I doubt wether the newschannel Euronews will ever become serious competition for CNN or, say, BBC world, but I’ve been catching glimpse of it on a regular basis lately. It sort of helped me through my days while lying on the sofa with the flu. One of the most memorable things I’ve seen on Euronews is not a news item, but a commercial. And to answer the question; how cool can aviation be: as cool as Finnair (Okay, I admit it’s an awful joke). I actually did have a couple of good flying experiences with Finnair, but right now I’ll only discuss the commercial, which is fantastic bit of 3D animation that would not embarrass the best animators at Pixar, Disney or Sony.

The plot outline: we see a young reindeer looking up at the night sky. A light flies towards the horizon. The reindeer follows it. We then see it is threatened by approaching wolves, however… the light is guiding it to it’s mother and family. The reindeer is safe. You’d imagine that the light you saw was Santa’s sled… but it turns out to be a Finnair plane that lands safely on an icy runway. The payoff: Finnair, the official airline of Santa Claus. How can anyone beat that? This is the moment where every poorly talented advertising creative that was not involved in the making of this commercial will argue that this is actually not a good commercial at all. Awful concept, great execution, because: what does it say about the Finnair brand? How does this contribute to the Finnair positioning, or secure their marketsegment against it’s competitors?

If you’re an advertising creative and you have no such emotions; you’re either talented or you don’t have as much of an ego as the average creative (or both). No one flies as much, as reliable and as on time as Santa Claus and why would that be? Combine that with no endorser evokes as much positive feelings as Santa and the beautiful hartwarming script and brilliant execution and, yes: we have a winner. However this spot will undoubtedly never win any advertising awards, because it’s not edgy, not trendy and not sexy. In Holland we have a saying: ‘Good wine has no need for a halo’ and this spot proves it. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to book a skiing holiday in Finland.

P.s. Don’t enter the competition. That would really reduce my chances of winning.

Two trendy looking guys accompanied by a Voguely dressed young woman entered the office. Blackberries were placed on the table (not switched off, obviously), vintage jackets taken off and placed over a chair subtly revealing an mp3 player of some sort. They sat down, brought their own bottled water and plugged a macBook into their portable beamer to show us their animated presentation on a wall. Indeed, webdesigners were in the house. Intimidatingly cool as they looked (especially to us, office dwellers) we could all tell there wasn’t much to their story. We wondered; have they even read the briefing? It was quite clear that these eWizards tried to dazzle us with so many moving images, cool looking design and eLingo so that we would forget that there proposal had nothing to do with our briefing whatsoever. We had invited some of the leading webdesign agencies around and they all showed this same pattern; assuming that we -the client- had (1) never heard of community sites, p2p networks or even IP adresses, (2) we would believe them that you can only communicate with teenagers through internet or mobile phones and (3) making an image move is pure sourcery to us. Hm, well.

Obviously, we signed a contract with the -seemingly- most suitable company for us. And, as is the case when you’re building a campaign, at first everything moved along smoothly. As the deadline approached we were assured that our website would be ready on time. At least; if we could deliver the needed texts they were sure they told us about. Well, we couldn’t remember, but “hey, we’re in this together“. So we wrote the texts, worked on the graphs and on friday night after a week of 14 hour working days we sent all that was required of us so the cool guys (who always work, obviously) could get our website ready on monday… the deadline. Alas. On monday morning ’something’ was on the requested url… but it wasn’t our website… Was it? Well actually it was. But it was just half of it. Accompanied by a ‘website under construction, more information will be here soon’ sort of message.

Of the half of the information that was there, about half was old, incomplete or outdated information. Addresses were wrong, links were dead, pictures didn’t load and there were typos everywhere. When we asked the fashionably speaking woman about this we were told not to worry. ‘Everything will be fixed soon’. The ‘fixing’ part took about two weeks… And for several more weeks, different kinds of errors kept popping up.
We weren’t all too pleased.

