After the first Twitter election comes the first Twitter World Cup

Greg Grimmer, partner, Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer, argues that real-time linear television broadcasting has been the real dominant force of the World Cup, not social media updates...

So, its finally over. The hype, the brouhaha, the noise, the cheating, the lies, the endless senseless babble, it is no more.

No more will we have to face the onslaught from print and broadcast journalists about the enormous effect that the web (and Twitter in particular) has had on this year's football shindig in South Africa, the bastions of old media will have to wait for the next big occasion to blow their Vuvuzelas' in support.

May's election was a similar story, you couldn't open a newspaper or turn on a television set without being bombarded by the number of relevant tweets and twitters that had been typing away about the day's coverage.

However, what has struck me during both these events is not the fact that people are using the real-time web properties of Facebook, Twitter and 4square to update their friends, followers and fawning acolytes of their views, observations, and insights in to the travails of Maradona and co. But instead it is the fact that both with the election (for the first time?) and with the World Cup (to a greater extent than ever before?) it has been real-time linear televisionbroadcasting that has been the real dominant force of the big occasion.

Unless you were either a politician or political journalist analysing the micro-performance of the party leaders, the election debate was a must-see real-time occasion that didn't have people pre-programming their Sky+ box in a way they do religiously for 24 or The Wire. Likewise, with sixty four games coming at you daily from the rainbow nation over the last four weeks, whether you were watching Brazil v Holland or Germany v Argentina, it didn't matter as long as you were watching it in real-time and in good company. With evening highlights programmes to catch up on what you missed during the day, the domination of linear viewing was in hindsight both an obvious result of the scheduling and an Englandesque defeat for those naysayers predicting the demise of both linear viewing and terrestrial free-to-air television.

The truth of the matter is the live election debates and the World Cup were excellent examples of how people will use multi-screen experiences to share their feelings, prejudices and humour.

We are all slowly turning into David Bowie in 'A Man who Fell to Earth' - for those with no Sci-Fi knowledge or not of a certain age, Bowie played an alien who amazed his earthling captors by being able to assimilate data from the simultaneous broadcast of a wall of television screens, not unlike my teenage son's bedroom (replete with Xbox, TV, Skye and mobile being consumed concurrently).

Like Pulpo Paul, the psychic Octopus - which is still trending on Twitter - I will make a prediction...

For a good time to come (and certainly in another four years where I can confidently predict an election and a World Cup), whenever an event can be watched in a bar with alcohol, the opportunity to watch in a mass audience will be taken up by a huge number of potential viewers and this will far out-weigh those that will chose to time-shift the event to watch in a convenient one-to-one viewing experience.

On a slightly different note and with no stats to back it up, I will lay a bet that a huge percentage to of the 250,000 people in the Madrid fan park tweeted or updated their status with something along the lines of "Estupendo!!!!! España Campeones del mundo!!!!!"

What is it with social media and exclamation marks? That social comment will have to be the subject of another column...

WIRED Celebrates First Anniversary with Ad Campaign

LONDON - Wired magazine has launched a £250,000 advertising campaign for its first anniversary, which includes mobile messages that "self-destruct".

The Condé Nast technology title appointed Ogilvy to create the mobile campaign whereby a text, dubbed a ‘safe text’ disappears to reveal the anniversary issue cover of Wired.

The texts work on any mobile and, after registering, users can send up to 10 free "safe texts" per day.

The outdoor, print and other digital elements of the campaign are created by Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer, the agency behind the magazine's original launch campaign.

The tagline for the campaign's safe texts 'The future can be erased' is created by Hurrell Mosely Dawson & Grimmer and the agency's digital outdoor creative reveals the line 'The future is under construction' which appears for 20 seconds.

The digital outdoor campaign for the May birthday issue will incorporate giant Transvision screens and digital LCD six-sheets at 16 national mainline stations, including nine in London, and runs from April 6th.

The anniversary issue is out today and is also supported by ads (up from today) on the Premier Ocean sites at Holland Park Roundabout, the Two Towers site on the A4, and Eat Street, the new digital site that can carry animation at London's Westfield.

Online anniversary activity will include a Wired digital sampler distributed via the Condé Nast sites, as well as via an email and online campaign, giving a taster of the May issue and a selection of the highlights from Wired during the launch year.

There is also an online ad campaign using the creative 'The Future is just a click away'.

The outdoor activity will be replicated to support the June, September and December issues of Wired.

M2M handled the media planning and buying for the campaign.

Wired had a target circulation of 50,000 at its launch and, after a full year of publishing, looks on course to reach this figure, falling just short with its debut ABC circulation released in February of 48,275 (including 10,000 bulk copies).

UK’S Number One Family History Website Launches First Brand Television Advertising Campaign

Ancestry.co.uk, ranked the UK’s Number One Lifestyle-Family website* by Hitwise, will launch its first television advertising campaign, airing from mid-September.

Earlier this year, Ancestry selected Hurrell, Moseley, Dawson & Grimmer (HMDG) to overhaul the brands online and offline campaigns, including all TV advertising.

