This Stanley Cup series was phenomenal. I know the ratings paled compared to what they get for NFL, NBA and even MLB, but the viewing #’s were up, it was awesome TV and the announcers, with their quirky Canadian accents, were outstanding. Geico and Verizon got a ton of exposure from their sponsorship deals, not that either needs much more exposure. And the NHL “No Words” spot was in the same league as NBA’s Amazing, IMHO.

At Mullen, we’re damn proud of what the Boston Bruins have done and proud to have been their partner on the Bruins Hockey Rules campaign the past couple of years. Roll-out the Victory Dance video one more time. The Bruins are Stanley Cup Champions!

Our Wenham offices were beautiful, dignified even. But the long, narrow hallways and closed offices separated us. Boston’s 40 Broad Street is raw and urban by comparison. Contrary to Wenham, its openness, light and intentional density foster collisions, effortlessly bringing us closer together, connecting strategy, media, creative and even analytics.

In our old manor house, the work got done behind closed doors, in small offices that were invisible to those who passed in the hallway. At 40 Broad Street, the work gets conceived and shared and produced out in the open, publicly displayed on walls where all can see it, along with their invitation to participate.

Two years ago, we were surrounded by trees and manicured grounds, along with a fair number of turkeys and the occasional fox. They belonged outside the walls and fortunately stayed there. At 40 Broad, we’re surrounded by the city and its diverse work force, construction workers and street performers, young emerging tech companies, local museums, ethnic neighborhoods and, of course, tourists and shoppers. Somehow all of that buzz and inspiration finds its way inside the agency, where it gets put to good use.

So what have we learned being at 40 Broad Street? A lot.

Space inspires creativity: Do it right and everything from glass conference rooms to tight quarters to visible walls of work will inspire collaboration and sharing.

It’s good to stand up and move around: Bar-height work stations and creative reviews that take place in a large open area bring more people together for quicker sharing and synthesis of ideas.

The elimination of borders fosters innovation: It makes no sense to isolate a so-called creative department, as better ideas emerge when everyone’s creative and working together in a space that encourages it.

It’s never perfect: Our offices remain a work in progress as we experiment with moving people around, trying new configurations, striving for even more openness and collisions.

For years the Wenham manor house and its historic splendor informed the outside world of who we were. But 40 Broad Street, Boston does something far more important. It reminds those of us inside the agency of who we are.

Mullen's Brendan Marrese with the stars of "How I Met Your Mother"

For those unfamiliar with this mob scene, the Upfronts is that time of the year when television network executives host the start of important advertising sales periods, attended by both press and major advertisers. We are subjected to an endless onslaught of self-promotion, sometimes interminably interspersed with Fall Television trailers. It is so named because of its main purpose, to allow marketers to buy commercial airtime “upfront,” or several months before the television season begins in the Fall.

After three days, 44 new trailers and ever-escalating hyperbole, what truly distinguished this year from seasons past? A few themes emerged:

Social media is television’s friend – BFF, in fact – the mantra of the week. As ratings were not as affectionate this past year, many of the networks kept touting their number of Facebook “Likes” and Twitter followers – social media is now the new “water cooler.”

• Of all the networks that sang this tune, only the CW – the smallest of all five – “showed,” rather than “told.”  It introduced an innovative collaboration with mobile LBS app Shopkick, featuring special giveaways when viewers activate its Sound Print technology and view commercials live on the CW Networks. The CW also thought up Cwingo: where viewers can play the game during a live broadcast, either on Facebook or cwtv.com, and have the opportunity to reap rewards by watching ads embedded in the game itself. This was an excellent effort to address engagement concerns.

• Ironically, Social Media also led to the premature leaking of all schedules on Twitter, in advance of the announcements – this, the networks blithely disregarded.

