Two Cents

Pacific Brands must be kicking themselves for closing down the Bonds factory earlier this year. Underwear sales are surely set to soar in the coming months, thanks to the launch of a brand new campaign for Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary.

The “Prepare yourself” campaign sends a stern warning to ‘pack a spare pare of undies’ to all who dare to take on Currumbin’s newest high ropes adventure course.

Designed by a former French SAS Commando, Green Challenge is a 2 hour long, adrenaline pumping experience full of barrel rolls, rope nets, wobbly bridges, Tarzan swings and an 18 metre high flying fox that has to be seen to be believed. The sheer scale and agility required of some of the ropes activities opens its appeal out to a slightly older audience: one who demands a very different style of communication.

Teenage kids may be only a few years older than 9-10 year olds, but they’re a world away in terms of physical development and most importantly, their worldview. They desperately want to be grown up. They play Halo on XBox. They watch M movies. They download music with parental advisories. They’re independent. They have a smart-arse sense of humour, with sex and scatology big topics.

To most 14 year old boys, being so scared you’ll crap your daks is absolutely hilarious. Ironically, it’s also a brilliant way of inviting them to take on a high ropes course that might make them do exactly that. Careful talent selection and clever mix of close-up shots and wide angles throughout the commercial were critical factors in capturing the thrill, terror and excitement needed for an engaging TV and radio campaign.

Hideously oversized underpants were distributed at the Skilled Park Rugby League Semi Final last week, and were, not surprisingly, well received. Strategic sampling was also carried out in numerous high traffic locations in the lead up to the campaign launch.

Keen to sample a bit of adrenaline pumping action yourself? Be my guest. But take my advice. Bring a spare pair of undies.

Rebecca Tame is an Account Manager at BCM Brisbane

I get very excited the first time I see one of ‘our’ commercials on TV.

The countless hours that go into creating a new campaign – the market research, competitive analysis, talent selection, soundtracks and supers – all dissolve in those first few seconds of victorious recognition: when finally it appears on my humble home TV. Hooray!

And it’s not unusual for clients, who have been just as much a part of the campaign journey from conception to birth, to be as excited as I am when their ad hits the market for the very first time.

We’d be forgiven for thinking that the rest of the world shares this enthusiasm, and that all that’s needed is to upload our new ads to our company websites to generate a flurry of tweets and posts about our new campaign.

But analytics data tells us that this approach rarely generates any real consumer interest. Why?

Well, as much as we’d like the case to be different, the lives of our consumers don’t actually revolve around our brand, and that they may not be quite as enamored when our new commercial hits the airwaves as we are.

The challenge is nothing new and the rules are still fairly simple: Speak to your audience with a message suitable to the environment you find them in.

For QUT… a university for the real world, it was about delivering a unique brand promise in a way that went beyond simply making their TVCs available online. Let me explain.

Every day hundreds of videos are uploaded to you tube, showing tricks, hoaxes and questions about authenticity.

Enter Real Not Real. An entertaining online challenge that invites you to make a call on the authenticity of a series of (potentially fake) videos.

Your skill at picking a real from a hoax is scored against the scores of others who’ve done the test before you, and your ‘Realness Percentage’ calculated.

Just before you spread the word to your friends and family, you’re challenged once more – to get a real dose of reality: QUT’s three commercials.

A university for the real world has certainly been a powerful differentiation for QUT. And creating a channel to deliver this in a brand new way, taps into a truth about a web-savvy, interactive-literate audience.

Check out Real Not Real and see how you fare. And if you like, pass it on.

Rebecca Tame is an Account Manager at BCM Brisbane

Are They Trying to Bore Consumers Into Buying their Brand?

While watching your favourite television programs this week take note of the number of ‘infomercials’ on air.

My observation is that the number of ‘infomercials’ on free to air television has increased fourfold in recent times.

Last night, I counted 9 different infomercials. That’s right nine! One was telling me that I had to protect my child from germs by covering every surface in my house with anti-bacterial liquid. Another was boring me with information about a cold and flu medication. Yet another, let me know, in great detail, about a new cereal that is on the supermarket shelves.

Quite frankly, I’m sick of them. And I bet the average consumer is too.

They’re bland, repetitive, uninspired and just plain boring.

What strategy are these marketers employing? Boring their prospects into buying their product?

Now, they would argue that there’s a role for this type of television commercial. It’s not about brand building, it’s about conveying important information to our consumer’ I hear them say. ‘We have brand TVCs that do that job’

Well, I have news for them.