HMDG has developed the new television campaign to target the core Ancestry.co.uk audience- ABC1 adults aged 45+. The creative will also be used in online and offline in print campaigns.

The 30 second brand ad, which will air on a mix of terrestrial and satellite stations from September 14, is designed to build awareness and consideration of the Ancestry.co.uk brand within its target demographic. Media buying is being handled by Brilliant.

The ad is built around a ‘then and now’ scenario, depicting people in period dress waiting in modern day settings to be found by their living descendants.

Ancestry.co.uk Managing Director Olivier Van Calster comments: “We have now reached the right time in the growth of our business to introduce TV-led brand advertising.

“We are confident that it is the correct media through which to build our brand and business, and especially given that the UK has been the pioneer of fact-based family history television content with programmes such as the internationally franchised ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, now in its sixth year and a strong reminder of the ongoing interest in UK family history.”

The UK family history website has grown its subscriber base to more than 200,000 since 2004, making it one of the largest online subscription businesses in the UK.

The Ancestry network of nine family history websites offers members access to four billion family history records and an online community of over one million people actively researching their family history.

WIRED Intelligence Briefing October 2009 by HMDG

Wired Intelligence Briefing on Prezi

The London Clinic Cancer Centre Press Release

Press Release

The London Clinic launches new cancer centre

The London Clinic, one of Europe’s most prestigious private hospitals has recently opened a new, £80 million, dedicated cancer centre, offering the UK’s most advanced cancer treatment and care.

Last year, The London Clinic appointed Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer to develop the launch campaign for the launch of the cancer centre. The objective of the campaign is to raise the profile of The London Clinic and the cancer centre among the private medical insurance audience, consultants, GPs, medical professionals and opinion-formers. Offline, the campaign includes print ads in national press, trade press, advertorials in press and periodicals, with online including digital banners and a dedicated microsite created for the centre: www.cancercarelondon.com.

The new cancer centre embodies the spirit of Inspired Care at The London Clinic. Everything, from the design of the building, the staff and the leading edge treatments available has been designed to deliver the best cancer care possible for the patients.

HMDG’s campaign reflects this commitment to innovation and excellence through the headline: We’ve been thinking.

Five press ads form the core of the campaign, which will launch over the coming weeks. They expand on the We’ve been thinking idea and explain how every aspect of The London Clinic’s Cancer Centre has been carefully designed with the patient in mind.

Following a Manifesto ad, four further ads explain the key pillars of the cancer centre campaign. These highlight the centre’s strong patient focus; the internationally renowned

healthcare professionals working there; the cutting edge cancer care equipment (including CyberKnife and Trilogy technologies) and the building itself.

Total media spend for the campaign is £500,000 with the first press ads appearing on Saturday 23^rd January. The advertising will then run in a range of titles including The Telegraph and The Times until early March.

All communications direct people to the new, specially designed, cancer centre microsite, which can be found at www.cancercarelondon.com. Created by HMDG and built by New York based production company B-Reel, the microsite provides an easy to understand introduction to the new cancer centre.

HMDG is responsible for the creative campaign and media planning. The campaign is bought through Zed Media. The PR campaign is provided by Trinity.

Karen Bullivant, TLC says-
"This campaign captures the essence of our brand and speaks to patients and healthcare professionals in a warm human tone while retaining our professional integrity. Our hope is to empower patients to take ownership of their cancer journey or that of a loved one. We want them to know that The London Clinic offers a dedicated patient focussed environment to help them through the challenges ahead."

Neil Dawson, HMDG says-
"We are delighted to have been involved in the creative and media campaign to
launch The London Clinic Cancer Centre. The London Clinic has an unrivalled reputation for excellence and this is set to be the leading cancer care centre in Europe."

For further details please contact Karen Bullivant, Marketing Director at The London Clinic on 020 7616 7788 or email k.bullivant@thelondonclinic.co.uk or Neil Dawson, Partner at Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer on 020 7278 6655, or email neil.dawson@hmdg.com.

Mobile - the next big thing ... well, since the last big thing

In his first monthly column of 2010, Greg Grimmer, partner, Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer, asks if we are finally in the much-talked about 'Year of Mobile', if it's too late to jump on the apps bandwagon, and whether "mobile display advertising is a snare and delusion thus far" ...

"The Year of Mobile". 1998, was the first year I heard this phrase and I think I have heard it every year since.

It was a chap called Will Harris that uttered the words. At the time he was account director at Abbott Mead Vickers on BT Cellnet and I was the media planner at PHD on the same account. Mobile handset penetration had just hit 20% of the population and the 'pay as you go' market had just been launched.

For those that have worked with 'Bomber' Harris, you will be able to imagine his imperious personality booming out these words and, thanks to an energetic support team, a client with huge ambition, deep pockets and a fierce land grab strategy - 1999, was indeed the year of mobile. Handsets flew off the shelves of new fangled retail outlets like the Carphone Warehouse and Phone4U, and the mobile phone became commonplace amongst the general populace rather than the preserve of city financiers and account directors in advertising agencies.

