Recently in Advertising Category

There I was in a post-Chrome haze thinking warm thoughts about Google, when the FT spoils my mood by reporting on the first major attack on the advertising alliance between Google and Yahoo.

"a Google-Yahoo partnership will control 90% of search advertising inventory and states ANA's concerns that the partnership will likely diminish competition, increase concentration of market power, limit choices currently available and potentially raise prices to advertisers for high quality, affordable search advertising."

The alliance will also impact on UK advertisers.  My view is that the alliance will particularly drive up the price of niche terms on Yahoo!, which are something of a bargain at the moment compared with the same traffic on Google.

Following swiftly on from Google's decision to allow a one-click unsubscribe to ad targeting on Google and Doubleclick, Yahoo has now announced a similar one-click unsubscribe from ad targeting on its site. 

Yahoo's announcement comes as part of its response to the request from the House of Representatives committee early last week for information from thirty major internet companies about their ad targeting plans.

Looks like this is  becoming a hot issue on the other side of the Atlantic - don't expect any political developments in the UK though, as parliament is well into its long summer holiday right now.  I wonder if any prominent UK brands will start offering a similar opt-out to targeted advertising.

Ah, it's the Cannes Lions this week, so to celebrate I've spent my lunchtime flicking through the ad slots mentioned as contenders for the Grand Prix in Ad Age's preview.

No doubt the Cadbury's Gorilla will do pretty well in the awards, although I'm pretty bored with this now. 

But I did like two commercials that I haven't seen before...

Ogilvy (Toronto)'s work for Shreddies has a great idea brilliantly executed - it's well worth taking the time to look at the other work in this campaign - all equally funny!



And I totally agree with AdAge that BBDO New York's work on Monster is just breathtaking - a really gorgeous piece of work that I'm sure worked brilliantly.  To be fair, Monster has been doing nice work for quite some time (back in 1999 they were running a commercial featuring a bunch of kids talking about their ambitions: "When I grow up, I want to file all day.  When I grow up, I want to climb all the way up into middle management.  I want to be replaced on a whim."

But this latest campaign really is the boss!  (Don't bet against the bloody gorilla though!) 

Another day, another map!

We've already done our first campaign aimed at Polish immigrants to the UK, so I was interested to see a recent report 'Floodgates or Turnstiles' by the Institute of Public Policy Research.  (See also http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7370955.stm for more interactive maps from the report.)

The map below shows the distribution across the UK of registered migrants from the "Accession 8" countries which joined the EU in May 2004: Poland, Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia.

The picture seems to be more one of the Lithuanian Fish Farmer or the Slovakian Fruit Picker than the stereotypical Polish Plumber so beloved of the tabloid press.  It's astonishing how the hot spots of immigration are generally not the major cities, but agricultural areas like the Highlands of Scotland, Norfolk and Herefordshire.

That's quite different to other waves of immigration in the past. And as the IPPR points out, another major difference is that it is very easy for migrants from Eastern Europe to return home on the same cheap flights that brought them to the UK.  In fact half of all migrants may already have returned.

With free mobility across the EU, we can't take it for granted that the UK will always be the most popular destination for migrants. With parts of the rural economy now very dependent on migrant workers (not just agriculture, but tourism as well) we could well see the marketing challenge of the future being to persuade workers to stay a wee while longer in the Scottish Highlands.

Genius bit of sub-editing at Marketing Week which has brightened my day no end!

Even the photo caption is rich in innuendo.  Or is this just my grubby mind?

Thanks to Crave for flagging up a fantastic piece of copywriting for the new BenQ DC E1000.

"Pure Masculinity. The new Digital Still Camera E1000

Metal is the primary element symbolized the manhood.  When talking about metal, hard, cold and rigid say it all."

Of course, whenever a product is described as "rugged" we know the copywriter has a target audience of men in mind - but it's a breath of fresh air to see copy as blatant as this!

I'm loving the new National Gallery campaign - The Grand Tour - which has, with beautiful simplicity, taken its art out onto the streets of central London. The campaign is sponsored by Hewlett-Packard and comes with its own Flickr group.

Amazingly, most of these pictures seem to have survived being stolen or vandalised - perhaps the art really is having a civilising effect on us all.

This Manet is hanging outside the front door of the Harvest Digital office.

Here's the card describing the picture - with a nice link to an audio tour you can access via your mobile. 

 

 And finally, a sense of what some of these pictures have to compete with in terms of a typical London street scene - this is the main entrance of what used to be the Regent Palace Hotel, near Piccadilly Circus. You'd like to think that the National Gallery provides a slightly less cluttered visual backdrop for their paintings!