Gillette Campaign

For the group project, Bridget, Mallory, Emily, and I were given the assignment to create a campaign for a new line of personal grooming products by Gillette, called ProSeries. Gillette is already the top global distributor of men’s skin care products, so naturally we were given a hefty budget by P&G to take the line worldwide in 2011.

We met over dinner during the first week of class to discuss ideas. I’ll admit, it was a struggle to get the creative juices flowing at first. We had some crazy guerilla ideas about shaving homeless people, but we mostly focused on our food. We took a break to gain inspiration during the week of the festival, and when we met at the beginning of this week, we had our idea.

We wanted to target a younger demographic, primarily young professionals and secondarily college students. Our creative strategy is that Gillette can help you be your best. It can be your first, it can help you out in your career and it can help you in your life. Our media choices include: television, viral videos, and twitter.

For our viral video executions we took a risk and developed an awkward character named Close Shave Dave. He will also maintain an advice based twitter feed that appeals to our young audience. For our older television audience we took a more serious note, but we still showed the characters in embarrassing situations.

I think our campaign is good, and will work well in the United States; my only concern is how it will translate globally.

You Look Dumber With Your Mouth Open (commercial critique 5)

For my final commercial critique I would like to examine a campaign that I saw at the film awards last night. It consisted of two commercials for Otrivin Nasal Spray in Switzerland. The first spot showed a kindergarten class waiting for the teacher to hand out scissors. As she went around the room, she comes to a little girl staring blankly ahead with her mouth open. Instead of normal scissors, the teacher hands her a pair that have a rounded edge. The tagline, “You look dumber with your mouth open,” appears and then clips to a picture of the nasal spray with the tagline, “The pleasure of breathing.”

I thought the concept was incredibly clever and used an insight that isn’t usually associated with products in the category. Because of the unique position of the campaign, it was very effective at providing an incentive to buy the product and humor to help you remember it.

For production of this ad, it seems that it was just filmed on a built set with actors and props. For a simple idea like this, I thought the simple set design worked perfectly.

If I were to offer suggestions for improvement… actually I don’t have any. Obviously, the film jury didn’t either since it won a gold lion.

The Music Never Stops (commercial critique 4)

One commercial I saw in the viewing room actually ended up winning a few gold lions. It was for MTV Brazil and pictured a never-ending line of balloons that each had pictures drawn on them. A pin was rocketing through them and when they popped the effect was somewhat like a flipbook.  They played a very intense, upbeat song in the background and as the pin continued on its path, the tagline “The music never stops,” is displayed.

What was really interesting is that the pictures in the “flipbook,” weren’t merely random images, but told a story of the evolution of music. The story starts off simply with an egg and morphs into record contracts and finally, a cartoon Slash morphing into a cartoon Eminem. Very creative and cool.

For the production technique, (I’ll admit I couldn’t tell if it was real or animation just by watching) I found that they used a very “low tech yet inventive animation technique where a traveling spike pops hundreds of balloons along a track” (http://great-ads.blogspot.com/2011/05/mtvs-inventive-popping-promo-ad.html).

I thought it was a really great spot, but if I were to offer a suggestion, I might change the song. It was good. The beat fit perfectly, really. However, it was distracting to me that the song was in German and the ad was for MTV Brazil. That’s my only suggestion, but I really think the ad was close to perfect as it was.

 

The Close

We watched a seminar today on the secret behind the success of Brazil as a country. Several important industry professionals participated in a panel. One executive was from Natura, the fourth largest cosmetic distributor in the world and the other executive was the CEO of strawberryfrog. The panel focused on why customers in Brazil are so satisfied with the work of their agencies. Obviously Natura is satisfied with strawberryfrog because Natura was voted the most trusted brand in all of Brazil for the last few years.

The numbers from Brazil were very impressive when they compared several components of what makes an agency stand out. However, I will point out that their numbers really only appeared strong against the four other markets they had chosen: Mexico, Argentina, China, and India. The performance of Brazil has been impressive here, I will admit. The only two countries they trail in number of awards are the United States and the United Kingdom.

