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Obama's campaign cleaned up last week at Cannes.

Here's the film DDB created that was shown before David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager spoke, at the festival.



Posted by Ed Cotton Hedging is usually something done by Wall Street to help protect companies against volatile commodity and currency pricing. This tool might now be finding it's way into marketing thanks to a company called Pricelock, who've just done a gas deal for automaker Hyundai. The possibilities are endless; being able to lock in your cup of coffee at Starbucks or even the price of your steak at a local steakhouse.

It will be interesting to see if this idea spreads, given how price sensitive people are at this moment in time.


Posted by Ed Cotton While it seems to be culturally ingrained into our DNA that you need mass scale for success, it's possible that you can find success in the niches. The Long Tail suggests you need have a hit or you risk sinking into oblivion, but we've heard of artists doing surprisingly well utilizing their Twitter bases to auction off band gear, t-shirts and special one-off performances. People making money in a way that few brands or even Twitter itself has demonstrated.

Kevin Kelly has spent some time thinking about this, as is his style and sets the magical number of 1,000 which he believes are the number of fans required to support an artist. He defines them as true fans, which is probably not the same as Facebook fans or Twitter followers.

"Other than aim for a blockbuster hit, what can an artist do to escape the long tail?

One solution is to find 1,000 True Fans. While some artists have discovered this path without calling it that, I think it is worth trying to formalize. The gist of 1,000 True Fans can be stated simply:

A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce. They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issued hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up. They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the t-shirt, and the mug, and the hat. They can't wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans."

While most consumer brands aren't artists, there are clearly some opportunities for brands who can find their niche super fan bases in social media and then offer up unique products and services that are limited only to those super-fans. It's a new way to think about limited edition. We are already thinking about brands as media, so brands as artists, is yet another lens to use.

Posted by Ed Cotton With legislation coming down hard on the tobacco industry, its options for marketing are becoming tougher and tougher. Pentagram recently took a look at what this could for cigarette packaging and communication in the future.

Here's one of the pack designs.



Posted by Ed Cotton There's a good article in Fast Company about restaurant powerhouse Darden. The story talks about how the company is trying hard to re-tool its business to be relevant to a changing American food landscape.

Of particular interest is the section on The Olive Garden where the insight about emotional togetherness helped the brand deliver a benefit above and beyond the food and how the company strives to bring more Italian authenticity to the chain with the establishment of a cooking school in Tuscany and field trips.

"Olive Garden promises "an idealized Italian family meal, whether you're Italian or not," says Pickens. When General Mills launched the chain in 1982, it was an affordable Italian restaurant -- a safe choice, nothing surprising. By the 1990s, it had hundreds of locations, but the menu had grown stale and sales were in decline. "It lost its culinary and cultural soul," says John Caron, Olive Garden's head of marketing.

Darden turned to research. "The key consumer insight was that people missed the emotional comfort and connectivity that comes with family," says chief operating officer Drew Madsen, then the chain's head of marketing. "People come to a restaurant for both physical and emotional nourishment. The physical is the food; and the emotional is how you feel when you leave."

Olive Garden executives began tying everything to this mythical Italian family, adopting the tagline, "When you're here, you're family." New locations were designed to suggest Italian farmhouses, with a large family-style table, modeled on one in a Florentine trattoria. Then executives formed a partnership with actual Italians: Olive Garden's Culinary Institute of Tuscany (CIT). It was a "stroke of genius," says Dennis Lombardi, a veteran food consultant. Eleven times a year, the company sends 14 top employees, many of whom have never set foot in Italy, to spend a week in an 11th-century village in Tuscany and learn from Sergio and Daniela Zingarelli, a husband and wife who operate a restaurant, winery, and inn. The couple and other local experts expose the Americans to everything from how olive oil gets pressed to how to layer flavors in a Bolognese sauce. The Olive Garden employees buy fresh vegetables at a market in Florence and prepare a multicourse Italian meal. "It's like getting into Harvard," says Pickens. "It's not, of course, but you know what I mean." Since 1999, some 850 employees have attended CIT; 80% of them are still with the company.

There are also what Caron calls "ideation trips" to CIT, during which chefs work in local Tuscan restaurants. They have come back with dozens of ideas that have served to expand and update Olive Garden's menu. Gone are the days of puzzling hybrids like Italian nachos. Today, many items on the dinner menu carry a CIT logo, designating that they were inspired by a staffer's experience in Italy.

These experiences -- and menu items -- provide an authenticity that's rare for a chain. Take risotto, an Italian staple that made its way into Olive Garden only two years ago. In a pilot program at a small number of restaurants, diners were initially tepid. As attitudes changed, the test kitchens took on the preparation challenge; risotto requires 20 minutes to cook, longer than customers are willing to wait. Chefs eventually found a more expensive variety of rice that could be cooked most of the way through in advance, finished off just before serving, and still retain the desired taste and texture. Risotto is now part of a CIT-inspired entree designed to entice more adventurous diners who might not have considered Olive Garden

While The Olive Garden might be the furthest from many people's perception of an authentic Italian experience, it's clear that the brand has to compete on a mass scale, by finding an emotional connection and pushing its employees to be educated, gives it a better chance of success than its major competitors.


Posted by Ed Cotton Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter gave a talk at the 140 Characters Conference held recently. He made it clear from the outset that Twitter is about three words; approachability, transparency and immediacy.

It's a nice and simple distillation of how brands need to behave in this new environment.

The reality is to achieve this most brands have a mountain to climb, one that's been built out of hundreds of years of established corporate culture, process and lawyers.
Breaking through all that is going to be tough.

This is not just about a policy for dealing with Twitter, but re-thinking the whole of your communication. Unless it's holistic and deals with the realities, it's likely to fail.

The shift from campaign to conversation is a radical and one that requires way more than half measures.


Posted by Ed Cotton