Busy... You guys take Friday off? I need to convince my DVD distributor to hire Campfire for the DVD release this fall... I guess I'll have to wait 'til monday...
- Paul Krik
Busy... Hey, Megan, why thank you! Where are you based?
- Steve
Busy... As one of my favorite companies to watch, I can't be any more excited to see the new campaigns and ideas that come out of the agency. Each campaign is unique and innovative in...
While I was busy attending too many Social Media conferences, 30 or more people here at Campfire were busy doing real work for real clients.
So, as you may notice, it’s been weeks since the last post to this site (to lessen the demand for frequent posts, we’re developing a new blog-lite site; it’s just that we’ve been too busy to finish the new site. Sigh.)
Meanwhile, here’s a bit of what’s going on at Campfire over the past month or so:
• Our True Blood campaign for HBO: working with Gawker as a partner we created a campaign that sparked a lot of controversy and a whole lot of attention to the show. In fact the launch of the second season was the highest scoring HBO show (second only to the final Sopranos’ episode). If you want to know a bit about what we did, check out this excellent article in the Financial Times.
• Verizon’s FiOS: We’re currently shooting two new episodes of this tech makeover show for the East Coast regions of Verizon; it’s now called My FiOS Home: Ultimate Upgrade and focuses on a competition to win a high tech makeover. Overall we’ve created 12 episodes, 10 huge live events, a rich web experience. And the infamous Twittering Teddy DIY. Watch for the new shows in the Fall.
• Terminator Salvation: We successfully completed our campaign for Warner Brothers and the McG-directed fourth Terminator movie, involving a complex backstory which used, among many other tactics, comic book stores across the US, and leading up to the release of the film. Check out this piece on summer movies in iMedia’s publication highlighting our campaign.
• The Dr Pepper/Snapple group: We’ve been developing a whole series of marketing efforts for a variety of Dr Pepper/Snapple group brands, including Snapple, Canada Dry, Venom, and Mixers.
• Shark Week. We are about to launch a new campaign for Discovery Channel’s much beloved Shark Week. Can’t really say anything about it, except it’s really, really amazing.
• We are also working on early stage plans for ten other clients, none of who can be named, as our competitors watch our site.
• Meanwhile we’ve made some new hires, including Benita Conde as Director of Project Management, Jackie Guerra as a writer, and Lauren Bozarth as an account executive.
• And our Executive Creative Director, Mike Monello, was just picked as one of the iMedia 25, Internet Marketing Leaders and Innovators.
My goal is to get the word of Campfire’s methodology out there, but also to assess industry practice during a period of major flux. So this week I’m going to ad:tech in San Francisco, followed by a 4A’s event, and a brief stop at iMedia’s Driving Interactive.
Already I‘ve seen one question raised repeatedly: the proper use of media in “new” marketing campaigns. In a way this is the old issue of separation of media planning and buying from creative, but now with a different spin.
Get this: I’m at the famous one-minute dating event at the iMedia Breakthrough in Fort Meyers. We, client and agency participants, are sitting at a long, long U-shaped table, and for one minute, “providers” pitch us on their services and then move down the line. Most of these providers are ad networks.
I don’t know what to say to them. Although Campfire works with some networks (Federated for instance), we largely rely on “Earned Media”. We tell people stories, they adopt and adapt them, and tell new versions to their friends. (Hence the name Campfire.)
At another session I sat through a couple of presentations about video distribution from two companies: BBE and DBG. These presentations, involving the syndication of branded video to millions of on-line viewers, are as impressive as hell — but don’t include any “social media”, i.e., the structure in not about retelling; it’s “Bought Media”.
Finally at the IAB, portals like MSN and Yahoo showed off marketing programs relying on their own platforms and a captive, or captivated, audience. “Owned Media.”
Randall Rothenberg, CEO and chief agitator at the IAB, and I have proposed that we focus on this issue via the IAB’s Agency Advisory Committee, which includes Campfire, Crispin, Droga5, AKQA, Ogilvy, Barbarian, and a group of media agencies. This should lead to a fascinating session, as each of us approaches media based on agency’s origins and staffing.
Meanwhile, think about this: does your company rely on just one leg of the Bought, Owned and Earned stool? And wouldn’t it be great if we found the right magic combination of these different approaches? And by what standard would we judge the best combo? ROI? The silver bullet of an engagement metric? Sales?
David Brooks, writing in the New York Times about the financial meltdown yesterday, put forth two possible theories as to how bankers got it so wrong: “either Greed or Stupidity.” And, after weighing both sides, came down on the side of Stupidity.
“To me, the most interesting factor is the way instant communications lead to unconscious conformity. You’d think that with thousands of ideas flowing at light speed around the world, you’d get a diversity of viewpoints and expectations that would balance one another out. Instead, global communications seem to have led people in the financial subculture to adopt homogenous viewpoints. They made the same one-way bets at the same time.”
