Conferencia Anual APAN: Visão de Futuro with Barry Wacksman from R/GA

Last week, at the 7th i had the extraordinary opportunity to attend to APAN's annual conference "Visão de Futuro" that brought to portugal one of  best specialists in digital marketing, Barry Wacksman, Chief Growth Officer da R/GA, which is one biggest digital agencies of the USA and the world.

Also, i was presented with some other fantastic testimonials about the the new paradigm of brand communication and the impact of the digital in the traditional advertising from Anthony Gibson, president of the group Publicis, Filipe Bonina, marketing director of Coca-Cola Portugal, Miguel Figueiredo, founder and CEO of Excentric and André Freire de Andrade, CEO of Aegis Media Ibéria.

The big picture from R/GA was surrounding this idea: "We believe that the marketing industry is driven by a simple formula. The technology transforms consumers and customers turn the agencies.The agencies that focus on changing perceptions will eventually settle down, while the agencies that create transformative experiences that change customer behavior, are rising. For many reasons, we believe that R/GA who is leading this transformation of the industry and represents an entirely new agency model, for our customers, we are the main partner in the digital arena."

Now in the interest of sharing ill explain this new model that most companies will have to apply in order to avoid failure. Instead of creating more and more totally different products in a horizontal strategy, the future lies on creating a set of products that rely on each other to produce value.

Let me explain this in a more suitable way, with a cliché example but that is in fact the best one, Apple. They first started with mackintosh, which in the beginning wasn't the first choice when buying a computer since it was more directed for professional work. 

However, one day Apple launched iTunes, a piece of software that revolutioned the industry of music as it allowed anyone to freely digitize music and burn cds at their liking with different songs. After that, the iPod came out and BAM! everyone went out there and bought one and with which program would you pass the musics to it? exactly.. iTunes. This goes on, whit iPad, iPhone, etc.

All these products syncronise and are used together to create value. In order to have the full experience you need all of the products and there we can find the secret for success in the coming future. Every company will need to get on board of this new strategy, for example even a car brand like BMW is already doing so, with new services for the costumer, on board technology to maximize the experience of driving and so on.

Ill end here with my part of the testimonial with a word of appreciation for these, lets call them "gurus" that clearly shared a huge amount of knowledge and insight about the future. Thank you.

Phones 4U: Haunt Zombie Ad

By now, your getting the idea that im a sucker for matters related with zombies and with October, comes Halloween and along side zombie movies and other stuff.

So to be on top of whats new, here we have a very entertaining ad around that theme to promote an online store "Phones 4u" and its incredible offers.

Virgin Radio: Louder is Better

What an extremely cool and funny way to advertise your radio brand. Virgin Radio, took things right down to where most people nowadays listen to music, Youtube!

We've seen some different things on Youtube that lets us to play with the layouts and stuff and here Virgin allows everyone to turn up the volume and see the craziness that happens. Its simple, funny and effective.

Start by this video that every teen can surely relate to. Its just to understand the concept and at the end choose one of the other two available where you can then mess around with the volume.

STA Travel Australia: Move

Sorry for the delay with a new post, but here we are again lady's and gentleman.

Today we have a very good film to promote the STA Travel, that shows the enormous variety of places you can visit and actually gives you the itch to travell.

However, despite that extraordinary concept would say that it lacks a bit of creativity if you for example compare it to something like this that was made very similar:

Google Maps: Know Before You Go

Here we have another extraordinary thing brought to us by Google. 

This time, we are shown a very strong print ad where we have a description by one "Hotel La Famille" accompanied by a very exquisite photo where everything around seems lovely, but when in reality if you use Google Maps you can check how everything really is in real time, especially before you go there.. with your family!

Touché Google, touché!

Google: Gives

Google Gives is an incredible service to encourage people to respond to emails that usually they wouldn't.

Google turned the act of responding to a simple email in a charitable act by letting users attach a donation to it and when the recipient responds to the email, the donation is made.

Brilliant idea that makes every one feel good. You get your reply and the others also can feel well for helping, or the other way around. Perfect!

China Environmental Protection Foundation: The Moment When Ozone Disappears

Today i found out of this incredible campaign from the China Environmental Protection Foundation about the problem of the ozone layer of our planet.

It consists on extremely visual and shocking white t-shirt in order to demonstrate the effect of the loss of the ozone layer which results in strong ultraviolet radiation skin burning or even causing skin cancer and other illnesses.

I think the idea is brilliant as its able to capture loads of attention to this problem that is getting worse by the second and hopefully they'll be able to support this campaign with other creative ideas such as this.