Vor der Gründung von vonlobenstein ltd. arbeitete Hubertus von Lobenstein 23 Jahre in namhaften Agenturen (20 davon in Geschäftsführungsfunktion) wie Springer & Jacoby, Saatchi & Saatchi, BBDO und in den letzten fünf Jahren bei der TBWA in Düsseldorf als CEO der deutschen Gruppe. Dabei betreute er Kunden wie Audi, Opel, Mercedes, BMW, Nissan, Beiersdorf, Henkel, Procter & Gamble, Masterfoods, TUI, Apple, Adidas, dm und die Commerzbank über das gesamte Spektrum der Kommunikation hinweg von der Klassik über PR und Online bis hin zur Handelskommunikation und Markenstrategie. Seit September 2009 publiziert er regelmäßig Beiträge in seinem eigenen Blog zu Marketing- und Markenthemen.
I guess you don´t know any of the following people: Ulrika Stridsberg, Ulrik Nilsson, Mattias Mattson, Anders Strömstedt, Lennart Petterson, Rune Andersson, Kjell-Aker Sjölund, Daniel Gräntz and Bert-Ove Andersson. If you don´t then it is highly likely that you don´t own an axe from Swedish axe manufacturer Gränsfors Bruks. Or, if you do, you´ve missed the best about your axe. Each axe that leaves Gränsfors Bruks is signed off by its smith. Not on paper, but by them putting his … Weiterlesen
According to a story in the Welt kompakt from the 5th of January the University of Bournemouth, in collaboration with 12 other universities across Europe, did a really “brutal” experiment: They stripped hundreds of students off their mobiles, internet connections, TV sets. The only thing they were allowed to do was to use their fixed line telephone and to read books. And then they had to report about their experiences. The most brutal part of the experiment, aptly called “Unplugged”? … Weiterlesen
This is my last blog post for this year. A year, that was full of new friends made and new inspirations experienced. A very special year. Therefore I want to dedicate this blog post to my biggest inspiration of this year and a very special new friend: Heather Cameron is special. Very special. Not so much, because she is an Assistant Professor for psychology and educational science at the Freie Universität Berlin. Not so much because the Canadian wrote her dissertation about Sigmund Freud and Theodor W. Adorno. But because Heather does change the world every day a little bit and makes it a better place. And because she does that with a smile on her face. This has been acknowledged recently by the Ashoka Foundation, a foundation supporting people in the field of social entrepreneurship. On the 24th of November Heather Cameron became an Ashoka Fellow. Here is what Ashoka had to say about her: Creativity, innovation and a good sense for business with a readiness for risktaking - that are the skills an Ashoka fellow needs. All that for one goal: overcoming social problems and creating social change - worldwide, for his/her model is also transferable. This coming Wednesday, the 24. November, the Ashoka Foundation presents Heather Cameron as one of these changemakers. Prof. Dr. Heather Cameron, founder and executive director of Boxgirls International. Cameron studied Political and Social Thought at the York University in Toronto, wrote her dissertation about Sigmund Freud und Theodor W. Adorno and now teaches a Assistant Professor for psychology and educational science at the Freien Universität Berlin and Professor Honorarius at the UWC. As a scholar, she creates new forms of teaching and learning and explores social innovation and participation. Her lab is real life itself: In 2005 she founded Boxgirls International in the district of Kreuzberg in Berlin-Germany. Meanwhile an international organisation(http://www.boxgirls.org/), Cameron combines theory with practice and supports socially challenged girls to become the strong, independent and participating woman, that every girl has in herself and therefore creates a generation of changemakers in Berlin as well as in Nairobi and since last year also in Cape Town, in the districts of Atlantis and Khayelishta
