We are incredibly passionate about the campaigns we are involved in and our hard work and dedication, going hand in hand with our innovative and dynamic clients, has resulted in a fruitful 2009. In no particular order, here are the top client campaigns that have excited us, inspired us, and achieved fantastic results:
Barbie’s 50th birthday broadcast project (Mattel)
2009 marked the 50th birthday of the world’s favourite doll and Mattel asked Ogilvy PR London to help kick off the party in Europe with a big bang at the International Toy Fair, Nuremberg in February this year. We combined visually compelling broadcast content with innovative digital tools, including a social media press release, to provide the media around the world with an engaging story package of Barbie’s birthday.
Future Focus digital campaign (IBM)
Ogilvy PR supported the series of ‘IBM Future Focus’ events for mid-market businesses through a social media campaign. This campaign was a first for IBM in the UK, bringing together social media interaction, video content creation and live publishing across multiple platforms. Through a programme of harnessing key influencers to contribute to the content, and integrating social media in to the onsite activities, through video, live blogging and micro blogging, IBM was able to bring an audience with relatively low social media engagement into the heart of a social campaign.
Corporate digital survey project (LexisNexis)
In order to raise the profile of information service provider LexisNexis as a corporate sponsor of the Online Information 2009 event, a survey was conducted examining people’s perceptions of the importance and influence of online information in determining their purchasing decisions. The survey results served to establish LexisNexis as a thought leader in the online social media space. We achieved positive coverage across multiple outlets, such as Brand Republic.
Rightmove iPhone app launch (2Ergo)
This trade campaign for mobile technology provider 2ergo involved working with a select number of key online influencers, technology press and mobile analysts to give them a preview of the product before it went live at an exclusive event. We also created a YouTube channel to host video content. As a result of the coverage generated about and the app, the Rightmove iPhone app shot up to first place on the UK downloads chart within days of its release. You can view some selected trade press articles on the Mobile Choice and IT Pro websites.
The Brazilian food journey campaign (Brazilian tourist board Embratur)
The campaign aimed to endorse Brazil as a tourist destination via one of its most unique cultural offerings; its food. We invited a restaurant reviewer to experience the Brazilian restaurant scene at first hand by setting up a trip to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro with an itinerary that took in a mixture of top-end restaurants, markets, juice bars and bakeries in order to show the full spectrum of Brazilian eating. As a result of the press trip to Brazil, coverage was generated in the Financial Times, Guardian online and Evening Standard twice.
The examples above provide a small insight into the type of work we have been involved in during 2009. Here’s to what promises to be a fantastic 2010!
I had the pleasure of filming an interview with ex-dragons den, current investor at large – Richard Farleigh. A man who has made his millions through taking risks in the post-dot-com-fallout and has worked with hundred of companies to drive business success.
This video was filmed as part of the wider work we are doing at Ogilvy for IBM’sFuture Focus programme, looking at how businesses can work smarter by utilizing advances in technology and communications.
Smart technology is a funny one, some of the simple things that we as the “young digerati” take for granted are the very systems and practices that will become the future of business communications. Talking with a friend who is far more clued up on the subject (@gemmapercy for more info), it dawned on me that so much of the tech that forms the discourse around “cloud” computing and “viruslisation” is not tales of future technology, but present technology. Facilities such as Google Docs, delicious and Amazon’s S3 storage are already changing the way we work.
Far more of our everyday data is being stored in “the cloud” rather than on our hard disks, from our databases, contacts and bookmarks to our personal data such as photos and increasingly video. As Russel M Davies points out in his article on Amazon S3 in this June’s issue of Wired UK – I too would rather trust Google with my contacts than my own ability to sit on my assortment of handheld media centres (the less fortunate of which glare at me every time I open my desk drawer). It is more or less a weekly occurrence that I get invited to a facebook group of one of my clumsier chums who has sat on / dropped / digested in drunken stupor their phone and now require me to send them my number. Which proves a number of things a) my friends are stupid, b) there are many people that I am very glad now have no ability to call me (not that they ever had reason to before hand) and c) that we may all be better of outsourcing our personal lives to the likes of Google or Amazon.