This raises a lot of interesting issues about our use of tools like Twitter, Facebook status updates, instant messaging, mobile Skype, etc. — and how they may distort our cultural perspective. While we are not trading trillions of dollars in world markets, we are feeding into mass culture, and then measuring it.
Are we participating in a digital/marketing echo chamber? Did the potent combination of SxSW and Twittercreate a false sense of our own importance?
About a year ago we posted a short piece about the origins of Twitter. Since then not only has Twitter become more popular (and, boy, is that an understatement!) but people have continued to post comments to our site and the original site about the first sketches of Twitter design by Jack Dorsey. Here’s our original post:
Among the recent comments, here’s something from just a couple weeks ago:
lassi.kurkijarvi says:
“This is makes an excellent case for preserving the stuff you do: document the ideas, moments of inspiration and when one day you notice that you’ve made another Twitter, you’ll have historic items such as this to show for it as well. ”
Ford has an excellent interactive campaign up and running for the 2010 Fiesta — called the “Fiesta Movement”. Ford is asking “Millennials” to submit videos pitching themselves as tester/bloggers for the new Fiesta (which won’t launch for a year). They’ll give the winning entrants a Fiesta for six months, asking them to post videos to all their social media platforms and to Ford’s Fiesta Movement microsite.
What’s great is Ford is reaching out to influentials among their target looking for feedback — although it’s not clear how much they can alter the design of the car before releasing it in a year. Car companies, particularly American ones, are notoriously slow to institute design changes.
Mediapost talked to Sam De La Garza (”SDLG”), Ford’s small car marketing manager, and Scott Monty (”SM”), manager of digital and multimedia communications, about how they were picking winners. Their answers reflect significant social media culture consciousness:
“Q: How do you decide on who these 100 “agents” are who get the Fiesta for six months?
“SM: Part of it is their demonstrated enthusiasm for and interest in the program, to see if they are into the whole thing. Second is demonstrating that they have an online audience they can share it with. They may be regular folks who have blogs, would-be journalists or part-time auto bloggers.
“SDLG: I think as we see the caliber of people [applying], we have changed our ideas a bit on the fly. Our original thoughts were around trying to use filters and criteria like: “Do you have over 500 friends on Facebook?,” “Do you have over 1,000 followers on Twitter or 250,000 subscribers on YouTube?” But these are basic thresholds; the next step is seeing what type of “pull” they get from their application videos on YouTube, which shows they can be a valuable agent for us.”
So Ford is trying to develop new ways of interacting with their audience, the lack of which in my opinion (IMHO), was one of the contributing factors to Detroit getting it so wrong over the past number of years. Ever since the destruction of Detroit as a city, designers and marketers for the big American auto companies have worked out of distant suburban industrial parks without any real consumer connection or audience feedback.
In a geographical sense white flight killed designer’s interactions and instincts. This new campaign is another way to reconnect with their target and with America.
Steve Jobs simple but amazing 2005 Stanford commencement speech touched on issues that are very much alive today: getting fired, being poor, pursuing innovation, inventing the Mac, Windows, the Whole Earth Catalogue as the first Google, and his dictum, “stay hungry, stay foolish”. And discovering he had cancer and being told he had only months to live.
Of special importance to me is his telling the story of learning calligraphy at Reed College (from the great Lloyd Reynalds, who I also studied under), and applying the art of calligraphy to the first Mac, which then “was copied by Windows.” From Jobs commencement speech:
“Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
“None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”
I wrote about calligraphy and Reed a while ago in a note on the internal Campfire Hub:
When I was in college at Reed (back before they invented the electric light bulb) there was an electrifying art history professor, Lloyd Reynolds. His class covered the history of art, education, what he called “significant gesture” in great art, Zen Buddhism — it was the first introduction I had to many of these subjects. The class was always mobbed and nearly impossible to get into, despite the fact that Reynolds was an incredible curmudgeon who would regularly attack his students as idiots.
The reason I bring this up is Reynolds was a world class calligrapher who insisted all his students buy an Osmoroid pen and learn Italic Cursive. For him intellectual work had to be intimately associated with craft and work.
For forty years (1948 on) Reynolds had every student at Reed writing in Italic cursive and talking about the drawings of William Blake. His lectures are still vivid in my memory. And among the digital luminaries he inspired are Steve Jobs, Howard Rheingold (Wired, etc.), Peter Norton (Norton Utilities), Sumner Stone (who for Adobe and then his own company developed many of the digital typefaces we use today), etc. Here are a couple quotes from a longer piece about Reynolds:
“The hands think,” said Reynolds. “The nervous system is continuous, so how can we say that the hands don’t think? Often the conscious mind merely interferes with the hand. Students learning to write reach a certain proficiency, and their eyes, like a police matron, take all the freedom away from the rhythmical movement. I tell them not to watch grimly because the eye is a cold judge that frustrates spontaneity. Let your hand move!