Mostly, they convey product information to consumers which is a list of product features and benefits in a format which is truly forgettable.

And, the only way to ensure that their brand gets noticed and then remembered is to repeat the infomercial ad nauseam (pun intended!)

For starters, this is a highly inefficient way to spend marketing dollars!

Also, because these formats are very similar (same presenters, sets etc) they all blend into each other and leave very little opportunity for the brand to stand out. And isn’t this one of the key objectives for every brand…to differentiate? To help consumers make a decision to buy your brand over a competitor?

As the world has become more and more commoditised there is even more need to stand out with a brand that consumers connect with. How many products have genuinely unique features? Often, the brand is the only difference.

Don’t believe me? Let’s pick a supermarket category. Tomato sauce. Walk into your local Woolies today and you’ll find Heinz, Fountain, Woolies Homebrand, Rosella, Masterfoods and Woolworth Select branded tomato sauce. 6 choices of sauce and all with almost identical ingredients and similar packs. So, how do you choose between them apart from price? The only way for consumers to differentiate is with the brands. Which brand do I like? which one reflects me? Which brand am I comfortable with in my trolley or on my dinner table?

Will an infomercial help consumers choose between brands? I think not.

Every single dollar spent, even when imparting product information is a brand contact opportunity. And with every brand contact there is the potential to empathize with people, communicate brand values, engage prospects, express brand personality as well as deliver product information.

I think infomercials are at best an opportunity missed and at worst a waste of marketing dollars.

What do you think?

This is the last part of a six part series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.

Mustangs suck.

Sure, they might look cool from the outside, but if you’re over 5 foot tall and jammed in the tiny back seat for 500 miles back and forth across LA, banging your scone on the rear window every time the car hits a divot, no amount of cool is gonna soothe your headache.

We didn’t miss much of LA today.

First up, the madness of Hollwood Boulevard, shooting the freaks and weirdos outside the Kodak Theatre (Oscars central). Those Angelenos sure know how to do tacky. The souvenir shops opposite the Chinese Theatre (handprints in cement of stars you’ve never heard of) flog plastic Oscar trophies in every possible designation. Hamster of the Year, Boss of the Year (sadly, I couldn’t fit three of them in my tiny bag), Second Cousin of the Year, Art Director of the Year, Surrogate Mom of the Year – there must’ve been 500 different kinds.

Next, on to Hollywood Hills, then Rodeo Drive, a chopper ride out of Santa Monica to grab a smoggy aerial shot of the city, a baseball game at Dodger Stadium (in future, I’ll dodge the Dodger Dogs), gawping in Beverly Hills and Venice Beach, and concluding with a grease fix at the charmingly named In-n-out Burger.

Locals suggested In-n-out was one of the better burger chains, but I’m still unsure if the establishment was named thus for the speed of its drive-thru service or the effect of its cheesy comestibles upon the digestive tracts of the clientele.

This is part five of a series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.

3am of the morning after we flew in, and nothing was going to make me sleep.

So I dragged on the trainers and ran down Sunset Boulevard, as Bentleys propelled partygoers home and less well-heeled victims of the night’s excesses lolled in every second doorway. Spotted a place the divine Anastacia had put us onto – the Griddle Café – which we returned to a few hours later, and then every other morning we were there.

An effortlessly cool place for brekky – so cool, in fact, that I bought the t-shirt, a singularly uncool thing to do. A highlight of the Griddle menu is the superb fat pancakes the size of a Chevy hubcap. Director Gerard ordered the short stack and managed to eat less than a quarter of ONE. He looked embarrassed, and people were staring, with good reason. It was a very ordinary effort. The rest of us managed to finish everything on our plates.

Sated, we began in earnest to suss out shooting locations.

Grabbed a rental Mustang to avoid being held to ransom by malodorous, mumbling LA cabbies. Finding a path through the Hollywood Hills to a place we could get a good shot of the famous sign took all morning. Many dead ends before we stumbled upon a clear vantage point free of gawking tourists. Our business graduate, Michael, was a star in every sense of the word. Doing all the (wrong side of the road) driving, smoking the Firestones when we needed to be quickly on the other side of a six lane road to grab a shot, eternally positive and helpful and full of good local knowledge.

We wanted to keep him.

