Lovely ambient ad for BlackBerry PlayBook captured in Manchester, UK, last month.

Tweet, watch TV and play your Xbox. While you read this blog.

The future of advertising in a morning. It’s a big ask, but I guess time is money for a lot of the leading executives who attended the seminar organised by the Westminster Media Forum on 31st May 2011 in London. We had a good mix of broadcasters and media representatives at the Royal Society in Carlton House Terrace, as well as people from creative agencies and leading brands.

Stephen Adshead of Plum Consulting led an interesting discussion of targeted advertising via set-top boxes, which is a clear challenge to the traditional ‘linear’ model of communication in broadcast media. Although many of us naturally worry about privacy and the extent to which brands can get inside our heads, Adshead raised the valid point that the technology could also help to protect people. We could, for instance, use data to block messages about fast food to houses with kids. Counter-intuitively, the technology that seems to be a regulator’s nightmare might turn out to be the nanny state’s best friend.

Microsoft’s UK Managing Director of Consumer & Online, Ashley Highfield, talked about a campaign for Lynx, the feisty deodorant brand which is known as Axe outside the UK. He made the point that we are going well beyond basic demographic targeting now. We can gather data on whether the typical male user is watching the TV, using a PC or playing on the Xbox at particular times of the day and target messages accordingly. Click-thru rates on the Microsoft-owned gaming platform reached an astonishing 20%. Even angels would fall for statistics like that.

A new directive from the EU threatens the ability of marketers to use online cookies to track consumers. Unsurprisingly, Microsoft favours industry self-regulation here and we were told about the anti-tracking opt-in that exists in the latest versions of the Internet Explorer browser. The software giant would rather focus on the possibilities presented by the first ads using voice and gesture commands, due to arrive as early as this autumn. Not to mention a Britain which is 100% digital – allowing advertisers the same online reach that they have long had through television.

Television, incidentally, isn’t doing too badly if you listen to Channel 4’s Mike Parker, who heads up the broadcaster’s Strategic Sales & Commercial Marketing operation. He is buoyed by econometric studies which demonstrate that TV is a key driver of online activity and notes that age-old programmes such as BBC’s Question Time have been given a new lease of life through realtime commentary on Facebook and Twitter. And as Sarah Goldman from UKTV entertainingly noted, no one goes home to watch the internet.

I suppose it could be argued that the real future was represented by Mark Slade of 4th Screen Advertising. While mobile is a surprisingly small advertising market at the moment in terms of spend, it’s also one of the largest growing and will probably be pushing a value of £1bn by 2015. It’s clearly also going to be an important part of what one tweeting delegate described as a ‘surf ‘n’ turf’ approach to media.

If there’s one conclusion I’d draw from the commentary at the event, it would be that the years ahead won’t be dominated by any one particular medium. TV won’t disappear. It will adapt to integrate and interact better with other digital, mobile and gaming platforms. If any ‘traditional’ medium is under threat, it’s probably print, but even the old-fashioned newspaper has its stalwart defenders. Lawson Muncaster, the MD of London free sheet City AM, gave a bullish defence of the 300 hours of journalism that his staff pack into a 10-minute read.

Maybe that’s the world we live in today? I can be leafing through City AM while playing on my Xbox and tweeting about the latest instalment of #bgt. Will there be room for attending conferences?

Watch out for commentary on 108th Street from the Westminster Media Forum's seminar on The Future of Advertising. I'll be attending the meeting next week in central London, which will bring together speakers and commentators from leading brands and agencies with key policy makers.

Great piece of ambient advertising for a company which doesn't allow its chicken to arrive on people's doorsteps cold. Simple, visually striking and effective. McCann Erickson, New Delhi.

Props to the old skool guerrillas

I'm looking forward to giving a couple of evening lectures this week at Chelsea College of Art & Design to students from University of the Arts London and French advertising school Sup de Pub. The topic is guerrilla and ambient advertising and I'll be making the point that we're actually standing on the shoulders of giants.