We also were in need of an online mediastrategy, so we hired the agency recommended by the cool guys. The mediastrategy was nothing spectacularly creative, but it all looked solid and they would be doing the buying and traffic as well. Banners would go from the cool guys straight to the mediaguys who would then see to it that everything was distributed and put online. We, the client, could direct our attention elsewhere. Which, unfortunately, we did. Guess what happened when the mediacampaign began? You’re right; nothing. No visitors whatsoever. The expected -based on previous experience- 3000 visitors a day were a meagre 300 a day. Banners weren’t placed, contracts we had to sign weren’t e-mailed through, plannings were changed without informing us… basically: they fucked up. Our account person as well as our replacement account person somehow disappeared from the company, colleagues could not be reached. So again, we lost several good campaigning weeks (which could also be a good thing, the site was still shit anyway) but in the end someone who claimed to working for the mediaagency got in touch and told us he would put matters right. Proposed solution: All the banners that weren’t placed during the campaign weeks, will still be placed now. He actually got annoyed with us when we told him that we thought that this wasn’t much of a solution at all.

I’ve been asking around a bit. I’ve spoken to several former collaegues that work with these webdesign agencies (or cross media marketingcommunication consultancy firms…..) and online mediastrategy companies, I’ve spoken to advertising creatives, even account people (yes really), I’ve spoken to mediaplanners that work at the traditional companies. Turns out this isn’t an unique story at all. the cool ‘webpeople’ have absolutely no understanding what an agreement or a deadline means. I you ask for a site on a set date, you will get something that resembles a site, somewhere a couple of weeks after the decided date. They will tell you that a webvisitor four weeks after the desired date is the same thing as a visitor actually during the crossmedia campaign. And these people think they can get away with it!

Since I make more use of the internet as a … erm… ‘civilian’ sounds like a good word, than as a ‘professional’, I am actually quit happy with this. Anarchy still rules the web and if you want to build a success online it is still ‘every (wo)man for her/himself. One of the words I hated most when worked in advertising was ‘accountability’ but the cool webguys and gals could do with some. It is annoying that you work very hard for something and these people get paid to fuck it all up. For our next campaign, we are definitely hiring some cool freelance creatives. We might still fuck the strategy and mediaplanning up, but at least we’ll have fucked it up ourselves.

*note: above story is based on reality, but is no accurate account. Matters were actually a lot worse.

I sometimes meet with and talk to media account managers and marketing professionals. Some of which are actually nice people (you never know who reads this… I need an escape), but a lot of them… well. Anyway; they’ve discovered something really cool: As a company you no longer should want to build your own subculture, it is much more efficient and effective to join an existing, autonomous cult. And it gets even better! They’ve come up with a really groovy sounding name for this: tribalization! Cool huh? And all the big brand names are into it now, not just Nike and Adidas (even though those darn sportsbrands are always on the forefront of this new developments) but banks, supermarkets and cereals too. Everybody’s doing it! (doing what? The turkey trot!) The idea is that if you join a very popular ‘tribe’ as a brand, all the tribe members will think: now that’s one cool brand… let’s buy its stuff. Makes sense doesn’t it?

Actually, no: it doesn’t. First of all; if the combination between your business and the tribe doesn’t make sense, don’t bother the good tribesmen and women with your bullshit. If you’re Exxon, don’t try and join an environmentalist tribe. This is something that most marketeers understand. Unfortunately, the second reason why it doesn’t make sense is a lot less well understood. If you don’t get the rules of the tribe, no matter how good the fit in your ‘pigeonholing matrix’ is: if you don’t get what the tribe is about: stay away. This second rule is especially frequently violated on the internet. And not just by small companies. We’ve seen companies like Toyota and ABN AMRO on Secondlife… why god why? even if all Toyota drivers are total Secondlife geeks they still do not need you there. What on earth could you have to offer? The corporate islands are all completely deserted. A brands advertise themselves as complete losers.
Besides Secondlife, all the companies now want profile pages on social networking sites, yet they don’t understand what those sites are about. How do you behave, what’s okay and what’s not? Most companies don’t know how to ‘use’ internet communities, what to do with them. Why would I want Coca Cola in my ‘contacts list’ if all they’re doing is send me advertising and spam? Most online brands just annoy their potential customers. So do yourself a favor, stay away. Please.

If you’re a bank, do bank things. If you’re an insurance company, go and insure. Be boring, yet reliable. Even if you’re desired customers are cool, trendy internetteens, don’t go and follow them around to embarrass everybody. Just be yourself.