International Marketer’s Blog

While Pepsi has dropped its Super Bowl TV advertisement slot for the first time in 23 years, preferring to create dialogue through its www.RefreshEverything.com digital campaign instead, a reminder of the influence the Super Bowl slot can have has emerged in new research from Nielsen IAG.

They reveal in Ad Age that a Super Bowl advertisement for Budweiser – ‘Clydesdale fetches a large tree branch‘ – achieved the highest likeability score of all US TV ads in 2009.

Another in the Budweiser series –  ’Clydesdale travels to find Daisy’ –  was highest in the most-recalled category, just ahead of their Super Bowl special.

Lowe worldwide chief creative officer Matthew Bull has pulled together a group of global creative directors centrally based at Lowe’s New York office in a bid to ratchet up creative excellence.

The group is made up of four creative directors who will work on new business pitches and briefs from existing clients. In addition to Bull, the team includes a digital specialist, an art director and two writers.

The digital specialist is Tom Markham, brought in from Lowe Sydney who has worked on Vodafone and MTV. The art director is Raj Kamble, who previously handled Unilever’s Degree and Aruba at Lowe’s New York office and Patrick McClelland, who also has worked on Unilever business.

The fourth member of the ‘flying squad’ – as the group is known internally is yet to be recruited.”All these guys show flexibility. They all have strong ideas that can be produced” across all media channels, Bull said, talking to Ad Age.

The move reflects Bull’s desire to “get my hands dirty” in his international role, which he reassumed in the spring of 2009 after three years as chairman of Lowe Bull, his namesake South African agency. “I want to lead by example, to do and not just talk,” he said. (more…)

Sony has ended it’s seven year relationship with Fallon and appointed relative newcomer Anomaly to handle its £50 million global advertising account.

Anomaly will now serve as Sony Electronics’ key strategic and creative partner, sharing the account between its UK and US offices.

“We are looking for great strategic thinking that leads to great creative execution,”  said Ben Moore, Sony Europe’s vice-president of communications in Campaign.

“To get there we were looking for a new advertising model that puts brilliant people, who instinctively understand digital but who have an agnostic view, at the heart of our approach. Anomaly will give us that.”

Established in 2004, Anomaly has been described in Business Week as “eschewing the traditional client/agency relationship” and in Campaign as “a response to the notion that old agency models are all broken” (more…)

If there’s one thing in the mind of the international marketer at the moment it’s efficiency. As I make my way around marketing strategy meetings via the airports of Europe, it’s always the issues of reducing wastage and streamlining processes that are top of the agenda.

Management of the creative development process is a key area of discussion. Developing creative centrally that can be rolled out across many country markets is no easy task. Even before you get to the part where you’re translating and implementing multiple executions, the first hurdle is often ensuring that the in-country marketing departments across the globe buy in to the central creative strategy and direction.

More often than not, country offices fight the one size fits all creative and they recreate/repurpose campaigns via their own local agencies and suppliers, duplicating effort and cost and most importantly, moving away from the global brand message. If this happens all around the globe, the costs mount up exponentially. (more…)

Publicis has appointed Olivier Altmann as global creative director, centralising global creative management through its flagship Paris office, Publicis Conseil.

Previously,  creative duties were arranged to run autonomously in each country market with the Paris office operating as a centre of excellence.

Altmann will now oversee global creative work for Publicis’s internationally aligned customers and is expected to spend at least 50% of his time on global business.

The network has not had a chief creative officer since Dave Droga stepped down from the role in January 2006.

The decision is in line with the aim of Richard Pinder, the chief operating officer, to have Publicis become a top-five ranked creative network in the Gunn Repoort by 2012. (more…)