Corresponding her theory, that innovative teaching can only be achieved through the principle of participative inclusion, all her students have the opportunity to become an active part in these urban research facilities for social change. It is no wonder, that she picked boxing to be the tool for that kind of change: In a Boxgirls training strategy, discipline, willpower and stamina are on the schedule. And the sport is just the door opener: presentation and media trainings are as much part of the Boxgirls programmes as first aid courses and workshops for economic empowerment, being true to the main principle of the organisation that is female empowerment. To aid the development of these skills, Boxgirls does not wait for the girls to come, but launches into action. With school outreach programmes and community work, Cameron found a way to meet the girls where they are. More and more people and institutions see the virtue of this approach and recognise the catalyst effect of the Boxgirls programmes. Heather Cameron realised her vision, to bring critical thought and social entrepreneurship together, against all odds. The ever growing success proves her right: The granting of the fellowship is preceded by the nomination as “Professor of the Year 2010” by the German Association of University Professors and Lecturers and winning the competition “startsocial” with the “Special prize of the chancellor” awarded by the German chancellor herself, Dr. Angela Merkel. I met Heather a year ago at the TEDx Conference in Berlin, where she delivered a very passionate speech about her organization. Right in the middle of it she let some of her girls talk to the audience via film. Here is one of them:
“I jab at poverty, I jab at HIV....” - as a father of three girls this line stayed with me throughout the year as a testament to what 1 person and her determination can achive in the world of girls. Not with a big budget (which she doesn´t have), but with a big heart (which she definitely has) and the power of persuasion to make others support her cause ( and boy, can she be persuasive!!) The day after her speech I called Heather to offer my help. Thankfully she accepted. Since then we´ve met a couple of times. I tried to give my two cents worth of advice and in return she offered me her friendship (I got the better end of the deal!!). I will gladly continue to help Boxgirls.org in the coming years. But I´m not enough. The Boxgirls organisation could use your help too. Not with your money (although that is appreciated too!!) but with your skills. Does this cause sound like something a client of yours might want to support? Tell him about it. Does this fit to your corporate outreach programm? Please let me know. Any film director or photographer willing to dedicate some of his time to document the organisation and create content for free? Call me. Any media people out there, willing to donate “ad space” to this organisation? Please do so. And last but not least: Any creatives willing to dedicate some of their ideas (new website, print campaign, CRM program for potential donators etc.)? Get in touch. If I haven´t persuaded you yet, listen to Heather and her speech in Berlin:
That´s it for 2010! Thank you all from the bottom of my heart for reading this blog. Get lots of real life hugs, likes and kisses under the Christmas tree. Switch of your digital life for a couple of days. And I´m looking forward to meet with you, talk to you, befriend you, follow you and write for you again in 2011.
These days, for some shoes the fact that Manolo Blahnik is written on them is enough to make them sell. But what if you are a sneaker which, at first glance, seems to be merely a sneaker with KEDS written on it? Then first of all, you display your 94-year history and point out that you are not just any sneaker, but introduced the term to advertising. The term “sneakers” was used by teenagers because the soundless rubber soles of … Weiterlesen
The day after World Aids Day is the first day before the next World Aids Day. It is the first day of a year in which, once more, thousands of people will die because not enough people care about them. It is the first day of a year when, again, people could be saved from dying if funds were available. Funds to finance medical treatment, funds to finance research, funds to finance information campaigns about safer sex. You can change that. First of all watch this film and hopefully get excited about this great idea:
If you think (as I do) that this is a brilliant idea, all you have to do for now is to go to http://www.facebook.com/dothiv <http://www.facebook.com/dothiv> and become a supporter. Why is that important? Because this idea can only become reality if it finds enough fans to persuade the sellers of the domain to sell dothiv to this initiative. Then, if you want to do something more, post the idea on whichever digital community you are on and persuade your community to become fans of dothiv. Spread the news! And hopefully the next World Aids Day will be a day where millions of people use google.hiv instead of google.com. And not only on World Aids Day, but every day.....
