B-E-L-I-E-V-E

On Thursday, we gathered over 100 friends of GERMAINE in a splendid location: the chapel of the “De Dames” school in Antwerp.

This was the appropriate place to share with everyone our choice to BELIEVE. Indeed, in the face of a financial crisis that hits our sector hard, and a structural transformation process that challenges the very basis of our profession, we choose to be optimistic, and see the half-full-glass. Never has the time been more right to reinvent communication, never has the need to experiment and learn been greater. For us and our clients and future clients and collaborators.

We believe in the future of brands - of course they’re not dead.

We believe in the future of communication - it just has to be reinvented.

We believe in the future of agencies - just not in the ones that today still don’t get what’s going on.

We’ve also presented our F-A-I-T-H model, which is basically the christallisation of everything we believe and have found true about brands.

And we’ve launched Migraine, GERMAINE’s and Gonzales’ strategic think tank. We’ll come back to those here later.

Confronted with all this news, Dirk Domen, our Creative Director, adopts the appropriate humble position. It might of course be the building too …

Return of the Blogger

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s a blog post on a blog that has been silent for some months.

As some of you may have noticed, it has been quite a while since I last wrote something here. One would be excused for thinking this blog was dead. Because that’s what some of my colleagues also thought.

So, let me explain why I’ve been silent so long, and why I’ve decided to start using this platform again. Because it may be a recognizable story for some of you: the story of trying to keep pace with all forms of social media, experiencing the pros and cons of Twitter and Facebook, mobile or not, figuring out what media serves what purpose best and fits one’s personality best.

Read more

The return of… earth hour.

Klik hier nu en doe het licht uit op 27 maart.

Nice work from the boys&girls at Gonzales & Germaine. #wwf #earthhour

Knitting

Updating all connections and knitting them together into one platform here at GERMAINE #GERMAINE #Gonzales #Migraine

Me-branding

Me-branding is something we all do. We use, buy, support this or that brand to show the world that we and our values are in line with the products’ or services’ brand values. We wear clothing with logo X, or we only eat food, imported by a certain fair trade label… We’ve been doing this for a long time, but now, more and more, people are me-branding over the internet.

Brands you are a fan of on facebook. Blogs you regularly comment on. Youtube videos you like… all these things are a part of the values you wish to add to your online image. Is it any surprise that the Obama-brand has more than 7 million supporters on facebook? Or that Nike has more than 1 million fans? Is it because of a genius social media campaign? Partially (for Obama obviously), the answer is yes. But the main reason is me-branding.

Just make sure you brand is present and clear on the net, so that people can have the opportunity to me-brand with this brand. And no, this brand does not constitute of words or a logo, but of actions.
A brand’s value is merely the sum total of how much extra people will pay, or how often they choose, the expectations, memories, stories and relationships of one brand over the alternatives. A brand used to be something else. It used to be a logo or a design or a wrapper. Today, that’s a shadow of the brand, something that might mark the brand’s existence. But just as it takes more than a hat to be a cowboy, it takes more than a designer prattling on about texture to make a brand. If you’ve never heard of it, if you wouldn’t choose it, if you don’t recommend it, then there is no brand, at least not for you.

Becoming a fan, recommending, retweeting, supporting, liking, ‘favoriting’, and maybe even buying, are all actions that make the me-brand online. Because everything is shared and so everything is seen by the community you are in.

The future of display advertising.

Is this where we are going with this? Ad-block apps, we’ve seen. This firefox plug-in replaces banners with tweets from your network. The tweets you’ll see are related to the content of the page whose ads it’s blocking. Not your average ad-blocker huh. Should this become standard, there’s maybe still a way to get around this: Brands could be putting enough social content out there, with enough followers, so that the banner space will be filled with their message/ brand anyway.

Social Media, a fad?

Drinking

Ever since I work in advertising, older colleagues have always assured me that “I’ve missed the good days”. Meaning: the anything-goes, 4-hour lunches with loads of bottles, followed by a brief drinking pause before going to some ad parties. While I’ve have actually experienced this, at a certain time and at a certain agency that will go unnamed, it is true that we have become much more sober in recent years. It’s one of the striking details of “Mad Men”, the way they drink continually and no office is complete without a set of good bottles.

Now, it seems like there’s an agency out there that wants to reinstall the “drinking with clients”-routine. I’m not against it …