Imagine you’re a banker. It’s 10:08 on a Friday night and you’re still in the office, reading an article online about the financial crisis in Greece. You’re 28 years old, living in New York City, but thanks to your job, you might as well be 78. You haven’t been out with friends, much less someone who might consider dating you, for months.

Suddenly, a familiar-seeming ad appears on your computer. It looks just like a funny poster you saw in the Wall Street subway station this morning — something about living in New York and making a million dollars but spending less time outside than a prisoner. There was something in Forbes last week, too. Or was it Worth?

“It’s 10:08 p.m.,” reads the Internet ad, “and you’re reading an article about the financial crisis in Greece. Get a life. Find Balance. Find Ultimat.”

Creepy? Maybe. But also an example of how a good integrated campaign can work in 2012. Rather than operating across platforms simply for the sake of it, as some advertisers were inclined to do in the early days of digital advertising, good cross-platform campaigns today deploy a single idea across a select handful of media, letting each do what it does best, one building on the other. Posters grab your attention, banner ads exploit personal information, a Twitter feed offers deals and interaction. Today, a good integrated campaign feels tailored to your life and your habits. Sometimes, it can appear to follow you.

“How can you use different media to tell someone a story that motivates them and drives that change in behavior you’re looking for?” asks Nathan Swenberg, global communications planning leader at BBDO. “What’s important is understanding how people are using those different platforms, and then thinking about how you can string those experiences together.”

Like most good cross-platform efforts, the 2011 campaign for Ultimat, a premium vodka brand owned by Patrón, started with a very specific target audience and a big, flexible idea. It didn’t operate on every platform, just the ones it needed to grab its audience and make its point.

The campaign started with a simple challenge: Not everyone is going to pay $40 for a 750-millileter bottle of vodka. So “we started out knowing we wanted to hit a white-collar target,” says Eric Silver, chief creative officer for Amalgamated, the creative agency that handles the brand for Patrón. The decision was made to go after young finance professionals (bankers, traders) with an interest in nightlife and upscale brands — people who tend to have a lot of money but work long, difficult hours. Hence the tag line, “Find Balance. Find Ultimat.”

But where to reach these people?

The campaign launched with out-of-home ads, particularly in places like the Wall Street subway station where bankers were likely to walk through every day. To appeal to its young demographic, Patrón paired a matter-of-fact, almost mocking tone with a highly personal message: “You work for the best firm in the city. You make seven figures. You spend less time outside than prisoners of Rikers Island.” Similar ads followed in magazines that the target was likely to read, like Forbes, Worth and The New York Times Magazine.

But the key was to hit the bankers where they lived — at the office, on their computers. So Amalgamated came up with a way to make highly targeted Web ads. “Through this API, the banner would know what you were reading,” says Silver, referring to an application programming interface. “The banner would say, ‘It’s 11:08 p.m., you’re reading an article about how bad news in Greece is spilling over into the markets in Italy. Stop it and get a life.” Patrón knew that its target audience tended to be using the Internet for work purposes when they would prefer to be out socializing, and the banner ads turned that insight into engagement.

Later, on Facebook, the personal became social. Amalgamated produced an app for Ultimat called The Social Life Audit that would analyze your profile, grade your social life and give you suggestions on how to improve it. “It would scan your photos, and through facial recognition, mood recognition, gender analysis, come up with this score,” says Silver. (In a clever nod to social media trends, the app deducted points for pictures in which people made “duck faces.”) By providing suggestions on how users could improve their scores, it provided an incentive for them to change their habits (i.e., get out and drink).

The campaign might be as notable for what it did not include. There was no mobile element, no TV, no radio, nothing (gasp!) on Twitter. The campaign went where it needed to go — and nowhere else. “We had a target we wanted to go after,” says Silver, “and we used the media we needed to reach them.”

Such is the evolution of cross-platform campaigns. Five to 10 years ago, when the Internet was younger, social media was new, and mobile devices weren’t so smart, clients were more apt to demand “a Facebook strategy” or “a viral campaign,” much to the chagrin of their agencies.

“The thing I heard five years ago was, ‘We’ll just do a viral video, and everyone will see it and that way we won’t have to spend money on TV,’” says Swenberg.

While that mindset certainly still exists among many clients, as well as some agencies, the savvier operators have come to appreciate the various platforms for what they are: different pathways to various audiences, each uniquely suited to different forms of engagement. What they are not is a frontier land in which to plant a flag just to prove a point.

Which media channel to use “should be one of the last questions a client should be asking,” says Silver. “Where we try to start is, what’s your current brand perception? How do they want to be perceived? What’s the overarching brand strategy? What’s the urgency or what’s the time line?”

“Once you know that,” he says, “that’s when you calmly figure out the proper channels to attack.”

Of course, following this advice sometimes means being absent on platforms where your audience might be looking for you — a prospect that, five years ago, was considered by many to be brand suicide. But there is mounting evidence that being selective about which platforms you choose to occupy can work better than being on a platform in which you can’t afford to fully invest.

Swenberg tells the story of a consumer packaged-goods client who, faced with a tightening budget and increasingly fragmented media presence, decided to rein in his company’s media presence in order to better focus its spending. “The guy who did it took a lot of flak from a lot of people — if I told you the brand you’d be surprised,” he says. “This guy said, ‘You know, I’ve only got the resources to do a good job in TV and the store.’ So all these other things got turned off, and all of a sudden his sales went up.” Having seen the benefits of concentrating his ad budget, the client proceeded to carry out the strategy across its various brands, and, according to Swenberg, is still doing so today.

“He said, ‘I’m going to focus on the two platforms that are most important for my business,’” notes Swenberg, “and it worked for him.”

It may be a titillating story to CMOs with shrinking budgets. But what about the frustrated consumer who goes on Twitter to complain about your company only to discover no one is listening? Or who tries to find out more about your company by doing a Web search for the tag line featured in a print ad, and finds himself wading through two pages of results before finding your site?

“Yes, people expect you to be on Twitter and they might want to interact with your brand online after seeing a spot,” says Swenberg, but that isn’t always a good enough reason to open channels you aren’t prepared to monitor properly. “If your legal department isn’t set up to deal with something like that, if you don’t have people who can represent the brand on that medium, then you’re probably going to do yourself more harm than good for being there.”

Others find that the right idea can translate to almost all digital media without a massive investment of time or money. The creative challenge in formulating a cross-platform campaign has always been finding an idea that works across the chosen platforms. The old clichés about “the big idea” still apply when working multiplatform, say creative chiefs. But in addition to being “big,” an idea also has to be flexible. And if it’s flexible enough, it can work anywhere with minimal investment.

“You have to have an idea and an insight that isn’t media specific,” Marty Orzio, chief creative officer at Gotham, says. “And the better the insight, the more compelling it’s going to be.”
Sometimes, the most flexible ideas are also the most simple. For Denny’s, Gotham last year chose to promote a new “cheese-inspired” menu with the tag line “Let’s Get Cheesy.” The idea was just silly and broad enough to translate to any number of media.

“From top to bottom, everything resonated cheesiness,” says Orzio. TV ads featured diners using classic cheesy pickup lines to talk about their food (“This cheesy dinner is a parking ticket. It’s got ‘fine’ written all over it.”) But other efforts required more creativity than cash. Gotham created a branded “cheesy love song” station for music service Grooveshark. It launched a Tumblr called “Cheese on My ___” that invited people to upload pictures of their favorite things (say, their cat) with a slice of cheese on them. On Denny’s Web site, they offered cheesy ecards (“You’re Grate!”) that friends could send to each other (and that came with discounts on food).

Another creative challenge with any cross-platform campaign is maintaining a consistent look throughout, so your consumer makes the connection between different elements. Gotham used a consistent aesthetic throughout its “Cheesy” work — similar colors, fonts and vocabulary, for example — but Orzio says that these days, visual consistency is less important than tonal consistency.

“You find a way to make it feel the same, have the same kind of energy,” he says. “It may not have the specific words on a rational level, but it still makes you feel the same. You’re being consistent but inconsistent.”

One challenge regarding multiplatform campaigns that never seems to get any easier is measuring, buying and balancing your creative across media. Different media still measure and report their audiences in different ways, making it difficult not only to buy media in a cross-platform campaign, but also to know just how much of your budget should be allocated to one platform over another.

Luckily, most of the major measurement firms have at least taken steps to resolve these problems. Nielsen and ComScore have both debuted cross-platform measurement initiatives that profess to bridge the divide between incongruous metrics. “It’s still not as easy as it ought to be,” says Michael Epstein, director of strategic resource, North America, at Mindshare, “because the measurements are still not standardized.” But it’s getting there.

In a bid to bring some clarity to the situation (and promote its cross-platform measurement product), Nielsen teamed with Yahoo in 2010 on a study called “Cross-Platform Campaigns: Getting to a Smarter Mix.” The idea was to help shed some light on how cross-platform efforts could better balance buys. To do this, they analyzed four existing cross-platform campaigns to see where they were over-invested and where they were under-invested. Angela Reynar, senior director of category insights at Yahoo, says they used Nielsen’s software to “map the reach and frequency curve, and see at which point the curve flattens out and you get no more incremental reach.”

After finding that a campaign was over-invested in a particular medium, they tried to find a better balance by (theoretically) moving money in and out of other media. “What we did was complete trial and error,” she continues. “We said, let’s take 5 percent from the most over-invested media and put it somewhere else, and let’s take an additional 5 percent and put it somewhere else, and that’s how we got to what the optimal was.”

What they discovered was that, relative to where their audiences were, the marketers were all over-invested in traditional media and under-invested in digital and mobile platforms. In other words, rather than making new impressions with untapped consumers online or in mobile, the campaigns were making impressions with the same consumers over and over on television.

“They were getting no incremental reach from a large portion of that spend,” says Reynar, “so you could cut back pretty heavily on that TV schedule, put the money elsewhere and get the bigger bang for your buck in terms of reach.”

The idea that many marketers are still over-invested in traditional media won’t come as a surprise to most media buyers. Despite the rush toward digital in recent years, “it’s still safer to do what we did last year than it is to do something different and better,” says Reynar, “because if I did what I did last year and it doesn’t work, I can’t really be blamed for it.”

There are also still many CMOs who are simply more comfortable operating in the traditional media realm. “If you want to shift dollars out of TV,” says Epstein, “you all of a sudden are talking to clients about, well, if I take these 100 GRPs away from TV, you’re gong to get two online.” Epstein is using hyperbole to make his point, which is that explaining the benefits of digital impressions to people who’ve spent decades thinking in GRPs can be a challenge. “You start having these conversations about engagement, but what does engagement really mean?”