Yesterday Alicia Keys died. Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga bid their farewells as well. Serena Williams gave up her racquet and followed Usher, Twitter phenomenon Kim Kardashian and a whole line of other celebrities into the great beyond. They decided to die in a sort of group experience. Announcement of the impending mass suicide came mostly online. However, you needn´t worry yet. Death came online too! Yesterday, on World Aids Day, the celebrities named above were simply sacrificing their digital existence by disconnecting from Twitter, Facebook and all the other platforms on which they are present. The 2.6 million Alicia Keys followers on Twitter, the 7.2 million Lady Gaga followers on Twitter, along with their 24 million Facebook-fans and the 9 million-strong following of both Justin Timberlake and Kim Kardashian on Twitter/Facebook since yesterday are looking at wordless Facebook and Twitter streams of their idols. Behind this whole event lies Alicia Keys’ charity organisation, http://www.keepachildalive.org, which has been supporting AIDS victims in Africa and India since 2003. The principle behind this is, as Alicia Keys puts it: “Why do we care so much about the death of one celebrity as opposed to millions and millions of people dying in the place that we're all from?” She continues: “It’s so important to shock you to the point of waking up.” For this reason the celebrities are bidding farewell with video testaments, a dramatic “final tweet” and other similar things. To quote Keys once more: “It’s not that people don’t care or it’s not that people don’t want to do something, it’s that they never thought of it quite like that.” As you can see the millions of fans aren’t only meant to think about HIV and it´s victims. They are meant to donate. Bar-codes, text messages – a variety of ways in which they can do this has been set up, connected to a promise: as soon as one million USD in donations has been given on the campaign platform http://www.buylife.org, the fans will have breathed life back into the digital presence of their heroes and will not have to manage without these daily messages from their stars in the future. And as firstly the fans, and secondly the stars themselve have a vested interest in getting them back “on air” quickly, and thirdly, as the number of fans is phenomenal, I am certain that the million dollars will come together quickly. After a time a little over one and a half years ago, when it was still all about whether Ashton Kutcher had more followers on Twitter interested in him than CNN did, celebrities are now relying on digital news deprivation for a good cause. This isn’t without a certain level of cynicism. Ultimately the stars are counting here on people who seem to be unable to make it through the day without a daily news fix from their idols. So even given that this all happens for the right reasons it still somehow smells a bit like blackmailing teenagers into becoming donators. At the same time however, this also shows how important digital platforms are today for celebrities’ business. They don’t cancel an appearance on a TV show to gain publicity, or give a Live-AIDS concert, or accept an award in the name of a good cause, or anything along those lines, but instead pixilate their digital existence. To quote Keys once more on this matter, "It's really important and super-cool to use mediums that we naturally are on!”. Today, those who want to reach the young generation directly do it digitally. Those who want to mobilise people quickly and en-masse for a good cause do it digitally. And those who don’t want to spend a day without a tweet from Alicia Keys or Justin Timberlake can still donate today on http://www.buylife.org. Though it is not World Aids Day anymore, the million $ haven´t been earned yet....
