Blindsided

It isn’t every day that you run into something THIS cool. So open your schedule book, grab a highlighter and color-in the next 45 minutes. Yep, right now. It’s worth it. Okay… done? Ready? Click here. When you’re done exploring, click here. You won’t regret it.

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The Future Of Advertising

image copyright 2004 Olivier Blanchard “How can we create a brand relationship with consumers, on behalf of our clients, in this new digitally-enabled universe? How does that affect the kind of narrative structure we can build around brands?” That’s one of the many question pondered by Lee Daly (C.E.O. Saatchi & Saatchi, UK) in his [...]

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Reach Your Audience

image copyright 2004 Olivier Blanchard Yeah, a bullhorn works, but it’s kind of limited. Still, much like any form of communications, having a captive audience makes a world of difference. When you think about the nature of advertising, it’s interesting to note that very few people actually seek it out. With the exception of… well, [...]

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Brand = Reputation. Reputation = Brand.

image copyright 2005 Olivier Blanchard In case you’ve been living under a rock, the big buzzword in the marketing world this year is WOMM (word of mouth marketing), which emphasizes the value of a brand’s reputation rather than a prefabricated image sold through advertising.Boiled down to its basics, WOMM targets the customer’s experience rather than [...]

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Dare To Inspire

copyright 2005 Olivier Blanchard All they said was, “Your work blew us away.” It really doesn’t get much better than that. Inspiring a client to fall in love with their brand all over again (and helping their customers do the same) is nirvana. Every day is a good day, but some days just rock my [...]

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Royal Flush

“Could toilet paper actually be the next frontier in affordable luxury? The Europeans and the Japanese are already all over it,” writes Dale Hrabi in his latest article for Radar Online magazine. What’s interesting isn’t so much the concept of luxury TP, but the way some brands are going to market with their luxury brands. [...]

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When The Train Has Already Left The Station

copyright 1993 olivier blanchard Don’t you wish you could turn back time every now and again? Take back that stupid comment you made during the last board meeting? Take back that promise you made that you knew you couldn’t keep? Take advantage of an opportunity that should have been obvious when it first fell on [...]

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The Bumvertising Revolution

(photo ripped from source) I came across this story and couldn’t resist sharing. From Bumvertizing.com (via MIT’s Ad Lab):Bumvertising™, or the use of sign holding vagrants to advertise, is a development of PokerFaceBook.com’s most recent advertising campaign. Homeless men are able to provide a valuable and tangible service to a company, while receiving an additional [...]

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Selling Value

copyright 2005 Olivier Blanchard Okay, let’s segue from the big vs. small discussion for a few minutes because I need to address the subject of value; more specifically, the role value plays in presentations made by an agency to a client. (This came up at lunch today.) If you are an ad agency (big or [...]

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Big vs. Small – Part I

copyright 2005 Olivier Blanchard So… what happens to great little companies once they reach a certain size? Why do so many of them stop thinking like the bold and creative little commandos that made them who they are? Why is it that the balance of power between risk and opportunity in the decision-making process shift [...]

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The K2 Principle

Co-branding can be fun… Especially when it kind of happens by accident. We were at the BMW test track in Greenville to shoot some winter speedskating images, and the friendly folks there generously offered to dress up our shots with some cars. “Um… How about that fast looking red one there?” It was really more [...]

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The Infinite Wisdom of Jack Spade

Jack Spade’s words of brand wisdom (From some semi-recent issue of Fast Company someone snagged from my office and never returned) : 1. The bigger you get, the smaller you should act.Never, ever start thinking like a big company. Otherwise, you become corporate, and there’s no interest in that. 2. Never believe anything you have [...]

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Some people just don’t get it.

There used to be a post here. I removed it because the company it was about (which the post praised, by the way) asked me to. Actually, they asked me to remove a lot of stuff from this blog that pertained to them. Logos, images, etc. This kind of reminds me of FedEx’s deal with [...]

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