In 2009, I caught up with Will Harris at Nokia World in Stuttgart. He has in fact lived by his 1999 proclamation and has made the last decade a career in mobile - working at an agency on Orange, in marketing at O2, and now as Global head of Marketing at Nokia. Truly, a mobile maven. However, unlike the time we had worked together on a network operator account, the chatter and the talk at Nokia world was not of contract land grab, or even handset innovation, but instead applications and business solutions.

My host in Stuttgart, David Barker, a mobile marketing veteran, was at the outset in the Nokia advertising sales division but being ever the technology nomad has secured a position working in the far more exciting area of mobile mapping for a recent Nokia acquisition - NAVTEQ.

This acquisition, according to the hard drinking Finns in Espoo, means that Nokia now has "a unique vision for location based services - to enable everyone to find their way to people, places and opportunities on mobile communications devices, cars, and desktop computers and in all the other places that are important to them." It certainly enables them not to pre-load Google maps on their X billion handsets, but whether the consumer then counteracts this move is subject to future scrutiny, but horizontal business integration is certainly the preferred option for the Nokians.

Interestingly the world of advertising is not. Whether talking to bright Cambridge techies developing commercial mobile search programmes, Finnish handset designers or German taxi drivers my 'profession' of advertising agent was deemed of low interest and with some degree of quaintness.

This is of course an anathema to anyone working in a London agency. We have all been focused on mobile as the next big thing, well since the last big thing. The thing is though we all need to work out what this thing is.

Business solutions, not mobile advertising (yet), is my watchword for clients and as for applications I am reminded of the James Goldsmith quote - "if you can already see a bandwagon it is too late to jump on it."

However, in an effort to prove me wrong (or to accentuate my point), this months Wired magazine features Jamie Oliver as its cover star, who is the owner of the UK iTunes app store's top grossing app. Truly a sign that the application marketplace is now a mass market phenomenon. (However, if anyone has managed to master the Ovi store on Nokia please let me know, despite one to one tuition I am still unable to make it function.)

Back to business solutions. HMDG's founding client Auto Trader have of course remained on their voyage as an innovative digital brand by heavily investing in mobile - yes we've done an app, yes we've done mobile ads to drive traffic to the specially created mobile site - but crucially, the investment in the mobile infrastructure to allow their key customers (the motor trade) to advertise on mobile handsets, as well as the web, and the magazine has ensured they will remain the number one marketplace in the motoring world. Others businesses (and indeed agencies and media owners) would do well to follow their lead. An easily accessible classified marketplace on mobile devices would surely be the same in property, jobs, and dating?

So mobile display advertising is a snare and a delusion thus far?

Potentially true. Search and classified advertising as demonstrated by Auto Trader are fruitful avenues for mobile revenue but maybe there is a company that is the exception that proves the rule. Whilst the latest brouhaha in the media is around Google's new smart phone (sorry super phone) the Nexus One offering and its threat to the dominance of the iPhone and Blackberry, one London based company has made interesting inroads into display advertising revenues by making a play for the fact that it will work on ten year old or ten pound handsets via Bluetooth.

Bluepod Media offers advertisers closed environments (cinemas, music venues, football grounds etc) where content and advertising is offered to consumers free of download charges and to a relatively captive (and crucially known demographic audience.) Their revenue figures dwarf some more established offerings and their growth show no signs of halting.

So, perhaps we are in the year of mobile, but we must all make sure that we don't have preconceptions of what that little screen space in our pocket will be used for.

MediaTel has launched a new Mobile section highlighting the latest trends and profiles affecting the growing mobile industry. Click here to access the new database mediatel.co.uk/mobile.

John Messum joins HMDG

Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer (HMDG) has appointed John Messum as Creative Director.

John has been with the agency for the last six months as head of art and also working with clients, leading the agency’s pitch for ancestry.co.uk and creative directing Auto Trader while also helping run the department day-to-day.

He was until May 2008 part of a five-strong management team in London working on advertising and design projects at Farm and its sister agency Leith in Edinburgh following their acquisition by Cello.

Previously, he had helped found Leith London in October 2001 and before that he was Joint Head of Art at Saatchi & Saatchi overseeing national and European brands including Lexus, Sony and P&G (Oil of Olaz, Pampers and Ariel) and NSPCC.

John started his career in 1988 at Saatchi & Saatchi and for nearly ten years he worked on many famous UK campaigns such as Silk Cut, for which he received Silver and Bronze awards at the Cannes Advertising Festival; and British Airways, for which he won six Campaign Press Silver awards and a Silver nomination at D&AD. In 1997 he was hired by HHCL & Partners as Head of Art working on the launch of British Airways’ low cost airline GO. He most awarded campaign was for the Nurses Recruitment campaign through S&S, which won three pencils at D&AD, a Gold at Cannes and a Silver at The One Show.

John Messum said: I’m very excited to be joining HMDG. The agency feels vibrant and there’s a good momentum at the moment, lots of pitches and great work. I look forward to helping the agency grow further faster next year.”

“John has made a huge contribution to the agency since he has been here,” adds Nick Hurrell. “We are delighted that he has decided to move in.”