Our Logbook » Slacking, Thinking, Working Archive

Earlier in the week you might have heard that we won the Jose Cuervo account, one of the oldest most recognised and awarded Tequila brands – worldwide.

To celebrate we thought what better place than a Mexican bar along the road where (guided by a knowledgeable barman) we tested out a number of Cuervo cocktails. The girls had some rather large pink ones (very SATC) and the boys went more macho with shorts followed by an odd looking green chaser (which the barman claimed to be good for you).

We think our night out has put us in good stead to work on the Cuervo portfolio of products and has given us an insight into the product to help us deliver an international brand positioning and creative platform.

One thing we learnt during the night is that Tequila definitely makes you happy!

Work will roll out later this year.

…a question pondered by many and only answered by a few brave souls. It could be anything – a piece of film or animation, an image or photograph, even a story or piece of juicy gossip.  But how do you recognise when something has the potential to be shared by hundreds, even thousands of people?

In true Blue Peter style, here’s one we made earlier. Yesterday in fact – and it’s a great case study on how things explode at the speed of light with the power of online word-of-mouth.

Before we start – it’s worth noting that we (Albion) did not create this image. It was sent to us. All we did was help it on its way to thousands of people via the interwebs. If YOU created this image, then give us a call and come in for a cup of tea and a chocolate digestive. You deserve it.

So, our ‘go viral’ mantra (case study of the ‘England Muppets’ image):

• Launch at exactly the right time. For the tiny percentage of the country that didn’t know, the England football team were playing yesterday and every man and his dog were acting like true football pundits on the social networks. We posted the image just at the right time when people were truly engaged in all things England and all things football.

• Make people want to share it. We laughed out loud at the irony in this work of art. To many, the England football team are a bunch of Muppets – so sticking their heads on to a team photo was perfect comedy value. It got our attention, made us smile and made us want to send this on.

• Make it simple to share it. Twitter is great for blasting out 140 characters quickly and easily, so we posted it via TwitPic with a shortend URL and tagged on the appropriate football hash tags that were trending at that time.

And finally…

• Hit the influencers – this is often easier said than done, especially if it’s branded content, but in this case, our picture was picked up organically by some heavy hitters on the key social networks. You need to know who you’re targeting; or just know that where you’re promoting the viral content, people will be interested in it.

In our minds, the ‘England Muppets’ image ticked all of the above criteria, so when it achieved over 300 views in 9 minutes, we knew this was viral gold. And it’s still going strong, achieving way over 2000+ views in less than 24 hours – and you can check out the original link here.

Perhaps one of the most thought provoking books published over the last couple of years has to have been Nudge: Improving decisions about health ,wealth and happiness. Last night, some of us were lucky enough to hear its author, economics god Professor Richard Thaler speak as part of the IPA’s Writers Unblocked series of talks.

With his co author Cass Sunstein, Thaler coined the phrase ‘choice architecture’, to explain how we, as humans, are all susceptible to the influence of a variety of environmental conditions that in turn, can cause positive and negative effects on our behaviour. He describes these factors as nudges. As he does in his book, Thaler took us through a number of examples of how ‘nudging’ can help to bring about changes in our actions. These ranged from the practical – such as the inclusion of smiley faces on some American households’ electricity bills when they used less power than comparable houses in their neighbourhoods – through to the hilarious – such as how the engraving of a fly, or insertion of goal posts in the drain of a urinal, could help the more careless males amongst us improve our aim in the bathroom.

For Thaler, it can be these little, relatively low cost initiatives that bring about some of the biggest changes in our lives, and in the case of global warming, potentially prove to be a solution.

