The effect of effectiveness
I was an extremely proud man last Thursday when I learned Advance had won its third Advertising Effectiveness Award. This time the award was in recognition of the work we did on the extremely successful global launch of LEGO Friends. For the record, our first two effectiveness awards were both for LEGO Bionicle. Given that we’ve only entered three times, we can actually boast a 100% hit rate!
Putting the cases together is extremely hard work, especially when it comes to getting the facts and figures. Clients have different ways of tracking, different ways to analyse data, and are sensitive about giving away information to the competition. That said, if you win, it’s definitely worth it!
The beauty of Effectiveness awards is that they unite the Agency team and the Marketing team in a mutual understanding of the objectives. And even more importantly, it pinpoints what has led to the effect – the old cliché that only 50% of advertising works, you just don’t know which half, can finally be buried in a cause/effect study. I’m also extremely happy to see the way the award unites the account people and the creative staff in a joint battle for effect.
On the other hand, when seeking to develop effective communication, we as agencies need to visit areas that may seem ineffective at first glance to challenge the solutions of the future. I believe it will be a dead-end just to copy last year’s effective campaign, which can be tempting for clients to save cost. Instead of just copying the successful campaigns we need to learn from them and bring this new understanding into the future solutions to clients’ problems.
Great results for LEGO Friends
LEGO came out with some great results last week, driven in part by the huge success of its Friends theme, sales of which are double what was expected. Here’s a selection of the best news coverage here in Denmark:
BureauBiz highlights our role in the success of LEGO Friends
Berlingske pinpoints Friends as key to LEGO’s recent growth.
DR picks up on LEGO’s plans to increase hiring, again partly a result of Friends’ success.
Revisiting Hyper Island
A fun day today with Hyper Island looking at what we’re doing right and what we can do better in the future to keep the agency moving forward. The film above was a quick experiment using Picle, the storytelling app recently launched by Made by Many.
A Picle is a still image tied to up to 10 seconds of audio. The user can then stitch a bunch of Picles together to create a Story, like the one above. The app’s been getting a lot of traction lately and, even though our first attempt feels a bit rough and ready, we think it has a lot of potential as a creative tool. Download it yourself and give it a try.
A year in the life of Advance
Here’s CEO Jens Krog with a quick review of the year just gone.
2011 was a tough year for the economy and a tougher one for the industry but I’m proud to say that we’ve come out the other side a wiser and even a bigger agency. As I write, most forecasts indicate another challenging year ahead and we’re focused on making sure we continue to evolve our offering.
Clients need agency partners to work faster, smarter and cheaper. These pressures are not new but have been accelerating in recent years to the point that the industry is barely recognisable from just ten years ago.
The digital transformation is the most obvious change but while we’re retooling to ensure we up our online skills, we’re just as interested in the way the contract between advertisers and consumers is being transformed. We’ve always said the best communication is a great product or service and this simple saying is truer today than it’s ever been.
We’re intrigued to see how the relationship between brands and people continues to evolve in the months and years ahead. We hope and believe the transparency of the Internet will continue to push companies towards more responsible practices and we think more of our time will be spent helping clients stay on top of societal changes, as well as those affecting the way brands communicate.
Anyway, here’s a quick look back at some of our 2011 highlights as an agency, and here’s to a great 2012.
LEGO – Blast From the Past
A while back we stumbled across an archive of VHS tapes that had been locked up in a cupboard and forgotten about. We had them digitized and, to our delight, they turned out to hold many of the old LEGO commercials we’ve made over the years.
We got in touch with the Brothers Brick – one of the best LEGO fan sites around – and they agreed to serialise the commercials on the blog together with the exclusive backstories of how they were made. For many of these old commercials, it’s their online debut! So if you’re a fan of vintage LEGO, keep an eye on the Brothers Brick over the next few months.
To give people a chance to see all the videos in one place, we’re also gradually posting them in a special Blast from the past playlist on our YouTube channel.