Normally we wouldn’t have noticed this ad, but since Vodafone has surprised us many times in the past half year by introducing so many different styles of advertising, we wanted to share this one with you. Agency THEY introduced yet another visual identity for Vodafone’s communication. We like the looks of it; it is clean, designy and distinctive. If they are able to stick to it for a while, we would say it’s a keeper. However, we don’t understand it. It says: “325.205 Dutchmen have sent intimate text messages to the wrong person”. Interesting market insight, but what’s in it for us? Is Vodafone going to intercept dirty text messages to our grandmas or something? The bodycopy reads: “However you use your telephone, we have a contract that fits your behaviour. The call+text contract for example. With two times as much text messages. Handy if you need to make up with someone”. So let us get this straight. If you send your grandma a text message saying “Look forward to tonight…I’m horny as hell”, then this contract allows you to send a second text message saying: “I am so sorry grandma, that was meant for someone else”. Is that what Vodafone is trying to tell us? We’re confused. Can anyone explain?

A great week for UbachsWisbrun/JWT. The agency won two major clients; both Nationale Nederlanden (insurer, owned by the ING group) and ING bank – the latter after an exciting pitch with three combatants pulling out. The trouble started when UbachsWisbrun, one of the most succesful indpendent Dutch agencies at the time, merged with PPGH/JWT in 2007. With this acquisition JWT wanted to buy fresh, creative blood and put itself back on the creative map. But of course merging two different cultures into one agency always needs some time. And then the credit crunch hit the advertising market. UW/JWT went through a very deep dip. Last year it lost two important clients, Vodafone and Rabobank and shrank to 50 employees – coming down from 188 employees just after the merger. The way back up was the win of the Belastingdienst (National Tax Collector) account in September. And after this week UW/JWT can seriously start hiring again. Whether the agency will also finally make its creative comeback, is still to be answered.

We’ve been writing quite a lot about Vodafone in the past months. Mainly because the mobile company seems to be in some sort of identity crises. Every time we see a Vodafone advertisement it communicates in a different way, with a different style and seems to be targeted at a different group of consumers. It started with the mutated guinea pigs, then they were giving away phones and other stuff, then you had to search for them (off and online) and the previous promotion asked us: ‘Who wants to be a prepaid millionaire?’. This time it’s not about your knowledge, but about your luck. That is, if we go by the campaign proposition: ‘Lucky Calls’. The concept is simple: you just call your favourite phone and ‘Anouk’ picks it up by moving through the screen in different ways. When you can answer a really simple question, you might win the phone. Not until you’ve submitted your personal data though – so Vodafone can add you to their database. Fortunately digital agency Super Heroes tried to make it all as digestible as possible.

Yesterday we were talking about the Golden Loeki. Today we are talking about the opposite prize, the raspberry for advertising; the Lead Lion. It is awarded once a year straight after the Golden Loeki, by Dutch consumer awareness program Radar. The first prize was won by KPN’s mobile phone brand Hi. It’s about a girl that looses her ‘pokkie’ (the Surinam word for mobile phone) and goes nuts – luckily though she saved all her numbers on her Hi-account. In the commercial she screams so loud that it irritated the crap out of the consumer. According to Hi, the commercial did well among the target: 18 to 24 year olds. We believe that, but still concur with the award. An adapted Axe (Lynx) commercial, with a guy that can role his eyes to look at his own sweaty armpits, ended second. This surprised us, it is a pretty mellow ad. Maybe it was the annoying voice-over that didn’t fit with the commercial very well. The Vodafone commercial by THEY that we discussed earlier ended third. Mutated guinea pigs try to imitate normal people and talk a language that no one understands. Interesting detail; in the most recent commercial, Vodafone kept the characters, but changed the voices. So what can we learn from the Lead Lion? Don’t use loud, annoying or unintelligible voices or strange, unattractive characters in your advertising.

What a catchy name for an activation campaign. And what a simple and strong idea from online agency Achtung! to engage prepaid callers – regardless their provider! It doesn’t need much more explanation than the name suggests. If you register yourself as a prepaid caller on the website, you can participate in the contest and receive one text message per day with a difficult question. The person that answers the quickest and closest to the answer, wins – voila! – 1 million text signs or mobile minutes. Questions are asked like, ‘How long can a cockroach survive without his head’ and ‘How many kilo’s of lipstick does a woman eat in her whole life’. And guess what, at the end of the day Vodafone has its database filled with fresh and eager consumers that very homogeneously fit within their prepaid target group!

