CHANGE OR DIE™ / This is our promise to evolve. To never be satisfied with the status quo. To always look forward. / Here is the online resource that captures our thoughts, conversations and discoveries along the way.
The Sorted Books project began in 1993 and is ongoing… The project involves culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom…
“Great juxtaposition of book titles and contemporary thought. ‘Literally’ read between the lines.”
by Ryan Cuthriell Brand Futurist The Republik Lieutenant Creative Ops
When life gives you lemons trash, make art. Tim Noble and Sue Webster seem to be doing just that. This makes me realize that everything one might need is already there at your feet. All that’s needed is inspiration and a change of perception.
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” – Albert Einstein
by Robert Shaw West Brand Futurist The Republik Companies Chairman/CEO
From time-to-time this blog will include change ideas on marketing. After all, The Republik is an advertising agency and marketing is the thing we know best. Today’s topic — “Pull Advertising” is an introduction to a novel marketing approach you’ll hear us referring to quite a bit. So without further ado, here it is.
We believe an agency’s job is to deliver big business-building ideas to its clients — not just advertising. In fact, some of the most powerful and effective ideas we’ve developed and implemented don’t resemble anything within the traditional definition of advertising at all. For one of our fashion clients, we created a shoebox that could be used as a closet organizer, gift box or photo storage.
As silly as it may sound, customers started buying nicole shoes, just so they could get a cool shoebox. Today, nicole is selling the boxes on their website — separate from their shoes.
Triumph, makers of the “World’s Toughest Boats” had an awareness problem. Instead of buying expensive traditional media, we produced a relatively inexpensive video. In the video, we challenged the world’s biggest redneck to break the boat. We seeded links to it on fishing and boating sites and blogs. The result? Millions of people from around the world downloaded the spot, it appeared on CMT’s “Country Fried Videos”, was the subject of a New York Times article and boosted Triumph’s sales in a down market. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone interested in a fishing boat that doesn’t know about Triumph.
The executions mentioned above are just two examples of “pull” ideas. The objective is to create ideas so compelling, informative or entertaining, selected consumer groups find them so “attractive” they go out of their ways to find or participate in them. This is diametrically opposed to the old school way of marketing where “target” consumers are identified and media is purchased to “push” interruptive messaging on them.
So far, it’s been our experience that pull ideas, when executed well and delivered through the right communication channels, are much less expensive and much more powerful and effective than “push” ones. Pull ideas not only attract people to buy more of a brand’s products or services, they also create a long-term bonds with them. Not surprising when you consider the fact that traditional advertising is geared around disruption — breaking up a TV or radio show with commercial pods, interrupting articles in magazines with print ads, disturbing the enjoyment of a web page with pop-ups and banners, etc., etc.
Our philosophy is and always has been, advertising at its worst is just another form of pollution that’s tolerated because people understand it’s paying for their entertainment. At it’s best, it can be better than the programming or medium in which it appears.
So why aren’t more agencies producing “pull” ideas? The simplest answer is they can’t. To create “pull” ideas and make a profit, they would have to fundamentally change their compensation models to ones based on idea generation and performance — instead of mark-ups and commissions.
by David Smith The Republik
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Artist Nina Katchadourian creates art by rearranging books.
IT’S ART, NOT TRASH
lemonstrash, make art. Tim Noble and Sue Webster seem to be doing just that. This makes me realize that everything one might need is already there at your feet. All that’s needed is inspiration and a change of perception.“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” – Albert Einstein
by Robert Shaw West Brand Futurist The Republik Companies Chairman/CEO
Photo Credit: © Tim Noble and Sue Webster | “Dirty White Trash [With Gulls]” 1998 – Six months’ worth of the artists’ rubbish, Variable dimensions