Credit Crunch Couture

At Lateral we love Viktor&Rolf.

Not because they are Dutch (although there may be some chauvinistic pride involved) but because we love great ideas.

And Viktor&Rolf do ideas as much as they do fashion.

We love the idea of creating a beautiful dress with big holes because haute couture is suffering greatly from the credit crunch.

Below are some pictures of their older work.

To us it never goes out of fashion, but maybe that's just because we focus on the idea behind it too much.

Playing With Sand. Always A good Idea.

We love what Theo Watson, Thijs Bierstekers and Karian Weijers are doing (the video below is a test which took place at september 4) for the new Dutch Film Museum.

They could have played it boring and safe by doing a (media wise expensive) poster or print ad announcing the coming of the new Film Museum, but they chose to make themselves and their clients budget work harder.

On the site where the new museum will be built they use the only material there (sand) to show the world what the new Film Museum will look like.

As fellow Dutch men, we are proud. And a little bit jealous.

Before Advertising Consider Your Other Options. (And Check Your Basics)

At Lateral we have many many many many theories on advertising.

(yes theories, because advertising never was and never will become an exact science. Not only because there is creativity involved, but also because the damn world just keeps changing too fast)

One of our little theories is that advertising is often not the best way to spend a communication budget.

If possible one should try to get word of mouth, which is much more powerful because it comes from people who have their friends best interest in mind.

Zappos.com does a great job at this. Instead of spending money on advertising, they spend money on extreme service, which causes people to recommend zappos.com to their friends.

PR is also preferable to advertising because it comes from an impartial if not critical source.

Virgin does a great job at this. Not only does Virgin save millions in media spendings, we are convinced Virgin's messages are received more positive because consumers do not turn on their "Beware It's Advertising Alert".

Another thing we hold to be much more powerful than advertising is realy realy great product design.

With a design like this study from Tai Chiem, Playstation 4 sales will benefit from advertising, but definitely not depend on it.

Evian Saves Money on Paul Smith

At Lateral we have many many many wonderful books about advertising.

We only look into 3 of those books regularly.

The first 2 books are decades old: George Lois' book and Bill Bernbach's book.

We look into Bernbach's book to remind us of basic ad wisdom like "if your ad goes unnoticed everything else is academic".

We look into Lois'book to remind us to be brave and ambitious.

The third book however, was published recently.

It's called Advertising Next.

There is not a single TV or print ad in it, because the book is all about advertisers and agencies who have managed to reach a lot of consumers without a huge media budget.

Every campaign in the book is different (some are products, services, virals, events etc) but there is one common denominator:
they use a part of the huge budget they do not have to spend on media, to make sure everything looks and feels great.

In other words: less money, more effort.

One of the great examples in the book is Evian, which collaborates with a new designer every year to create a new special Evian bottle.

These bottles become collector's items instantly, turning the lucky few who own one into Evian fans forever, and the rest of us in to Evian admirers.

Evian's latest collaboration is with designer Paul Smith.

Who surely doesn't come cheap, but surely costs less than the production and media budget of the average TV commercial of the average big brand.

The moral of this story? Drink enough water, read Advertising Next and start thinking differently.