The lobby of the Elysian.

Over the past few years, zig has been working with the Elysian, a 60-story hotel and residence that aims to redefine the Chicago hospitality experience with a unique operating model built around delivering remarkable moments. The agency worked closely with Elysian to build a brand that could bring that promise to life. Now that the doors are open and guests are raving, we can share the fruits of our labor. And share we did, with the New York Times.

You can read all about the Chicago’s newest Gold Coast addition, and our role in building the Elysian brand, here.

And you can browse some of our work in the gallery below. Enjoy!

[View with PicLens]

12►

The power in advertising has shifted from the brands to the consumer; if you build it, they won’t necessarily come. Now we are forced to provide value to the consumer, giving them something they want, not just what we think they need.

Because of this, we now need to start building content for the consumer’s wants and needs, not just for the brand’s needs. In short, we need to “understand human behaviour on the web and build sites and applications that work with those behaviours, not against them.”

This presentation by the guys at Jet Cooper goes a long way in helping to understand that there is in fact a human at the other end of everything digital we do. That human can make or break a brand’s success, so we need to everything we can to make their experience an engaging and pleasant one.

The consumer is now driving the ship, we need to do everything we can to get on board.

These days argument goes that kids are getting dumber and dumber because of the internet. Kids are losing the ability to spell and come up with coherent ideas because of MSN and spell checkers.

I don’t buy that…there have always been stupid kids, this is just our generation’s version of dumb. As the internet evolves, its going to develop the tools to allow the smart kids to have a mastery of language never seen before.

Case in point, the New York Times website.

Highlight a word and the little question mark balloon pops. Click that and it opens up the word in a dictionary for you.

If I had this kind of functionality in all the reading I did as a child, my vocabulary would be at least three times…what’s the word for it…more big than it is right now.

(Any spelling or grammatical mistakes you find upon giving this a close read-through, I meant to make them. I’m being ironic…)

(via therobhayes.com)

A half dozen months ago Phillips released the spot ‘Carousel’ to promote the launch of their 21:9 LCD TV. The video travels through a frozen moment in time during an epic gunfight between the police and some clown-masked bad guys. The video is shot as a seamless loop, so you can start the video at any point and the story will still make sense. Its a great video, but has limited legs for such a well-produced piece because it lives solely online.

So how do they help the video retain its relevance? Get 50 Cent to base his next music video around the concept of ‘Carousel’. Fitty’s new video starts out exactly like the Phillips spot, zooming in on the 21:9 LCD with the gunfight playing on it, until he pulls off one of the clown masks and steps out of the narrative.

According to the director of he 50 Cent video…

“We actually have a partnership with Phillips where they gave us the rights to take this commercial,” he added. “It was kinda underexposed. They made a great piece but maybe didn’t know how to use it that well so we took it and we just taking it way over the hill with a smash record at the same time and the biggest hip-hop artist on the planet.”

The TV is featured a number of times before the song ends.

Phillips have managed to expose their commercial to an entirely new audience by allowing 50 to co-opt it. On Youtube, the original ‘Carousel’ has been viewed almost 500k times. The 50 Cent ‘Ok You’re Right’ video has been viewed 1.4 million times.

It’s probably no coincidence that the director of ‘Carousel’, Adam Berg, is a veteran of music videos.

Architecture for Humanity and Nike Inc. recently announced GAMECHANGERS, a campaign to encourage community organizations to empower youth through sports by proposing programs that spur social and economic development in a community. You can read all about it here. The goal of the program is to support the design and construction of innovative facilities through a matching grant fund established by Nike Inc. Architecture for Humanity and they opened up the platform to suggestions from, well, anyone. Great opportunity to apply some smart creative thinking to a worthwhile cause, right? We thought so.

So of course, we had a suggestion.

The Nike Sports Box project would provide sports equipment to youth in the same way that libraries provide books to the public. Where access to sports equipment is limited due to financial limitations, Nike could provide the equipment kids need to practice, learn and play. Instead of building expensive and complicated (permits, zoning, etc) permanent structures, this project uses standard 40-foot shipping containers (sport boxes) that have been redesigned to fulfill this mission.

