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Bruce Winterton serves as the President of The Barbarian Group LLC. He oversees all New Business, Client Service and Strategy. Bruce has a long and thrilling history in advertising and marketing, both on the client and agency side. Then again, he’s decided to come here to The Barbarian Group precisely because the story of advertising and marketing needs a little shaking up. Inspired to investigate agency life in the late 90’s after Dan Weiden suggested he give it a whirl, he most recently comes from the world of traditional advertising, where he did successful stints at Hill Holiday as their director of client services. At Hill he was instrumental in their recent turnaround, shepherding such successful campaigns as the America Runs on Dunkin’ campaign for Dunkin’ Donuts. Prior to that, Bruce served at Ogilvy & Mather running as an Executive Group Director running the Motorola campaign in North America, most notable for the “Hellomoto” campaign. Bruce kicked off his agency career in 1999 at BBH New York as a Group Business Director, moving on to Head of Account Management, where he oversaw the growth of the company from 20 to more than 100 and ran two of the largest and most successful integrated accounts and campaigns: Keep Walking, for Johnnie Walker, and the launch of the Axe brand for Unilever.
But wait. There’s more. Before agency life, Bruce was a celebrated client side marketing executive. He made the jump to the agency side after having handled the marketing duties at Miller for MGD and Miller High life as a marketing director, where he developed the MGD blind date series of concerts with artists such as David Bowie and Beck. This came on the heels of being named one of AdAge’s top marketers of the year in 1995 for his work on Molson, especially the Molson Ice Polar Beach party. Bruce’s career in marketing kicked off in 1990, with his first position being at Kraft Foods in Chicago.
Bruce holds an MBA from UCLA, which had quite the entertainment management program, providing the trifecta of knowledge that we need here at The Barbarian Group as entertainment, advertising and marketing merge in new ways.
Content and Context
The Television Industry has been experimenting with pod-busting for over a year now with little success. What is pod-busting? Well, instead of a those predictable breaks at 10 past the hour filled with eight :30 second spots resulting in an efficient four minute block of time that gave you time to change the channel, go to the kitchen and get a soda or, of course, fast forward on your TiVo, viewers were subjected this past year to advertising pods that fell in unpredictable places or didn’t exist at all; ads were scattered throughout the entire show. Apparently this was a bit of a failure as detailed in a recent NYT article. Hey, at least TV Execs were experimenting, making changes to age old ad structures and formulas, trying to hold onto precious viewers…albeit with a bit of trickery.
More promising is the plan for this upcoming season. The primary reason is a realization that ads and promotions that are somehow connected to the programming have more significant impact. Deadliest Catch advertised on Shark Week. An Allstate ad set at a wedding during Father of the Bride.


Makes sense. After all, advertising is content, just like everything else. The formula seems pretty simple to me: align content with context. Oh, and yes, the Web does this quite nicely.
Celebrity Candy
The M&Ms Campaign spearheaded by BBDO continues to impress. The latest iteration I particularly like are the celebrity print ads. Bobby Flay, Indiana Jones, Kyle Busch. I hope they continue because it can become the next big iconic print campaign, like the milk mustache or Absolut Vodka.

A good sign is the latest iteration by Latinworks, Austin TX (good friends of mine Manny Flores, Alex Ruelas are the founders) featuring Wilmer Valderrama and discussed in the NYT. Ok, I wish it was someone with a bit more street cred like Carlos Santana but hey, it’s gotta start somewhere.


Plug in Detroit
Auto industry sales figures are in and it’s a s**t storm. No surprise. Who the hell wants to buy a new car when the price of gas is $1000/gallon?
It’s time, finally, for Detroit to develop electric cars. Right?
I was watching The Early Show on CBS and there was a bit on the new Tesla all-electric car. I guess it’s really fast and can go over 200 miles before needing a plug-in, into any regular electric outlet, to re-charge. Beautiful. Imagine a world with no gas stations and a lot less smog and no reason to worry about OPEC. I feel better already.

