Lost Touch & Heimie's Ideas

An interesting subject was broached among my mother, my sister and myself, the effectiveness of the new Toyota Prius Ads.

How effective are ad reviewer's at major publications and how objective is their analysis? I read an article decrying the Toyota ad for being to flippiant and creative for creatives sake. Yet, many non-ad friend's and relatives have brought up the ad on their own, and upon looking it up it ranked 3rd in most liked ads by Nielson during May. Judge for yourself.

Read this review on an earlier Toyota ad by Ad Age.

Toyota Prius' "Harmony"

Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi

Reason: Although it hinges on being visually stimulating it truly has the effect of capturing the consumer's attention and getting across the eco-friendly message.

As I mentioned earlier, I wanted to get some in-progress work up for the concept I'm working on with my friend Dan on Heimie's Haberdashery. For the time being it's been primarily research, consumer target and the bigger picture idea; but, I had a chance to start sketching out some logo and tag line ideas.

Take a look at the progress thus far. And below is a first go at a logo. I'm not too terribly happy with it at the moment; but, it was great to get it out of my system and see how it looked.

Sticking To It

After having my site live for just under a week (coupled with an 8-hour campaign), I received an offer for freelancing, over 300 hits on my site, a threat to sue from a major agency and the same agency calling back a few hours later with interest in my work and approach. All-in-all it's been a good week.

I spent the majority of my day generating ideas for the Heimie's Haberdashery campaign, which I mentioned in an earlier post. After spending some time thinking about the specific target consumer I feel we should go after, I tried a number of different approaches in terms of the way the campaign should feel. In the process I dug up some great old pieces of reference that I researched when working on an alcohol pitch earlier in the summer. These two are excellent examples of targeting the same demographic with slightly different personalities.

42 Below Vodka's "Map of the World"
Agency: Saatchi & Saatchi
Reason: It pulls off an extremely dry sense of humor very well. A perfect approach for an affluent single male around 21-30.

Ketel One's "Table"
Agency: Grey Group
Reason: It pulls of classy cool in a unique way. Great for the affluent single man that thinks of himself as an alpha male.

Look out for some of my process work for this campaign which I will have posted tomorrow.