Why this is interesting right now: Armenian folkloric culture is being expressed digitally through a major brand name to a Russian audience across the web.

Amsterdam Worldwide, an international communications agency, is unveiling its first work for Pernod Ricard with the reinvention of Ararat – a legend and institution in the world of discerning brandy drinkers, I’m led to believe, and a household name in Russia and Eastern Europe. 

Targeting Russians and Eastern Europeans in their home countries as well as Armenian and Russian communities internationally, the centerpiece of the first work is a 15-minute short film directed by the award-winning Shammasian Brothers.  ‘Akhtamar’ is a modern day re-telling of a classic Armenian legend of unrequited love. 

Akhtamar is set in Armenia and draws on the brandy’s heritage to inspire a new audience to become Ararat ambassadors and champion authentic legends.

The legend

The original “Legend of Akhtamar” features an Armenian princess (called Tamar) who lives on Akhtamar Island in Lake Van (in historic Armenia). She was in love with a commoner who would swim from the mainland to the island each night, guided by her candle light. One day her father found out and was very upset. That night, as Tamar held the flickering beacon, he took it from her and smashed it, leaving the boy lost in the middle of the lake. It is said that his dying cries of “Akh, Tamar” (“Oh, Tamar”) can be heard to this day at night.

Oh my!

The short movie 

Amsterdam Worldwide’s re-interpretation opens with stunning shots of the Armenian landscape, and features a young Muscovite (Grigory Dobrygin) who travels to Armenia to meet his girlfriend (Ravshana Kurkova) with a heavy heart at the impossibility of their love.

On his journey he encounters a taxi driver (Armen Dzhigarkhanyan) who, sensing his state of mind, draws the reluctant Grigory into conversation, and during their night-time drive through Yerevan recounts the legend of Akhtamar.  

Armenian born actor Armen Dzhigarkhanyan is one of the most recognisable faces in the Soviet and Armenian film industries, having starred in more than 200 films. Akhtamar also features two emerging young talents, Ravshana Kurkova, winner of Best Actress at the International Film Festival of the CIS, and former Bolshoi Theatre pupil, Grigory Dobrygin.

Stephen Hilton wrote the film score. Hilton has worked on movies such as Ocean’s 11 and Quantum of Solace. The world famous Armenian ‘duduk’ (woodwind instrument) player Djivan Gasparyan also contributed.

The film, is the first in a series, and is supported by a print and outdoor campaign designed to generate awareness and direct audiences to a campaign microsite (www.ararat-legends.com), where they can watch the film and learn more about the modern relevance of Armenian legends.

Outdoor and print campaign

World-renowned photographer Erwin Olaf shot a series of posters and print executions with backdrops of Akthamar Island and Mount Ararat.  These will appear in business, lifestyle and in-flight magazines including Maxim, Kommersant Daily and OK!.

Online

The microsite (www.ararat-legends.com) will be seeded with a social media and blogger outreach campaign crafted to create intrigue, relevance and notoriety about the film and its stars internationally.  The campaign will target film, culture and art audiences globally.  An online PR campaign will generate grass root discussion and buzz.

Brian Elliott, founder and chief executive of Amsterdam Worldwide, said: “The ‘Legend of Akhtamar’ campaign marks a new beginning for the Ararat brand, underlining Ararat’s leading position as the Armenian brandy and taking the brand beyond the competitive and category conventions by investing in long-form story telling.” 

Richard Gorodecky, executive creative director, of Amsterdam Worldwide, said: “This is a huge platform for Ararat that goes well beyond traditional communications and engages a real cultural dialogue.”

Well worth tracking to see how it fares over the short and medium terms – and to see what the shareholder return is! After all, we know (courtesy of the lovely Laurel Papworth) of the ROI of not doing anything in the social space (what Laurel smartly calls the ‘Risk of Inaction’); we know what Hugh McLeod did for Stormhoek wines in the early days of ’05, but can SocMed still ‘deliver’ value amongst the noise? I think so, but let’s all watch and see…

Look, it’s not often I promote Ragan Communications, even though they do a tremendous amount of work for the North American business communicator (as Melcrum does for the European and Australasian), but I just HAVE to talk about an upcoming webinar.

