Russ Jefferys

A Crash Course to Shine

As seen on ABC’s Gruen Planet on Wednesday 12th September, the above is VW’s attempt to get a profoundly serious message across to a very targeted audience. 

It’s influencer marketing at its best. Find out who the target market listen to / watch, create an utterly convincing YouTube tutorial, slam home one shocking stat, and leave the audience in no doubt about the consequence of applying makeup whilst driving.

I’m a big fan of this. We should expect to see more of this kind of influencer marketing in the near future.

New $250m Tourism Australia Ad Launched

Tourism Australia launched their latest TVC last week - to a mixed response.  No question, the footage is stunning and I want to see it all.  But the specially written soundtrack is weak and it feels like the ad is trying to appeal to too broad an audience. And in doing so, it lacks substance. 

If Australia is a brand, this ad is evidence that Tourism Australia hasn’t worked out what it stands for or how best to sell it.  And that’s a shame - because I really want to like it. But maybe all of this won’t matter.  Because most of what Australia has to offer can sell itself.

TNT Push to Add Drama

PR doesn’t get much better than this. In order to launch new Belgian TV channel TNT, this button was placed in a Belgian town square. All that was required was for a passer-by to push it to add drama…

XXXX Island

With the above video, Aussie beer brand XXXX has launched a gem of a campaign, acquiring a 15 acre island on the Southern Great Barrier Reef designed to be a ‘getaway for mates.’

The idea is simple. There’s nothing on it yet, but men get to vote stuff on to the island which will officially open in October. By visiting the website, www.xxxxisland.com.au, blokes can decide what activities are offered and what gets built, under the guiding principle it should be ‘less Club Med, more Club Shed.’

For submitting ideas, punters stand to win a trip to the island for them and three mates worth $10,000.

It’s the work of BMF and Holler. And I think it’s XXXXing genius.

Paddy Power’s Chav Tranquilliser

Online betting site Paddy Power are courting controversy once again, this time with their latest YouTube ad featuring the ‘Chav Tranquilliser’.

On the eve of the 2012 Cheltenham Festival (one of the most prestigious events on the National Hunt racing calendar), Paddy Power released this video which has quickly spread across the web, with over 1.3m views on YouTube alone at the time of writing.

Almost as quickly as it was released it was banned by the ASA, meaning it isn’t gracing TV screens in the UK. But that seems only to have made the ad more popular.

Paddy Power claim the ad is a response to a comment on their Facebook page left by race-goer Dan Collins. After a drunken brawl broke out on Ladies Day at Ascot last year, Dan wrote ‘Hope the Chavs don’t ruin Cheltenham like they did Ascot.’

And so the ‘Chav Tranquilliser’ was born.

My view? It’s brilliant. Funny, topical, provocative, controversial, outrageous: everything that makes a campaign viral, and memorable.

For a brand that doesn’t take itself too seriously this is bang on the money. We hear you Dan Collins!

‘Our Blades are F***ing Great’

Every now and then I come across an idea so simple, so logical, so beautifully obvious, I hate myself a little bit for not thinking of it first.

And so it is the case with Dollar Shave Club.  The idea? Why do we need $20 razors with ‘Mach 4’ technology, rotating heads, eight blades and who-knows-what-else? How did our forefathers cope without such modern shaving equipment?

For $1 a month, Dollar Shave Club send you a stainless steel razor, so you’ll never forget to buy new blades. So simple it hurts.

The video above not only argues a compelling case for getting back to simpler shaving, it does it in an hilarious and provocative way. A better brand/concept launch and 90sec ad I don’t think I’ve seen.

‘Kony2012’: Raising Awareness in the Social Age

If you’re signed up to any social network you’ll have undoubtedly seen #stopkony trending over the past few days.

If so, you’ll know it’s the latest work by the charity Invisible Children to make famous the Ugandan leader of the violent, child-recruiting Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony.

The 30min feature film uploaded to Vimeo and YouTube has, at the time of writing, received a combined 55 million views - and that number is growing fast.

It’s an emotional short film. It’s also an extremely well shot and edited feature that has spread rapidly across social netowrks and news channels.  But it has drawn criticism from some quarters for the budget required to make it, and, perhaps more concerning, for some alleged factual inaccuracies.

Visible Children, a Tumblr blog, is vocal in its criticism of ‘Kony2012’. They question the charity’s distribution of funds, accountability and support for Uganda’s army and other military forces: “Is awareness good? Yes. But these problems are highly complex, not one-dimensional and, frankly, aren’t of the nature that can be solved by postering, film-making and changing your Facebook profile picture, as hard as that is to swallow.”

Despite this criticism, I can’t help thinking this is precisely what Invisible Children should be doing.  After all, their stated mission is to ‘use the power of media to inspire young people to help end the longest-running armed conflict in Africa. We make documentaries, tour them around the world, and lobby our nation’s leaders to make ending this conflict a priority.’

As a tactic to raise mass awareness in a short space of time, Ivisible Children should be applauded.  There is no doubt that many millions of people the world over will now know who Joseph Kony is and the crimes he is alleged to have commited.

And all the criticism, claim and counter-claim surrounding Invisible Children will only help their cause by keeping ‘Kony2012’ firmly front of mind for a long time to come.

I suspect some of the criticism levelled at the charity is valid. But if the objective is to build awareness and compel an astonishingly large number of people to dig a little deeper and find out for themselves what Kony and the LRA have been responsible for, this short film is nothing short of brilliant.

Parking Made Simple with Mercedes-Benz Tweet Fleet

Mercedes-benz have harnessed ‘Park Assist’ technology to work alongside Twitter in an initiative that allows followers to not only see empty parking spaces, but to receive mapped directions to the available spot.

The video above explains. As a possible solution to driving around aimlessly looking for that elusive parking space, Mercedes might just have hit upon an awesome new way forward.