As well as talking about the adventurous marketing antics of people such as 19th-century circus entrepreneur Phineas Taylor Barnum and Sir Thomas Lipton of tea and infusion fame, I'll be delving into some antiquarian literature. I was recently reading the classic text by Henry Sampson on the history of advertising, which was written in 1874. That's right. Written in 1874. He talks about the problems created by flyposting and has a section on the stencilling of marketing messages on pavements. Unsurpisingly, Victorian police and magistrates started taking a dim view of this kind of guerrilla activity.

With the help of H G Wells, Mr Sampson would have felt right at home if he'd transported himself to 2011. According to the San Francisco Examiner, the City Attorney of the west coast town is currently pursuing Levi's for their sidewalk graffiti on behalf of the Dockers brand. Perhaps there really is nothing new under the sun?

Chinese trainers sold to a suspicious American market. Nice creative work and an interesting commentary on the shifting balance of power between the US and a nascent superpower.

Interesting approach to financial services marketing from British high street retailer, M&S. The overtly feminised creative is designed to demystify insurance, credit and investment products for the typical shopper. But when does cleverly targeted and imaginative communication become patronising?

Interesting ideas from Dentsu and design gurus, Berg.

How would the French save Gordon Brown?

I'm a great believer in giving my students some difficult tasks. It helps to separate the men from the boys or, very often, the women from the girls. Or, in this particular instance, les dames from les filles, as the class in question came from Sup de Pub - the leading advertising school in Paris.

The brief I gave yesterday morning to a group of would-be account handlers and planners was to save Gordon Brown from catastrophic defeat with just 24 hours of the British election campaign remaining. They only had a few hours to work on a problem that would frustrate even the most seasoned admen and political pundits.

There were a number of interesting ideas for tactical media, including the distribution of Oyster card holders at London tube stations tracked on social media such as Twitter and Foursquare. We had a lengthy debate as to whether such giveaways constituted a bribe under electoral law. To my shame, having stood on a couple of occasions as a parliamentary candidate, I was a little vague on this point, but thought we were probably on dodgy ground.

Creatively the strongest campaign idea was one which used iconic British buildings as a metaphor for the economy. We saw Tower Bridge crumbling, with a warning that you shouldn't dump the architect of the recovery at a critical moment. The argument was that we could change the building to reflect a local landmark in key marginal constituencies, which I thought worked very well.

Strategically, there were even braver suggestions from other groups. Recognising the gaffe-prone Gordon Brown as a source of many of Labour's problems, some suggested creative work which had a strong 'mea culpa' theme. Or we could go a stage further - removing Gordon Brown from the equation entirely by admitting publicly that the election wasn't about just one man. It was about everybody else. Coming hot on the heels of Labour Ministers' calls for tactical voting and a Labour candidate suggesting Brown was the worst-ever Prime Minister, the strategy had a plausible, if rather desperate, feel to it.

One thing's for sure. It's always good to get the impartial observations of outsiders on any advertising campaign. And objectivity is often in short supply when it comes to elections.

Very much liking the current LG campaign in the US which is built around those text messages we ought to think twice before sending. I was discussing it this week in London with students from Maryland's Towson University and making the point that it's beautifully integrated across a number of different media. Traditional TV commercials and posters are linked to the web, Flickr and Twitter. I've even befriended the Ponder Beard on Facebook and he's been kind enough to stop by for a chat.

Campaign site: www.giveitaponder.com

A great deal has been written about the way in which charities, campaigns and political movements have borrowed the techniques of commercial marketers and advertisers. Very often, however, the marketing profession would do well to look at the ideas that evolve spontaneously as part of political protests. Many are simple, but ingenious.

Mass movements - particularly those which are denied the right to free speech through conventional channels such as television, radio and the press - have increasingly been using the internet and mobile technology to promote their messages. These newer media are, of course, by their very nature more democratic and difficult to censor effectively. Sometimes, however, activists are forced to think more laterally.

