NE Creative

How To Identify and Deal With Different Types Of Clients

Here is an entertaining post on Smash Magazine by Robert Brown that categorizes the different types of clients and how to deal with them. According to Mr. Brown the categorizes include The Passive-Aggressive, The Family Friend, The Under-Valuer, The Scornful Saver, The “I-Could-Do-This-Myself”-er, The Control Freak and The Dream Client. (Full Article)

Cliff Freeman & Partners Shuts Its Doors

The agency that brought us great advertising moments like Little Caesar's "Pizza, Pizza," firing a gerbil out of a cannon for Outpost.com and 'Where's the beef?' for Wendy's, is no more. (Adage | Adweek)

Shocking Barack Campaign for Brammo

Brammo is sending out two men on a journey from Detroit to Washington DC using Brammo's Inertia cycle to get them there. The journey symbolizes the same trip the Detroit-based vehicle execs took (expect on their private planes) to DC to get their bailout. However, when they get their instead of asking for a bailout they will present an idea to present the President, if they can get an audience with him, with the energy efficient Brammo electric motorcycle.

The no budget "Shocking Barack" campaign from Cripsin, Porter + Bogusky uses a website, ShockingBarack.com, to help you follow their journey through blogging, video updates and tweets at @shockingbarack. Right now the two men, Dave Schiff, a creative director at CP+B and Brian Wismann, lead designer at Brammo, are in Cleveland. Along they way, they’ll be using couchsurfing.org to find a place to sleep and donations of electricity to charge up their bikes.

We shall see if they will get enough attention using social media to get a chance to chat with the Big Cheese on Capitol Hill.

VW "The Fun Theory"

Here is a new campaign from DDB Stockholm for VW. The is an initiative to get people to change their behaviors by allowing them to see the fun side of acting responsibly. This ties into acting responsible about driving environmentally friendly cars.

The campaign is a number of experiments with the theory fun can change people's behavior. One of the tests is a staircase in a Stockholm subway station that was converted into working piano keys. So when you walked down the stairs each person participated in creating music.

Check you the experiment and others at TheFunTheory.com. You can also look behind the work look at the campaign on Creatvitiy.

Zappos Hired New Creative, Web Agencies

After a much heated and debated RFP and pitch, Zappos has chosen Mullen as their new creative agency (Adweek, Adage). Mullen beat out finalists Draftfcb,San Francisco and CHI & Partners, New York. The incumbent was New York-based, The Ad Store. Zappos estimated marketing budget is around $7 million. The marketing chores will include includes media, creative, discovery/research and agency fees whereas before Zappos marketing efforts have focused mainly on internet direct response.

On a similar note, Zappos also announced the hiring of Happy Cog has their web design agency. Happy Cog will be put to the task to redesign Zappos.com. Some web designers, namely Andrew Wilkinson of MetaLab Designs felt that the Zappos website and even its improve Zeta version, is "a confusing mess." Happy Cog have designed beautiful web site for The Today Show, Thomas Rueters, AIGA, Wordpress and Books A Million for example.

Keep on out on Zappos.

Thinking Inside the Box Project

Check out this great project about not so much design or advertising creativity but about creative solutions. Zak Mroueh, the founder of agency Zulu Alpha Kilo and former Taxi creative leader, set up shop in a giant white box in the middle of Toronto's Dundas Square for nine hours. The Toronto shop welcomed anyone to present any challenge that they could then try and come up with a creative solution. The agency then compiled the footage of the experiment and launched a website documenting the Thinking Inside the Box project.

I recommend going to http://www.thinkinginsidethebox.ca and watching the full length video and if you have time going through each challenge and solution they came up with. The challenges themselves ranged from something as small as helping a wife figure out how to get her lawyer husband to spend money and take a vacation during this economic time (What they came up with was just genius). To something bigger like figuring out to distribute 300 tents to the homeless (they idea, and the great name and logo, ended up in a completely different direction than the "client" had originally thought).

This idea brings me to another article in AdAge called "Stop Being an Agency and Start Being an Agent of Change" by Wayne Arnold. You need to have an AdAge login in order to read the article. Mr. Arnold mentioned that "back in the day" companies used to come to ad agencies for creative BUSINESS solutions also not just creative marketing and advertising ideas. Yes there are consultants that now do such things. In a recent episode of Mad Men, Sterling Cooper client London Fog reached out to Don Draper for ideas on how to increase sales. His idea was to move into new markets like children's coats, hats, and umbrellas.

"Get A Mac" Newspaper Ad Idea

In yesterday's (Monday Aug. 31st) Omaha World-Herald Money section the front page story was about safeguarding your computer for spyware, viruses and all those good things that can slow down your PC. The headline read "Want to keep hazmat out of your computer? Follow these steps" and "Protecting your hard drive doesn't have to be that hard."

I immediately thought about the Mac vs PC TV spots from Apple. What if Apple had know about the upcoming article and could have bought ad space on the rest of the front page? This is what I thought it could look like. I thought it would have been funny and a reaffirming message for Apple against all the problems in doesn't have compare to other PCs but that is just me.

National News: VW in Play

I thought this was interesting enough to report on, so I will. Volkswagen of America has announced that it has put its US account, valued between $220-250 million (not including digital and direct marketing) in review. Crispin, Porter + Bogusky who has handled the account since 2005, was invited to participate in the review but will not participate siting "As a rule, we do not participate in reviews for current account and this will not be an exception."

There is much industry controversy over the VW account since 2005 when then VP of Marketing Kerri Martin change the lead agency of 10 years, Arnold, to CP+B without a review. Kerri Martin had worked previously with CP+B when she was the marketing communications manager at MINI USA. There is speculation that CP+B will soon be announced the lead agency for Coda Automotive, a California-based electric car start up where Ms. Martin was recently hired as CMO.

As for the VW review the likely agencies to be invited could be Deutsch who has been working with GM's Saturn but the parent company is trying to sell so Deustch would no longer have a car client. DDB handles creative chores in Europe, New Zealand and Singapore. Goodby, Silverstein & Partners until recently handled Hyundai but the Korean-based car maker has moved the majority of the account in-house. Arnold has been tossed into the ring seeing as Tim Ellis VW's client vp, marketing was tired in 2007 from Volvo and while at Volvo Mr. Ellis hired Arnold as their lead agency.

Accounts this size don't seem to go into play very often, so expect any agency involved to pull out all the stops. As I mentioned keep an eye out for Coda to announce the hiring of CP+B which would be unfortunate for creative boutique Droga5 who was recently hired in June 2009.

Art & Copy Trailer

Here is a great trailer for the movie Art & Copy about some of the most creative minds in advertising

Award Shows: Evolve or Die

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