Conan O'Brien on stage at the 2011 broadcast upfronts

The Hollywood talent pool needs a strong dose of bleach: As in years past, some themes (or memes) never die:

• Familiar Period Pieces: ABC’s Pan Am, and NBC’s The Playboy Club hearkened the look and feel of AMC’s successful Mad Men franchise. ABC’s Charlie’s Angels epitomized the ’70s – likely the most visual, one-trick show that ad buyers secretly suspect will bomb (along with ABC’s cringe-worthy Bosom Buddies remake, Work It).
• Fairy Tale/Fantasy: Forget anemic ratings and aging demographics. Attendees were transported into the land of the twee (NBC’s Grimm,  ABC’s Once Upon A Time, CW’s The Secret Circle). More mature attendees enjoyed  various “Lost” doppelgangers (FOX’s Alcatraz, FOX’s Terra Nova, ABC’s The River, CBS’ A Gifted Man).
• Why outsource when you can “in source”: Networks – NBC, in particular – shamelessly shilled shows by stars with franchises across their properties – Chelsea Handler on NBC Primetime (Mid-Season) and E!; NBC’s Playboy Club, again with franchises on both nets; the TBD Brian Williams Show, featuring reporters from NBC News, CNBC and MSNBC.
• Women are now worthy: This year, there’s a bumper crop of shows with female leads. Kudos.  Prime Suspect; Whitney; Are You There Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea; Charlie’s Angels; Two Broke Girls; New Girl; Revenge, etc. Some are even strong characters – better yet, some shows were even good.
  

  Christina Aguilera performs at the 2011 broadcast upfronts

• Music is BIG: With The X-Factor on Fox leading the charge, NBC’s The Voice returning in mid-season, after making viewers endure a quarter of Sing-Off, and the new musical drama Smash, the Glee effect is now utterly ubiquitous.
• Steven Spielberg and JJ Abrams are this season’s Jerry Bruckheimer, with shows on every network.

mediahub’s Prognostications:

• With an unprecedented amount of new programming in development, the networks are clearly hedging against a high failure rate.
• CBS will continue to dominate amongst all viewers, especially the older ones.
• FOX will continue to win amongst the key advertising demos.
• First to Go: ABC’s Work It (awful beyond words); Charlie’s Angels (just because Hawaii Five-O is popular does not make this vapid remake of slow-motion visuals a guaranteed success).
• Definite Winners: The X-Factor and Terra Nova on FOX are undisputed triumphs. That said, buzz on mid-season shows has been great, and NBC’s “Sliding Doors” — like Awake, and FOX’s Kiefer Sutherland vehicle, Touch seem to have warmed some cold, cynical hearts.
• The One to Watch: Two & A Half Men, with Ashton Kutcher – it may yet work, and his Twitter following could bring the median age of CBS down by at least 30 years.

Barnes and Noble Creative Credits for Read Forever.

Creative Credits for JetBlue Mr. Non-Stop 4 18 11

While we await answers to these excellent questions, we do have the answer to an age-old riddle courtesy of our friend The Bear.

Good luck to the Bruins in the playoffs and don’t forget to grab your playoff tickets. This feels like it could be the year of the Bear.

Mullen worked with Psyop – NYC on the production of this spot.  Click here to see full creative credits.

The campaign also includes a website redesign and a social media conversation strategy on Facebook and Twitter.

Left to right: Mullen's Stephen Larkin, John Moore, Alex Leikikh, Mark Wenneker and Sheila Leyne

Cool news -  Mullen has been named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies in Advertising & Marketing.The news broke in the March special issue on “The World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies.” In addition to the Big 50 (which included Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Netflix) Fast Company published industry specific lists for the following sectors:

• Advertising & Marketing
• Biotech
• Design
• Fashion
• Mobile
• Music

In explaining the selection of Mullen, the Fast Company editors said:

For an internal transformation that helped it win new business from progressive social-media-savvy clients such as JetBlue and Zappos.

It’s awesome to be on the same list as Google Creative Lab, Wieden+Kennedy, Vivaki, 360i and all of the innovators in our space. Many thanks to Fast Company for taking notice of the changes here and to the progressive clients and talented Mullenites who make it all possible.

