Happy New Year

May fortune smile on you in the New Year of the Pig.
Gong Xi Fa Cai

For full new year message go to ganforhire

Odd Man Out?

Then. Arms and legs ahead of the field.

Olympic champions in men's 110 m hurdles
1896: Thomas Curtis | 1900: Alvin Kraenzlein | 1904: Frederick Schule | 1904: Robert Leavitt | 1908: Forrest Smithson | 1912: Frederick Kelly | 1920: Earl Thomson | 1924: Daniel Kinsey | 1928: Sydney Atkinson | 1932: George Saling | 1936: Forrest Towns | 1948: William Porter | 1952: Harrison Dillard | 1956: Lee Calhoun | 1960: Lee Calhoun | 1964: Hayes Jones | 1968: Willie Davenport | 1972: Rod Milburn | 1976: Guy Drut | 1980: Thomas Munkelt | 1984: Roger Kingdom | 1988: Roger Kingdom | 1992: Mark McKoy | 1996: Allen Johnson | 2000: Anier García | 2004: Liu Xiang

I was reminded once again of this 'Asian Hero' by my ChinaDaily newsletter this morning.
This great phenomenon caught the world by surprise and me in awe and bewilderment during the last Olympics. And capturing that moment, this is classic reporting from Time Magazine, when he achieved the feat;

"As Liu Xiang raced to victory in the 110-meter hurdles at the Athens Olympics, his legs pumping with flawless precision to clock a world record-tying time of 12.91 sec., the panic creeping into sports announcers' voices was almost palpable. Even though China had touted the 21-year-old Shanghai native as a medal hopeful, few in the West knew that China had a decent hurdler, much less a record-making one. Stunned by the victory, a Greek TV announcer stammered: "In first place, it's ... it's a Chinese man." Foiled by the X in Liu's given name, the broadcaster sidestepped the problem: "He is Mr. Liu. Congratulations to Mr. Liu from China."

This self driven young man has a great future as a big "brand' as he keeps winning the world championships and even more await him as China stirrs for the 2008 Summer Olympics. If he wins the event in Beijing, he will be the third person after Lee Calhoun and Roger Kingdom to do so but he will be the first Asian, first non-Afro American, first Chinese. So odd this man....
Now. Preparing for Doha Asian Games in South Guangdong Province.

Save the Word!!!

Hey y'all, look what came in the mail... while clients continue to diminish the value of good copy, some people are taking a stand, such as it is. A great read. Even if you don't enjoy long copy.

An open letter to advertising copyrwiters throughout the region, from Titus Upputuru, from WordSociety, New Delhi, India:
This letter is from one Copywriter to another. I was going through the results of the award shows this year and was saddened to notice a death. The Word has almost disappeared.
In most ads, there are just one or two. (There are a few exceptions though, and the outdoor Grand Prix at Cannes gives me hope.)
In many, there are none at all.
I was wondering what happened to the Copywriter. When did we stop writing Copy? And when I say Copy I do not mean the long copy masterpiece that we all set out to make at least once in our lifetime.
When was the last time we wrote a good, full-bodied headline, even? Was it because the Client had rejected the picture-only ad so many times that we had no option left but to do a headline ad?
This email is an initiative to 'Save The Word'.
If you would like to join this movement, contribute by doing the following:
1) Do your next five ads or campaigns with headlines, irrespective of brand guidelines.
2) Pick an old One Show/D&AD Annual and photocopy copy-led ads and paste them up all over the agency.
3) Dnt wrt lke ths.
4) If you are a Creative Director, ask your writers to show a headline, with every visual-led ad that they show.
5) Hire writers who have at least ten headlines in their portfolio.
6) Spread the word. Send this email to all the copywriters you know.
You can add more to the list.
The only way, we are going to Save The Word is by getting together and ensuring that we see more Copy in the media. For that to happen, this email needs to find legs and travel far and wide. So, please forward this to as many Copywriters in the world as you can.

Long Tail Marketing

Had lunch with Chow at Saffron yesterday and had a meeting of the minds on a hot new topic for me-Long tail marketing. He just had an encounter with a Search engine marketing company out of Mumbai and I have been extolling the virtues of SEO- search engine optimization with my IT partner from Mumbai. Here's the marketing model that drives amazon.com and iTunes and is fast democratising the consumer.


Long Tail Marketing is a term coined by Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson. It is a way to economically increase revenue from hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of niche markets.

Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

successful long tail marketers include Amazon with their 200k+ listings of books, some which only sell a few times a year Cafe Press with their thousands of websites that each sell customized clothing, hats and mugs printed on demand is another example of a company using Long Tail marketing.

As Chris said in his wired article, Long Tail marketing is not just a virtue of online booksellers; it is an example of an entirely new economic model for the media and entertainment industries, one that is just beginning to show its power. Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at notables to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far past what's available at Blockbuster Video, Tower Records, and Barnes & Noble. And the more they find, the more they like. As they wander further from the beaten path, they discover their taste is not as mainstream as they thought (or as they had been led to believe by marketing, a lack of alternatives, and a hit-driven culture).

What's really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you've got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles. Consider the implication: If the Amazon statistics are any guide, the market for books that are not even sold in the average bookstore is larger than the market for those that are (see "Anatomy of the Long Tail"). In other words, the potential book market may be twice as big as it appears to be, if only we can get over the economics of scarcity. Venture capitalist and former music industry consultant Kevin Laws puts it this way: "The biggest money is in the smallest sales."

Read the entire article here:

Long Tail at Wired Magazine

Mini Max

To overcome the perception of the MINI being a small car, the distributors in Switzerland cleverly spoofed the entrance to high traffic areas giving the impression of infinite space. This is an exageration of course but a brand like mini already has cult status required to transcend the realm of reason.
It was good enough for a gold lion at Cannes.

Type of Medium: Use of Media
Category: Best use of Ambient Media
Title: Size
Advertiser: MINI Schweiz
Product or Service: Mini
Advertising Agency, City: Jung von Matt, Zurich
Country: Switzerland
Creative Directors: Alexander Jaggy/Michael Rottmann
Account Manager: Rolf Helfenstein
Art Director: Hendrik Schweder
Account Assistent: Christine Kuhnt
Art Director: David Hanselmann
Copywriters: Lars Haensell/Ole Kleinhans
Adrian Riesen Head of MINI Brand Management BMW
Michal Tocek Manager of MINI Communication BMW

Nike "Plus" Apple: wow!

Nike and Apple, iconic brands always one step ahead. Look at what they have done together: the Nike+iPod Sport Kit which allows you to keep track of your running performance and also receive voice updates during your race. Simply amazing, also because they have a very good website to support the product launch and allow people to register their performance through an online software.
Simple, usable and extremely clear in the explanation, the site also features the favourite tracks of some popular Nike's testimonials. Do you want the tracks? Buy them at iTunes.

http://www.nike.com/nikeplus/

From the ashes, new life

Advertising is dead. Long live advertising. Yadda yadda yadda. Advertising has transformed, transmutated, transcended itself in form and function, becoming not merely a tool for big, rich monopolies and the scheming members of Big Corporation, but a necessity even for the smallest of enterprises. So if we have global giants like Publicis Group and WPP consuming the mega bucks of the world's leading brands, why shouldn't there be lean, mean, branding machines powering the new players, small-to-mid-sized corporations and local boys? And by that I mean doing solid, strategic work with the sustainable growth and expansion of these companies in mind, not the ad-hoc, mindless tripe that passes for branding these days.

And so, we come to the fresh-out-of-the-oven, pristine-as-freshly-pressed-sheets, herald-of-the-New-World-Order-like www.B3my.com Don't let the extension turn you off; we ain't no web design firm. As Peter Gan would put it, we don't design websites, "We build successful businesses online." And in case that makes us sound like just another Web-savvy, hot-and-hungry small shop, we don't stop there; www.B3my.com is an access point to all things branding, IT solutions and beyond.

So now, clients have a choice; play ball with generic agencies tuned to fulfill the egos of clueless executives, or hit one out the park with people who've been honing their swing in the most unforgiving of environments. It's a whole new ballgame now. And the mother of all curveballs is spinning your way. Are you batting with the right team?

PS: OK, so my baseball allegories suck. You can sue me later.

Forza Italia!!!

On a day when due diligence and hard work paid off, I start my blog on B3. At the very start, although my heart was Italian, my head tells me France was the better side as tacticians for winning the World Cup. But as the adage goes; follow your heart and you will find truth. Hmm... I wonder how it goes for the hearts of the French?
The Italians filed a caveat so strong that it showed a perfect 5/5 on their report card. At the end, they hoisted the World Cup ever so magnificently yet ever gently but very deservingly. Bravura Italia!!!