Andy was like a kid in a lolly shop. He wouldn’t stop photographing: signs, textures, California girls, billboards, buildings, girls in short skirts, outrageous cars, freaks, ghettoes, pretty girls with LA haircuts… an art director’s dream.

This is part four of a series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.

There’s nothing like a big dose of jet-lag to blunt one’s fascination with a new city.

Los Angeles is irresistibly shiny, brash, loud, dirty, mean and sexy all at once. When we first laid eyes on her, all we wanted were chops and mashed potato and a nice lie down. Which is a bit sad when it’s Saturday night and the rest of the city is straightening its sun-kissed California tresses and lifting its hemlines for a night of fun and sin.

Four bedraggled Aussie blokes in jeans didn’t quite cut it (with the possible exception of our director, Gerard, who looks good in any kind of pants). But after accidentally stumbling into the lounge bar of the Mondrian on West Sunset Blvd, soothing our aches with a $13 Corona, and being attended to by an angel in white ankle-boots and nightie called Anastacia, things started looking up.

Anastacia clearly took pity on us, because she even had a word to the nine-foot black doorman at the Sky Bar next door who let us in ahead of a queue of much prettier people.

Sky Bar is so LA.

An outdoor bar overlooking the city with twinkling lights and topiarised magnolias and a pool and the world’s most beautiful bar staff with the world’s shiniest teeth and giant pouffes for cuddling on and oozing with wannabe starlets with legs up to there… aaaaahhh.

This is part three of a series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.

More on driving, because that’s what you do here. (Dubai isn’t a place to stroll anywhere – it’s too hot, there are too many roadworks, fuel is too cheap.) Anyway, in Dubai, car number plates are allocated according to one’s place in the world. The lower the number, the greater the owner’s power and influence. 1766 might belong to a high ranking official, 45, a cousin of the Sheik.

Whatever you do, you don’t cut one of these low numbers off or flip ‘em the middle finger.  Grave punishments would be likely to befall you. Seriously. I saw a pimped black Mercedes G-class pass us at a leisurely 140km/h. His plate displayed the number 22. The traffic ahead was like the parting of the Red Sea.

Arvo of Day 3 – It’d never happen in Oz.

We took our QUT star out into the desert to shoot him (with a camera) on a sand dune.

At three o’clock, Maleet from Manila picked us up in his Landcruiser. 90 minutes and one stop at a reeking Pakistani tourist trap later (camel snow domes – 24 Dirham, frozen chicken gizzards – 12 Dihram), we paused at the edge of the road and waited for the 4WDs of some other tour companies to assemble.

And then, they came. Not 10, not 20, but more than 200 white Landcruisers slowly formed an endless line on the edge of the burning sand – like wildebeest gathering to drink at a waterhole.

When someone gave the sign we were off.

Up the first of a violent series of orange sand dunes, nose to tail, mere metres apart, in first gear the whole way, revving the bejeezus out of the engine. Maleet would play chicken with the other drivers, flooring the pedal and taking us to the very crest of a dune before chucking a 180, sending a wave of sand over the car, and sliding the 2-tonne vehicle back from whence it came. Impossible to see if another similarly crazed maniac was approaching from the other side of the dune, but amazingly, we witnessed no collisions.

This sort of hair-raising, public liability-warping stuff could never happen in Australia. Then abruptly, we stopped. 200 groups of gasping, giggling tourists poured out into the 47 degree heat. We caught our breath and reeled off a few feet of tape. Then one of the Indian drivers cranked up his car stereo and shook some impromptu booty to that classic 70s track from the buck-toothed boys from Woody Point: ‘Stayin’ Alive’.

Truly surreal.

This is part two of a series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.

Shooting begins in earnest.

First stop, the Dubai HQ of the engineering firm our young QUT student already works for. They’re using a brand new and highly secret welding method to build secret components for a top secret engineering project I’m not at liberty to discuss here.

We continue on to various Dubai engineering landmarks. Our young star (a real student; no prior television experience) makes a good fist of repeating his lines to camera half a dozen times in eight different locations, in conditions that’d have an Aussie actor calling for his union rep.

Arvo of Day 2

Aston Martin DB9. Bentley Continental GT. Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera. Of the many exciting ways to die in Dubai, being mown down by a half million dollar supercar is just one.

Look left as you would in Brizzy and you risk becoming a new hood ornament for one of the countless exotic vehicles oil money has bought for the lucky Emiratis. For such a highly regulated and dare I say, punitive society, the average driver’s behaviour on the road is nothing short of jaw-dropping. Everywhere you look, Pirellis are being shredded and redlines are being ignored.