BrandBowl2011 Pre-Game Site

Get your adjectives ready: Brilliant, Genius, Hysterical. Or if you prefer:  Lame, Boring, Derivative, WTF. BrandBowl is back. Time to think about Super Bowl TV ads. For even in the age of social media, conversation, user participation and engagement, we still like a good TV commercial. And what better time and place to watch them than during the annual advertising festival known as the Super Bowl? It’s the one day of the year when our friends and family join us, not just to consume :30 second messages, but to actually talk about them. That’s right, the ads. Whether they feature half clueless men, scantily clad women, talking babies, washed up celebrities or even squirrels (or were they cats?; please see video below).

So with that spirit your friends at Mullen bring you our third annual BrandBowl, an online social media party to which everyone’s invited. This year it’s bigger than ever. Radian6 is back. And Hulu is feeding us the actual commercials as they become available. We’ve brought on a new partner in Boston.com, the online version of The Boston Globe, to both host and help promote the event. This could make it a much bigger event than in past years.

Tweet to your heart’s content no matter where you are and add the hashtag #brandbowl. If you’re really into it, we invite you to upload your comments, predictions and condemnations in video form to the BrandBowl YouTube Channel.  Just tag them “brandbowl” and we’ll grab them to show on our BrandBowl channel. If they’re really good or funny or both, we might even import them to Boston.com, where we’ll have a video window to showcase the best of what we find online.

A quick refresher if you need it on how Brandbowl works:

• The stream appearing on Brandbowl2011.com displays tweets that are posted from the main site, or our new mobile version, along with any tweet that includes the hashtag #brandbowl. If you tweet from Brandbowl2011.com the site automatically includes the hashtag for you.

• The rankings represent an assessment of every Superbowl ad-related tweet, whether it included the hashtag or not. As long as a tweet mentions a brand that’s advertising on the game, or refers to its specific commercial, we can include it in our analysis, thanks to both a pre-game and in-game compilation of relevant keywords that we determine refer to the advertising.

Hope to see you there.  Go Steelers (for our colleagues at Mullen Pittsburgh) and Go Packers (for all our friends in Packer Nation!).  Most of all, go advertisers, please do some memorable spots this year.

Mark Wenneker and Edward Boches (photo: Bethany Acheson)

A changing of the guard at Mullen today. Mark Wenneker is moving from Executive Creative Director to Chief Creative Officer. Edward Boches, who had been CCO for the past 11 years, is moving into the new role of Chief Innovation Officer.

Here’s a quote from the big chief, our president and CEO Joe Grimaldi, explaining it all:

“This is an acceleration of our endless transformation. Mark has elevated our product, recruited great talent, been a force in new business and fundamentally impacted Mullen’s DNA. He has emerged as the creative leader in our Boston office, and that has liberated Edward to more aggressively pursue digital, our growing social media business and whatever is next. It’s time for us to take these organizational changes up a couple of notches.”

Under Wenneker’s creative stewardship Mullen has  prevailed in both the Zappos and JetBlue reviews and just this week announced it had been named U.S. agency-of-record for fast-growing FAGE Yogurt. In his new role, Wenneker will direct a creative department that unites traditional art and copy with embedded capabilities that include technology, UX, connection planning, social media and mobile.

Mullen is a unique agency, said Wenneker. The capabilities here don’t fall so neatly under the word ‘advertising.’ We have a culture and environment that are working together to redefine what constitutes `creative’ and where `creativity’ can or should come from. To lead that effort is a great opportunity.

In his new role, Boches will think more broadly and aggressively about emerging technologies, social platforms and changing consumer media habits to develop innovative ideas for clients and to influence agency transformation.

In the last two years we’ve taken down any remaining walls between disciplines, said Boches. We’ve invented new ways to include consumers in the process of communication. And we’ve made technology and interactivity fundamental to what we do. I think we all know that the future of advertising is both software and storytelling. My role is to help make sure we’re good at both.

Congrats to both these guys. And these parting thoughts. Edward noted, “This will either be scary or fun. Or both.”  Mark added, “I’d like to thank my dad. He would have loved reading this.”