These containers are inexpensive, can be designed to Nike brand standards and serve as a place for equipment to be stored as well as distributed to kids. Seasonally relevant equipment can be rotated in to keep up with the sports that disadvantaged kids want to play throughout the year. High school athletes could be recruited to staff the sports box under the supervision of a community program manager. ‘Sports boxes’ would give meaningful opportunities for the high school athletes to further themselves off the field, as well as provide the kids with role models. Equipment would be loaned out by signing up for a Nike ‘library card’ that would be completed with a parent and provides a phone number in the case of emergency. Having community athletes be responsible for the equipment discourages theft and a record of who has what equipment encourages accountability. These containers are the standard in international shipping, so moving them from city to city or country to country is not an issue. This idea can also inspire kids to try new sports that Nike is involved in around the world. A container of rugby and cricket equipment in Detroit? American football equipment in Sweden? The possibilities for getting kids get closer to the benefits of sports are endless.

You can read more about our Sports Box idea here. Of course, we’re still fleshing out all the details, but so far so good…how incredible would it be to be able to actually bring this to life?

Here’s some heretical thinking for debate.

 There is a strong case to be made against what has been the Holy Grail for many brands, integration, and for deliberate brand fragmentation.

This is not a case for abandoning rigor, but rather embracing it even tighter. Integration can exist on many levels but is usually considered in terms of look, feel, and tonality and that is the kind of integration I am debating. I am not calling into question brand efforts that collectively align to achieve a common goal as those efforts need to be integrated.

It feels like integration has been a measure that most brands have strived for and many agencies have espoused for a long time. Take that fractured schizophrenic brand and give it a single look and feel that will make your brand feel bigger and help people connect the dots to come away will a compelling perception of who you are and what your products are all about.

Do we really think that people from all kinds of backgrounds and subcultures should have the same interactions and perceptions of a brand? Instead of one big singular target audience shouldn’t we break them down into smaller audiences that allow us to think about them in the ways that make them truly unique?

Many marketers are hesitant to define a target audience in terms that are truly helpful because they’re afraid that they’ll miss someone who might have money to boost their bottom-line. For many, a proper target focus is replaced with a fear of alienation and so the biggest brand net possible is cast, as opposed to the most efficient one.

 Anyone familiar with the strategic rationale in ‘Microtrends’ knows where I’m going with this. Based on the current population of the US, if your target audience definition encompasses 1% of the population you’re speaking to 3 million people, a group large enough to impact the bottom line of most brands. When brands embrace this kind of hyper-targeting their resources get applied in a way that yields a much greater degree of relevance. Where before there may have been a spectrum of focus groups covering a range of ages, genders and income levels, now it’s possible to execute deeper richer methodologies that shed light on more compelling links between your brand and the audience. Prevailing consumer attitudes, media habits, brand perceptions as well as the competitive set become more focused because the research is allowed to uncover a deeper understanding of a smaller audience. From this kind of consumer understanding comes the kind of insights that spark brand fanaticism.

So what to do next? Add rigor. Take your big audience and make it smaller. Prioritize the one sub-group that has the best chance of growing the business and ruthlessly pursue them by making the brand as relevant as possible. Get to know them like you’ve never known a consumer before. Then play with the logo, find a new color palette, throw the brand book out the window if that’s what it takes. Whatever you do, keep relevance the goal, not integration.

Stumbled across an interesting article on Wired today about The White House’s new Q+A with the President called “Open for Questions”.

You can read the article here.

I was able to sign-up and participate using a hotmail address and good ole 90210, which is a little creepy that the American Government now has an email address of mine on record…

The wired article gives you a good sense of what features the site has and doesn’t have.  The “Online Town Hall” that the article speaks of will be interesting to see as well, perhaps similar to Obama’s weekly YouTube video.

The videos of Obama are also kinda creepy, reminds me of 1984, etc. not in what he’s saying but rather the uniqueness of receiving government messaging in this way.  Not sure how much other countries’ governments have done in the digital space, but definitely haven’t seen much like this from the Canadian government.  It will be interesting to see how this grows into the President’s “personal” relationships with his constituents and if/how it affects the way other governments communicate with their peeps.

Something to watch.

Expanded domain names. Have you seen this, have you heard about this? 

Right now, there are 21 generic domains. For those not as digital-savvy as Cam Wykes, domains are the little “words” that come after the dot in a web site address: .com, .gov, .org, .ca.

