China largest marketers are now spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, produce and advertise products to local consumers. Ad budgets are growing, and so is determination to win brand loyalty. So why isn’t China dominating regional and global awards shows like AdFest and Cannes? Thoughtful Media discusses the cultural and operational challenges faced by agencies and advertisers in creating great advertising in China.

To celebrate Nike’s Festival of Sport, Nike China with Mindshare have made this rather splendid 3d Wall Painting.

The Festival of Sport was held at Shanghai Stadium August 18-21, and sent the message that anyone can use sports to make their lives better and provides access to a variety of activities from basketball to football, tennis to skateboarding. The Festival’s impact wasnt restricted to one weekend though: among other initiatives, the basketball courts set up at Shanghai Stadium have been donated to the city. There are now 6 full courts, 1 half court,  a kids’ court, and 3 pavilions outfitted with lights and awnings to provide year-round access to sports.

The tagline (roughly translated in English as “Use Sports”) features in Nike’s latest campaign for China, kicking off a festival of sport this summer.

In typical Nike fashion, the brand distinguishes its message by including 失败, “shibai,” known to English speakers as “failure.” It’s a powerful overall message and, more importantly, accomplishes what’s become the rallying cry for any brand in China: “Localize!”

Kobe Bryant is in there, but only for a split second. Otherwise, it’s all about “using sport” in China, or, one might say, “Just doing it with Chinese characteristics.”

For the full campaign, Nike clearly is still using the “Just Do It” motto in English — as it’s doing globally — but it’s a slogan that doesn’t translate so meaningfully into Chinese. Use Sports hopes to express Nike’s vision around the power of sport more clearly.

As a cultural background note, the choice of the loudspeaker voiceover in the spot at top references the tradition in Communist China of morning exercises, when all school children and worker units would line up on the facility grounds and do eight-count exercises with a man on a loudspeaker keeping pace. Sport isnt about routine, it’s about so much more.

Just Do It. Use Sport.

Thanks to BrandChannel for the write up!

W&K won bronze for their Design work on Nike’s point of view at the Asian Games – “Your game is your voice”. Full article and details here. You can see Mindshare’s amazing OOH installation on the buildings overlooking the courts:

Greenpeace (Ogilvy & Mather, Beijing) won Bronze for their disposable “chopstick forest” work:

Samsonite (JWT Shanghai) won gold for their Outdoor work:

Check out a longer list of Chinese Cannes-worthy work here

Contagious suggested today that we think about marketing in the following 4 brackets, with accompanying examples.

1. Advertising as entertainment. How can you engage and sustain your audience?

For example: Jay-Z and Bing teamed up to launch Decoded, Jigga’s book; Intel’s Museum of Me perhaps shows the weird skew to your real life that is Facebook, but a charming idea nonetheless; Arcade Fire’s Wilderness Downtown broke my laptop, but it’s a great execution; Mini Getaway in Stockholm; and of course my own favourite, Nike GRID.

2. Reacting in Real Time. How can you or your brands harness the power of a response? Can you turn disaster into an opportunity? Can you extend the relationship you have with consumers (people) who increasingly expect a dialogue with you?

Old Spice’s Responses; Mitsubishi’s Live Drive; James Ready’s Blank Bottle Cap recall; Kulula.com airline’s marketing during the World Cup (the link is only part of the whole campaign… sorry).

3. Work in Projects, not Campaigns (sure, there’s a time and a place, but real change comes with commitment – work that is born to live, not built to die).

This works off the idea of building a bonfire that draws people in to your point of view/ambition/(product). A little strange given that not long ago we talked about how “If you build it they will come” is an outdated model… but hey, that’s the Internet for you.

Good examples include GE’s Vacuum cleaner made from the floating plastic islands; Norte’s “best excuse ever”; WWF’s unprintable PDF; baby carrots sold as junk food; IBM’s Watson computer taking on the best Jeopardy contestants as a (de)volution of Deep Blue vs Kasparov (I write (de)volution, but really the Jeopardy test is arguably more interesting a measure of intelligence than chess… or is it simply memory?)

4. Marketing a service design. An interesting development from the first principal, furthering the idea that your advertising should enhance consumer’s existing behaviour.

Heineken’s Star Player is an incredible game to play during a group vieiwng event, and can easily be extended form Champion’s League football to include, for starters, US Open, Olympics, even X-Factor; Footlocker created the Sneakerpedia – sure, to enhance sneakerheads’ engagement with Nike, Adidas, etc… but really to develop incredible insight into that world for Footlocker, which can then be sold on to Nike etc when considering re-issues, collections to buy etc. It’s a CRM tool, really.

Below is a comment from Naomi Klein in the Guardian. Ten years after No Logo, Naomi Klein considers how corporate branding (marketing) has taken over America. I found this on Comme des Fuckdown who read it on somethingchanged, who must have quoted it from The Guardian. It’s relevant in a way, so I highlighted the bit I thought was most interesting.

“Personally, none of this makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns. All of their high-priced market research had found a longing in people for something more than shopping – for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. Of course the brands tried to exploit that longing to sell lattes and laptops. Yet it seemed to me that we on the left owed the marketers a debt of gratitude for all this: our ideas weren’t as passé as we had been told. And since the brands couldn’t fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.”

Deep.

Thanks, Contagious.

Nike GRID has won Grand Prize and Best Use of Innovation in Outdoor at the Clear Channel Outdoor Planning Awards.

Discussing the overall winner, Caroline Marshall, Chair of the judges and Executive Editor at Haymarket Brand Media, said “Nike GRID, a powerful collaboration between Mindshare, Kinetic, Wieden & Kennedy and AKQA, stood out as our overall winner for several reasons.  It was a fresh, impactful and premium idea, dripping with planning insight, built around laser-sharp targeting and making intelligent use of technology.”

Excellent news! Well done everybody who worked on this campaign. Damned fine work, and deserved winners, all.

Dentsu and Berg have created these toys that interact with you and each other when you look at them through a filter (iphone, typically). Really interesting extension and cross over of the digital world into the real.

I can see branded toys coming to life in their world, acting as a (real world) desk-top toy reminding you of your digital engagement. I.E: Bird is released and acts as a Twitter feed, Fox for Firefox, Puppy for Andrex, Tiger for Esso, a black Horse for Lloyds… etc.

Contagious has the full story as does Denstu’s own blog

RFID in shoes from Hampus Lemhag on Vimeo.

WESC and Hyper Island have produced shoes fitted with RFID chips that can store opt-in information about the wearer, delivered through a web application at the time of purchase.

Furthermore, the shoes can be used to trigger a number of interactions powered by associated social networks, just by having the wearer step onto mats equipped with RFID readers. A handful of potential applications described include:

* Triggering a photograph at an event, automatically sending that photo to the wearer’s Flickr
* Connecting two people on Facebook when they both step on a mat
* Automatically trigger status updates when within range of a reader
* Access to VIP restrooms at popular events for people wearing WeSC shoes, or simply entry into the event itself

From PSFK