Iran has seen a great deal of turmoil in recent months, with a protest against the bogus election results turning, over time, into a challenge to the theocratic regime itself. Low-resolution video footage on sites such as YouTube has given us a glimpse of the brutality of the government forces, while Twitter has played an important part in the dissemination of news. There are two other developments that have particularly caught my eye though.

The first has been the use of rooftop chanting at night to show the strength of anti-government feeling - a form of protest that was used successfully against the former Shah in the 1970s, prior to the Islamic revolution. The second, reported more recently, is the campaign to deface the Iranian currency with protest slogans. As Iran is a largely cash-based economy, this has even greater impact than it would on the streets of, say, London or Paris.

Perhaps this is the ultimate viral campaign? The medium is ubiquitous, as the currency is in constant use and people can't ignore it. The message spreads quickly via retail outlets and market transactions and the notes can find their way into the hands of absolutely anyone. What's more, there's a constant circulation - at least until such time as the authorities can remove the offending cash.

The government's solution currently is to say that 'defaced' notes will no longer be legal tender from January. I suspect this tactic is doomed to failure by the sheer number in the hands of the public and confusion over the status of individual notes. When exactly does a scribble or a smudge of green ink become a subversive political statement? When does a messy note become an illegal one? Generally, if people receive a 'dodgy' note or coin, they always like to kid themselves that it's ok, don't they? And hope that they'll be able to pass it on. After all, if they accepted it as genuine, maybe someone else will?

Next time you encounter a celebrated viral campaign for a big brand, spread via email or social networks, it's worth remembering that messages are probably travelling more quickly and effectively in Tehran on the back of 1,000 rial note.

In the past, we'd distinguish between traditional forms of advertising aimed at mass audiences and direct marketing techniques which targeted groups or individuals directly. One of the interesting things about the brave new world of Web 2.0 is that these distinctions are becoming blurred. It's no longer TV campaigns, billboards and press advertising versus direct mail, e-shots and targeted web content. We can take an olde-worlde discipline such as radio advertising and adapt it to the brave new world.

Take Spotify, for instance. I was discussing the brand at a recent CIM course on marketing communications and making the point that the music is interrupted by pretty bog-standard commercials. One minute, we're enjoying virtually unlimited 21st-century tunes streamed over the web. The next, we're being treated to one of those cheesy ads that I grew up listening to in the 1970s on LBC or Capital in London. Unconvincing characters spouting stilted dialogue, dreamed up by the agency B-team.

While it may not be easy to drag the creative work kicking and screaming into late 2009, it is becoming possible to make the advertising more relevant to the listener. In an intriguing twist on the personalised communications we see on social networks, Spotify's Daniel Ek recently announced that his business would target ads based on customers' musical tastes.

Apparently it's possible to tell from my choice of tracks whether I'm more inclined towards BMW or Audi. This sounds intriguing, but as someone who's in the market for neither car, I'm wondering if the potential of the personalisation is likely to be rather limited. There's no doubt we're getting another glimpse of the future. How quickly it will arrive, however, is anyone's guess. In the meantime, my listening pleasure will still be disrupted by British Gas and some company which checks the memory of my computer in a free online test.

A number of my clients and delegates on training courses often wonder whether Twitter can truly be used as an effective marketing platform. Too often, we think of it as a vehicle for conveying a message, whereas actually it's an instantaneous method of anyone conveying a message on our behalf.

US space agency NASA recently invited 100 of its followers to Cape Canaveral for the launch of the Space Shuttle. The enthusiasts were only too glad to act as PR ambassadors for the American space program.

Yet another example of marketing communications passing out of the hands of the 'professionals' and into the hands of the general public. And just one of the many ways in which NASA has attempted to exploit the new technologies.

Watch this space.

A fine example of German-style 'buzz' marketing. I wonder what viral messages these flies could carry in the future?

Everything's 4-star, except the hotel...

Earlier this year, budget hotel chain Premier Inn claimed in its UK newspaper advertisements that it offered "everything you'd expect from a 4* hotel".