We ended our last post about Vodafone with ‘to be continued’. Why? Because we were surprised that Vodafone’s new, distinctive characters (the ‘mutated guinea pigs’) weren’t used at all in Achtung!’s brand activation, ‘Upgrade a stranger’. And while Vodafone internally is still being divided over the new ad property – created by THEY – Achtung! was asked to create yet another activation campaign for the (young) consumer. The principle is quite similar to the previous activation; through two different micro-sites Vodafone gives away more mobile phones. The first campaign is called BlackBerryHideout; phones (BlackBerry Curves) are hidden around universities, video clues are given by two students  (in English) on the website and anyone can search for it – in real life. The other activation, is called TheYouFlickInMyHyveFaceChase; an online treasure hunt through social networks and blogs. This time the prize is a Samsung H1 (and some other prizes). We are not sure how many consumers are involved in these activations, but it definitely sounds like something that will cause a lot of rumour around the brand – this time mainly positive rumour…

This commercial by THEY for Vodafone, is the talk of the (advertising) town at the moment. No wonder, the mutated guinea pigs are kind of odd. But we think it’s very brave of Vodafone to adopt such a distinctive ad property and respect THEY for being able to sell it. And since it is always hard to judge a completely new concept, we can only say we didn’t expect it from Vodafone. It is actually a campaign we would expect from a completely new player in the market – that needs to build up awareness in a short time – or one with a niche target. The brand proposition ‘Power to you’ sounds a bit like marketing talk. On the other hand, it should give a creative agency enough inspiration to come up with an ‘empowering’ campaign. And the phrase ‘life is too short for hasty calls’ seems illogical (we always keep our calls short for the same reason), but makes sense when used in different ways – ‘Life is too short to search for Wifi’ etc. The campaign is accompanied by a set of banners, made by Achtung! And there’s also a ‘Power to you’ website (also made by Achtung!) dubbed ‘Upgrade a stranger’. Complete strangers, filmed with a hidden camera, can win different gadgets (a mini laptop, a mobile phone, etc.) when the visitors of the website vote for them. We wonder why the mutated guinea pigs don’t play a role in this. You want to push your ad property through different channels, right? And didn’t Vodafone choose for the partnership THEY/Achtung! to enrich the market with truly integrated advertising? To be continued…

Finally UbachsWisbrun/JWT seems to have taken the big turn. Through Adformatie we learned that the agency has won the prestigious Belastingdienst (National Tax Collectors Office); a several-million-account. DDB, Publicis,  Roorda and Imagine were also involved in the pitch. Through the grapevine we learned that at JWT the champagne has been flowing abundantly. In the last two years the office has only been loosing (important) accounts. After having been ditched by Vodafone (went to They/Achtung!) and Rabobank (went to N=5) the agency shrank from 188 employees to 50. Belastingdienst came from Indie, who owned the account for five years and produced some very smart advertising. Indie literally gave the tax collectors a sympathetic face, which is – if you look at the nature of their ‘business’ – not an easy task. 15 employees were made redundand, because of the loss. Anyway, congrats JWT.

After having worked for 7 years with UW/JWT, Vodafone this February announced it wanted to reconsider its communication strategy. The brand that facilitates communication had noticed that its target group had changed its way of communicating (well spotted!). No less than 7 agencies participated in the pitch for 2 different parts of the account; theme and online. This seems to be the best of both worlds; THEY is known for its solid brand strategies, while Achtung! is one of the best online agencies around. But how will they work together? Hopefully not like many agencies still do today; one agency comes up with a superb offline idea, while the online partner is asked to translate it into a flashy website.

Sikkens approached 2009 for a new corporate identity. And when the agency found out Sikkens was partnering with the ‘Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Formula1 team’ (we had to copy-paste this mouthful), they thought why not design it with a racecar. Farfetched? Not at all; Adobe Illustrator is soooo 2008. This lenghty video was the result. And now seriously: the artistic result is being used for advertising!