Bruce Winterton's Barbarian Blog

Videos of videos

Bruce Winterton — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 09:06:18 -0400

EA Sports, Wieden + Kennedy and Tiger Woods making video responses to YouTube videos as on-line advertising. I like it. Savvy. And, in the case of the Rubik’s Cube ad, slight amazing.

I particularly like that W+K paid Penn State University film student Bryan Levi, who as Levinator25 made and posted the Tiger Woods PGA Tour 08 Jesus Shot, for the rights to his video.

For God’s sake, both my kids are in film schools, why can’t they sell films rights to W+K to help ME defray massive tuition fees. Maybe I’ll have to make a phone call…

Facelivre!

Bruce Winterton — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 09:56:29 -0400

Facebook is now the largest social networking site in the world. Awesome. We like those guys. They beat News Corp’s MySpace by being a good software company and focusing on their users and giving them tools to use, like translation tools. Simple. MySpace continues to act like the media company they are, top-down, with local bureaus, focused on selling ads.

Specifically, the translation tools reminds me of a mobile app I want to build whereby I can text message anyone in the world and it instantly translates into the receiver’s language. I would use it when abroad, like when I went to Cannes, because I can’t speak a lick of French. Oh hey maybe this mobile app could be an actual translator of voice. I call someone, they speak Japanese, my voice is translated United Nations style, there’s is as well, we have a conversation. That would be really cool. I could have actual meetings, in person, face-to-face, over a beer or two, with anyone in the world. For now I guess I’ll just do it over Facebook.

Tastes Great, Less Relevant

Bruce Winterton — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:21:38 -0400

Must be my week for taglines…

News coming out of Milwaukee (or is it Colorado?): Miller is, once again, resurrecting the “Tastes Great, Less Filling” tagline. I say to this: ugh.

As a former director of marketing at Miller (but never on Miller Lite, for the record) I understand the intense pressure on management from beer distributors to run advertising they love. And boy do they love “The Debate.” But, my God, that line, written in 1981 by Bill Backer, was intricately linked to very masculine ex-athletes, like Mean Joe Green and Boog Powell, precisely because light beers were brand new. The campaign was brilliant, in 1983, when regular guys would never be caught dead with a “diet” beer. The ex-athletes made it okay to drink light beer and the “Tastes Great, Less Filling” line and debate was a simple and catchy creative device. BUT, it’s 30 years later and light beers are more popular than regular beers and this argument, this “debate,” is completely irrelevant.

Can’t Miller find something else to say?

And, for the record, the article states that the last time Tastes Great, Less Filling was used prominently in a campaign was 1991. So not true. Miller is conveniently trying to forget the late ‘90’s brilliant execution starring two scantily clad ladies who wrestle it out in a public fountain. This ad was over-seen by a good friend of mine, Tom Bick, who at the time was charge of content at Miller (and is now a strategic planner at Hill Holliday.)

Here’s the ad, as if you need to remember it. I pulled this quickly from YouTube and particularly love the rogue cut-in two-thirds of the way from some dude who looks kinda like Jonah Hill.

Syndicated Advertising

Bruce Winterton — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 09:15:20 -0400

Andy Berndt at Google, good friend of ours, making some advertising for Burger King through Seth MacFarlane of Family Guy fame. The ads, created by Seth, will precede his Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, an interesting experiment in online syndication through Google AdSense. Instead of creating content for a website and driving people to that site to aggregate eyeballs and then sell media this “series” will be exported across the web via Google (and YouTube). I was always wondering how they would make decent money on this syndication but now it makes sense: relevant preroll. Nice.

Can’t wait to see how this plays out. I’m certain the ads will be funny, if nothing else.

Just Do It for 20 Years

Bruce Winterton — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:00:08 -0400

So one of the greatest lines in Advertising history is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this summer, Nike’s Just Do It. Awesome. And congrats to Nike and to Wieden & Kennedy.

When I was a marketing director at Miller Brewing back in the mid-nineties I had the pleasure of working with Dan Wieden and Dave Luhr and the rest of W+K Portland. At that time we were looking at re-introducing the phrase It’s Miller Time back into the American lexicon and we were debating where the line should be used, under what circumstances, and how often. My initial reaction was everywhere, in all cases, as often as possible. Dan Wieden then described how Just Do It is used, or more precisely, not used. “Only use a brand motto (that’s what they called Just Do It, it’s certainly not a slogan…) when you can give it meaning. Every use out of context, on say a t-shirt, subtracts value.” Or something like that. And then I realized I had never seen a t-shirt with the words Just Do It, or a hat or a bumper sticker. What does a bumper sticker have to do with authentic athletic performance? Nothing. In fact, he went on to point out that most Nike TV spots do not end with Just Do It. I said I didnt believe him and he showed me a reel of the greatest hits and only a handful actually ended with Just Do It. It was remarkable and made perfect sense. No wonder it has lasted so long.