Dentsu NYC Blog

Finally, the word is out. I’ve been holding Google’s secret for the past 4 months.

Dentsu sent me to attend the Google presentation of the work in Project Re:Brief in November at the New Museum in NYC.

I was at first impressed with the heavy hors d’oeuvres and fancy cocktails, but by the end of the presentation, it was the simple Coca-Cola that had us all really amazed. We enjoyed hearing from an impressive cast of advertising icons and some of the creative minds that originated the classic campaigns that were getting an overhaul. It’s amazing that ads were running before I was born are still quoted as normal conversation today, e.g., when I say “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”, every day, after lunch.

One of the most exciting parts was seeing the World Coke vending machine in action. They had a working model in the auditorium. The speaker had someone record and send a message live. We watched the animation take off and the machine come to life with the video message we just saw recorded and an ice cold Coca-Cola. I was instantly thirsty and wanted to try it myself, sending it to everyone I know. Literally buying the world a Coke. Not bad.

It was actually amazing. To think this works around the world is pretty impressive and really touched a soft spot seeing the genuine excitement of the machine users who got to try it (watch the video here).

The concept behind the Google Re:Brief project is fantastic and can serve as an inspiration for the possibilities of any great piece of work. It was really fun to hear how the creatives of then worked with the creatives of today to make the past relevant to the world right now, despite their feelings of doubt and general feelings of out-of-the-loopedness.

These re-imagined campaigns prove that the medium is not the idea. The idea is the idea. And if it’s great, it can live anywhere, in any decade, on any device.

See Creativity Online’s write-up here

Often the reason we avoid trying new things is fear of failure. It’s the reason we don’t speak up in meetings, avoid taking on challenging projects, and don’t put forth new innovative ideas. Basically, it’s why we “go with the flow.”

Alberto Savoia, Director of Engineering and Innovation Agitator at Google Ads, has a different way of looking at failure and innovation. His thought is that the key to coming up with a successful idea, otherwise known as the right “it,” is to reach the failure stage as soon as absolutely possible if that’s where it is going to end up. Savoia has developed a series of methods for testing ideas, which are all organized under the philosophy he calls pretotyping.

While most of his methods and philosophy are focused around entrepreneurs, that same attitude towards innovation, ideation and how we treat failure can be applied to any job we do. And by taking the fear out of failing, it allows us become the people who speak up in meetings, put forth innovative ideas and challenge others to think of alternative ways of doing things.

This month, our very own EVP of Media, Scott Daly and Managing Director at STEAK, Mark Schwartz will be speaking at SES New York. Their talk focuses on best practices for how a traditional and digital media agency can partner together. Using real client data, they’ll show how a truly holistic approach to advertising yields great benefits for agencies and the clients too. Incisive Media’s SES Conference & Expo is a leading global conference and training series focused on search engine marketing. Visit SES NEW YORK for more information and how to register.

You are a robot. You stand beside a sealed door. In your hand, you hold a gun. A gun that doesn’t shoot bullets. Instead, it shoots…portals. Doorways that allow you to teleport, instantly, between two distant locations. You have to get through the sealed door. But how? When you flip that switch on the other side of the room, the door opens — but it closes by the time you can get to it. You sit and think. What if you shot a red portal on the wall next to the door, and a blue portal on the wall next to the switch? Then you could flip the switch without getting too far from the door. You try it. It works. You just beat Level 1.

Portal 2 is probably the best video game I’ve ever played. It didn’t just blow my mind. It changed my life. In case the rambling and incoherent paragraph above this one didn’t give you a good sense of the gameplay, feel free to watch this charming commercial for it: http://bit.ly/glKiuW. If that’s not enough, try this one: http://bit.ly/glKiuW. If you didn’t click either of those links, just read this: it’s a puzzle game. You use your “portal gun” to reason your way out of one sealed room and into another.

But describing what the game is doesn’t convey how it feels, and that’s the part that changed my life. In short, it makes you feel like a genius. Like a true, empirical, scientific genius — as if someone combined the brains of Einstein, Hawking, and Tesla and smushed it right into your skull. When you look around that sealed room and suddenly, it all clicks, and you know exactly how to point that laser at that mirror and refract it through those portals – you experience something transcendent.

The experience was particularly transcendent for me. I’ve been playing video games for a long time, but I’ve never bought a “puzzle game.” That’s because the left side of my brain has always been a little scrawny. High school math gave me posttraumatic stress disorder. I once asked my Dad how many quarters there were in a soccer game (which he politely pointed out was “idiotic on a number of levels.”) Needless to say, the idea of a “puzzle game” appeals to me about as much as the idea of a Phil Collins concert followed by back-to-back screenings of Notting Hill. If I ever played a game like Zelda or Resident Evil that unexpectedly had a puzzle in it, I’d just turn the controller over to my sister. She’d solve it in a matter of seconds, and then I could go back to blasting my way through the Zombie apocalypse.

