Lee Newman of GSD&M's Idea City
with
Don Schechter
Lee Newman, Senior VP/ Group Account Director on BMW at GSD&M's Idea City, talks about how affordable high quality web programming facilitates brings advertising ideas to life.
Transcript: Lee Newman of GSD&M's Idea City
When we talk about Second Life, there was so much hype around it, and could it ever really live up to that. I think it became a poster child for an over-hyped fad. When in fact there really might be something within it, if you think about broader genre of virtual worlds. My daughter spent a good part of the weekend online with her Webkinz. And that's really just another form of that activity, while I might not recommend investing a lot in Second Life, I certainly wouldn't let go of the idea that there might be something to virtual worlds and what they can do and how they can impact marketing.
We're still believers in it, and I think its important to play in that space and to test things. But I will grant you that our efforts to date have not lived up to our expectations or the clients expectations. I work specifically with BMW and one of the things that we re doing is taking some of our outdoor advertising in airports, when people are standing around with a lot of time, and testing some different ways to engage them through their smart phones and mobile devices. We ve had a little bit of success and we re starting to understand what will drive that interacting, but I will grant you that we haven't hit a home run yet. But I m reluctant to give up on it because I certainly see a growing future. You just need to be really careful about interrupting and annoying somebody. That s something that we always ask ourselves.
I come at it from a slightly different perspective. We ve worked with some interesting things over the years with BMW films and program with Audi called Art of the Heist, and what I talked about today is called Relearn to Drive and all of it used video content. I m excited about the fact that we can continue to do more and more with less. The quality of the video content and the video interaction can be done with lower budgets. Then it really becomes about the idea, because if you have the idea then you are able to bring it to life, there aren t all these barriers. That opens up worlds of opportunities for us. I m excited about the future that you are going to be able to bring ideas to life for fewer dollars, and therefore we are going to be able to execute against many more ideas. I m not necessarily talking about user generated content, because traditionally, I m not a huge fan of the product that it ends up being. I realize that there have been some enormously successful cases, but from my perspective its what we can do together with consumers, with fostering a two way dialog and ultimately it comes down to production dollars dropping and your ability to do more and more with less.
I think the iPhone is absolutely a game changer. It's either going to be this version of it, or the next one, or the next one after that. But I already look around airports for example and I see what people are able to do, and it is totally different. I m not sure if anyone has mastered what to do with that from a marketing standpoint yet, but certainly as we think about some of the pitfalls and downsides of mobile marketing to date I think it solves some of the problems, not all of them, but some of them. I m pretty excited for that future.