That comfort with traditional media, coupled with an economy that doesn’t exactly encourage experimentation, could have as much to do with marketers being more selective about which platforms to operate on as any other factor. But if the result is campaigns that exist on particular platforms for a reason, not just because a CMO is afraid of missing out, then that, too, can be considered progress.

“The smart way to plan is to understand what the role of each channel is going to be and then use it accordingly,” says Epstein. “You sometimes get people who just want to do something because it’s the new thing. I think we need to be a little smarter.”

-MEDIAPOST, June 6, 2012

Mr. Stefanski has about 15 years of experience on both the agency and client side. Before DirecTV, he served as assistant VP-global brand and marketing at insurer MetLife, and had spent time at big New York shops, including BBDO and JWT.

“When I left the agency world I always had a feeling I’d be back someday, and maybe didn’t expect it to be quite so soon,” Mr. Stefanski told Ad Age. “But I’d been talking with [CEO Brian Martin] and [Chief Creative Officer] Eric Silver over the last few months and the more we talked, the opportunity to be part of Amalgamated at this time in its history was just too exciting to pass up.

“Having been on the client side will help give me good perspective on how to build our clients’ business, and I really look forward to rolling up my sleeves and getting in there,” he added.

Amalgamated’s roster includes Ben & Jerry’s, Coca Cola’s Honest Tea and CarMax. Mr. Stefanski’s connection to the shop is Mr. Martin, who joined last summer as CEO. The two met a decade ago while working at JWT, New York.

“I’ve had the pleasure of working with Michael on both sides of the table,” Mr. Martin said in a statement. “At JWT, he was one of the emerging stars within the agency, and, several years later at MetLife, he was a smart and effective brand leader within a large corporate culture. He’s a strong leader, an intelligent brand thinker, and a creative sparkplug. He will fit right in here.”

Separately, the shop’s former president and management partner, Fiona McBride, has departed to go work at Womenkind.

-Advertising Age, May 11, 2012

There was no shortage of speculation about why so many folks seemed to be striking out on their own at the same time. One theory was that they wanted to escape a holding company’s formulaic processes. Or, others mused, they wanted to start a shop so they could eventually spin it off and sell it to a holding company.

Everyone leaves for different reasons, but I think, in the end, there’s a commonality of ingredients that would be about 1/3 supreme confidence, 1/3 total fear and 1/3 clinical restlessness. In short, you move because you must. Because it’s time. When the mass exodus was happening, all the soundbites departing creatives supplied to explain their new ventures had the reassuring term “fun” built into them. It’s an amazing experience to be sure, but I bet, for those who made the leap, the “fun” descriptor might now be accompanied by some sort of asterisk. If you’re a creative contemplating this odyssey, be prepared for a crash course on some decidedly noncreative things.

I remember about three months into Amalgamated, Gerry Graf, who started BFG9000, anxiously called and asked how a specific contract might work. My response was, “I love you, but I’m fairly certain I’m not the person to offer counsel on this particular matter.” I can say with a great deal of certainty, contracts are not yet our forte.

Did you know some Xerox machines are better to own and some are better to lease? You do now. Small-business owners might want to consider two health plans. One for the younger employees and one for those over 40. If you lease space in a building in Manhattan and they decide to put up a Courtyard Marriott in your vicinity, you won’t be getting a break on your lease payments, no matter how defiantly the syncopated jackhammers cry out.

You very quickly receive lessons in all the things you thought you knew and all the things you never thought you’d need to know: Rent. Furniture. Travel. Corporate promotion. New Biz. Outside services. Consulting. Maintenance. Business insurance. Health insurance. 401(k). Travel. Dues. Subscriptions. Office supplies. Telephone. Payroll expense. Payroll taxes. Lots and lots of taxes.

I will say this, though. There was unexpected assistance from former big-agency employees who also left to start their own shop. A fraternity, if you will.

The Dave Drogas and Carl Johnsons of the world were very generous with their time and pointers. I suspect once you’ve been through the drill (and made it) there is a satisfyingly benevolent feeling in helping others navigate some of the obstacles.

Advertising is an admittedly tricky business. Whatever stage you are in, whether newly launched or 10 years in with a dozen hot clients, it’s of paramount importance that you and your partners are in constant alignment. It’s probably less about the “defining” statement you have no doubt crafted to search consultants and would-be clients and more about knowing your strengths and striving each day to remember why you got into this business in the first place.

The trick is then parlaying your existing mantra into an agency where you can’t wait to walk in the door every morning and, of course, having the patience to stick with the proverbial plan.

So has it been worth it? I think we’d all say yes. In my case I have a roster of clients and a body of work I am extremely proud of, as well as employees I consistently love being around and laughing with. To be sure, there is still much to learn. But I now know, if you own an agency, that process never really ends.

-Advertising Age, May 01, 2012

Honest Tea wants you to recycle your Facebook status — supposedly, to raise awareness of recycling everyday products.

Organic tea and drink company Honest Tea has launched The Great Recycle — a call-to-action to recycle bottles. The campaign’s goal is to turn recycling into a new fad on social networks and in the real world.

Online, Honest Tea is hoping to encourage Facebook’s 901 million users to recycle by reusing their status updates. The company is working to inspire the masses to recycle the same amount of bottles it produces each year by 2020.

The Facebook campaign has its own official website. Users can scroll through statuses until they find a great one. The old status will posts to Facebook with an alert that says: “I’m recycling this old Facebook status message as a sign of my commitment to recycle more this year.”

Facebook users are rewarded with Recyclebank points that can be redeemed for rewards. The Facebook Recycler app currently has 87,000 Likes.

Honest Tea is starting off small before their 2020 goal date. The company is kicking off the campaign officially in NYC on April 30. The goal of the event is to recycle the same number of bottles as sold in NYC each day. The company is collecting the bottles in a 30-foot-tall bin that will be situated in Times Square.

-Mashable, April 25, 2012

When Coca-Cola’s first invested in Honest Tea in 2008, it had distribution in about 15,000 outlets, but since the completion of the beverage giant’s purchase of the brand, it’s shot up to more than 100,000. Its portfolio has diversified, too. It has 40 different varieties in glass, plastic and kids’ pouches. New flavors include Passion Fruit Green Tea, the brand’s first stevia-sweetened zero-calorie beverage, and Raspberry Fields, an exclusive beverage for Whole Foods. Honey Green Tea is the company’s best-seller.

Honest Tea controls just 0.5% of the ready-to-drink tea market, but it’s among the fastest-growing brands, with volume up 31% in 2011, according to Beverage Digest.

Amid the growth, the company brought on a new top marketer, Peter Kaye. After a stint as a consultant, and earlier in his career working in marketing roles at Time Inc. and spirits giant Diageo, Mr. Kaye took on the post of Honest Tea’s VP of marketing and communications in early 2011.

It was his decision to hire the brand’s first lead creative agency, New York-based Amalgamated, early this year. Honest Tea previously did most of its advertising internally or with the help of agencies on a project basis.

Mr. Kaye informally held talks with a number of shops late last year, and ultimately decided on Amalgamated — whose head of strategy, Doug Cameron, he’s known for years — for what he says was the right mix of chemistry and work history.

Said Mr. Kaye: “It really clicked with me that we were really ready at a brand development stage to bring on a partner. … What they’ve done with Ben & Jerry’s over the years really resonated with me. The combination of their capabilities on the strategy side, and their cultural branding approach” made Amalgamated an attractive shop, he said.

“We built this brand with a lot of grassroots marketing, events, demos and one-to-one marketing, literally handing out cups over the years,” noted Mr. Kaye. “The idea with working with Amalgamated is to complement what we’ve been doing and try and really step on the gas and significantly increase our brand awareness nationally.”

Their first project together was the The Great Recycle Facebook status application which launched this week.

Eric Silver, chief creative officer and part owner at Amalgamated, said a brand campaign will launch across digital, TV and outdoor this summer.

Honest Tea will also complete a package redesign over the next 18 months. “The message is a more integrated expression of the brand to reach more people,” said Mr. Kaye.

-Advertising Age, April 25, 2012

The company alone generates about 20 million glass bottles and 60 million plastic bottles annually. Over all, Americans used 38.6 billion glass beverage containers, and 71.9 billion plastic beverage bottles in 2010, according to the Container Recycling Institute, an antiwaste organization based in Culver City, Calif., that tracks data on the topic.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that only about 33 percent of glass bottles, and as few as 27 percent of plastic bottles, are recycled.

“We wanted to do something in a big, visible way,” said Seth Goldman, co-founder and chief executive of Honest Tea, a low-calorie beverage brand that Coca-Cola bought last year.

“Recycling rates are still low, so we were looking for something aggressive but still fun and engaging to deliver the message,” Mr. Goldman said.

The company’s first “Great Recycle” event will take place on April 30, in Times Square, with a 30-foot-tall recycle bin, then move to other cities. The immediate goal is to recycle 45,000 beverage cans or bottles — the number of products that Honest Tea sells daily in the city. From there, Honest Tea plans to expand its recycling aggressively.

The event is part of a campaign that will use online, social media and some outdoor advertising. Mr. Goldman said Honest Tea chose New York because it was the company’s largest market, and to support Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s drive to double recycling in the city by 2017. Only about 15 percent of the city’s total waste is being recycled. The New York Department of Sanitation says 182 tons of glass bottles and jars go into the trash every day.

The Honest Tea campaign is an outgrowth of recycling efforts that the company started at its home base, in Bethesda, Md. The company has placed more than 30 recycling bins on city streets, and has also provided bins to music festivals.

While municipalities and parks still face mounds of jettisoned drink containers, large beverage companies have been promoting recycling. In recent years, Coke has provided some 150,000 bins to events and public areas, and set up beverage container recycling centers. It also has supported curbside residential recycling.

As consumers have drifted away from soda to less sugary beverages, tea sales have boomed. Last year, they were $6.5 billion, up 5.2 percent over 2010, according to a report by market research company Packaged Facts.

The Honest Tea event is being advertised on city billboards, and at businesses and colleges in the city’s five boroughs. Over a 10-hour period, recyclers will be able to climb onto a stage to toss bottles or cans into the huge bin. Honest Tea employees, including Mr. Goldman, will pedal a bicycle-powered conveyor belt to carry bottles and cans to be dropped in the bin.

Participants will be able to claim a rewards point for each recycled container, and add points with a recycling pledge made on stage. Using points, they can claim items including cold bottles of Honest Tea, T-shirts, tickets to concerts and Broadway shows, yoga mats and skateboards.

For those not in Times Square that day, the company is spreading the recycling word with a new Web site, Thegreatrecycle.com, where users can recycle an old Facebook status message in return for points in a program devised with Amalgamated Advertising, an independent agency in New York.

“We wanted to reach out to brand-friendly influencers and friends to make people more aware of recycling,” said Paul Aaron, the agency’s director of interactive.