“To think that art has two parts, one intellectual and the other servile . . . no. It’s a false dichotomy, absolutely false. Universities from the Renaissance on have put criticism above work, above action. They claim that there is the thinking or philosophical man and the man of action—that the two cannot be in one person. This is one of the worst heresies in Western civilization. It accounts for much of the mess that we’re in, in colleges and universities, where if a work is rational and analytical, it’s respectable.”
We chose the name Campfire for a couple reasons: (1) one of Campfire’s core skills is telling stories — and you tell stories around the campfire; and (2) the real power of the campfire is the way one night’s audience becomes the next night’s storytellers, passing tales along.
Anyway a couple years ago I set a Google alert for the word Campfire. The alerts that come in each day are frequently for Campfires other than our own. Today’s were particularly interesting, ranging from profoundly disturbing to ordinary and mundane, so I thought I’d pass them along.
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Posterity to lose out on Zimbabwe’s wildlife heritage
“Recent media reports proclaim that the desperate government of Robert Mugabe is busy slaughtering elephant for its starving soldiers in the barracks and one wonders if these reports are true, how much impact the operation would have on the conservation efforts of environmentalist and animal rights activists…
“A Community Areas Management Programme for Indigenous Resources (CAMPFIRE) official, who refused to be named for fear of reprisal, said his organisation was in charge of the slaughter of the elephants and the distribution of meat to the army barracks.
“‘We kill the animals from regions where the population is very concentrated and we transport the meat using army vehicles to various army barracks. Although the operation is not noticed by many, it could have serious consequences on the animal population in the future if it continues unbridled. What we actually don’t know is what happens to the elephant tusks, which are handed over to the national parks guys and the soldiers, it is rather scary,’ the CAMPFIRE official told the Harare Tribune.”
********************************************** Lot 67030JOSEPH HENRY SHARP (American, 1859-1953) Daylight and Firelight (Bawling Deer), circa 1940
Estimate $250,000 - $300,000Starting Bid $125,000
“Here we see Bawling Deer sitting near a campfire and smoking a traditional pipe. With this later work of Sharp’s, the focus has shifted from the portrait to the exploration of light. We see Bawling Deer’s face illuminated by the warm red glow of the campfire, while the top of his head and back are lit by a different, cool-toned light source.”
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A World of Warcraft Campfire:
Simple Wood no longer needed to make campfires
January 24, 2009 – 2:13 am
Posted by: Justine
(No Ratings Yet)
“This is quite possibly the most game altering change Blizzard has implemented in WoW thus far: Building a Basic Campfire no longer needs Simple Wood, only Flint and Tinder or a Gnomish Army Knife. This is right up there with stackable clams! Personally, my mind is blown.
Okay, let’s be serious, this is actually a fairly decent (and convenient) change. Is it absolutely needed? No, not at all, but how many of us carried around Simple Wood and Flint and Tinder at all times? Who took those things to raids with them?”
Beer of the week: Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier Maerzen
1/23/2009 8:20:07 AM
“Rauchbier dates back to the 1500s in Bamberg. The malts for the beer are smoked over open fires of beachwood, imparting a unique smokiness… This beer displays notes of bacon, venison and campfire. The taste offers up notes of smoky meats, venison, very dark, dry chocolate, caramel and campfire.”
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January 23, 2009
(No Ratings Yet)
What are some good scary ghost stories to tell around a campfire?
Filed under: Ghosts — admin @ 12:44 pm
“One Day a man’s car broke down so he called the RAA. They told him that it would take 3 days. So he Decided to go to the motel down the road. The person at the hotel gave him his keys and warned him never to go out of his room at 12:00 midnight so he took his bags and went up to his room, forgeting to ask why. So he went to sleep at 12:00 but he heard a noise coming from outside, he looked through the keyhole and saw a little girl wearing white skipping down the corridor, so he was about to go outside and tell her to go to her room. Then he remembered what the man at the lobby said. So he went to sleep. The Next day it was midnight when he was about to go to sleep and the same girl was there skipping down the corridor, but he didn’t do anything and went to sleep.
The Next day when it was midnight he was getting ready to go to sleep, but he went to look through his key hole again but all he could see was red.
As he was about to leave the hotel next morning, he asked the man at the lobby why did u say not to go out of your room at midnight, and so the man told him, there once was a girl who died in the corridor and everyday she skips down the corridor at exactly 12:00 midnight as a ghost. She’s white, and has red eyes.
As the man was leaving the hotel he realised something, when he could only see red on the third day, as he was looking at her, she was LOOKING AT HIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Comment by Rammy and Rima a — January 23, 2009 @ 12:44 pm