So, Detroit…it’s called the tipping point.
Pre-Release the Remakes
Michel Gondry is one of my favorite directors, made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (loved it, genius) and Science of Sleep (liked it, very sweet) and, most recently, and a movie I just watch on PPV last night, Be Kind Rewind (rough start, a bit sentimental). The story of Be Kind Rewind, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is about a flailing local video rental shop where all the tapes have been erased and in order to keep making money Jack Black and Mos Def remake all the movies. Their remakes are of course more interesting and popular than the originals and they save the store from closing its doors.

Okay, decent premise, and the movie was okay but all I really wanted to do was see the movies that Jack Black and Mos Def had made. Remakes of Ghostbusters, Lion King, Men in Black. Where are these movies? Of course I was hoping they would be on the website but instead there was a too-cool-for-school site about erasing the internet. Hrmpf. I then went on YouTube and found a branded site built so that everyone else can make and post their own remade films. Yikes. I don’t want to watch some idiots’ remake of No Country for Old Men, I really just want to see Jack Black doing Bill Murray.
This made me think about film marketing. Why wouldn’t Michel Gondry post all the remade films online before Be Kind Rewind was even released? It would have created significant buzz. I would have sent a Ghostbusters film with Jack and Mos to all my friends asking if this was for real. It would have made me want to see the film. He should have taken a lesson from The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield and used the web to do all the marketing be pre-releasing all remakes, ahead of time, untethered. It certainly would have done more than $4MM on opening weekend (and $12MM overall). And, more importantly, I wouldn’t have to wait for the DVD.

Interactive Print
So I am flipping through Food & Wine magazine this morning and I happen on a page that looks like wallpaper, literally. It’s got a thin texture and an old-school European hotel type design. It looks like this:

I looked on the prior page and on the next page and there didn’t seem to be any connection between this piece of wallpaper and those pages. Then I looked closer and discovered a tiny brand mark for St. Germain, a new imported liquor brand made from elderflower blossoms. Nice. This is what print advertising should do. Make you interact with it. Make you try to figure it out. What the F is this? Hmmm. It’s interesting. What is it for? Oh, I see, cool. Something surprising. It works. Print ads can work. I then went to the web, looked at their website, remembered some in-store POS I saw. Brand identification cemented. Bravo.

This is my new favorite booze brand. I’m not sure how it tastes. Next time I’m at Milk & Honey I’ll give it a go.
I Don't Want To
Watching the Celtics dismantle the Lakers for the second straight game and the announcers tell me to go and vote for the Player of the Game at NBA.com and, before I can vote, I have to sign-up first. I don’t want to sign up. And I presume since it’s sponsored by T-Mobile I’m gonna have to endure incessant e-mail offers from them in exchange for voting. Please.
Ok, I really don’t give a crap who’s chosen MVP of this game or the series or the league for that matter (although Kobe is pretty radd) but as a representative of The Internet I feel compelled to go to a site whenever the TV tells me to go to a site just to see if the experience pays off. Many times it sucks. Like this time.
For God sakes let’s stop trying to collect names and just make The Internet easier to use people!
And, for the record, I would have voted for Paul Pierce.

Not so sure about The Internet
Hilarious debate among Hollywood types at last week’s Digital Upfront about whether or not there’s been an internet video “hit” yet. Ha. Really? How about the fact that Time magazine chose user generated video content as their person of the year in 2006?


And, I guess, I should also mention our very own Subservient Chicken which has had more than 200 million unique visitors worldwide, twice the size of this year’s Super Bowl?
What is Hollywood talking about? Oh wait, they are waiting for THEIR first hit. I see…
Relevant TV

CBS Outernet announced last week the launch of GameStopTV, an in-store digital video network using high-definition screens. I am usually pretty annoyed with in-store TV channels because they are so, well, annoying. In this case the content is absolutely relevant to the retail experience and as such is a natural extension of the shopping experience. Awesome.

I wish my local Shaws would learn something from CBS. God, standing in-line to buy ground beef tonight I had to endure three back-to-back television ads for tampons. Ugh.