Tonight we are heading over to the Palais to watch the film awards. Hopefully we’ll be able to snag some tickets to the closing gala. If anyone in the industry actually sees this (highly, highly unlikely) HELP!

Imaginative Minds Need Imaginative TV. (commercial critique 3)

This was truly beautiful advertising. Right away it sparked my attention, and throughout the entire 2 minutes and thirty seconds (a very long ad), I was dying to know what the story was about. We only saw one spot for this campaign for TIJI TV (I had to look it up, but it’s actually a French children’s television programming station).

The spot began with a scene in black and white that was styled to look sort of like a coloring book. It then showed a paintbrush painting an entire forest scene with watercolor paint. Music played and the paintbrush danced across the scene. The colors were pretty and the music was very upbeat. Eventually you come to the climax of the story; the paintbrush disappears and soon after, a panda emerges from out of a cave. He’s still black and white because he had slept through the coloring of the forest. He sits down and then the scene clips to a panda in a children’s animal guidebook. A boy is holding it and we are to believe that his imagination designed the paint story behind why the panda is black and white. The tagline then appeared, “Imaginative Minds Need Imaginative TV.”

Obviously the ad was produced through use of animation. It was very good animation at that. The coloring of the forest was very well executed and was quite attention grabbing. I have no changes to propose to this commercial.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBphtvT5JrY

As real as if you'd experienced it yourself. (commercial critique 2)

This campaign for History Channel in Germany featured everyday looking people who were recounting stories from history as if they’d actually been there. One featured a woman speaking from the point of view of Jackie Kennedy on her husband’s death, another featured a man on the space landing, and finally a young boy spoke of seeing Hitler’s corpse after his suicide. After each of the dialogues in each commercial finished, the tagline “As Real as if You’d Experienced it Yourself.”

For my first point, I would just like to state that I really admire the campaign for addressing that watching shows about history can be fun. Education will truly be the savior of this world, and learning about history through watching this channel can be fun and interesting. I am a history channel nerd already, so that’s the message I took away from the campaign; however, it was very well done, and I believe that it could have affected other viewers in a similar way.

In it’s production, it was very simple. It was an actor who had memorized a script with a plain background behind him or her. The actors were actually what made the commercial so special, because they really captured the emotions that the different people in history would have felt. I felt myself on the verge of tears when the German woman was talking about holding the lifeless body of JFK in her arms and telling him “I love you, John.”

For improvement, I don’t have any meaningful corrections. I felt it was on point with the message it needed to promote and did so in a meaningful, engaging way.

Creativity. Creativity. Creativity.

Today we arrived in Cannes for our first Young Lions workshop sponsored by BBDO and HP. The featured speaker was Brazilian (shocker… they seem to have all the talent these days) Art Director and advertising rockstar, Marcos Medeiros. He gave a presentation that featured a client of his, Billboard Magazine. His concept was for covers featuring popular musicians faces, but made up of their musical influences. He then partnered with last.fm where music lovers could design a cover of themselves and with paid subscription, receive a custom cover printed by HP.

The idea really impressed me because of its integration. It featured all of the right people, it was witty, it reached the target, and it even had a brilliant outdoor campaign to match. The outdoor campaign featured typefaces made out of important moments in popular artists careers. These could be downloaded from the Billboard website as well, creating a product placement forever in the individuals’ font books.

BBDO also did something a little… we’ll call it interesting. I was a plant with a pre-written question to ask during the workshop. “How do digital print and traditional print differ?” Formerly considering a degree in traditional darkroom photography, I know exactly why digital is different than film. It makes things easier and cheaper. And although I do believe that he answered the question very well, I don’t think that easier and cheaper is always better. For the next few years at least, I believe there will still be some advantages to traditional print… at least in the art world.

Chris Hall talked to us briefly afterwards, and while he is quite the valuable connection to have made (especially in Atlanta), I couldn’t hear him very well. One message I did take away was the importance of creativity, which my entire experience at the festival has completely reinforced.