Regardless of context however, Thaler cited 3 qualities that would automatically help to ‘nudge’ people. Firstly, as in the case of the urinals, Thaler argued that simply by making the more mundane tasks fun, it can be possible to both change behaviour and bring a smile to people’s faces. Secondly, again playing to human nature, he also argued that just making things easier to do was one of the most obvious and successful catalysts for change. Thirdly and perhaps most far reaching however was his support of sharing data and information – essentially enforced disclosure. That way, Thaler argued, it would be possible to regulate organisations based on what they revealed, rather than what they chose to keep private. Given the pace of change in life and both the public and private sector’s inability to keep pace with it, he maintained that through this sharing of data, we as humans would have been better equipped to cope and adapt our behaviour accordingly to one in a million chance events, from the credit crunch to the recent oil spill.

But what does this mean for adland? After such thought provoking stuff, it was hard not to agree with Rory Sutherland’s summation that Thaler’s thesis provided an “Uplifting view of our skills”. Despite the wealth of tools and advancements in the ways we communicate, so many campaigns today still focus on outright cajolement rather than the art of intelligent persuasion. Key to changing this behaviour is the genuine appreciation that it’s not always he who shouts loudest that wins the day – rather it’s human insights and psychological rationale that are the key to effective communication.

As a digitally-minded agency, of course we love the Internet, and we do cool stuff on it whenever we get the chance. We love it so much that when it was time to produce and shoot online video content for our client that brought a router, the Internet and a master socket to life as people, we got very excited. So excited in fact that, before we knew it Albion’s very own Client Service Director and Technology Director (known to us as Mark T and Gav), were scheduled to be starring in these films. One as router and the other as the Internet.

Well, we realised on the day of the shoot that nothing could have prepared us for when Mark would be to wear Silver latex pants with Y-fronts and Gav would be dressed as a gold genie with a Haribo sweet glued to his forehead. .. Not even having read the scripts that our brilliant Creative Jon wrote, having seen them as storyboards and even having discussed the costumes with the Film Production agency beforehand…

The shoot was on a sunny Thursday, and as the clock hit 8am a film crew of 20 barged in armed with really cool filming equipment. But as we curiously looked over to the changing rooms, we saw that the Costume and Make-up artists were unpacking some really interesting stuff – from Aladdin-alike gold pants to silver body paint, from silver boots to shiny electronic hair… Our Mark & Gav stayed brave in the face of having to be the lucky ones who got to wear this lot, never knowing the Internet and a router could look this shiny and bright. Only at this point Gav realised what he got himself into, but it was too late.

However, it was a slightly different story with Mark. He got into the spirit of turning himself into a Router so much that he didn’t even flinch at the sight of one brave make-up artist coming at his nipples with sellotape.

Even more amazing is that once Mark and Gav (known to us now as our Albion actors) were pampered and dressed to go in front of the camera, they couldn’t have loved it more. Gav actually finished his scenes the quickest, giving a very convincing performance as the Internet. As he left the stage, he got a big round of applause for pulling off being a grumpy Internet-Genie Oh-So-Well!

This was definitely no ordinary shoot. The laughter was non-stop even after 12 hours. We’re really excited for the final edits on these videos, scheduled to go live and wild on the net at the beginning of July. In the meantime we are keeping the pictures of Mark and Gav, and congratulating them on their excellent performance, enthusiasm, and for giving us a lot to laugh about.

Watch out for these videos, you will never look at your router the same way again….

Nes

If you haven’t heard yet – Albion are going to be working with FIVE to help them launch a new TV show ‘Don’t Stop Believing’, with an integrated advertising campaign.

The show is due to air later this summer and will see FIVE scan the UK for groups that can sing and dance who will then be choreographed and judged by a team of industry experts, with Emma Bunton hosting along the way.

If you’re a Glee fan (or Journey) you’ll already be familiar with the title and this could be an opportunity for you to achieve fame as the show also offers the chance for the public to join a specially created DSB Supergroup who will represent the UK in the international Glee club circuit in the U.S.

We’re all very excited in the office about the show (and the competition).  Some of us have already been warming up our vocal chords, stocked up on honey and lemon and are even thinking of turning one of our meeting rooms into a studio so we can practise our singing and dance moves – we’re ready to pop, lock and drop – are you?…