If I have to name the advertiser of 2011, I don’t have to think long; it’s easily KLM. The reason? The Royal Dutch airline launched numerous digital platforms in the past year, experimented wildly with social media, and turned Twitter into a mature customer relationship channel. If there’s one company that has fully embraced the extensive possibilities of digital communication, without forgetting about both its commercial and communication targets, it’s KLM.

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In a recent crowdsourcing campaign airline Transavia asked the consumer to come up with a new slogan for the company – the prize: one year of free travelling around Europe and your slogan on a plane. An impressive 110,000 slogans were submitted. But to everyone’s surprise the top 10 nominated slogans were ridiculously bad. All of them were lame, hollow, and generic. Among them: “A good story”, “The choice of Holland”, and “We fly for you”. The eventual winner “Makes you happy” only makes some sense when referring to the fact that it made me laugh out loud.

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Robert Röling, PhD student at the University van Amsterdam (economic geography), wrote an article about his research on Amsterdam’s success in attracting international agencies and creative talent. The article is titled “Small Town, Big Campaign: The Rise and Growth of an International Advertising Industry” – it is published in the academic journal Regional Studies. Röling’s thorough article starts with describing the history of international advertising. In this context scholars nowadays speak of four big waves of international advertising, Röling explains. And Amsterdam is the centre of the fourth wave. (more…)

While BP pollutes the Gulf of Mexico with around 100.000 barrels of oil per day, British-Dutch oil company Shell is broadcasting a very sober corporate commercial on Dutch television at the moment. In the commercial a Japanese kid plays his electrical guitar in his bedroom. His parents are annoyed by the noise and turn off the power – in Japan you have a switch that allows you to turn off an individual power socket. The message; Shell sells clean gas in Japan, so the people can enjoy clean energy. At the end, a voice-over adds with some tongue in cheek: “as long as Mr. Yukotami [or a similar name] allows his son to do so”. (more…)

How Apple closed the technology gap between older en younger generations by making user friendly software

Recently I came across this ancient ad for Remington typewriters. How old fashioned, I thought; “For young. For Old. For everybody”. When it comes down to today’s digital ‘typewriters’ the gap between grey bearded men and their grand children has never been bigger. My dad for example can only use – let’s say – 5% of all the functions that I use on my computer. This problem did not exist in the time of the mechanical typewriter. (more…)

How Philips confirmed my preconception about LED and shed a whole new light on its tagline

In 2004 Philips launched the tagline ‘Sense and Simplicity’. I clearly remember that I liked this small phrase straight away – though it wasn’t hard to improve the previous one: ‘Let’s make things better’. Sense and simplicity communicated exactly what I wanted to see in consumer electronics; made by intelligent engineers and translated into a simple product that I can intuitively use. Just like the iPhone; loved for its sense and simplicity. But last weekend I saw a Philips ad that gave sense and simplicity a whole new meaning. (more…)