Day: June 19, 2007

Pure imagination

I said in the prior post to beware of Lenovo’s Anthem video as the soundtrack — Gene Wilder singing “Pure Imagination” — is infectious. It is. My kids are walking around the house singing:

“If you want to view paradise,
Simply look around and view it
Anything you want to, do it
Want to change the world?
There’s nothing to it”

A little background on the song is in order. One, Gene Wilder does not go down in history as a great crooner, yet he is definitely a musical talent. Second, the song, in its original setting, is sort of lost.

Here’s the YouTube link:

And here’s the Wikipedia entry on the song, which, to my surprise, has been covered many times. (interesting trivia, Wilder played the congas on The Talking Heads I Zimbra). When I showed the video to some people at Google last month, one person said it was one of their favorite bedtime lullabies. I can see why.

I want to acknowledge is the brilliance of the creative directors at Ogilvy — Greg Ketchum and Tom Godici — who insisted the ad be scored with this song.

A brief history of the Best Engineered Campaign

Last August I was invited to a meeting at Ogilvy and Mather, Lenovo’s global advertising agency, to preview a concept for a new campaign celebrating our excellence in engineering and legacy of building the world’s best PCs. Lenovo hadn’t run a unified brand campaign, having focused on maintaining the venerable ThinkPad brand in its first year after acquiring the business from IBM. Now, the time has come to build some awareness in a brand name my mother continues to insist on pronouncing “Lenova.”

Oglivy’s concept was whimsical — to celebrate the fantastic possibilities of technology. Their manifesto, which I will try to quote from memory, came down to: “The future isn’t being defined by rock stars or celebrities, it is being built by engineers and scientists.” The concepts were … different.

Now, ten months later, we’re rolling out the fruits of the campaign. At the center is a 90-second video — I can’t call it a commercial really, it isn’t being shown on TV — called “Anthem.” Here it is on LenovoVision. The tune is Gene Wilder singing, from the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, “Pure Imagination.” Beware, the tune will get embedded in your head and prove unshakable.

Anthem is a compilation of four other videos, all shot at the photo shoot for the print and out of home advertising. I think they come off as more than byproducts for the shoot. My favorite is the Crash Test.

Here are the links from YouTube:

Crash Test:

Sand:

Water:

Airbag:

The things to keep in mind about these five videos are:

1. We aren’t buying TV time to show them.

2. We are buying rich media placements — so these are purely “Internet TV ads”

3. We aren’t hitting people over the head with a Ronco announcer saying, “But wait, there’s more.”

4. Did anyone say death to the 30-second spot? The Anthem is 90 seconds, the others are a minute. I dare you to play a long form commercial on television, Internet video advertising is limitless. The question is how long will a person watch?

I’d love your opinion.