
If you have no paying clients, show work of good photographers or artists. Tell a joke. Start a competition to best use the vacant space. Get people talking about your product.
Anything but this.
Because when the recovery starts, you're already behind the curve.

RailCorp: dill of the week.

In case nobody noticed, the game has changed. Companies and corporations are no longer the custodians of their brands, their customers are. Marketing managers and advertising professionals don't get to decide what a brand is, and what it is not. What we get to do is divine what people will or will not permit us to be, and then be that to the best of our ability. Which makes NSW's RailCorp the dill of the week. When a bright young spark created an application to allow commuters to check on Sydney's (notoriously unreliable) timetable on their iPhones, the Bureaucrats got all medieval on his ass. Legal letters were issued, threats to sue were made. After mumbling some crap about timetables being 'copyright', the government institution then issued other threats against makers of similar applications. No doubt a shiny new TVC will be out soon extolling the virtues of the Sydney rail system, and how grateful Emerald Citysiders ought to be that 90-something percent of their services run on time. Which will only rub salt into the would of the poor viewer who's just got home an hour late. Despite what lawyers might say, marketers and corporations don't own the 'copyright' to their brand attributes. The public can withdraw it just as fast as they give it.

You do not own your brand, your customers do.

For decades, brands like Bonds, Stubbies and King Gee have had a special place in the Australian heart.
From Chesty Bond to Steve Irwin, the iconic blue singlet, the front-pocketed short, the faded khaki work shirt became something close to revered.
They had managed to become part of the national identity.
Then they were bought, sold, amalgamated and floated. Local factories were closed and the manufacturing was shifted to places where labour costs were inevitably less. It all made perfect business sense, yet today people marched the streets against the 'owners' of these brands. The same people have been condemned by the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader.
The CEO of the company has been pilloried in the popular press and the stockmarket has punished the company by valuing the entire Pacific Brands entity at less than one of it's mid-sized brands.
All successful brands are a mix of personal passion, happy accident and commodity. when you forget about the first two, all you're left with is the last. The consumer's gift to Pacific Brands was the ability to run campaigns like the one shown. Now, it seems, they've asked for it back.

A Promise Kept.

'A promise kept'. It's the best definition of a brand that I've heard. And the man that has taken brand to a new level was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States of America this morning (Melbourne time). President Barack H. Obama's campaigns for both the Democratic nomination and the Presidency rewrote the rules of political marketing, and provides the definitive case study of communicating a seamless brand across both broadcast and digital media. The Obama brand, if there was an accurate way of measuring it, would surely be amongst the most valuable on the planet at this moment. How much it is worth in four years' time will depend on his ability to keep the difficult promises he has made. I hope, for all of us, that he does.

TV isn't dead, it just has a nasty cough

It's 9.50 on a Friday night and I'm captivated by a one-day cricket match between Australia and South Africa. SA need 14 runs with 13 balls to go. It's broadcast in Channel 9, with a single, good old-fashioned 30-second ad between overs. With the entertainment on offer, I'd imagine the audience will be sitting happily through them.
But what happens when the entertainment isn't quite so good? As is often, if not usually, the case?
If you're an ad-blog junkie like me, you'll read a lot about the death of broadcast media. How the TV stations are toast and newspapers a quaint throwback. It's all RSS, YouTube and podcasts these days, don't you know.
But there are moments, like this game tonight, where the broadcast medium can prove it still has its moments. And doubts remain over digital's ability to move mass markets on its own.
So while TV isn't quite as dead as some would like it to be, it appears that digital isn't quite grown up enough to step into the breach just yet.
For creative people like us it presents a particular challenge; it's not enough to invent ideas that work for either broadcast or digital. You must invent ideas that work for both.
An idea that works well on television but is unitelligible online ignores the new consumer reality. But a solo digital idea can simply get lost in an ocean of limited time and unlimited choice.
Do such ideas exist? Of course they do. And if you're not getting them you should be asking your agency why not.

Our Cate.

Able & Baker have been working with our good friends at Al Gore's Climate Project and the Australian Conservation Fourndation to create the Connectors. It's a national social network of over 800 Climate Project Connectors, each of whom will instigate a locally based project to help reduce the impact of Climate change. We're working to have more than a thousand of these projects up and running by the beginning of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit in December next year. This'll not only do it's bit for carbon emissions, but also build a bank of good behaviour-chaning ideas that can be accessed by the rest of the country and the world. The Connectors program was kicked off with a national series of screenings of the documentary Telling The Truth, hosted by Able & Baker's favourite Bob Dylan, Cate Balnchett.

Two monkeys and an old jam jar.

Able and Baker fancied a latte yesterday, and swung down from their plush Flinders Lane digs to Federation square to check out The Greenhouse. Built in just a couple of weeks by Melbourne flower artist Joost, the idea was to help us understand the unsustainability of many of the things we consume by providing sustainable alternatives.

The building itself is made of old strawbales and recyclable steel, coffee is served in old jam jars and the seats that become stools that become coffee tables are to build from discarded shipping crates.

The rooftop is covered in vegies grown in old milk crates which go straight to the kitchen. The outdoor furniture appears to be made of old billboard skins and road signs.

The Greenhouse won't single-handedly save the planet. But at the table next to Able & Baker's, a gaggle of ladies in their 60s teased their friend for refusing to drink out of a jam jar. They were talking about sustainability, recyclability and the life-cycle of objects. Which they would not have done had they been sitting in Gloria Jean's.

A special space-monkey clap for Joost and his chums at bttb (Bigger Than Ten Bears).

At the end of January, The Greenhouse will be dissembled, apparently leaving not a single trace of waste. Rumour has it that it will resurface somewhere else, possibly next year’s Milan Furniture Fair

Tata to Commodore and Falcon?

Earlier this year, an Indian manufacturer launched the Tata Nano at the New Delhi Auto Expo.

The Nano is the cheapest production car in the world, selling for about US$2300.

It makes car ownership available to people who could never before dream of such a thing.

The Nano will grow the Indian car market by an estimated 65%. Cars can be shipped in parts and assembled by local entrepreneurs, creating a whole new class of business-owners and bypassing the traditional dealer network.

And the same time, Able and Baker's colleagues in multinational ad agencies up and down St Kilda Road are scratching their heads on how to sell Holden Commodores and Ford Falcons that fewer and fewer Australians want.

Sales in this segment fell 21% in November alone.

Australian car dealers are now dependent on government handouts to stay open.

One car creates a market for itself. The other two fight over one that is dying.

Perhaps our creative friends will pull something out of their hats and create a compelling case for Ford and Holden. But you can be certain the Nano will sell itself.

Serendipity and the effect of girls.

Able was out on the front lawn this evening, enjoying a glass of Mt Difficulty pinot noir, and happened upon his neighbour.

His neighbour is about to be married, and her sister was over from Oregon for the occassion. Able got chatting, only to find that said neighbour's sister worked for the Nike Foundation and worked on The Girl Effect.

Able clapped his little rhesus monkey hands, as it one of he and Baker's all-time favourite ideas.

What's nice about it is the appropriate invisibility of Nike. Their sweaty pawprints aren't all over the spot or the program. The Nikeness is only there if you look for it.
Or if someone tells you. Which Able thinks is really nice.

Unlike Starbucks, who ripped of the idea shamelessly but got all heavy-handedly focus groupy ROI on it.