Houston-based Holmes Smokehouse has chosen The Swizzle Collective as Agency of Record for it’s premium sausage brands, hoping to drum up statewide awareness for a brand that is already #1 in Houston according to the Houston Chronicle.
We share our win with fellow Austin-based PR agency, Wyatt Brand, who will complement our creative work with buzz-building efforts in PR, Social Media and Event Planning.
Look for the majority of our efforts to appear in the D/FW market, where we’ll kick off the grilling season with a billboard campaign
If you’re in Austin and you’d like to celebrate with us, stay tuned for a Facebook update on our Links, Drinks and Kinks cook-out party next Friday, May 20th.
Irony runs pretty rampant in advertising. So, when Velocity Credit Union wanted to send a paper notice to their customers asking them to sign up for eStatements (in order to save paper, no less), the hypocrisy made us a little queasy, until it made us giggle with possibility.
Our solution?
Seed paper.
The copy on the back of these beautifully textured card inserts reads:
Go paperless and make a difference.
Directions: Plant this wildflower seed card under a thin layer of soil in a sunny spot. Water thoroughly and soon your wildflower seedlings will begin to bloom.
Stay tuned here for a play-by-play of how the paper actually works as it grows in our office window.
In our third consecutive effort with Director Mike Angelo Torres, we’re challenged with breathing new life into an Austin institution. Our new campaign for Threadgill’s is simple. In fact, it’s only one word. Yet, it’s a word that encapsulates the jerk-reaction you can only get from Southern-style cooking done right. The word?
Dang.
With a TV campaign breaking during the NCAA Championship this week, and a SXSW Music Event rebranded as Dang Fest, along with hats, t-shirts and posters, Threadgill’s attempts to pull in a younger clientele that might not have grown up with Threadgill’s like some of us here at The Swizzle Collective did.
Dang Fest kicks off on Thursday, March 17 at Theadgill’s South location at 301 W. Riverside Drive with the family-friendly Roky Erickson’s Ice Cream Social sponsored by Amy’s Ice Cream and featuring the John Lennon Educational Tour Bus.
We’ll be camped out at Threadgill’s Dang Fest, which will continue through Saturday with all day music acts including Roky Erickson, Grammy-nominated Will Sheff and Okkervil River, Bob Schneider, Soul Track Mind, Matt the Electirican and Stone Honey, among many others.
As Threadgill’s Agency of Record, we’ll be complementing current Dang efforts with PR, Social Media Management, and Media Buying services. And as long-time Threadgill’s fans, we are thrilled to add Threadgill’s to our client roster, which includes Velocity Credit Union, Champions Westlake, and The Stage Alliance, among others.
1. Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Japanese)
2. Kevin Costner in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (English)
3. Charleston Heston in Touch of Evil (Mexican)
4. Ben Kingsley in You Kill Me (Buffalo, NY — and the inspiration for this list. I watched this movie last night… absolutely dreadful NY accent from Ghandi).
5. Rob Morrow in Quiz Show (Boston)
So I’m watching the pre-Oscars coverage on TV Sunday night, not particularly interested in who designed the ladies’ dresses, though Tim Gunn at least made it bearable. Then it happened.
The commercial.
People debating about their love or hate of Miracle Whip. Let me start by saying I’m definitely not a Miracle Whip fan. Never have been. But to see the passion these people had, whatever side they were on, was just good stuff. Now I realize they’re paid actors, but this to me was a ballsy spot. I mean, how many marketers do you know who would allow both sides of a conversation, a debate, to happen on behalf of their brand? Allow negative reactions to my product? Uhhh, no.
But that’s it exactly. For a real conversation to happen, there has to be two sides. A little tension, but in Miracle Whip’s case, without the nastiness of politics. Just the politics of condiments, which to me is much funnier.
So many brands are trying to make themselves relevant, and are scrambling to jump on the social media bandwagon to do it, but in all honesty, the overwhelming majority totally miss the mark, because when you peel back the covers, there’s nothing interesting there. Just because it’s in the social space doesn’t mean it’s worth talking about.
I think what Miracle Whip has done is find the perfect conversation, which by the way is based on an essential truth about Miracle Whip: people either love it or hate it. In the Swizzle Collective office, we had this same conversation. One partner saying Miracle Whip was one step away from that nasty Thousand Island-tasting goop on Big Macs, to another partner claiming how the addition of Miracle Whip changes the whole flavor profile of a sandwich, how it’s an extra ingredient, unlike mayo, which is basically sandwich glue.
My favorite lines from the spot:
1. Miracle Whip tastes like… lotion. But sweet. And who wants a sweet lotion sandwich?
2. Miracle Whip tastes like disappointment. Like spreadable disappointment.
3. The secret ingredient? Miracles.
And then the line near the end that tied it all up nicely for me:
We’re not for everyone.
Marketing 101 would tell you to avoid the negative like the plague. Thank God this marketing director said no thanks and embraced the truth. Gave it a bear hug. I think this is a conversation that will continue, and I honestly hope it helps Miracle Whip sales.
And I hate Miracle Whip, so that’s saying something.
In case you missed it, here’s our spot that ran during the 2011 Academy Awards Show.
This is one of the first spots we produced for Velocity Credit Union, and it’s also one of our favorites. It seems to resonate with others, as well. Here’s why we think it works.
One of our goals in every piece of communication we create is to find a universal truth that people can relate to. People like to see themselves reflected back at them. They like to point to the television and say, “that’s me. I totally do that.” When people get it, we score. The client scores. It’s a win win.
