I was fascinated by the execution of the Chlorox ad. See it here.

It’s a prduct message seen through the life of several generations. We see the ‘machines’ (the fridge, car, speakers, treadmill) come in and out of life as the product is still central to the clothes washing routine. The product, the bottle of Chlrorox, is always in the same spot, and deliberately not in your face.

The best advertising is always a story. No matter what special effects we employ, the simple stories communicate the most. It’s the ultimate weapon that can fight short attention spans and clutter.

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Not too very far from where I sit, the 4A’s conference is coming to a close. It’s a very warm day in Scottsdale, and many agency heads are probably steaming –after taking in Euro RSCG Ron Berger’s address.

But we have to take that in the context of the huge asteroid, the Net, heading in the direction of the agency world. Consider some of the topics of the conference:

"The agency’s role in marketing accountability" and
"Kick ass creative in the digital world" or
"compensation models" or
"How and why the ad agency business model must change."

Interestingly, this management conference (for CEO’s) is titled "ROI: Return on ideas. Return on Involvement. Return on Investment."

Tony Hopp, the incoming chair bemoaned negativity always seemed to ooze out of advertising conferences — a la the ‘death of the 30 second commercial.’ I suppose he was not-so subtly telling outgoing chair that trashing Martin Sorell and the others in the business was not the kind of thing the industry wanted to be known for. "Are we as an industry too self absorbed?" he asked rhetorically.

I hope Hopp’s reign brings in a new ROI: is a return on inspiration, as agencies struggle with change.

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Mike Swenson’s comment opens up a window into the world of how the PR world is addressing the famously empowered consumer. His comment on the ‘manifesto’ on Joseph Jaffe’s blog, got me thinking. The consumer with more power, isn’t really a new concept. (Remember the ‘prosumer?’) The consumer has always been more than a person with a fat wallet. Just to dwell on Toffler’s prediction for a moment, he envisioned an active consumer, not a passive one. IMHO, this active consumer is more than an engager. Sure we would configure our own sneakers, and be our own travel agents but there’s another side of the control revolution: to control what we hear and watch. We can be brutal gatekeepers, and at other times, welcome hosts.

I don’t want to know what Fox TV has to say on Channel 10 because it’s all special effects and tabloid news. That channel at home is non-existent; we skip past it so fast, it’s almost funny. I don’t see most of the ads online because I minimize or click past anything that smacks of interruption marketing. But I do listen to what columnists and companies have to say via newsletters and podcasts to which I subscribe; I don’t object to the pitch of the ads in magazines because to a certain extent, I have imposed a filter (buying only the ones that I plan to read) and feel safe to let them in.

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Execution of a message is what makes the idea memorable.

WATER. I had this sent to me from a friend, Lalith Dassenaike, who works at Cigar, an organization that deals in water management and sustainable development, among other things. It’s a long commercial for Evian, that takes a different look at the lifecycle of a drop of water.

CHILDCARE. This execution about a different kind of childcare, demonstrates an interesting use of outdoor messaging by Grey Worldwide, Mumbai.

If you have any fine examples of how great execution makes a simple idea stand out, please send it my way.

WATER. , again. For World Water Day, 2006, Green Belgium placed these stickers inside wash basins of cinemas, restaurants, pubs etc in Belgium and Mexico City. The stickers photographs of a child’s face, placed in such a way that his mouth is exactly positioned where the water goes down the sink. You get the idea… See story here.

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Marketing has loosened up. Controlling the customer experience was once considered a virtue. Funny how this was the discipline when media was relatively limited. Today’s brand guardians (the term is a bit of an oxymoron, now) yearn for a somewhat anarchic distribution of the message, hoping it would create its own momentum across all networks. Buzz marketing, for one, is the art of getting it started. Monitor, yes. Control, no. In fact, the more you lose control, the better it could spread.

Notice how easy it is to stumble on a book once the ‘search inside this book’ feature is turned on at Amazon. The portion of the Amazon site encouraging authors to participate in this program says it uses actual words from inside the book (not those keywords supplied by the publisher.) This gives people a chance of finding the book in search results when they use words that may not even be directly related to the title or author.

I bring this up just to illustrate how an author could get tremendous marketing lift by giving up control and allowing his book to be available this way. We often talk of marketing communications from Big Company company perspective. In this digital era, it’s amazing how we could too.

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My son’s school, Brophy College Prep has just announced that starting with the new batch of incoming freshmen, all students will be required to buy a Toshiba tablet PC. The purpose is clear –apart from the stated one of replacing expensive text books: Students are living in the age when much of their education experience in the analog world has a digital counterpart.

Their homework is already hosted on Blackboard, used by thousands of academic institutions.

How will we communicate with this Net generation? Don tapscott writes about this, how the 88 million in this generation won’t be avialble on the on-to-many technologies that are still around. He writes:

"…to today’s media literate kids, television’s current methods are old-fashioned and clumsy. It is unidirectional, with the choice of programming and content resting in the hands of few, and its product often dumbed-down to the lowest common denominator."

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