Online participants earn points for each post that is recycled. Points can be redeemed at Recyclebank.com for discounts and items from more than 3,000 businesses, including restaurants and stores.

Honest Tea did not disclose how much it is spending on the campaign, but Mr. Goldman said the costs of getting a permit for Times Square, the bin and other expenses “were not inconsiderable.” Last year, Honest Tea spent slightly less than $1.1 million on advertising, according to figures from Kantar Media.

As part of its campaign, Honest Tea also produced a 60-second teaser video that, wordlessly, tracks one bottle’s path to being recycled. It was produced with Wandering Hat, a Washington-based video production company, and can be found on Honesttea.com and at Thegreatrecycle.com.

In addition, the company has set up a Twitter tag called #GreatRecycle, which will be emblazoned on the side of the bin and on fliers (made of recycled paper) to be distributed in the city. To build interest, Honest Tea also is using Facebook ads.

The collected bottles will be refashioned, according to Honest Tea, by the nonprofit GrowNYC as urban gardening supplies, including shovels and watering cans, as part of its program for public schools.

Honest Tea will be collecting one of its best-selling products, Honest Kids drink pouches, but the pouches cannot be easily repurposed because of their design. Honest Tea works with TerraCycle, a company that creates recycling systems for previously nonrecyclable or hand-to-recycle waste, to remake drink pouches into pencil cases and other items. The program has saved nearly a million pouches from landfills, Honest Tea says.

“Our focus is to make a high impact this month, which is called ‘Earth Month,’ ” Mr. Goldman said. “We want people to be aware and make a commitment.”

-The New York Times, April 22, 2012

If you experience deja vu while exploring Facebook over the next few days, it’s not (only) because you’re going crazy. There’s a very good reason why some posts you may have seen before will soon start reappearing.

In support of Earth Month, Honest Tea teamed up with New York-based agency Amalgamated to come up with a clever way to promote recycling through social media. The initiative resulted in a Facebook app called The Great Recycle, which recycles users’ most popular posts (and offers a small reward) once they make a pledge to recycle more.

The Great Recycle app uses the Facebook API to analyze users’ timelines and cull old posts that received lots of likes and comments. After you choose a favorite old post to recycle, the app reposts it to your timeline with a branded message promoting recycling. As a reward for their pledge, users also receive 10 points in credit at Recyclebank, an organization that rewards individuals for recycling with prizes redeemable from sponsors like Kashi and Dunkin’ Donuts.

The Great Recycle is part of a larger series of initiatives Honest Tea is undertaking to support recycling nationwide.

-Co.Create, April 23, 2012

While business relationships are no doubt a different beast than personal relationships–more formal, thankfully less intimate–the human behavior behind forming these bonds is the same. As in love, chemistry–or fit–is the most important element to a fruitful partnership, and the rigid, often arms-length way in which new partners are engaged does little to help foster the necessary connection to make professional fireworks.

Rosemarie Ryan, Co-CEO of Co Collective suggests thinking of the process less like pitching and more like dating. “Chemistry is everything. Do they spend the entire time talking about themselves or are they genuinely interested in you? Do you want to keep talking after the meeting ends, does the time fly by? Are you looking forward to getting together again?,” she says. “Find the people you would walk through a burning building with and then get down to the real work.”

That said, Sam Wilson, Managing Director from Wolff Olins cautions that while dating is an apt metaphor, competitive dating is not the goal. “One at a time, please. There is nothing worse than those briefing calls (or worse, in-person meetings) where there are multiple agencies present. They can’t be themselves; you don’t get to know them. This is not The Bachelor!”

For Krystle Loyland, head of new business at Mother New York, the importance of meeting prospective clients at the pitch phase is key to a quality outcome. “Pitches are often run by marketing folks who don’t necessarily have the authority or vision to make the final decisions. So by the time you present to the ones who do, you have developed creative ideas based on someone else’s strategy,” she says. “This will always prove to be a waste of time and energy for both the client and the agency.” Mother avoids this, says Loyland by meeting with all key decision-makers at the beginning of the pitch process. “This helps us not only better understand the core business problem, but also the client dynamic. It allows everyone involved to assess chemistry, compatibility, and shared values; and ultimately leads to better-fit work and long-term' partnerships, not short-term wins.”

As in your personal life, where you meet someone matters as well, which is why AKQA CEO Tom Bedecarre insists that pitches should always take place at the agency. “If you are hiring an agency, then you are hiring the people, culture and work environment of that agency. It makes no sense to have pitch meetings at client offices or neutral locations because it shortchanges the opportunity to learn more about the people, culture and work environment of the agency you are about to hire.”

Because as John Matejczyk, Executive Creative Director of MUH•TAY•ZIK HOF•FER says, “Understand what you’re really hiring is what’s the hardest to come by: taste.” And the best way to get a sense of someone’s taste is certainly not in a cattle call.

2. GO FOR A BETA TEST DRIVE

If many agency leaders advocate for a more personal touch when searching for a creative mate, others go a step further, suggesting that clients engage prospective agencies in short term but real project to get a sense if they’re a perfect match.

“If you’re looking for a long term agency partner, beta test. Build and test a live partnership with the agency(ies) you’re considering; get involved, assess it, optimize it, roll it out more widely if it works,” suggests Emma Cookson, Chairman, BBH New York. “Assign a controlled but real project, pay fairly but not excessively, and work with the agency honestly and in depth–it’s the only way to really know in advance what you’re buying.” On the flip side, Cookson feels that for one-off jobs, the pitch should be limited to fast, intense, focused presentations. “Think TED talks. That would minimize time/effort on both sides, maximize pace and stay focused on what you really need to buy – a big central concept or idea that you can then later blow out together.”

Similarly, Alasdair Lloyd-Jones, COO, Big Spaceship suggests reinventing the pitch process by building collaboration. “Bring on two agencies that excite you and pay for them to work with your team for a month or two on a particular challenge,” he says “It’s full commitment on both sides. At the end of those two months, you decide which of the two makes the most sense to commit to based on thinking, cultural fit, ideas, achievement and commitment to the brand. You have to put in time and money but you end up with the best partner and that should lead to a longer-term engagement.”

And it’s understanding the nuances work styles, personalities and culture that Andrew O’Dell, CEO at Pereira & O’Dell, sees as the key to more a more valuable pitch process. “The biggest issue with most reviews is it doesn’t simulate a real working relationship and that can be a big business hazard for clients in the long-run. Compensate the top two finalists for a 3-6 month period and engage them on a real assignment, not pitch. Both agency and client will benefit from the extra time spent building the relationship and developing work. At the very least, a more informed and confident decision can be made by both sides.”

3. REMEMBER THAT IT’S MUTUAL

It’s easy for agencies, hungry for accounts or eager to work with a hot-shot client, to think they have little say in pitching matters. But not so, say these agency leaders.
Amalgamated CEO Brian Martin says that often companies enter the pitch process as if it is a beauty pageant looking to take home the crown. But that’s missing the point. “Winning the pitch is merely the beginning of a (hopefully) long relationship,” says Martin. “That relationship is going to have significant ramifications on your firm’s future. So don’t approach the pitch prepared to jump through every hoop the client puts in front of you. Approach the meeting as if you’re looking to hire them. Be thoughtful and ask good questions. But most of all, be ready to walk away if the answers you receive in the process aren’t what you want to hear. A partnership is only good if expectations on both sides are in alignment.”

“You are hiring each other,” says Co’s Rosemarie Ryan. “It’s important that both parties are honest with each other about their hopes, dream, worst fears. More critically, it’s important that they are honest with themselves about whether that’s something they can live with.”

Another way of looking at this same idea is to consider soliciting creative partners not within a pitching framework, but as if you’re hiring a key member of your team. “The best thing that could happen to the agency/client relationship is stopping the pitch process altogether,” says Jeff Jones. “Clients should hire agencies following the same process they use to add a marketing executive to their team. Just like great marketing executive candidates, many agencies have the right credentials but very few are the right fit for the organization. Even the best pitch process today does very little to assess fit from both perspectives.”

Tom Denari, President and Principal, Young & Laramore echoes the sentiment. “Recognize that agency relationships are just that–relationships. Instead of having the agencies spend ungodly hours developing a campaign that might never be used–or worse yet, might be very ineffective–have the actual working team commit to a two-day session of intense interviewing,” he says. “Interview the agency principals individually. Find out what they believe in. What are they in the business for? Are they going to sell out? See if their stories match. Make sure you can work with a group that might present something you won’t like, not just something you do.”

4. BE TRANSPARENT–FOR REAL

Transparency is a beloved buzzword, often devoid of any meaning. But when actually applied, it can foster a sense of common respect–no matter if the outcome works in an agency’s favor.

McKinney’s Jeff Jones asks that clients be clear about their intentions–whether they’re looking for a new partner or just simply fishing for ideas. “Both are OK. It’s only a problem when you are not transparent because it is obvious to agencies. We can tell based on the list of agencies you are talking to and the overall tone and structure of the process.”

Peter McGuinness, CEO at DDB Chicago says, “Be honest with those who don’t have a shot so they can bow out early and with some dignity.”

For AKQA’s Bedecarre, transparency meets a very pragmatic need: “Agencies must balance the costs of time and resources put into a given pitch against the potential benefits of winning the business. If the odds of winning are 1 out of 2, your expected value of the pitch is 50% of the assignment. If the odds are 1 out of 6, then the expected value drops to 16.7% of the assignment. Agencies should be willing to put 3 times the effort into a pitch against a single competitor compared to a 6-way shootout. So if clients narrow the list of finalists to 2 or 3 agencies, the results will be stronger.”

And if the odds don’t stack up in an agency’s favor, Big Spaceship’s Lloyd-Jones simply asks for honest feedback. “Thorough feedback is the least a client can do to those agencies that didn’t make it. It respects the amount of effort put in and helps an agency improve for next time or at least understand why their pitch didn’t win.”

Mother’s Loyland adds its incumbent upon all parties to ensure they’re painting an accurate portrait of their skills. “A pitch is really just a shorthand way to see if you have found the perfect collaborator. Sometimes this pure ambition becomes muddled because clients want to be someone they aren’t prepared to be, and agencies want to win new business by being someone they are not. This will always prove to be a waste of time and energy for both the client and the agency.”

5. ALLOW FOR ACCESS TO DECISION MAKERS

Unless you’re Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, getting lost in translation is the farthest thing from romantic. In the pitch scenario, when the agency is unable to ask direct questions of key clients, any communication is open for misinterpretation.

