A little NFC, and a lot of Creativity can go a long way these days. This post takes us to South America where Creative Director Fabio Seidl and his team at Ogilvy Brazil created the first music magazine that PLAYS the music you are reading about! The project, BILLBOARD: The End of The Silent Magazine, uses NFC technology to turn readers, into listeners!
I sent a few questions over to Fabio and he was kind enough to reply. Since English is not his first language, I did make some minor corrections, but kept his expressions and descriptions as they were shared… I think that helps us Americans feel more international!
DC: Who is Fabio Seidl and what does he do?
FS: I’m a creative director at Ogilvy Brazil and that’s basically what I do in 90% of my time right now 🙂 With the 10% I try to disconnect with my “addictions”: family, soccer, books, comics, music, cinema and stupid TV series.
DC: We have some things in common! I worked at Ogilvy in NYC, and worked on Coca-Cola through McCann at Amster Yard. What is Agency life like in Brazil?
FS: It’s a bit insane. The market is young, full of energy and really competitive. Here, if a competitor brand launches a campaign, five seconds later you are in a war room planning a creative strategy to respond. You can’t count on resting over the weekends or with a right time to leave the office. It’s a big developing country, with a big particular culture, big demands and short deadlines. I’ve worked in Europe before and it is totally different, less “nervous” than here.
DC: Tell us about you project: The End of The Silent Magazine
FS: It was one of these ideas that would be in the trash bin without a great team, a collective spirit and different skills of each one of us.
I was talking about our client Billboard Magazine with Juliana Martins, who’s an Art Director/Designer from a different department we have here called UXD (User Experience Design, specialized in digital), so, in this totally informal brainstorming, we came out with an idea of a playable magazine.
We shared it with our ECD, who gave more suggestions. We went to talk with our Head of Digital, who gave us a deeper explanation of how the technology could help, and then we talked with a creative technologist, the head of UXD, and everybody contributed to shape the final idea and to make it happen. The codes and everything were developed by our amazing tech team in our own lab in Recife, northeast of the country, a place that we call the Brazilian Silicon Valley. Ogilvy Brazil is one of the few agencies in the world with such an structure. And now it can be a game changer for the Billboard publishers.
DC: Is NFC a widely used technology in Brazil? We barely have it in the U.S.
FS: You have it a lot in the USA, that’s the funniest part. NFC has been inside most of the modern smartphones for 3 years or more, but nobody knows it. That’s why people get surprised when they just put the mobile phone over the cover of the magazine and it plays many songs. The NFC is there, running and you have no idea. It’s not something that you need to open or run, or download, or anything. It was something invented to make payments with your mobile, but until now, not many brands used it.
DC: What are a few emerging marketing trends in your part of the world? Is there still a large focus on Print?
FS: Brazil is still a TV country. But digital is developing like crazy, especially on social media. We are the first or second country on Facebook, for example. But print is in the Brazilian advertising blood, that’s probably the discipline we do better.
DC: What message would you give to the graduating class from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro regarding the future of Advertising?
FS: Not only to them but to my students at Cuca School or to anyone who’s entering in this jungle now. Please stop following the steps of the guys you admire, run over them and do something they would never think about. Being new is nothing if don’t do anything new!
DC: Please provide links to anything else you’d like to share, and thanks so much for letting me know about your Billboard project!
FS: We are launching some cool projects here that we had a lot of fun executing!
Here’s something with Social Media we’ve just released for Red Balloon an English School for Kids here about how social media is killing grammar, it’s called Celeb Grammar Cops. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b2VWa9HY8M
This one is a project for Philips Blenders in which we created fruits with two flavors, it’s called Fruit Mashup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl4Vz9zVTQk
And I am attaching a recent futuristic print ad we’ve done for Forbes…