As for the Dubai cabbies… even though they drive Toyotas, not Lamborghinis, they still make like Dick Johnson at Mt Panorama. To a Dubai cabbie, speed signs are invisible, indicating to change lanes is for wimps, and if you can see bitumen between your cab and the car in front, it’s just not tailgating. I was sure our driver had a dicky throttle, such was the randomness of acceleration/deceleration on our drive from the airport. At least the violent motion helped loosen up my fused vertebrae from the plane flight.

This is part one of a series of behind the scenes blog posts about the making of the latest QUT television commercials.

God gave man hair for two reasons. To stop him passing out after banging his head on the floor joist when doing a bit of illegal wiring under his old Queenslander. And, to prevent his scalp from being blow torched off by the Dubai sun while shooting a TV commercial for QUT.

The desert in May is no place for bald men. But true to the BCM never-say-die spirit, two of us have been doing just that.

What a blast. Dubai is insane. The whole place is a construction zone (despite the GFC having kicked in big time). The money they continue to spend on building engineering marvels is astounding. Everything is the world’s biggest, the world’s best, or the world’s most mind-boggling.

• A building just shy of a kilometre high? Check.
• A four-level shopping mall that would fit two Westfield Chermsides on each level? Check.
• A 400 metre ski-slope in the middle of a desert? Check.
• A 5×5km group of man-made islands in the shape of a palm tree? Why not two of ‘em?

When you’re shooting an ad which, in part, promotes the possibilities of a career in engineering, you’d be hard-pressed to choose a better backdrop than Dubai.

A 3am departure from Brisbane followed by a 19 hour flight made comprehending the place even more difficult upon arrival. I think my brain’s about to explode. Is it because it’s 45 degrees, or because the airport contains a 100 foot waterfall? Pass the tube of 30+ would you?

Last night, BCM picked up some hard earned plastic-wear on ‘The Pitch’ segment of The Gruen Transfer. We were up against Gatecrasher from W.A, and the battle ended in a rare 2-2 draw, so both agencies went home happy with a trophy in hand. Having said that, we were thrilled to secure Todd’s vote on the night, considering he is clearly the brains trust on the pitch panel!

The task, in case you weren’t watching, was to “Convince the IOC that it’s not too late to switch the host for the 2012 Olympics from London to Australia.” A fairly tricky brief even by Gruen standards. Nevertheless, the challenge sparked vigorous brainstorming in all corners of the agency, followed by a week of panic-station production! Alas, we got there in the end.

So how did we cull a banquet of ideas down to a 48 second video clip? And what concepts died in the process?

Well, we certainly weren’t short of initial thoughts (some great, some average, some not fit for broadcast.) We conceived and considered everything from doing a Bin Laden style threat video, to piggybacking the global recession, picking on pom’s bad teeth, leveraging crap London weather, exploiting Princess Mary of Denmark, bribing IOC delegate’s wives with sexy Aussie hunks and more. Man it was fun!

As it turned out we got to a shortlist of four concepts, which we soon culled down a two horse race. One was the ‘Doomsday’ idea we ended up pitching, the other was built around doing a PR job convincing the world that the Poms just don’t WANT the games!

Ultimately, we chose the Doomsday idea as we felt it was more original, more insightful, and more ‘do-able’, given the time and resources we had available. Actually, it was rather surprising seeing just how ‘legit’ all video content had to be for Gruen pitches. Unlike normal agency Pitch videos where you pillage any images you want, this stuff had to be bonafide! That came neither easy nor cheap, but I guess every agency was in the same boat.

So, that was that. We agreed on a concept script, it was quickly approved by Mr.Denton’s crew at Zapruder, and we promptly went to work bringing our video to life. We enlisted Gerard Lambkin and Damian Tiernon from Zoom to help shoot a few clips with ‘star-talent’ from the agency, shot a scene ourselves using a ‘whinging pom’ in account service, and the rest was down to stock footage magic. (Sorry if I just gave away any trade secrets!)

Soon enough I had the ‘pleasure’ of being coated in man make-up and pitching the idea in front of an ABC studio audience, while a handful of my workmates sat in the green room sipping beers and eating crackers. My fears were soon confirmed. It’s much more comfy being on the ‘filming’ side of the camera, than the ‘filmed’ side of the camera!