“When a company decides to change agencies, it is usually looking for a better way forward. Quite often, RFPs state that clients want to ‘re-invent’ the brand, or ‘challenge the status quo’ of the category, or ‘re-capture’ market share, or appeal to a new or expanded target. These bold moves require change, but when it comes down to it, big moves may not be supported by the ultimate decision-makers,” warns 180 Managing Partner/CEO Michael Allen. “Therefore, all stakeholders need to own the RFP, evaluation criteria must be clear, and it should be evident who has the final say. Everyone needs to make time for the process to work.”

As John Matejczyk says: “Always have the person whose yes’ matters in the meeting. Unfortunately, everyone’s ‘no’ matters; few clients’ ‘yes’ matters. That’s who has to be in the meetings, making the decisions–not just about what agency to hire but what work to create. When I look back on the biggest hits of my career, without exception, we were dealing with the decision makers from the very first meeting. No escalation. No ‘go sell it through the business units’.”

6. REMEMBER THE PITCH ISN’T THE RELATIONSHIP

“Do clients really buy the pitch?” Dan LaCivita, President of digital agency Firstborn says no. For him, the pitch is created inside a bubble, with the focus on creating the perfect pitch as opposed to the perfect solution to the client’s problem. From there, the initial creative idea often ends up looking nothing like what was presented. “As we know, once the pitch is won, the idea(s) presented are often tweaked and altered, ‘Frankenstein-ed’ together leaving the agency with only a shell of the once amazing concept that supposedly won them the business in the first place,” he says. “I think there needs to be greater value put on not just selling an idea to the client, but on also selling the approach to an idea. Seeing how an agency thinks when developing creative solutions to real business problems is extremely valuable for a client looking for a long-term relationship.”

Beth Waxman-Arteta, CMO of JWT North America agrees. “It’s fair enough to qualify an agency based on its previous work, but focusing on how it thinks about the direction of the client’s business will help both the agency and client determine if they are a good fit. Instead of discussing the past, agencies are better off highlighting their critical thinking skills and a future vision for the client.”

She suggests a simpler RFI process, one that gets straight to the point: the client. “Wouldn’t a process that covers the basics and brings clients face-to-face with prospective agencies earlier on in the game be the most effective use of our time? I had the good fortune to participate in a review last summer that ran exactly this way, and it was a refreshing experience for everyone at the agency. The process moved straight from RFI to chemistry meetings, where the client stopped us short and said: “Forget your presentation. Obviously we know you can do all that–let’s just talk.” They got to know us better much faster by asking direct questions about their challenges and how we’d solve them. Agency experience does matter, but it materializes much faster and in the most relevant ways when clients ask us direct questions about their business and how we envision the future.

7. DON’T GIVE AWAY IP

McKinney’s Jeff Jones is blunt when it comes to the sticky topic of intellectual property. “Approach the topic of IP like a real partner. It’s an arms race for intellectual property in today’s business world, and it is no exception for agencies. Clients who take hard stands on IP ownership are fundamentally not respecting the agency business model and are setting up the relationship to ultimately fail. Agencies may say yes initially because they need to grow, but win/lose relationships on IP are an ultimate recipe for failure.”

8. TALK ABOUT MONEY

For whatever reason, talking about money is a delicate conversation that most people dance around. But in the pitch process, it’s crucial to talk about… right away.

“Knowing that you are in the right ballpark will save a lot of time and effort. Everything is always negotiable, but if there’s a serious gap between your budget and their rough price, better to know before you fall in love,” offers Sam Wilson of Wolff Olins.

Jones is once again straightforward in his call for the straight goods on money. “Don’t make the budget a mystery. In today’s world, there is no way the budget is not known. Every marketing P&L has a line item for agency fees. It could save a lot of time and lead to a better decision if clients were clear about this.

John Matejczyk has an even more radical–but ultimately intriguing–idea when it comes to talking money during the pitch process. He suggests paying agencies to pitch. “It’s not just that a pitch is an enormous drain on an agency’s resources. It’s also that significantly compensating an agency for the pitch process will clarify your own thinking about who you really want to be working with. No one writes large checks to an agency who is there just to ‘round out the list.’”

9. CREATE A CONTRACT OF EXPECTATIONS

If much of the input has centered around building productive relationships, some call for complete forthrightness when it comes to what’s exactly expected of the pitch process, like the duration of the pitch and the agencies competing, both of which DDB’s Peter McGuinness think should be limited.

“People spend hours working through financial and legal contracts and little if any time on a contract for the relationship,” says Co’s Rosemarie Ryan. “Spend a day on what success looks like, for the business, the team, the individual. What are some things you should always do/never do?”

Donna Wiederkehr, CMO, Aegis Media North America says, “The best processes start with clients clearly defining their objectives, which must be well thought-out and actionable. It is important for agencies to have a clear understanding of why the business is going in for review, why the client is considering a change in agency, what the client wants to accomplish with this pitch process, etc. While these questions may seem intuitive and inherently basic, they are absolutely fundamental to the process.”

For 180’s Michael Allen, even with a clearly defined, streamlined process, spec work should never be a part of the equation. “Spec creative work rarely wins pitches and is usually created in a vacuum (with little client involvement). Besides, it isn’t needed to evaluate an agency. Clients are savvy and know a lot about different agencies and the work they are capable of creating. If clients are unsure and need a test drive, start with a project.

10. FOCUS ON THE FUTURE

Finally, having an eye to the future helps keep what can be a long, laborious process moving forward. Says Amalgamated’s Brian Martin: “Pitch meetings tend to start more broadly and progressively focus in on the core issue the client is looking to solve. So, give the client a sense of what you will deliver in the next meeting. The client will feel as if you understand their business better because you are going deeper than the others. And, by having that next meeting before you are actually asked to have the meeting, you will be better prepared with what to do with that next meeting.”

Beth Waxman-Arteta of JWT adds that it’s important to ”keep in mind where you want your business to be in the next several years–and get to that point right away. Asking your potential agency partners to explore and dream with you about the future is a step toward bettering the pitch process.”

-Co.Create, March 7, 2012

As JWT’s newly appointed North American Chief Creative Officer Jeff Benjamin put it, “I have a policy — if somebody spams my wall, I remove them as a friend.” He’s talking about Facebook, of course, and his point makes a lot of sense. So why do so many brands spend so much time creating the sort of campaigns that clutter your newsfeed and leave that sort of processed-meat-food-in-a-rectangular-can taste in your mouth?

Ad Age and Creativity’s latest trend report explores what it takes for brands to “do good Facebook.” We gathered a roundtable of seasoned creatives, including Mr. Benjamin, a former CP&B co-CCO who helped steer notable Facebook campaigns such as Burger King’s “Whopper Sacrifice.” We were joined by his former Crispin colleague Paul Aaron, now digital executive creative director at Amalgamated; Tool’s Jason Zada, EVB co-founder turned director, who created one of the most viral Facebook efforts of last year in “Take This Lollipop”; Pereira & O’Dell Creative Director Jaime Robinson, who worked on the successful Intel-Toshiba “Inside” social film; Team Detroit ECD Scott Lange, who oversaw Ford’s “Doug” social-media puppet effort; and Jung Von Matt Limmat’s Livio Dainese, creative director on Graubünden Tourism’s “Obermutten Goes Global,” which earned a tiny Swiss town more Facebook action than the fan pages of Justin Beiber and Lady Gaga.

If you don’t know their work, you should. All of them have successfully navigated the social-media platform and created Facebook campaigns that people actually cared about. They discussed what works and what doesn’t, and “social skills” you need in order to truly interact with at least some of Facebook’s 800 million users.

We also dissected a number of the most-innovative Facebook efforts of the past 12 months, and noted what brands should keep in mind when trying to build a dedicated fan base on the platform.

Here, a taste of the lessons unearthed within the report.

Tell a story
One of the characteristics of the best advertising — no matter what platform — is that it tells a story.

Pereira & O’Dell told a gripping tale via Facebook and brought users into the creation process with the Intel-Toshiba “Inside” campaign. It engaged Facebook users in an evolving social film, in which their Facebook posts and own videos influenced the plotline — and helped the film’s lead character, played by Emmy Ludwig, escape from a room where a mysterious kidnapper has trapped her. The fans became a part of the story’s plotline, and they loved the campaign so much they created an online film thanking the brands for the experience.

In the case of Jung Von Matt Limmat’s Obermutten effort, the story was built into the PR strategy. The campaign invited Facebook fans to like the tiny Swiss town. As thanks, the Obermutten townspeople would post their fans’ profile pictures on the town’s physical community bulletin board and show the fans their posted mugs in album pictures. That set the stage for some interesting plot twists, such as what happens when the number of fans exceeds the real estate of the bulletin board? The photos had to be posted on the walls of local barns, which made for a great PR story.

The campaign earned Obermutten fans from 32 countries and generated about $2.4 million worth of media from a budget of only about about $10,800.

If you can, step into the real world
One smart strategy to give your Facebook campaign legs and sharing value is to extend it into the real world. The Intel/Toshiba campaign invited its fans to real-life events tied to the plotline of the evolving film. Obermutten tacked Facebook followers’ pictures onto physical walls.

Another campaign featured in the report, Heinz’s “Get Well Soup” out of the agency We Are Social in the U.K., allowed users to send their sick friends personalized cans of soup — extending the feel-better wishes they’d posted online all the way to their dining-room table.

An effort for Ariel laundry detergent out of Saatchi Stockholm showed off the strength of the cleaner with a robot that shot stains at a line of crisp, bright-white shirts. Facebook fans could control the ‘bots online, picking which “flavor” of stain to shoot. The shirts were then dunked into a vat of suds, after which they were dried and delivered in the mail to the culprits who soiled them.

Be social; be human
Perhaps brands’ first rule of doing good work on a social-media platform is to learn how to be truly social.

Earlier this year, Pfizer’s Chapstick experienced a social-media catastrophe when it did something very uncool. The brand posted a new ad on Facebook that highlighted a model’s voluptuous rump as she bent over a couch (she was searching for her lip balm). Consumers deemed it sexist and started posting negative comments on Chapstick’s Facebook wall. Chapstick responded by deleting the unfavorable posts. Ironically, the ad’s copy read, “Be heard at Facebook.com/Chapstick.” That, of course, drew even more fire from consumers and the press.

Chapstick proved to be one of those that just doesn’t get how to be on Facebook. As Jeff Benjamin said, “Brands need to evolve culturally and become social brands. When a brand is on Facebook and you feel like it probably shouldn’t be there, it’s that the brand hasn’t figured out how to communicate in 2011. If that brand wants to survive, it needs to become a more social brand and figure out how to communicate socially.”

-Advertising Age, January 30, 2012

For the fourth consecutive year, Zeta Interactive, an interactive marketing agency, has released a report of which ad campaigns generated the most buzz online. Zeta uses a technology that monitors what consumers are saying about online ads that they see on blogs and on video sharing and social media sites.

