brand-e

By Simon Fuller. BEing BEcause. Experiential marketing’s on the menu at many agencies, but few can claim a sector specialisation in quite the same way as London’s Because. With a small army of brand ambassadors, some of whom work exclusively for BEcause, the company has picked up big name clients, among them Heineken, adidas, Superdrug and the RAF.

By Hugh Jordan. Creativity shop. All companies rely on ideas, which are the bread and butter of any good business. And Ogilvy is a bit of in ideas factory, having worked with some of the world’s biggest brands.
Feeling philanthropic, the agency decided to offer its services to local firms in the Brixton area of London. The best bit is, it didn’t charge a penny.

Code crackers. Buzztag, a new marketing company based on fusing branded merchandise with new media, has opened its doors on Oregon.
“Many businesses haven’t cracked the social media code,” says Brenda Speirs, co-founder of Buzztag. “They either haven’t taken full advantage of it or they don’t understand what it could do for them. We show them [...]

By Steve Mullins. Annual watch. JWT has come up with 100 Things To Watch In 2010. Well, we don’t have the space to run an exhaustive list, but we do reserve the right to cherrypick on your behalf.
There’s augmented reality, of course, which the agency says will make its way into the hands of mass audiences this year. “Marketers are getting in on the act, including GE and HP, whose AR game Roku’s Reward has players chase virtual images… on a phone’s screen.”

All in. New York production company 24DP has rejigged itself as a hybrid ad agency to offer ‘all the services of a large agency without the overhead’.
“When it comes to executing an idea, most large agencies use a multitude of third party vendors,” says 24DP. “The agency typically hires a production company to execute their [...]

By Hugh Jordan. Brand bonkers? What do you get if you cross a cow and half a tonne of baked beans? Usually the response would be ‘a lot of methane’. But when the animal in question happens to be Cow PR, the award-winning comms agency, the answer is a Heinz pop-up cafe in London.
Cow PR is also the brains behind innovative campaigns such as Aunt Bessie’s Mash Van – where all-weather ‘99’ cones of mash, peas and gravy were thrust upon an unsuspecting public – and Scent Of Seduction, featuring Piers Morgan posing half-naked as the ‘face’ of Burger King’s flame-grilled cologne.

Social excellence. Tribal DDB Worldwide has launched its Tribal DDB Radar social media ‘centre of excellence’ to define and capitalize on marketing opportunities in social media.
Tribal DDB Radar’s approach will be rooted in anthropology, with a focus on studying technologically enabled human communities around the Internet. Insights gained will be used to help brands participate [...]

Long letter. The Belgian ad world has gone on strike. Well, it’s a so-called Virtual Strike, meaning that participating ad agencies – among them the likes of Saatchi, Punta Linea, VVL BBDO, Famous, Kunstmaan – have shut down their websites for a week. There’s still something to see online, though, in the form of an [...]