In this spot, we borrowed from the culture of Facebook. We never mention Facebook. We show the computer screen for half a second in our other :15 spot, entitled “Cute Baby,” which you can see here. But even though we don’t mention it, people get what’s going on because they’ve all been there before. Who hasn’t found themselves mesmerized by somebody’s photo album, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, that they’ve never even met while browsing around Facebook?
Guilty!
This spot doesn’t just borrow from pop culture for the sake of getting a laugh. It actually makes a point. The VO says, “If you have time to look at stranger’s pictures online, then you have time to switch to Velocity Credit Union.” So, in the end, two things that never had anything to do with each other before–Facebook and Banking–are brought together to create something new. That is what defines creativity.
It’s what we live for.
CREDITS:
Client/Media Buying Goddess: Carol Cain, VP of Marketing at Velocity Credit Union; Agency: The Swizzle Collective, Chris Davis and Stefani Zellmer, writers; Production Company: Beef & Pie Productions, Mike Woolf, Director, Andrew Yates, Director of Photography, Brandon Thomas, Editor.
This week in Ads of Our Lives, we’ll discuss the classic Volkswagen spot, “Snow Plow.”
Background
Created by Doyle Dane Bernbach, this classic ad won gold at Cannes in 1964. Now known as DDB, which is still active today on Madison Avenue, the agency began with 13 people who hailed mostly from Grey Advertising. The cream of that crop was also the first true “creative team,” legendary art director Bob Gage and copywriter Phyllis Robinson. “Snow Plow” was directed by Howard Zieff in 1963. The VW campaign from this era was voted number 1 on Ad Age’s Top 100 Ad Campaigns of the Century.
Strategy
The strategy was simple, which is why the creative solution followed suit. We suppose the strategy was about how surprisingly well the tires handle in inclement weather. In a nutshell: VWs come equipped with some bad ass tires.
Why it works
It works because it’s simple, which harkens back to what we just said about strategy. This is about tires. Period. If the agency had allowed the client to sell five more features of the car in this one spot, it would have been lost on the audience. Instead, it won our affection.
Also, it’s clever. It makes us think about something in a way we wouldn’t have thought about otherwise. This is something that wins respect in an audience. Ads work when they tell us something we didn’t already know, and when they do so in an entertaining way. Which this totally does.
What’s remarkable about it?
It breaks through the clutter because it’s quiet and understated. But it’s also interesting that we never see the snow plow driver, do we? This is a spot about a car, where we don’t see any people, and yet it is dripping in humanity. Quite a brilliant feat, actually.
Also, you never see the VW logo. Not even on the car itself. This is a nod to how original-looking the car was for its time. There were no others like it. But it’s also another coup for the agency, who convinced the client over and over to keep it simple.
What would we do differently today?
The voice over in this spot says, “Have you ever wondered how the man who drives a snow plow, drives to the snow plow? This one drives a Volkswagen. So you can stop wondering.”
Personally, I would have said, “Have you ever wondered how the man who drives a snow plow, gets to the snow plow?” That is actually how I remember the line in my mind. And then I would have stopped at that. Do you really need the other two sentences? Today, we might have done away with those two sentences and plopped a shiny logo at the end. And a web address of course.
Like ads through the hour glass, so are the ads of our lives.
This is my favorite oxymoron. And my metaphor of the day.
As we go into the weekend, I’m busy wrapping up the work week and preparing for a casting session on Monday. I’m in that eternal segue of work life and family life. I say eternal because my work life and home life are intertwined, as this was a business founded by my husband and myself. When we are at home, work still happens. When we are at work, life still happens. And so it goes.
I bring it up because lately, with all the stresses of our growing business and our growing children, the demands seem endless. It often gets overwhelming. In the midst of it all, we forget why we got into this business in the first place. We, quite frankly, wonder why we thought it was a good idea to have all these kids!
The answer is because it’s rewarding. And at the end of the day, it’s a lot of fun.
One of the top five reasons I love my husband is because he makes me laugh.
One of the top five reasons I got into advertising is because its a career that lets me explore my sense of humor.
One of the top five things I love about my children (and there are thousands) is that they are clever, funny and peculiar little human beings.
Finding a comfortable work life balance is a constant struggle. But I think it’s when the balance skews more toward the tickle than the fight that it all begins to feel manageable.
For twenty years, I’ve been telling the story of how my life was pointed down a different path by one very dynamic advertising class.
See, I thought I wanted to be a journalist, and I often still glamorize what my life would have been like if I had stayed that path. I even wrote about it here.
As a journalism major at The University of Texas, I was required to take a class outside my chosen major, but within the School of Communications. I chose to take a class in Advertising.
It was a lecture class of hundreds, with one man standing on a stage in front of gigantic screens that played slideshows and videos of classic Volkswagen ads, Samsonite ads, Jewish Rye, etc. You know the ones.
And something in me clicked. A lightbulb went on when I realized I could still be a writer, but I only had to write 8 words of clever copy (your average headline) and make a decent living at it. I even had the right to be funny. In fact humor was encouraged and often the most effective form of the craft. Great Scott!
I swooned. I changed my major to Advertising. I never missed a class.
I got an A.
This Intro to Advertising class was taught by John H. Murphy II, and I believe it still is, 20 years later. Since then, I’ve been telling the story of how I was once a journalism major, and how one charismatic professor changed all that. I have never forgotten how much that class affected my life.
This past Saturday night at the Austin Addy Awards Show, I ran into Dr. Murphy. And I got the opportunity to tell him what an impact he had on my life.
Houston-based Holmes Smokehouse has chosen The Swizzle Collective as Agency of Record for it’s premium sausage brands, hoping to drum up statewide awareness for a brand that is already #1 in Houston according to the Houston Chronicle.