Zeta Interactive gives ads scores reflecting the volume, or the total number of posts each ad had per day, and tone, or the number of positive or negative posts about the ad. The company analyzed more than 200 million online posts.

This year, of the top 10 ads, eight made their debuts during the Super Bowl. In 2010, only four on the list made their debuts during the Super Bowl.

At the top of the list was an ad for E*Trade Financial called “Enzo the Tailor,” which featured a baby being fitted for a custom-made suit and talking about how his tailor could retire in Tuscany. The spot was made by Grey New York, part of the Grey Group unit of WPP.

Both E*Trade and Snickers, whose “Logging” spot featuring Roseanne Barr and Richard Lewis was the seventh ad on the list, showed how some brands were able to have success in campaigns with recurring themes, said Mary Beth Keelty, vice president for marketing at Zeta. “They found something that worked and they are refreshing it,” she said.

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The Snickers spot was created by BBDO New York, part of the BBDO Worldwide unit of the Omnicom Group. Snickers was the only brand to have a repeat appearance on the list this year.

Automobile ads were popular with digital consumers as well, with Volkswagen’s ad featuring a young boy dressed as Darth Vader, and Chrysler’s ad featuring the rap artist Eminem and the city of Detroit, taking the second and third spots, respectively. The Volkswagen ad was created by Deutsch LA, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, and the Chrysler ad was created by Wieden & Kennedy.

“Cars really were a big part of the top 10 here,” said Minna Rhee, Zeta’s chief executive. The auto ads were a “reflection of coming out of the recession and the car industry taking a bigger role in 2011,” she said.

Other car ads in the top 10 included Mercedes-Benz’s ad featuring the artist Diddy, in the ninth spot on the list, and an ad for Nissan’s Leaf in the eighth spot. The Nissan ad, called “Gas Powered Everything,” shows people using everyday items like alarm clocks and hair dryers that are powered by gas engines. It featured a new trend on the list — the eco-conscious ad. The spot was created by TBWA/Chiat/Day, part of the TBWA Worldwide unit of the Omnicom Group.

An animated ad for Chipotle Mexican Grill, called “Back to the Start,” was the fourth most popular ad on the list. The ad, which was also shown in movie theaters, tells the story of the industrialization of farming. The film, which was more than two minutes long, was directed by Johnny Kelly and featured a Willie Nelson version of the Coldplay song “The Scientist.”

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The ad demonstrated that it is possible for brands “to break that top 10 with something that wasn’t necessarily with TV at the center of what the campaign was about,” Ms. Rhee said. The Chipotle ad also tied with an ad for the PepsiCo beverage H2oh! for the most positive tonal ranking. The H2oh ad, which was created by BBDO Argentina, was the first and only ad in Spanish to make the list.

Bud Light and CarMax rounded out the list in fifth and sixth place, respectively. Bud Light’s commercial, “Product Placement,” featured swashbucklers on a movie set, while CarMax’s spot, “Kid in a Candy Store,” promoted its selection of auto and money-back guarantee.

The Bud Light commercial was created by DDB Chicago, part of DDB Worldwide, owned by the Omnicom Group. The CarMax ad was created by Amalgamated New York.

-The New York Times, December 28, 2011

Halls’ ‘Uva Verde’
After the Kraft Foods-owned brand Halls discontinued its green-grape flavor in Brazil late last year, cough-drop enthusiasts took to social media to demand its return. Kraft relented, then commissioned Agency Espalhe Guerrilha Marketing to hire artists to create busts of three fans out of 5,000 units of Uva Verde. The agency also ran a Facebook campaign to find a fourth subject.

Small Business Saturday
Social media again played a central role in the second year of “Small Business Saturday” — an American Express-led effort to drive shoppers to local retailers on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Facebook offered a $100 ad credit to the first 10,000 businesses that registered. The page has more than 2.7 million fans, compared with 1.2 million last year, and #SmallBizSaturday trended on Twitter. Crispin Porter & Bogusky developed the campaign with Digitas.

‘True Blood’
HBO hyped the Season 4 premiere of “True Blood” by creating a Facebook app, “Immortalize Yourself,” which enabled fans to produce videos of themselves with real characters and Facebook friends. The app pulled in data from users’ profiles to generate the videos, which could feature random or specific Facebook friends. It was developed for HBO by Definition 6.

Heinz
Heinz partnered with the We Are Social agency for a U.K. campaign launched at the start of cold and flu season. It enabled Facebook fans to send sick friends cans of cream of tomato or chicken soup. For a $3 fee, a user could buy the can of soup, which was inscribed with the recipient’s name and shipped, arriving at its destination within three to four working days. It would bear the greeting “Get Well Soon” and the sender’s name.

Ultimat Vodka
Ultimat Vodka unveiled a Facebook app called the Social Life Audit that uses the site’s facial recognition API to calculate how much fun users are having in their photos, and gender analysis to see if there’s hookup potential. The app employs BlackBook’s database of 2.5 million hot spots to cross-check against Facebook check-ins to see if users are going to trendy places. Amalgamated did the campaign, and Stink Digital was the app developer.

Citroën
Netherlands residents could win a Citroën DS5 when the company sponsored a daylong “Twitter race,” in which TV presenter Froukje de Both drove the car while a co-pilot read directions off Twitter. People urged de Both to come to their location by tweeting #ds5race. The winner was the first person to retweet the final message from the car. Euro RSCG Amsterdam and Perfect Fools teamed up for the campaign.

Volkswagen
Volkswagen built an app on its Netherlands Facebook page asking fans to vote for their favorite classic car — the T1 or Beetle — for a chance at getting the “Fanwagen,” which is the winning model tricked out with social features. The lucky owner can print out a Facebook news feed inside the Fanwagen and display relationship status on the license plate. Dutch agency Achtung! was behind the campaign.

Flair
Belgian fashion magazine Flair built a Facebook app, Fashion Tag, to help users find out where their friends discovered their best outfits. Created by Duval Guillaume, Brussels, the app lets users tag friends’ clothing and accessories and then post on their walls to ask where they got the corresponding item. The answered fashion tags appeared in a special Facebook gallery, and the best of the best were featured in the pages of the weekly magazine.

Intel-Toshiba
Intel and Toshiba worked on “The Inside Experience,” an interactive movie/social-media campaign starring Emmy Rossum as Christina Perasso, who’s been abducted and can only transmit clues about her location via Facebook, Twitter and YouTube on the laptop she’s been left with (also the subject of the promotion). Fans had to collaboratively unravel the mystery with clues from Christina. The campaign was the brainchild of Pereira & O’Dell.

-Advertising Age, December 12, 2011

Personalized infographics illustrate the different categories and the app then suggests activities that could help improve your score. Users can also compare and share the results of their Social Life Audit with friends on Facebook and view their rankings on a leaderboard.

-PSFK, November 21, 2011

The Social Life Audit app, released this week, rates your social status (measured by how many photos you appear in per week on Facebook). your crew size (the average number of people who appear in photos with you) and your activity level (how many places you check in to per week), among other factors, to make its determination.

There are 12 variables in all, which are illustrated below. Some of the measurements are pretty dubious. For instance your “hookup potential” is determined by the percentage of people tagged in your photos who are single. If you get a failing grade, as I did, then Ultimat will offer you some tips to improve your score.

The app, created by Stink Digital, may not ultimately become a Klout for your social life, but it is a clever piece of advertising for Ultimat with a lot of viral potential. Other marketers have attempted to cull Facebook data to cater to users’ narcissistic tendencies, most notably Intel’s Museum of Me, but Ultimat and its ad agency, Amalgamated, appear to sowing new ground with Social Life Audit. At the very least, it’s a good excuse to hit the bars.

-Mashable, November 18, 2011

As long as you can get past being told that you have “failed the social life audit” then this app is pretty interesting. Try it out here and see if your social life is up to scratch. Nice find Alicia!

-Digital Buzz Blog, November 18, 2011

The increasing popularity of vodka among American drinkers means that distillers are continuously bringing out new labels, flavors, varieties and packages. To keep up, established brands are developing new products and changing campaigns for existing products.

The result is a vodka war that is beginning to rival the spending battles among makers of soft drinks, autos and fast food.

There are vodkas that promote their American heritage, like American Harvest, Colorado Premium and Tito’s; a vodka, Medea, with scrolling LED displays on its bottles; a cake-flavored vodka from Three Olives; and a vodka, Hangar 1, with its own airship.

There are also vodkas bearing licensed names like Hard Rock; a vodka, Kru 82, marketed as “adventure worthy” and sold in a “reusable, recyclable, shatterproof, stainless steel container”; and a vodka, Sobieski, with the actor Bruce Willis as a shareholder.

And reflecting the slumping economy, there are vodkas that aim their pitches at value shoppers, declaring they are just as good as vodkas with premium, superpremium or even ultra-premium prices.

Sobieski is active in that category, too, as are brands like Boru, 42 Below, Ikon, Select, Svedka, Vesica and Wodka.

The focus on value means that higher-priced brands need to remind drinkers why they are worth the extra cost. That is leading several of them to rethink the way they approach the marketplace.

An example is Ultimat vodka, sold by the Patrón Spirits Company in Las Vegas, which is known for its Patrón tequila. Patrón Spirits is about to introduce a campaign for Ultimat that represents a different direction for the brand, which is imported from Poland and sells in this country for about $39.99 for a 750-milliliter bottle.

The new campaign carries the theme “Find balance. Find Ultimat,” which replaces the theme used in the most recent ads for the brand, “Live ultimately.”

The budget for the campaign, which includes print, outdoor and online ads, along with a presence in social media, is estimated at $8 million.

The campaign, which is to begin in mid-October, is from a different agency than the one Patrón Spirits previously used for Ultimat. The new Ultimat agency is Amalgamated in New York, replacing the Richards Group in Dallas, which continues as the agency for Patrón tequila.

In 2008, the first year that Patrón Spirits sold Ultimat in the United States, it moved about 14,000 cases. That almost doubled in 2009, to 22,000 cases, but sales increased only slightly, to 23,000 cases, last year.

Although “the brand is growing,” says Jennifer Long, brand director at the New York office of Patrón Spirits, “with this new campaign we think it will be growing significantly more.”

“Yes, it’s a crowded category,” she says of the vodka market, but the company is optimistic because over all sales for vodkas continue to increase.

The initial ads for Ultimat were “centered on the product attributes,” Ms. Long says, particularly that it is distilled from grains (wheat and rye) as well as potatoes.

“We’re still keeping some of that messaging,” she adds, but taking a different tack for the voice of the brand.

“What we did first is we looked at the competitive landscape,” Ms. Long says, and determined that “other vodkas were taking a fashionista approach,” in that their ads were about “the fashion of the brand.”

