A cool, simple but yet very Big Idea from the chaps of Shackelton (one of the most creative agencies in Spain). At least for me shows how spreadable an insightful idea can be in this days.

Do you want to join the party?  Check bushbyebyeparty.com to see where your local party will be. There’ll be like 900 parties all over the world….. Why to party you ask? here’s an example

But… Do you know how to ask questions? Do you know the different types and what kind of response you can achive with them?

Probably you do in a very intuitive way, but now thanks to Dave Gray (a sensei in the art of visual thinking), you can have an interesting guide for thinking questions called Q-Tools.

There he show us through a series of very clever visualizations, 9 types of questions you can make and the type of answers you can receive. It’s worth checking it, and at least for me has proven to be a very useful tool.

Well, it’s been a long time since the last time I wrote something here. 2008 was definetly a bad year for this blog because I couldn’t keep up with it. But in the other side, even when I didn´t updated for almost a year, the blog helped me to land in 2 planning jobs last year.

The first one  was around July  in a local agency called Prana. I was an Associated Planner and I must say it’s was a great place to work, I learned a lot about branding and strategy, but then in November a second job  opportunity came up, being Planning and Creative Director at an agency called Pullbrand….. It was so interesting and attractive opportunity that I couldn’t say no. One of the great things of this new gig is that I actually get paid for reading and blogging, so I think it’s about time to take once again this nice little blog where is deserve to be: an interesting place to share my thoughts and findings with you.

So here I am, once again (wait… that sounded like a song). Hope you are still out there too…

P.S. I also gave a new look to the blog… it really need it.

Thanks to Rakka for the picture.

As I talked earlier to Tiffany, those agencies have created for the past 20 years the most amazing advertising ever made in Latin America. The secret: they created an argentinean way of doing advertising. Argentina is pretty strong in creating films, but not the traditional :30 spot, they create engaging and interesting stories of 2 maybe 3 minutes, where they bring their storytelling abilities and deep consumer insights together. I could go on and on telling you why I love argentinean creativity so much, but that´s not why I wrote this post.

The reason I started talking about Argentina is because they have became the role model to the rest of the latinamerican advertising industry. Every single country is trying desperately to find their “inner voice”, a local but yet very global way of expressing their ideas. In all the spanish-speaking countries (Brazil has a their own approach to creativity, but I´d talk about it in another post), people dream of travelling to Argentina to learn how to do great advertising, reason why Buenos Aires is full of creativity schools and foreign copywriters/art directors.

In this quest for a local voice, Colombia and Peru are the ones in my opinion that are doing the biggest efforts. Today I´m going to make a little review of some of the best jobs (and by best I mean awarded) made in Colombia in the past few years, as an attempt to find a pattern that show us how our creativity is going.

The Lions

The first Gold in Cannes. A campaign of the national government against drug consumption. Made by Leo Burnett. It´s quite clear and powerful I think.

This was the beginning of a series of awards for innovation in media category. DDB and OMD created this TV format (sorry I don´t know how is it called), where just seconds before the end of the show the color fade away turning the image black and white. Then the color returned as we see a product shot of the Clorox detergent.

Another Gold. This was an activation of a new TV show called “Los Reyes”. It was made by Sancho BBDO and OMD. The strategy was to mark different places of Bogota as owned by Los Reyes (The Kings)

A bronze lion. This time for innovation in media category. The client was Motorola, the agency Ogilvy&Mather, the point: hold the magazine between the pages where both ads are and you´ll see how thin the new Motorola´s mobile is.

In the next post, I´ll be showing the winners for Colombia in the regional festivals (FIAP and Ojo de Iberoamerica) and local festivals (EFFIE and NOVA). Until later then…

Hey, just for you know, I´ve started a new project called Colectivo Planner. The original idea started in Facebook and now has it´s own blog. Most of it´s content is in spanish but we hope that people all over the world start to participate. For the moment me and a friend from TBWA Colombia are the only contributors, but if you want to join just leave me a comment and I´ll add you to the list.

You all know that I didn´t like the gorilla spot, so what can I say about “Trucks”? Perhaps that´s every kid fantasy come true (come on, who didn´t made races with toy trucks when was little… I totally can relate to that), perhaps that Fallon is becoming more a videoclip producer than an advertising agency (if I didn´t knew better, I´d think they search for a song and then create the ad around it) or that YouTube is to advertising what MTV was to music industry (an opportunity to become more popular, even if that mean to sacrifice a little bit of quality so every one accept it), etc.

But in the end I must confess I really enjoyed this one, that I have watched it like ten times, that I can´t get the song out of my head and because of that every time I remember the ad, that it´s a shame that you can´t find a Cadbury chocolate here in Colombia. So for all that, I think that, as I said in the title, we all should shut up and just have some fun with this great piece of creative and effective advertising.

Senior planners, junior planners and wannabe planners (like me) jumped in the wagon and started blogging, sharing their thoughts and creating the whole plannersphere thing. But until recently, this only could be described as an underground movement, something that the industry, specially the advertising/marketing/branding magazines, wasn´t very aware of.

Gladly, things seems to be a little different lately. First was Brand Republic which hosted the blog of Rory Sutherland, planning VP at Ogilvy UK . But in the last couple of weeks I have discovered 3 planning blogs in specialized magazines, which clearly show how far the long tail (or should we talk of hype cycles?) of this “counterculture“ have come.