Now, I have a hard time keeping them all straight to begin with. It never fails that I get the .ca’s mixed up with the .com’s which are actually re-directed .org’s. Thank god for Google, which is, indeed, making me stupid.  But now, a proposed expansion of domains means that by the end of 2009, there could be hundreds of domains to keep straight. Marketers could request domain names to literally “own” a category: IKEA could request .home, Best Buy could request .electronics, Elysian could request .luxhotel. To quote a recent article in Advertising Age, “The potential for names and online branding would be limited only by the imagination of the creative marketing industry.” 

Sounds exciting, eh? Especially for anyone who has agonized over finding an available .com domain for a client, that is actually intuitive for the user. But you also have to consider the logistics of who would get to own what name, how expensive this could get for marketers, how this will be policed, and last but not least, how the heck anyone will be able to remember your web site anymore? 

So, you tell me.

 Loading ...

Beginning almost a year and a half ago Fox and NBC began to quietly remove all of their content and their channel from Youtube. This came at a time when their programming (SNL, The Office, Family Guy, Simpsons) was more popular than ever. Everybody and their mother were heading to Youtube to watch the chicken fight or people getting punched*. Then all of the sudden…they were nowhere to be found. Anytime there was a hilarious new SNL digital short everybody was talking about at work, you’d have to search the deepest bowels of the internet just to find a dubbed version posted on Kyrgyzstan’s leading video sharing website. It was infuriating…why are they keeping their comedy gems from me?

Well, I guess the answer to that is that people were watching their content online, from full episodes to the shortest clips, and they were making no money off of it. FOX and NBC knew it was inevitable that people want to, and are going to watch tv shows online, it was just a matter of figuring out how to profit off that. And that is the million-dollar-question for everybody in the television/advertising/online industry: how can online video be profitable?

In an effort to find an answer, FOX and NBC teamed up to launch Hulu in March of 2008. Here they have full episodes and movies from their current offerings, as well as a substantial number of titles from their back catelogue, available for streaming in HD. Each is supported by a handful of ads interspersed through the show’s duration. Does it equal the profit they’d make from people watching these shows on tv? No. But at least they’re trying. Its inevitable that people will be watching tv online more and more as broadband coverage expands and devices like the iPhone make it that much easier.

This all brings me back to my initial problem; I want to watch ‘football in the groin’ the moment the urge hits me. That is what the internet is for…bringing me what I want as soon as I want it.

Now that these companies have a (somewhat) viable means of generating revenue from their content established, the most popular clips from Family Guy, Simpsons and SNL have found their way back onto Youtube. Each is underlined by an ad driving visitors to Hulu. They can give us the scraps if it will lead us to the main course.

It is encouraging to see these companies attempting to embrace online videos, because I would hate to lose these shows because they no longer make money. Almost as much as I hate to watch them during their regularly scheduled time on tv.

Now I can watch ‘football in the groin’ as I please. Thank you Hulu.

*That’s a lie, my mother has no idea what either of those are.

It seems like every company today wants to create ‘viral content’. Though the reality is that you cannot create ‘viral content’; you can only create content in hopes that your audience loves it enough to pass it on and on, making it viral. ‘Viral’ isn’t in the content that is produced, but in the act of it being shared on a large scale online.

So, in an effort to create content that goes viral, companies have one of two options.

1. Produce their own videos/sites/meme’s that merit people passing on to their friends, in hopes that it reaches critical mass, becoming an internet-wide phenomenon. The issue with this is that often they do not have the resources/talent/following to provide any sort of guarantee of this result.
2. Provide funding to (’sponsor’, if you will,) those who do have the resources/talent/following to enable them to create even greater content. Brand content that you know is going to be seen by millions in your target audience, and piggyback on their success.

Axe has chosen the 2nd option, by providing funding for the latest in the series of CollegeHumor.com’s prank wars. The previous in this series, the Yankee Stadium proposal, has become legend on the internet. This one is sure to follow suit.

And what does axe get out of this? They get the cachet of helping make this awesome video happen. The in-video thank you to them gets seen by the (as close as you’ll ever get to guaranteed) millions of viewers. Millions of viewers who are the exact demographic Axe is trying to reach. Presumably, all for much less that it would cost to create their own content.

Branding content like this offers a huge return with almost no risk. I’m glad to see Axe is interested in doing this. And this post is proof that its going viral.