So Ultimat is shifting to an approach tailored to reach a large target audience for the brand, white-collar professionals in fields like finance. (They have the wherewithal to pay $40 or so for a bottle of vodka.)

Those consumers are “yearning for a work-life balance,” Ms. Long says, which is reflected in the theme to “Find balance. Find Ultimat.”

“It works on a functional and an emotional level,” she adds, with the functional side being “the balance of wheat, rye and potato, which gives you smooth taste.”

The emotional side comes in as the brand tells its potential customers, as Ms. Long puts it: “Hey, we understand you need to have that time off. And Ultimat is the perfect ultra-premium product to enjoy when you’re relaxing with friends.”

That is expressed in a playful way in the initial ads in the campaign.

One ad proclaims: “You work for the best firm in the city. You make seven figures. You spend less time outside than prisoners on Rikers Island.”

A second ad declares: “Your C.E.O. calls you Jack. The treasury secretary calls you John. Your kids call you Mr. Phillips.”

A third ad says: “Your kids love their Christmas gifts. Your wife adores the diamond earrings. They called your office to tell you.”

All three ads end with the “Find balance. Find Ultimat” theme and, in small print at the bottom, the words “From the creators of Patrón.”

There was no formal review to find another agency for Ultimat, Ms. Long says; rather, “We did some desk research, word of mouth, seeing what people are saying about different agencies.”

“Amalgamated is small and entrepreneurial, much like our own company,” she adds, “and we like how they go about brand-building.”

Amalgamated, which was opened in 2003, also works for marketers like Ben & Jerry’s, CarMax, Coca-Cola and MSG Networks.

“Patron Spirits is an organization that knows how to create iconic brands,” says Douglas Cameron, chief strategy officer and a founding partner at Amalgamated. “They take a point of view and stand for something.”

In this instance, the new campaign for Ultimat is based on the concept of “forging solidarity at the end of the work day,” he adds, much as “This Bud’s for you” and “Miller time” did decades ago for Budweiser and Miller High Life beers.

“No drink right now was providing bonding or solidarity for today’s new generation of upscale, white-collar professionals,” Mr. Cameron says, “college graduates who are superambitious and want to climb up the corporate ladder very quickly.”

Ultimat is “giving them balance at the end of the work day,” he adds, and “when you join your work mates for a drink, Ultimat is your social glue.”

The campaign will be addressing “a variety of different white-collar subcultures” with “busy, over-managed” lives, Mr. Cameron says, and the “core group” of those who work in finance is first up.

(Shhhhhh. Don’t tell the Occupy Wall Street protesters.)

“Ultimat has its investment bankers, hedge fund managers and other financial professionals,” Mr. Cameron says, “a group that works hard and also plays hard afterward.”

“The campaign is upbeat and uses humor,” he adds, to “present in a positive way” the idea of finding balance.

“Even though there are a lot of vodkas,” Mr. Cameron says, “they tend to play in the same space, targeting the metrosexual, fashionista crowd.”

Just as Patrón stands out in the competitive tequila category, he adds, Ultimat will be able to stand out in the vodka category with its new approach.

“By not trying to be something for everyone,” Mr. Cameron says, “the focus on professional groups allows us to connect with them in a way that will stand out from other brands.”

The media choices for the campaign will underscore the targeting effort.

For example, the print ads will run in financial publications like Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, The Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal.

The outdoor ads will appear in financial districts, Mr. Cameron says, in cities like Boston, Chicago, New York and San Francisco.

And the digital and social media elements of the campaign will run in “the professional social networks,” he adds.

In addition, the campaign will also include event marketing.

-The New York Times, October 3, 2011

The only way to find out is to travel the city in a food truck stocked with nothing but Qdoba’s 3-cheese Queso and driven by Joey Dundale, an up-and-coming Chicago comedian with a legitimate love of Queso.

The truck made its debut at Wrigleyville on Aug. 30 and will troll the streets of Chicago through September.

The Queso Quest allows Chicago residents to track Dundale on his adventures and convince him to stop by their neighborhoods.

The Queso Quest Web site shows a Google Maps grid of Chicago, highlighting the places Dundale has visited, the locations of Qdoba restaurants, where the truck is currently located and places where Qdoba coupons can be found. As I write this, there are 30 coupons left at Soldier Field. For those who don’t feel like schlepping to a disclosed location to grab a coupon, if you share one of Dundale’s videos on Facebook, a free coupon awaits and you don’t have to leave the house.

Fans can also suggest food items via Twitter, sending tweets to Dundale’s Twitter handle, @QuesoJoey, and including the hashtag, #queso.

Amalgamated created the campaign and Stink Digital built the Web site. The videos, directed by Jun Diaz, are quite funny.

Dundale pairs queso with another food, then scouts the city for someone with an adventurous palate. In one video, he takes queso and rattlesnake hot dogs to a used car salesman. The combination of foods goes well and Dundale tapes an impromptu car commercial for the dealership. See it here.

Curious about how queso and pickles taste, Dundale crashes a date to find his answer. Hint: Dundale already hates pickles. Watch it here.

When queso is combined with caviar, the food truck is temporarily ditched for something classier: a horse-drawn carriage. But how will the food taste? See it here.

“Queso Quest presented a unique challenge for us,” said Paul Aaron, Director of Interactive for Amalgamated. “We were asked to increase awareness and sales of Qdoba in a nurturing market. Given the budget, our geographic target, and our task at hand, digital felt like the best way in. But beyond that, we wanted to do something that would get people in the Chicago area talking about us.”

The Queso Quest took roughly one month for Amalgamated to develop and set into action.

“Social is a huge part of the Queso Quest,” continued Aaron. “We’re on Twitter at all hours updating people on our locations, and really just engaging and conversing with Joey’s fans. We’re supporting this by doing some paid advertising on Twitter.”

For those with food always on their mind, like me, how did Dundale snare such a fun gig? His obvious love of food. “We wanted someone who was earnest, hard-working, and would take the challenge of topping Chicagoan’s foods with Queso to heart,” concluded Aaron. “Plus he’s got an awkward charm that we found sort of endearing.”

-Media Post, September 12, 2011

Amalgamated, which works for marketers like Ben & Jerry’s, CarMax, Coca-Cola, MSG Networks and Qdoba Mexican Grill, is hiring Brian Martin as chief executive, succeeding Charles Rosen. Mr. Rosen, who was one of the three founders of Amalgamated in 2003, is leaving to pursue what he described as his longtime interests in public affairs and progressive politics.

The arrival of Mr. Martin is to be formally announced on Friday. It comes 11 months after a majority stake in Amalgamated was acquired by Eric Silver, a creative executive who left DDB Worldwide in New York to join Amalgamated as chief creative officer. Mr. Silver continues in that post, and is the majority owner of Amalgamated; Mr. Martin is acquiring an unspecified minority share in the agency as he comes aboard.

Mr. Martin, who is 51, has worked in management posts for agencies that include Deutsch, JWT and what is now Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners. His specialty was business development, helping agencies attract new clients. Mr. Martin also served as chief marketing officer and chief executive of Qtopics, an online polling service.

For the last five years, Mr. Martin has run his own consultancy in New York, Source Martin, where he worked on agency reviews and other assignments for marketers like AT&T, Citibank and MetLife. Source Martin is being dissolved as Mr. Martin arrives at Amalgamated, effective on Sept. 1.

The moves are among a recent reshuffling of the executive suites at agencies that has involved many prominent industry figures. The increasing challenges that agencies face as they seek to keep up with changes in consumer behavior, technology and the economy are leading to more changes in top posts.

“I think it’s the most exciting time in my lifetime to be in this business,” Mr. Martin said in a phone interview. He compared it to “the beginning of the TV era” in the early 1950s and added, “The next 10 years is when the most interesting things are going to get done.”

For that reason, Mr. Martin said, the place to be is “in the middle of the action” — that is, at an agency — rather than on the periphery at someplace like a consultancy.

Joining Amalgamated represents “an opportunity to come into a place where you don’t have to fix things, just turn up the volume,” he added.

Mr. Silver, 44, said he was pleased with results at the agency since his arrival, citing an expansion to about 40 employees, from 34 a year ago; new digital work like a “Fair Tweets” campaign for Ben & Jerry’s on Twitter, which was tied to World Fair Trade Day; and the addition of new clients like CarMax.

Still, “I want us to play on a bigger stage,” Mr. Silver said, “expand, grow bigger.”

Mr. Martin “knows how agencies operate, knows how clients operate,” he added, “and his new-business record at his prior agencies seems pretty impressive.” That should offset any potential drawbacks from Mr. Martin’s never having been a chief executive at an agency, Mr. Silver said.

Mr. Rosen, in a separate phone interview, also endorsed Mr. Martin, calling him “a wonderful addition” to Amalgamated who will “fill in the mortar” around the agency’s “bricks” of its digital, creative and strategic work.

Mr. Rosen, 44, said he would sell his minority stake in Amalgamated as he steps down. He will subsequently serve as a consultant, he added, working with the agency on projects.

Although “I have such mixed emotions about leaving,” Mr. Rosen said, he agreed with an opinion expressed by Mr. Silver at a recent dinner.

“He said, ‘You know, Charles, when you talk about politics, your eyes light up,’ and it made me think,” said Mr. Rosen, who has worked in advertising for 13 years at agencies that in addition to Amalgamated included Cliff Freeman & Partners.

“As I look at the current political climate,” Mr. Rosen said, “the discourse has shifted so far to the right that I felt it was time to take everything I’ve learned in the industry, at Amalgamated, about cultural strategy and branding, and apply it.”

“Look at how shockingly effective the Tea Party was from a marketing perspective,” Mr. Rosen said, adding that he would like to work on “creating an entity that would be a new populist movement” to serve as a liberal counterpoint to the Tea Party.

Mr. Rosen’s departure will leave only one of the three founders of Amalgamated still at the agency: Doug Cameron, the chief strategy officer. (Fiona McBride, president of Amalgamated, joined the agency in 2008.)

The third founder, Jason Gaboriau, was executive creative director before Mr. Silver’s arrival. He sold his stake in Amalgamated to Mr. Silver and left the agency; he is now a co-executive creative director of the Los Angeles office of Crispin Porter & Bogusky, part of MDC Partners.

-The New York Times, August 18, 2011

ES: Something that displays a unique way of thinking. Creative directors at “creative agencies”—and there are not that many—see tons of books every day and, unfortunately, many of them start to look alike. Perhaps because ad schools are teaching with the same methodology or perhaps because ad annuals and award shows tend to all look similar. The truth is even just one brilliant campaign can lead to a hire.

WS: What do you think about including “non-ads” in a book?