For those of you interested, this is the list of those blogs:

1. Jen Patterson, planning director at La Comunidad, started to blog in Advertising Age´s Small Agency Diary, where she writes along with other bunch of ad people.

2. Mariana Hernandez, planning VP at DraftFCB Mexico, recently started to write a weekly column in Adlatina, the main advertising magazine in Latam.

3. Juan Luis Isaza, planning VP at DDB Colombia, writes in The Insight Point, a blog hosted by Portafolio, one of the leading business publications here in Colombia.

Hi everyone. Is there still anyone out there?

This year has been quite busy for me, since two of my coworkers left the company in January and they haven´t been replaced. Because of this I had to return to being a full-time creative (I was already working in some planning projects, but because the circumstances the projects have been postponed)

It´s kind of cool being able to be in the two sides of the fence, but I must admit that miss doing planning a lot. At least for me it´s a more enriching and liberating experience and having this blog is by far the most fullfilling thing I have done in my professional live for a while. So here I am, once again, trying to put my thoughts into words and hopefully I´ll keep making my way into the plannersphere.

For now, I´ll leave you with this pic someone send me in Facebook, that in my opinion has a great insight into our actual world. The phrase says: “Videogames hasn´t any influence in our children. What I meant is that if Pac-Man would been of any influence into our generation, we´d be in dark rooms running around, chewing magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music” Kristian Wilson, Nintendo Inc, 1989 

20 years later we definetly could say that Mr. Wilson didn´t get it at all. Don´t you think?

Last month, Neil tagged me to put my vision about the Media Snackers meme that was going around. (Sorry for the late response Neil, I was kind of busy…)

The whole assumption that the media revolution is only being lead by (and for) the youth is something I really don´t agree with. For example, the blog “A mis 95″ (a blog made by a 95 year old lady) won the BOB award for the best blog in spanish. That´s a clear example of how this whole myth of Internet = Youth is simply wrong. If you check the studies made recently you´ll find that some of the hottest properties in the web (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, etc…) aren´t an exclusive domain of young people anymore.

For a global perspective as Neil asked to, I think that latinamericans (I´m not talking here about the latinos in the US) are growing in an interesting pace the way they consume media, but we´re far, far, far away from the levels in Europe, Asia or North America.Why? Because while some of the most advanced societies of our planet have a very post-modern lifestyle, Latam is barely living a late modernity and is desperately trying to keep up the rhythm of their postmodernist counterparts. In the case of the changes in media landscape, we do know the technology that is shaping it and transforming it but I think that we aren´t using it to it´s fullest.

To give you a little context, in Colombia 70% of the population has a mobile phone, but only around a 10% of them have Internet access through it and while there´s a good amount of people using SMS (an average of 40 messages per person in a month), the MMS usage is still very low. In the country there are around 5 millions IM accounts, but only 1 million of houses have an internet connection and just 30% of them have band-width now, which makes a little bit difficult to the average person to access many of the usual “media snackers” feeds in the web (like video and photo sharing sites, podcasts, virtual worlds, etc). We don´t have digital TV yet, but 60% of the population has cable TV in their homes and there are 17 colombian channels through IPTV network JumpTV but I think they are mainly watched by colombians out of Colombia, although I could be wrong…

Now, that doesn´t mean that we don´t have an emerging media snacking culture going on. There are almost 4,000 blogs and just 7 podcasts registered at blogscolombia.com (the main blog directory in the country). There are 370,000 profiles in the Colombia network at Facebook and almost 9,000 active users in Second Life (sadly I couldn´t find any statistics of MySpace and Flickr, but there are a great ammount of users on those places too…)

As you see, the digital revolution has obviously landed in our countries but may I say that we aren´t living the “total digital life” that media snackers do just yet.

Oh, and I almost forgot. The original question of the meme was if I was doing enough as “media publisher” to pay my respect to the media snackers generation. Well, I must say that NO. First of all because I´m not a media, so I don´t have nothing to lose really. And second, the main purpose of this blog (and any blog I think) is to help me to shape my thinking about planning, consumers and brands. This means that sometimes my thoughts could be a little bit elaborated and (as this post) quite long, that is a mayor reason why my blog isn´t Media Snacker friendly (they like to consume tiny bits, while what you should find here is a proper banquet)

Thanks to Alphafish for the pic. The usual applies.

Today, AdStructure is turning one year old.

It has been a wonderful experience to share my thoughts with all of you guys, and most of all to see how well received they have been. That´s why the only thing I have to say is THANKS!

Thanks to Richard, Russell, John, Adrian, Faris, Antonio, Ramon and Jordi. They pretty much have shaped my way of thinking about brands (even withouth knowing).

Thanks to Will, Clay, Neil, Johanna, Tiffany, Diana, Juanjo and Asier, Luiz and Felipe for being friends of this blog along the way.

Thanks to all the people who have check this blog. ´til this day, there have been 24500 page views (although I must confess, many of them have come because of this picture of Eva Green and Daniel Craig with a boat of my company behind them)

A very special thanks to my subscribers: 42 using Google Reader, 28 using Bloglines and the many more out there that use another feed reader.

And most of all, thanks for each one of you that have commented in this blog. 216 comments so far. A blog is nothing if there isn´t people out there expressing their opinion about it and helping to co-create it.

I really hope that all of you will excuse me for not posting very often now, but it seems like parenting doesn´t match blogging to much. But I expect to return to the daily-posting routine very soon. And again, THANKS!