See this week’s PRWeek for the full article and quoted comments from OPR’s MD of EAME Ash Coleman-Smith, click here.
In tune with the economy, PRWeek decided to run this survey and it is a great moment for them to have raised the issue of how recenssionary pressures are challenging some of the green assumptions about consumer habits. We should all be thinking about where we stand on our clients position on this and how they should be positioing their green credentials. I think the message is that ‘greenwashing’ will still be spotted by increasingly cyncial consumer and business audiences. I agree with the tone of the PRWeek piece which is that environmental campaigns are moving down the agenda against given economic pressures.
PRWeek’s exclusively commissioned and just published reearch was carried out with Populus and they surveyed 1,999 adults in the UK. PRWeek said: “It showed that 81 percent of respondents paid more attention to cost/value than to environmental credentials. Asked about how concerned they were and whether they were more concerned now than 12 months ago, respondents were evenly split: 49 per cent were no more or less concerned and 50 per cent were more concerned. The findings suggest communicators need to focus on value when crafting their environmental messages”. The research goes on to show that small easy green steps are still interesting to consumers “94 percent of respondents said they would take green steps such as buying energy saving lightbulbs” (PRWeek).
Finally, as PRWeek point out in their feature, there are some brands who have led on a green/environmental positioning such as Green and Black’s, Innocent Smoothies, the entire organic sector etc who are currently paying the price. Maybe now is the time for marketing teams and their agencies to be developing creative and clever strategies for how they re-ignite consumer interest/purchase driven by ‘green’ preferences.
It sounds like the script for an action movie… Cars… Girls… Cigars… And it’s kind of felt that way in the past few months!
The Ogilvy Broadcast & Digital team have had a cracking start to 2009 with big european projects for Nissan and Infiniti at the Geneva Motor Show. Barbie’s 50th Birthday took the team to the Neuremberg Toy Fair, and The Festival Del Habano (Cuban Cigar Festival) sent the team to Havana, Cuba for the sixth year running!
We have had some amazing coverage for our clients across these projects, and it felt right to shout about it, so the team have pulled together this little showreel to show of the best of best!
So a month or so ago, you’ll see from Tim’s post below, the consumer team here at OPR, have been working on Embratur. As a teenager, I used to leaf through the NME and dream about one day becoming a music journalist, and a decade later, our recent work for the aforementioned Embratur (Brazilian Tourist Board) enabled me to fulfil my long-forgotten ambition. Fifty years ago this year, the bohemian beach scene in Rio de Janeiro threw up its most enduring musical form – bossa nova– so to celebrate, we helped to put on a festival on the South Bank in London. The idea behind the exercise was to bring Brazilian culture to a new audience, so the bands hired to play at the show weren’t necessarily of Brazilian origin. We wanted to show that Brazil is a cultural superpower, and its bossa nova music – just like jazz in the USA - should be recognised as a timeless international genre, rather than dismissed as little more than elevator music. No one demonstrated this better than our headline act, Nouvelle Vague – the French band who are popular for their breathy covers of classic British punk songs, though few would identify the bossa nova inspiration. By ghostwriting a piece by them for The Guardian (in amongst the copious amounts of other coverage the event received), we helped bring a little taste of Rio’s Zona Sul to the urban English music fan (and I rekindled a passion that really, had never gone away).
Ogilvy Amsterdam, MTV Networks and film producers Shilo in conjunction with the Burma Arts Board came together earlier this year to produce a beautifully shot video as a message of support to the people of Burma living under the Burmese military junta. The short, haunting film was initially due to launch during the first week of May but was was held up from being released, due to a new crisis that afflicted Burma; cyclone Nargis.
The website and spot’s final title card were rescripted to change the messaging to encapsulate the new disaster that had hit the Burmese people, and the result is even more powerful. While aid to Burma has been hampered by military authorities, only this morning we read that the Burmese government is now beginning to allow foreign aid workers in regardless of nationality.
The spot was featured on Ad Age this week and is generating a large amount of buzz online having already wracked up thousands of hits on youtube, sparked conversations on Twitter, and the creation of facebook groups showing their support. A worthy cause and a video to watch out for.