When the wife of Schahrayar, the King of Persia, betrayed him for a slave, the King decided to never again trust a woman. In fact, he got married every day - but the wife was killed the morning following the night in which they consummated their marriage, so that she wouldn’t get any such ideas. Scheherazade, the beautiful daughter of the King’s Grand Vizier, watched this for a while. Then finally she decided to offer herself to the King, and he accepted her. However, on this wedding night events unfolded differently. For in the night, Scheherazade began to tell her husband a story. She told the tale throughout the whole night and the King listened, captivated. As daylight finally broke, and the hangman, as always, stood ready by the door to drag the next poor victim of marriage away, Scheherazade broke her tale off just before the end. She was deaf to all the pleas of the King: she would only tell him the end of the tale the next evening. And then she would also immediately begin a second story. Eventually the King agreed. He was too excited about hearing the end of the tale. Over the course of 1001 nights Scheherazade captivated the King with her stories, bore him three children, impressed the King with her cleverness and finally convinced him of her faithfulness. What Scheherazade managed to do to her husband over 1001 nights (and what her stories have then done to us over hundreds of years) is the same thing which brands achieve in their moments of best communication: captivation through the power of story-telling. Some of these stories are still being told today. For me, Audi’s “Dancing Elvis”, Mercedes’ “Slap in the face” and TUI’s “Darling, you’re not whinging at all!” campaigns are examples of such stories. There was a time when you would go to the cinema early just so that you wouldn’t miss the advertising stories which were shown, by Levis and P&S among others, before the main feature. And sometimes the double-page-spread adverts in Stern magazine held stories just as interesting as the actual stories which preceded and followed them. And we used to enjoy retelling these stories . Last week I went to the cinema once, watched television three times at peak advertising hours and read the usual suspects in the magazines and papers. Arriving extra early in the cinema, paying extra attention in front of the TV, taking extra time to read. This made it clear once more that the stories from 1001 Nights and the best advertising stories have something else in common: whoever tells them begins the tale with “once upon a time. . .”. Aside from a very, very small number of exceptions (thank you, Hornbach!), what we call “classic advertising” has today forgotten how to tell stories. Stories which delight the audience, captivate them, enchant them and therefore make them enthusiastic about the brand - and convince them to buy it. Even in the former strongholds of storytellers, for example in car advertising, there is a terrible and widespread lack of stories. Instead, there is a lot of technical effort, a lot of clamour, a lot of cost and lots of verbal “corporate bullshit bingo”. And at the end, even in the best-case scenario, instead of stories all that emerges is 30 seconds of stills which are nice to look at. Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t just a marketing old-timer lamenting the good old days. I have long since been sourcing my brand stories elsewhere. From Levis and Best Buy to KED’s – brands today are telling the best stories using, and on, social networks. I just find myself wondering why so few marketing divisions and agencies are exploiting the joy and pleasure which people derive from good stories, and their enjoyment in passing these on. And why, if there’s nothing more to tell, so much money is being spent on it. In times when it is becoming ever more evident that in future the creation of re-tellable, re-postable, and re-bloggable content will play a decisive role in the success or failure of brand communications, continuing to dispense with storytelling is downright reckless. As Tom Peters, an old Management guru and certainly no child of the digital age, states, story-telling actually is in our genes.
“Story is more powerful than the brand, best story wins!” That was true in Scheherazade’s time. It is true today. And it will be especially true in the future. At the same time, it is certainly not the case that a precondition of story-telling is doing it on digital platforms. Brands such as Hornbach or VW are the rare exceptions which prove that this can be done in 30 seconds or with an advert in the press. Classic advertising itself is not dead, however the ways in which its channels are being used today are. Maybe it would help to read the fairytales from 1001 Nights one more time . . .
Yes, yes, I know – it’s only just November. So it’s ok for there to be an explosion of Christmas items in the supermarkets, but still too early to review the year’s events. However there is a special old-school friend in my life: my ideas book, made of brown leather, with many pages, and always at my side. A good quote, an idea for a client, a thought for a blog entry or just a sentence that starts a thought … Weiterlesen
Is it enough to separate your rubbish at home, to have fair-trade Nutella on the table, to trade your SUV in for a Fiat 500 and to switch to a really green electricity provider? Or, moving to the next level, to pay attention to the Utopia Conference for two days ( http://www.utopia.de/ <http://www.utopia.de/> ), to have a board of directors mandate for a good cause and to take your eldest daughter on a trip to the anti-nuclear demo in Gorleben? … Weiterlesen
Sometimes inspiration comes at unexpected moments. When Andrew Simms, policy director of the The New Economics Foundation, a U.K. based think tank, and the head of their Climate Change Programm was ending his speech on the Utopia Conference in Berlin his audience was in need of an emotional uplift. Although peppered with funny anecdotes Simms had delivered one clear message: Stop talking. Start acting! Otherwise a global climate catastrophy won´t be prevented from happening. But then, on a final note … Weiterlesen
