re:direct launches

At the DMA Conference in San Diego last week, OgilvyOne launched re:direct, a movement to reinvigorate creativity in the direct marketing industry.

Above is the video we played at our cocktail reception. It was part of a print->mobile ad experience as well as PR (guest column in AdAge, press release) and social media. The re:direct blog is here and you can follow us on twitter @re_direct.

Rory Sutherland at TED

Very funny+smart perf by Rory Sutherland, Ogilvy UK Vice Chairman, including highlights of Diamond Shreddies towards the end (14:00ish).

Short Takes - Torrey Pines

Ezra Pound in Print

The West Side Spirit and Our Town published a piece of mine about dog parenthood, featuring Ezra. You can find it in this week's street boxes on the Upper West Side and Upper East Side of Manhattan, or over here.

Early firsts : Ecommerce and Dayparting

I think I’m getting sentimental or just paranoid of my memory going. I’m thinking back to early digital experiences and realizing how early on I emigrated from advertising to the web.

In 1995, America On-Line was very precious and didn’t allow anything commercial (this would be amusing years later when it became a shopping mall), but CompuServe had an online store where you could, get this, buy directly. I was a copywriter at FCB and for our client Rayovac Batteries, and with Sean Connolly and Adam Gargani, we set up a mini-store in what would be one of the first ecommerce plays for a packaged good. I wrote sell copy in formats I had never done before, and within a few weeks, we had sold thirty (30!) sets of rechargeable batteries. I remember being excited, feeling the rush of actually selling something directly to people.

Just a few months later, Nabisco wanted to be among the first corporate web sites, so my art director Miguel and I concepted a Nabisco “town,” where Town Hall would have corporate and HR information, the park would have Oreos, a cafe would have Cream of Wheat, and so on. We created the design comps but to program it, we went over to then-True North partner Robert Greenberg & Associates on West 39th Street, who seemed to be the only ones in town who knew how to actually program it. (I would return ten years later to work there as a creative director when it was hot interactive shop R/GA). Realizing that people could come to nabisco.com at any hour of the day, we suggested it go dark at night and those crazy programmers were able to do it. Yup, this is one of the earliest examples of day-parting on the web. Later, there were tons more virtual towns for brands but this was before all that.

I'll try to update this with screengrabs but my images are all on FLOPPY disks ;-)

The Puma Index: Direct Sexponse

The latest and greatest in lead capture -- The Puma Index. To showcase Puma Bodywear, your choice of female or male model will take off their shirt if the market goes down. So if you lose your shirt, so do they.

While attention-grabbing digital pieces like this have existed before, this requires your email address before getting in. This helps make it less hit-and-run advertising-like and more substantial acquisition leading. Will be paying attention to what they do with my address and see if it was worth it.

Notes from the OMMA Panel on Social Media Creative

The panel I was on at the OMMA Global Conference as part of Advertising Week was interesting, though it felt like we didn't really tackle the topic: "Best 2009 Creative Social Media Campaigns." Wonder if we disappointed the audience.

Hosted by Greg Christian from SamnLori recruiterswe covered a little bit of work and each chimed in about challenges facing creative development in social media and what agencies and clients need to do in the space to succeed this year.

Cathy Taylor from MediaPost was in the audience, and afterwards, she wrote an article about things she heard throughout the day, including what I spoke about for creating nimble creative teams for social media.