Having worked in the ad industry, I know there's inevitably a certain amount of poetic licence in the promotion of products and services. Sometimes, however, boundaries get crossed. I protested to the Advertising Standards Authority about the misleading nature of the claim and was pleased to see this week that the watchdog ruled against the Whitbread-owned business, saying that the ads breached three sections of the relevant codes of practice.

As I frequently tell my students, however, the British regulatory system tends to be rather toothless. The ads won't appear again with the same form of words. But the campaign is now over and some months have elapsed since the original insertions. Is there any way we could create a system that works faster and carries more clout?

Driving Fatigue advert from Driving Fatigue on Vimeo.

This film has been put together by two recent graduates of Kingston University. Works very well, I think, at a conceptual level. Also has high production values for a portfolio piece. Hope these guys get some agency work.

Can we turn back the tide of greenwash?



Advertisers have long been accused of brainwashing the public. Over fifty years ago, when Vance Packard published his famous book The Hidden Persuaders, people were already worried about the extent to which we're manipulated by subliminal messages.

Today, the worry is that we're peddled a load of soft soap on the environment by a bunch of skilled PR practitioners and experts in so-called 'corporate social responsibility'. This greenwashing phenomenon has been nicely parodied by two students I taught this year at Kingston University in south-west London. Eleanor Goodwin and Sarah Burnett have created a range of eco-friendly packaging for distinctly unfriendly products such as weedkiller and rat poison. You can now destroy vermin safe in the knowledge that you're doing your bit for the planet.

You don't have to be mad to use Twitter, but it helps...

On the courses I run for the Chartered Institute of Marketing and University of the Arts London, there's inevitably more and more discussion of so-called 'social' media such as networking and microblogging sites. Twitter has grown hugely in recent months thanks to high-profile endorsements by celebrities. These range from American A-listers like Demi Moore and Willie Nelson through to UK talkshow hosts Philip Schofield and Jonathan Ross.

But how exactly can Twitter and other similar sites actually benefit marketers and advertisers? A clue may lie in the work being done with AMC's Golden Globe winning TV show Mad Men. The series is set in Madison Avenue, New York in the early 1960s and features an array of glamorous but rather unsympathetic characters who populate an ad agency called Sterling Cooper. Viewers in the UK can currently catch the second season on BBC4 and BBC2.

Actors from the show such as Jon Hamm use the site in a pretty typical way, posting about everything and nothing in 140-word bites. What's far more interesting, however, is the way that the characters from the show interact in real time on Twitter. Neurotic housewife and former model Betty Draper, for instance, tells of the meals she's preparing for her husband Don. Recently she posted that the creative director had taken a trip to Austin, Texas and remarked on how far afield businessmen seem to get these days. These days, of course, being 1962 rather than 2009.

When I responded to the tweets of one of the other characters - copywriter Peggy Olson - and told her that she shouldn't forget her roots, she was sweet enough to reply. She'd never forget she came from Brooklyn, she told me, but her career in Madison Avenue was where the future lay.

At one level, this is all completely bizarre. I am a real person in 2009 communicating with a ghostwriter for a fictional character who lives in the era of JFK. Some people might tell me to get a life and perhaps they're right. I can't help feeling, however, that this ability to interact with the characters cements the relationship that the viewers have with the show. And what do the TV producers know? Stronger relationships mean greater loyalty, more viral referrals and higher viewing figures. And higher viewing figures mean greater advertising revenues.

Perhaps when the history of 21st century marketing communications is written, the book won't start at the Millennium. It will reach back to the days when smoking was a mark of masculinity, Vermouth flowed freely during office meetings and the Mad Men ruled the roost in Manhattan.

© Phil Woodford, 2009. All rights reserved.

Phil Woodford is a freelance trainer and creative who lectures in marketing and advertising at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Although this is a blog about advertising creativity, the world of marketing communications has been moving at a phenomenal speed in the past few years. If you're interested in exploring some of the newer forms of social and viral marketing, why not sign up for my new online forum?