ES: Again, it’s subjective. For me personally, “non ads” will go further than any advertising that’s in a portfolio. Again, the job of the applicant is to set themselves apart from the competition by any means necessary. When I was hired at Wieden in Portland, I had a decent book but Dan Wieden hired me based on a comic strip I worked on called “Smear.”

WS: How did you get into the business?

ES: I went to one year of law school and then did a clerkship in Los Angeles. During that job I was reading a statute and just couldn’t digest it. It dawned on me that I had zero aptitude or interest in my chosen profession. So I quit that day and started working on a portfolio. I always loved the idea of being able to create mini-movies. It’s a career perfectly suited for my attention deficit.

I took my first advertising job at a day rate of $25 a day. It’s very hard to get that first gig but, like any profession, it’s on the job that you’ll really learn the craft. So it’s critical that you start out at a great agency with smart mentors who will steer you in the right direction. It’s cliché, but don’t worry about money when you first start out.

WS: Do you have any tips for someone who wants to get into advertising?

ES: I would study all of the advertising annuals you can get your hands on. You should at least be familiar with all the work that has been done previously. Once you’ve done that…then forget it all. Go about the business of charting brilliant new avenues.

-Breaking In, July 6, 2011

where is your hometown?
i grew up in a small town outside of new haven, ct.

where do you currently live?
short hills, nj.

what led you to working as a copywriter when you first started out?
i was in law school and blown away by some nike tv commercials i saw in the early 90s. god, i can’t believe it was that long ago.

who influenced or inspired your career path the most?
the people i met at wieden and kennedy in the mid-90s were amazing. it was truly an honor to work there then. at the time, it felt like getting into harvard or something. dan wieden begged me to write from my heart and his lieutenants lambasted me if i created anything that felt like an “ad.”

what is your most marked characteristic?
i would say my two most distinct qualities are: not caring and caring way too much. kind of an odd dichotomy

what is your favorite aspect the creative process?
my favorite part of the creative process is watching the idea come to life. irrespective of the medium, i love watching words on paper take take flight.

how did you land at amalgamated?
i was faced with a few offers to join big agencies and, ultimately, i thought this might be my last shot to own a small agency. the success rates of small agencies in manhattan are very daunting… but, fuck it, you gotta try, right?

what are your thoughts on digital advertising vs. traditional?
i loathe the terms “digital” and “traditional.” i think the two necessarily overlap. some of the very best digital ideas utilize film and some of the very best traditional ideas use digital elements. for example, i know chalkbot out of wieden was great. but is that digital or traditional?

what’s your biggest passion right now?
figuring out this whole business owner thing.

if you could have another skill what would it be?
patience.

what do you consider your greatest achievement?
the thing that i will always take the most pride in are the people who used to work under me… who are now cds. i’m in no way taking credit for their success, but i am proud to have mentored them in some way.

the bbdo group was amazing and, of course, i fondly think back on the cliff freeman crew: william gelner, dan kelleher, rick ardito, grant smith, jason gaboriau, steve doppelt, ian reichenthal, scott vitrone, kevin roddy, ari weiss, aaron adler, roger camp, richard bullock, reed collins, adam chasnow, rob carducci, etc.

what would you like to do next?
rest.

-Poolhouse, June 21, 2011

Ben & Jerry’s “It’s what’s inside” campaign continues with this spot from Amalgamated called “Chocolate Fudge Brownie,” which shows a miniature fudge brownie bakery being created inside an ice cream tub. The theme of the campaign is to focus not only on what makes up the ice cream but also on the ethically stringent way the company is run, at least according to the proprietors. In this case, the focus is on how Ben & Jerry’s works with small businesses—specifically, Greyston Bakery in Yonkers, N.Y., which has been supplying the fudge brownies that go into flavors like Chocolate Fudge Brownie and Half Baked since 1990. The spot has no voiceover, just a pleasant, soft melody plucked out on strings. As the scene unfolds, the tiny bakery and arts of the city around it are constructed before our eyes. The line at the end, “Packed with brownies that do good,” actually takes a second to figure out but is obvious once you do—they are singing the praises of the company for keeping others employed. Earlier efforts in the campaign have focused on other worthy acts, like the sourcing of ingredients, and it’s not clear that this one works as a celebration of ethically driven business. Don’t all companies keep their suppliers in jobs, too? I am sure the employees of Greyston would feel strongly that this message is a worthy one, but the spot actually works better as a celebration of ice cream, model making, and little-grin-inducing animation.

-Adweek, May 23, 2011

Earlier this week, Ben & Jerry’s launched a Twitter application that squeezes a message and link about World Fair Trade Day in the leftover characters of one’s tweets — i.e., if your tweet is 30 characters, the remaining 110 will contain a message about World Fair Trade Day and a link to more information, like so:

For users, it’s a simple way to spread awareness about a worthy cause, and a clever marketing tactic on Ben & Jerry’s end.

-Mashable, May 6, 2011

- Digital Buzz Blog, May 5, 2011

Aaron will oversee Amalgamated’s team of digital creatives, strategists, and producers, working alongside chief creative officer, Eric Silver. His remit will be to create integrated campaigns for a client roster that includes Ben & Jerry’s, CarMax, Qdoba, Coca-Cola, and MSG Networks.

In an agency release, Aaron said of his appointment, “There are these models out there for digital that have been established by big agencies, but they were all established years ago. The landscape has changed a lot. I truly believe that Amalgamated is uniquely poised to make great digital in the coming decade. It’s a small shop, with some really amazing people. What I like most about it is that there aren’t any weak links on the staff. Across the board, everyone is great at what they do, regardless of title or department.”

-Creativity, Mar 28, 2011

…It wasn’t long thereafter that the first chants of “Mellll-looo! Mellll-looo!” came tumbling out of the rafters, wasn’t long after that that the Knicks were walking off the floor 114-108 winners. It wasn’t time-capsule basketball by any means. But the 19,763 folks who squeezed into every Garden seat didn’t much seem to mind.

They were too busy having a hell of a good time.

“You can drop him anywhere, any playground in the world,” D’Antoni said, “and he’ll drop 27 points.”

Sure, long stretches of the game felt like they’d been plucked out of the West Fourth Street playgrounds, or out of Rucker Park uptown. Anthony and Chauncey Billups were the only newbies who played, but they could master only a fraction of the Knicks’ system in a couple of hours. It had the ring of improve, most of it, Anthony and Stoudemire frequently talking over who should be where, and when. There’ll be some of that. It’s good that the schedule breaks as it does, with this game against the Bucks and then what should be a user-friendly trip to Cleveland tomorrow. But Miami looms on Sunday, and Orlando two days after that, and that’s when this team might really start to look like a bunch of guys introduced to each other five minutes before starting a run.

And even with all of that?

It’s going to be something to see. Chauncey Billups, the overlooked member of the mega-deal, instantly raised eyebrows last night with his 21 points and his eight assists and his 12-for-12 from the line. He’ll help the transition phase. And of course when Douglas plays as he did last night, the Knicks can outscore just about anyone.

But the story, for now, for the coming days and for the foreseeable future, are the 1 and 1A that Stoudemire talked about the other day. Outside, all day, the Garden marquee had already started running interference, welcoming Anthony — capitalizing the last two letters of his surname, colorizing them, so what you saw right after his smiling face on Seventh Avenue was an orange “NY.”

There’s still some kinks left in this show.

But, damn. It’s a hell of a show already.

-New York Post Feb. 24, 2011

Repetition and the reliance on a winning formula were the keys to success in this year’s Super Bowl. And no, we’re not talking about the Green Bay Packers passing game or its tenacious blitzing defensive schemes. We’re talking Doritos and Snickers, this year’s clear winners in the annual YouGov Polimetrix BrandIndex study of the Super Bowl, which measures the brand buzz gained in the days following the game’s very expensive commercials.

Across gender, age and geography — see the charts below — Doritos and Snickers ranked at or near the top of spots increasing positive buzz, according to YouGov’s daily interviews of 5,000 adults from New Year’s Day through the days after the game.

YouGov calculated “before” and “after” scores for consumers’ perceptions of brands, coming up with net scores that represent the percentage of respondents who have heard recent positive buzz about a brand advertised in the Super Bowl minus the percentage of respondents who have heard recent negative buzz about that brand.

The study proves that marketers’ investments — Fox was looking for $2.8 million to $3 million for 30 seconds during the 2011 Super Bowl — can prove incredibly fruitful despite the cost, said Ted Marzilli, global managing director of YouGov’s BrandIndex.

“The Super Bowl is a unique event,” Mr. Marzilli said. “It’s not just the size of the event. It’s live, so people aren’t going to TiVo and fast-forward through the commercials. The commercials are arguably as big if not a bigger part of the event as the game itself. It’s a unique platform and for those who execute well, it’s hard to beat in terms of making a one-time big splash.”

This year’s most-talked about Super Bowl advertiser Groupon, who came under fire for what many deemed to be highly insensitive commercials, was not on the list due to its late entry into the game, which kept YouGov from compiling any pregame data on the brand.

Plenty of people want to know whether Groupon, whose commercial offended plenty of viewers but amplified awareness of the company too, helped or hurt its cause with its Super Bowl commercial. But because it bought time during the game at nearly the last second, unfortunately, YouGov didn’t compile pregame data on Groupon.

But the game’s most talked-about spot both before and after the game, Volkswagen’s Darth Vader-themed commercial, did not generate a significant amount of positive buzz for the brand. Its highest showing was among viewers at least 50 years old, among whom it boosted a positive buzz score of 5.6. Snickers, by comparison, scored a good-buzz boost of 9.9 across all ages.

“Something like the VW ad can be artistically interesting and very attractive and somehow just not stick with consumers, particularly in the environment of a major event that has another 25 or 30 advertisers,” Mr. Marzilli said. “I’m not saying the commercial wasn’t good enough to reverberate with our subjects, but among the folks we queried that ad didn’t make the top 10 in most cases.”

In terms of overall positive change in buzz, 2011′s big winners were Snickers (9.9), Doritos (8.2), Kia (6.9), CarMax (6.7), E-Trade (6.5) and Pepsi Max.

Among men, Doritos (19.9) and Kia (15.0) came out on top while women were more enamored with Snickers (14.8) and CarMax (7.8). And Snickers (29.2), E-Trade (20.9) and CarMax (18.2) were tops in the 18-34 demo.

The game’s biggest losers, the brands whose buzz got worse after the game, were Coca-Cola (-2.0), Bud Light (-2.2), Chevrolet (-2.8), General Motors (-5.8) and Android (-7.8).

With regards to Android, Mr. Marzilli said, “The lesson here might be ‘don’t mess with Apple.’”

-Advertising Age Feb. 16, 2011

Super Bowl XLV on Sunday had a record estimated average viewership of 111 million, according to Nielsen, meaning that several of the commercials are among the most-watched ads in the history of advertising. That makes the post-game assessments perhaps more interesting than usual.

