Marketing Your Agency

[Via Creativity]

The London office of ad agency Mother has let its creatives produce a quarterly graphic novel that is being distributed as an insert within Time Out magazine.

Mother creative Stuart Outhwaite said, “It’s an opportunity for all writers at Mother to come in and have a go; relief for the frustrated creatives who want to do things other than advertising.”

The swap is that the agency is reducing the fees it charges the magazine for work it does for it, and the magazine offers the pages for the agency’s project. The agency hopes to publish all the installments (three more are planned) as a graphic novel that can be bought.

I think this is a very clever idea.  Mother's management is smart to position it as something they are doing for the good of their creative team [talent attraction and retention], when it's also clearly a new business development tool.

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Jackass 2.5 Online Release

Rs861johnnyknoxvillerollingstonen_2On Dec. 19, Paramount/MTV will release a gratis stream of "Jackass 2.5" exclusively on Blockbuster's site.  Then on Dec. 26, it will be available for purchase on DVD at all major retailers, including iTunes [but rentals will be available only at Blockbuster].  Full WSJ article here. 

The "Jackass" franchise is nothing to sneeze at ... I think a lot of media folks will be watching the financials on this experiment.

[My friend Andy still believes that the original "Jackass" deserved to win the Oscar for "Best Documentary."  Sadly for Andy it wasn't even nominated]

The Perils of UGC ... Malibu Rum

2793backlash_2 Seeing these stories more and more.  You just get the sense that brands don't know what they are getting themselves into when they put all the power in the consumers' hands.  The latest incident involves Malibu Caribbean Rum. 

Malibu solicited entries for a contest ('you design our commercial' type thing) from the YouTube community.  But when the winner was announced it caused a backlash of negativity, with many people accusing Malibu of rigging the contest.  From an article in the NY Times:

"The winner, however, was posted Monday, and finalists were not publicly named. Some consumers who lost the contest were quick to start a rumbling on YouTube message boards that the contest had been rigged — a charge that Malibu denied.

One YouTube user even made a six-minute conspiracy theory video that compared images from a professional Malibu commercial promoting the contest with the winner’s video, saying in part: “Wow, the same nose!? The same guy? You be the judge!”

The article goes on to say:

"Many well-known brands — like Doritos, Heinz and Dove — have recently held their own user-generated commercial contests, but these contests are often difficult to manage. And they do not always generate many entries — despite large cash prizes. In Malibu’s case there were 270 entries, though only 84 qualified to be posted on the YouTube site, said a spokeswoman for the Thomas Collective, the public relations agency that managed the contest."

Attention agency people and brand managers everywhere:  Be careful what you wish for when you run these types of promotions, and ALWAYS have your PR team briefed in so they can manage any backlash.

On PR & Bloggers ... Mandatory Step 1

Wizardoz3Regarding the subject of the relationship between PR professionals and bloggers ... Steve Rubel doesn't raise any earth-shattering points in this blog post, just like I didn't in this.  But I do like the way Steve puts this ...

"To thrive in this new distributed environment, the PR community must step out in front of the curtain, become a bit more technically adept and participate transparently as individuals in online communities. We will have to openly collaborate and add value to the network and help the companies we represent do exactly the same."

It's pretty simple as far as I see it ... any PR practitioner who is going to advise their clients on how to navigate the world of online social media must actually participate in online social media.  And by participate I mean write a blog, read other blogs, use Skype, use Twitter, etc.  This is 101.

The Evolution of Creative Artists Agency

Picture_1_2Interesting read recently in the New York Times about Creative Artists [AKA CAA ... the talent agency juggernaut].   It talks about the agency's evolution in a time when:

"... new technology would combine to create growth even as the recording industry faltered, television networks fractured and studios clamped down on costs."

CAA is probably both a really interesting and really screwy place to work right now.  All at once they are dealing with the issues that the music industry has yet [!] to tackle; figuring out how to package TV shows that will be attractive to advertisers despite the evidence that viewers are leading a 'Tivo' lifestyle; trying to understand the issues that cable narrowcasting presents; and dealing with skyrocketing film production costs.  Just another day at the office for Lovett, Huvane, Light, Lourd, Nicita and O’Connor.

Read the article here.