Portal 2 changed all that. It wasn’t the dark humor, the voice acting, or the graphics, all of which have received extraordinary praise. It was the sense that only you could have devised that solution. Only you could have perfectly manipulated gravity, friction, and momentum to get through that sealed door. It wasn’t like other games. It wasn’t a puzzle in a world. It was world that was a puzzle.

For the first time ever, I was relishing an opportunity to flex my weakest neurological muscles. I learned to love something I’d always hated. Because I was good at it.

Moral of the story?

The best creative doesn’t make you think differently about things. It makes you think differently about you. And only one medium can really do that. We call it “digital.”

Last week Lucas Watson, Google’s VP of Sales and Marketing for YouTube kicked off our Speaker Series and spoke in the café at 360i, our downstairs neighbor. YouTube is restructuring its content and advertising platforms and Lucas Watson gave us the deets.

To compete with cable and general content providers like Hulu, YouTube must surface from its position of being a cluttered, unorganized internet junkyard and become a destination—not simply a URL you’ve ended up at.

The new plan for YouTube is to organize everything around Channels. So instead of the 300+ channels we all have, you can have 20 (or 3 or 50) that have exactly what you want. This lets the advertising become increasingly more tailored.

Google with YouTube has the awesome goal of keeping the creative behind the content in the benefit. They have a twofold goal of being 1) the best platform for artists, creators, and innovators. 2) To make an economically efficient system that pays the artists, not the middle men. Ideally paying the content creators directly to host their content.

To keep advertisers relevant, YT is introducing The TrueView approach to advertising, which allows viewers to skip an ad. If the ad is skipped before its full play, Google doesn’t pay for it. So if someone isn’t getting paid even if an ad technically runs, then what does this mean for advertising? That the creative must get better. It will cease to be an obligatory 15 or 30 seconds before your show and become something viewers can opt out of. Not unlike fastforwarding with a DVR, but with highly tailored ads, but now it’s a more personal blow.

This is of course a call to creatives, but also a call to the clients to be willing to serve the viewer. To blatantly skip the one single spot that comes before a show? You gotta make that spot shine. Or else someone doesn’t get paid, and it’s not the content creators.

But with better tailored content, it can become a worthwhile investment. Think Google ad words gone big. (Lucas assured us that it would not be in a creepy way, but in a “yay, I love that ______” kind of way.) Of course, traditional pre-roll ad space will still be offered, but knowing you can skip might lead you to watch because you can decide if you want to skip.

Interesting concept and it will be exciting to see where it goes. Here’s to making the unskipable ad!

Press Release

ML Rogers is the latest agency to join the Dentsu Network, combining its clients and capabilities with Dentsu America under the leadership of newly named CEO, David Cameron.

A couple of weeks ago, a few of us at Dentsu attended MIT Media Lab’s Sponsors’ Week in Boston. Being a sponsor of MIT, Dentsu is invited every year to check out the latest student projects and innovations coming out of Cambridge. While a lot of it was over my head, there were several interesting projects I found applicable to us ad folks that explored new trends in augmented reality and how the tablet can enhance experiences beyond the screen. Check ‘em out.

Congratulations to Dentsu America’s Santa Monica office on recently winning the 2011 Award of Excellence in the Best Entertainment/Gaming Deployment category from the Digital Screenmedia Association.

The Get Your Game Face interactive kiosk was developed by Dentsu America in conjunction with technology partner InWindow Outdoor as an extension of our campaign promoting Union Bank’s San Diego Chargers sponsorship. The unique interactive installation engaged Chargers’ fans attending games at Qualcomm Stadium, adding a whole new dimension to their game day experience by transforming participants into Chargers’ super fans instantly through augmented reality and real time face tracking technology. To see how it works check out the video.

Our Communications team has been named finalists in the 2011 PR News Nonprofit PR Awards for Best Media Relations Campaign and Best Event PR, an awesome way to end the week! This is a fantastic honor and a recognition of our work with the Siemens Foundation for the 2010 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. We’re truly amazed to be selected among some of the industry’s leading PR firms and hope that when all is said and done we can bring home the prize, actually we hope to win.

The Dentsu team will be acknowledged during the awards luncheon at the National Press Club in DC and our campaign from the 2010 Siemens Competition will be highlighted in a special issue of PR News. Congrats to everyone on the  PR team that put in the hard work and the long hours to make this happen! (#WINNING!)

To see our name and the agencies we hope to beat visit, http://www.prnewsonline.com/awards/nonprofit2011-finalists.html. Thanks for the support and fingers crossed!

A brilliant idea and a beautiful execution by Tristan Perich, 1-Bit Symphony “is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip.” Nothing traditional about this. The CD jewel case itself houses the music on a microchip (that Tristan himself programmed), alongside a battery, an on/off switch, a volume control and a headphone jack. Nothing is recorded, it literally “performs” the composition when turned on. Check it out!