For the most part, the same dozen or so commercials, out of the 60 or so that ran nationally during the game, rise to the top in the various studies. Sometimes, though, some truly “OMG” results are being released. There are now more folks than ever who keep track of the responses to Super Bowl commercials, largely because of all the data that are available from interaction in social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube…

A study by Networked Insights, a social media analytics company, found that Chrysler received the largest “social lift,” which is the percentage increase in “buzz” on Sunday and Monday from a baseline period of Jan. 1 through Feb. 4.

Chrysler rose 377.4 percent, followed by CarMax, up 322.1 percent; Volkswagen, 283.9 percent; Bridgestone tires, 246.2 percent; and Teleflora, 178.1 percent.

- The New York Times Feb. 9, 2011

There was Eminem for Chrysler (and Lipton Brisk Ice Tea). Faith Hill for Teleflora. Justin Bieber and Ozzy Osbourne for Best Buy. P. Diddy for Mercedes. Will.i.am for Chatter.com. Kenny G for Audi. (Deep breath, we’re halfway done.) Joan Rivers for GoDaddy. Kim Kardashian for Skechers. Richard Lewis and Roseanne Barr for Snickers. Timothy Hutton for Groupon. Adrien Brody for Stella Artois. Tony Soprano for the NFL. And, of course, Darth Vader for Volkswagen.

But celebs don’t always make an ad a winner. Here are a few of the biggest, buzziest ads from Super Bowl XLV, some with celebs, some blissfully without.

Carmax
Not a celeb to be seen in this ad. And yet it was certainly one of the big game’s big winners. After all, how often do we get to see an ad with pro wrestlers, trapeze artists, and hippies in a drum circle? Not often enough, that’s for sure!

-Yahoo! Feb. 7, 2011

But thanks to… some solid efforts from Anomaly and Motorola, Amalgamated and CarMax, and Tyler Max and Doritos, the night wasn’t a complete loss.

Before I get on with festivities, I’d like to remind print readers that this review was written prior to the game. (We also exclude movie trailers and ads not bought in the national broadcast.)

CARMAX
AMALGAMATED, NEW YORK
A couple of charming spots make a point about customer service, which has become all the rage again. In “Gas Station,” a 21st-century driver confronted with 1950s customer service is convinced he’s being carjacked. “Kid in a Candy Store” visualizes a number of absurd statements of happiness — geek at a robot convention, hippie in a drum circle, acrobat in a mattress store — leading up to the line “I feel like a customer at CarMax.”

- Advertising Age Feb. 6, 2011

The buy was handled by CarMax’s in-house media team, while the creative will come from its new agency, Amalgamated, New York, which was hired after a review this summer. At the time of the pitch, the shop didn’t know CarMax would be buying national time in the Super Bowl, said Laura Donahue, VP-creative marketing and advertising and an 18-year veteran of the company.

In the past, CarMax ads have starred animals such as monkeys and prairie dogs, and while Ms. Donahue was coy about the creative the spots will showcase on Feb. 6, she did say furry creatures won’t have quite the starring role they had in the past. She did guarantee the work would be funny, but in a “sophisticated” way.

The lead creative working on the ads — being produced as we speak — is Eric Silver, a well-known creative whose career has taken him through Cliff Freeman & Partners, BBDO and DDB before he became chief creative officer and majority owner of Amalgamated in September.

Ms. Donahue took a few moments to chat with Ad Age today from the set to explain how CarMax was lucky to nab some of the last inventory Fox had available in the Super Bowl and why the company’s confident that the media buy — while expensive — will be advantageous to the brand.

Ad Age: When I think of going from a regional Super Bowl presence to having two national in-game spots, it sounds like a big difference in terms of cost. Why is this investment worth it for CarMax, and what’s the overall business goal you’re hoping to achieve via the Super Bowl this year?

Ms. Donahue: The Super Bowl is obviously a great platform for showcasing a brand. We’re interested in providing a broader reach for us to be able to explain our customer-service story, and as we continue to grow into more markets and grow our online presence to make it easier and easier for people to access our products. It’s primarily a brand-building effort.

It definitely didn’t come without good thought about the creative that Amalgamated presented, but once we saw that, we knew the work was worthy of the platform. So it was a combination, a marriage of the creative and the opportunity. The main thing we’re hoping to convey via these two spots is that we’re a great company, we have a consumer offer, and it’s a differentiated offer. What makes it really timely right now is that it’s a really different story about customer service than what’s playing out today in all industries — whether it’s airlines, banks, you name it. Customer service has been suffering as companies have tried in the recession to try and get a foothold on profitability and, unfortunately, that has included charging for services that used to be free.

Ad Age: The inventory for the 2011 Super Bowl sold out the fastest in recent memory, and according to Fox, it was all gone by October. Did you buy your time during the upfronts or later? And spots are said to be going for as much as $3 million. Is that how much you paid?

Ms. Donahue: We bought the time well past October. I think we got some of the last inventory, because I know [Fox was] more than 90% sold out when we got our two spots. Even if we didn’t, we had lots of good opportunities lined up that we could have taken advantage of. I don’t want to address specifically how much we paid as a company, but when we evaluated the two spots, the ancillary benefit — the fact that you’re so talked about, all the buzz you get both online and on TV — that a national presence provides us as an advertiser seems to benefit us versus last year’s standpoint. It’s expensive obviously, but we really liked the value.

Ad Age: Are you concerned that the presence of so many automakers and auto-related companies in the game this time around will make it more difficult for your brand to stand out?

Ms. Donahue: I don’t think so. We love it when automakers can do a good job advertising their product, because it’s great for CarMax; their products are our used products. In terms of the Cars.com of the world, we’re a great business partner with them. It’s a place for consumers to find information about cars, but they’re not a seller. We’re providing all these products to consumers; we’re a retailer.

Ad Age: What can we expect from the creative? Will the spots have animals in them?

Ms. Donahue: No, animals won’t be the centerpiece or theme of the spots. If you’re familiar with the work Eric [Silver] has done on and off the Super Bowl in the past, then you’ll know that they will be humorous and not disappoint. Both of them have a very sophisticated humor, though, not a gag-type humor, if you know what I mean. They’re definitely not cookie cutters of one another; the two spots are two very different approaches to the same theme of our customer service and customer experience, and providing our customers what they want — great quality, great pricing and an overall low pressure environment.

Ad Age: Besides your own, what Super Bowl ad or ads are you most excited to see on Feb. 7?

Ms. Donahue: I don’t know. We’ve been so busy making ours that I haven’t had the time to see what everyone else is doing. I love watching the game for the ads, though. And I’m really looking forward to seeing what will happen this year.

-Advertising Age Jan. 13, 2011

Until now, the three admen who set up Amalgamated in 2003 all had equal stakes in the shop. As part of the changes, co-founder and executive creative director Jason Gaboriau — who plans to leave the agency to pursue a creative position at a larger shop — has sold his stake to Mr. Silver. The two other co-founders, Director of Strategy Doug Cameron and CEO Charles Rosen, have also sold portions of their stakes to Mr. Silver, though both maintain minority interest and are remaining with the agency in their current titles.

“I wasn’t having that much fun at my last job, and when you’re not having fun, you’re not doing your best work,” Mr. Silver told Ad Age. “As you climb the corporate ladder, it’s easy to lose sight of why you got into the industry to start, and this is as excited as I’ve felt in a long time.” He added that he’s looking forward to “an environment where I work with partners I like and trust and where bullshit is put aside” to focus on the creative product.

Most recently, Mr. Silver was at DDB, New York. He jumped there in 2009 after a five-year stint at sibling agency BBDO under David Lubars, but the move to DDB proved short-lived and yielded little in the way of interesting work, especially compared to Mr. Silver’s award-winning campaigns for FedEx and Monster. In late July, Matt Eastwood was imported from DDB, Australia, to step in for Mr. Silver. DDB North America President Dick Rogers told Ad Age at the time: “Eric will be taking on creative responsibilities for DDB’s business-development efforts in the U.S., working with U.S. Director of New Business Development Brandon Snow.” DDB representatives couldn’t be reached by press time to comment on Mr. Silver’s exit.

Mr. Silver’s move to Amalgamated reunites a team that worked together for five years at Cliff Freeman in the late 1990s, producing work for clients such as Mike’s Hard Lemonade, Fox Sports and Budget Car Rental and other brands. “All of us spent quite a bit of time together at Cliff Freeman,” said Amalgamated CEO Mr. Rosen. “Eric quit and 15 minutes later, Doug, Jason and I went into Cliff’s office; the three of us left to go start a small agency and he left to take on big-agency opportunities. We all chose the thing we needed to choose at that time. In that seven or eight years, Doug and I learned what we’d need to do to take the agency to the next level to attract a certain caliber of clients, and Eric became very, very ready to do his own thing, but it took him that journey to be ready to do that.”

Mr. Silver has already contributed to bringing in a new client for Amalgamated; he helped lead a pitch for used car company CarMax in which it last week prevailed as the winner. That account is a boost for the shop, which earlier this year lost longtime client Mike’s Hard Lemonade to Arnold, New York after a review. In addition to Carmax, the agency’s current client roster includes Unilever’s Ben & Jerry’s brand, Coca-Cola Co., Qdoba Mexican Grill and MSG Networks.

For now Mr. Gaboriau is still at Amalgamated, shooting campaigns. While he hasn’t secured a new position yet, he has voiced intentions to go work for a larger agency in a creative-director or executive- creative-director capacity. In the past, Mr. Gaboriau has spent time at shops such as Lowe & Partners and Berlin Cameron & Partners working on brands such as Mercedes-Benz, the NBA and ESPN.

Amalgamated currently numbers just 34 staffers. While it’s planning to make a few hires to service new accounts, it isn’t planning to open any other offices in the near term, Mr. Rosen said.

The departure of Mr. Silver — who has also worked with Wieden & Kennedy and TBWA/Chiat/Day, and briefly was a writer for “The Late Show with David Letterman” — to a tiny shop continues a trend that’s seen major changes for longtime creative fixtures at major agencies, including Ty Montague, Gerry Graf, Alex Bogusky and Eric Hirshberg this year. “I had offers to be a CCO at other big agencies, but this seemed like a window in time to join an independent agency with partners I’ve known and liked for a long time,” said Mr. Silver.

Asked what he thinks is fueling the departure of so many well-known creatives from big agencies or the industry in general, he said: “I suspect we’re seeing more and more creatives from big agencies either leave advertising altogether or opt for a smaller structure in an effort to use more of the right side of their brain: to get closer to the work, roll up their sleeves and really focus on what the client needs.”

-Advertising Age Sept. 7, 2010