Transparency
>Even before the financial crisis, brands have learned the hard way that having transparency imposed on you by Internet users is a bad thing. Dominos suffered recently when two rogue employees posted a video on YouTube of themselves hawking loogies onto pizzas. Amazon was caught by consumers trying to lump GLBT literature in with adult material. Painkiller Motrin launched a critique of carrying babies in slings, causing outrage amongst mothers. All spread like wildfire over the web and elicited hasty public apologies.

Market research showing that people trust their peers more than almost anything else coincided neatly with the explosion of social media. That’s led to brands working ever harder to get into that space and in some cases attain the Holy Grail of communication: getting the public to become their vocal brand advocates. Skittles had a takeover of its home page, aggregating content from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Flickr. GE meanwhile tasked The Barbarian Group with cataloguing its drive to come up with a marketing campaign on GEadventure.com. adidas had NBA player Dwight Howard document his All Star Weekend with blog posts, Flickr photos, tweets and YouTube videos, and promises more insider info with new enterprise adidas.TV. Panasonic asked influential bloggers to cover the Consumer Electronic Show for them, with no editorial oversight.

Technically, that desire to peek behind the curtain of ad making carried on with crafty in-camera spots: Sony “Zoetrope”, Nokia “Maps”, Honda “Grooves” and Smart “Junk Ballet” to name but a very few all provided an inside look into the process. Honda and T-Mobile meanwhile got real, creating live-event spots with a three-minute live skydive, “Difficult Is Worth Doing”, and a massive flash mob in London’s Liverpool Street Station, “Dance”. The drive for authenticity saw documentary-style ads bloom, led by the success of Henry-Alex Rubin’s Whopper Freakout, with efforts from him for Microsoft and Office Max. Virals like Tracfone “Microwave” and Activision Guitar Hero “Bike Hero” showed that the genre had grown up, going from shady agency sleights of hand to subtly branded online films. Microsoft’s massive brand campaign meanwhile tackled Apple head on, taking the cooler brand’s simplistic human ciphers and replacing them with the real thing: everyday PC users from around the world.

Perception is reality, which has now moved from advertising to our peers, empowered by social media. Watch out for more transparency, accountability, social media and authenticity as Google and not advertising becomes the leading brand barometer. Q

Music Marketing
>One promising consequence of the economic crisis is a slowly developing creative courtship between bands and advertising agencies. It’s no secret both record labels and advertisers have been trying to reinvent their business models in response to consumers high-tailing it to the Internet, so it seems natural for creative minds in both spheres to find common ground.

When former T.A.G. creative director Geoff Edwards joined forces with Mauro Alencar to start Fancy, the duo made it part of their mandate to court the music industry. Edwards already had a taste of music video directing: while at T.A.G., he created and co-directed an interactive music video with HSI Productions director Diane Martel for Pharrell Williams’ band N.E.R.D. (pictured).

“We think there’s a really good opportunity for someone to step in and help new bands and help the studios that work with these bands,” Alencar told Boards in February. “Help brand them correctly, help sell their product differently in a way that people connect to.”

By early 2009, familiar names from the advertising world were turning up in the credits for major label marketing pushes: London agency Work Club and B-Reel released a series of films promoting Dido’s new record, LA-based Omelet and Chris Robinson’s Robot Films launched an ARG-style campaign for rapper Eminem via Twitter, and BBH, New York partnered with Warner Music to launch Oasis’ new album in September via New York City street buskers.
Oasis’ Dig Out Your Soul campaign also cleverly incorporated one of BBH’s clients: the city of New York, which helped promote the one-day event as a tourist draw. The agency has since picked up top honors at the ANDY Awards, The One Show and the Clios for its effort.

A big challenge for creative directors interested in meeting their favorite rock stars will be the approach. Fortunately, a huge segment of Adland’s population is experienced in dealing with entertainment egos: production companies. Many commercial producers and directors are veteran music video makers with deep connections in the music business. With music video budgets dwindling, they should be positioning themselves as key creative partners in bringing these two worlds together. Q

Visualization
>Generative art in advertising was a big trend in 2009, with brands tapping experimental design companies and tech-minded artists to create unique and fleeting visualizations. The most high-profile branded excursion into generative art was Wieden+Kennedy’s Beautiful Connections campaign for the launch of Nokia’s e71 smartphone, which married minimal design with colorfully abstract app art by Marius Watz, Marcus Wendt, MoreSoon, Universal Everything (UE) and SHFT.

Sheffield-based UE (recently signed to Passion Pictures) was also behind two high-profile generative art projects in ’08: Advanced Beauty, a series of aurally-generated sound sculptures created using open-source programming language Processing, and Forever a winter video wall installation at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London that endlessly generated visuals to a soundtrack.