My mate Shel Holtz (@shel) is running a 60-minute webinar on the future of our profession, Tuesday Jan 26 at 2pm-3.15pm Central time in the States (that’s 6.30am Wednesday morning for me in Adelaide, 7am in Sydney and Melbourne – check your time zone at DateAndTime.com).

Our profession includes just about everyone I have regular dealings with. If you are in:

·         PR

·         Marcomms

·         Employee comms

·         Marketing

·         Advertising

·         Customer service

then you NEED to be paying attention to what Shel is saying. I certainly will be.

The cost is a pittance compared to what you will get out of it.

I am fortunate to enjoy friendships and conversations with communicators all over the world, but when Shel speaks the whole room falls silent and focuses on his words.

Just received my courtesy copy of the 2^nd Australasian edition of Wood, Zefane, Fromholtz, Wiesner and Creed’s core textbook, ‘Organisational Behaviour: Core Concepts and applications’ (Wiley).

Very flattered, because again they have referenced by article on communication styles that you ‘know’ can lead to conflict. If you have the book, or your library does, check out p.497.

Do OU know the five styles of communication that can and very often DO lead to conflict? You can find them here: http://www.leehopkins.com/conflict.html

Enjoy!

Tim Burrows from ‘always great for a read’ ad/pr blog Mumbrella has a great take on the social media disaster that is the Toyota Yaris fiasco.

As he says,

“Going back to the cause of this, a big part of the issue is a cultural one. This could have happened to many ad agencies other than Saatchis. Culturally, very few are genuinely active and involved in social media. There are also few ad agencies who really understand PR. It’s hard to understand how social media really works unless you do it. There are only a handful of ad agency people who also have a genuine social media profile.

If they want a piece of the social media action that will have to change. They will need to start learning about it for themselves rather than using their clients as guinea pigs, or they will need to find partners who do.

In the end, it wasn’t social media that created this disaster for the brand – it was the lack of social media savvy.”

And as one of the commenters on Tim’s post, Gezza, remarked,

“For the client it is simply staggering that a senior marketer working for one of the world’s biggest brands could imagine for a moment this piece as being remotely acceptable.

P45’s all round I think.”

Indeed.

Here’s the video in question:

Companies that I speak to often ask me why I am so adamant that PR are closely, nay, intimately involved with any social media activity. It is precisely because of the risk of disasters like this. I have refused to work with some potential clients because they saw no point in getting a PR agency on-board and refused to listen to my heartfelt plea. It’s akin to letting the 15 year old teenager of the MD design and build the company website. PR and Social Media are a hand-in-hand fit precisely because good PR agencies and people know that business and reputations are built and lost on how companies manage the relationships with their publics.

I even had an online stoush with some twenty-somethings over this very issue late last week. They were convinced that Social Media should be run by the Marketing people, and that PR should be a subset of Marketing. To a point I can see where they are coming from and slightly agree with them. But PR is a stand-alone discipline that should – but often doesn’t – stand up for itself and trumpet its own achievements.

But hey, I’m old… what would I know?

Good PR is not about having pretty women make old businessmen feel ‘powerful and strangely alluring’; good PR is about positioning a business so that the business derives the best benefit from ALL of its various publics – the shareholders, the suppliers, the employees, the general public, and so on. That is why PR is a degree-level course, with post-graduate options for those really serious about the industry.

And it’s why – even though I am not a PR person myself, nor schooled in PR practices – I am a fervent believer that Social Media is best left in the hands of those who best understand it. Which is one of a handful of true ‘experts’ in this country, and is best delivered when that ‘expert’ is partnered with highly-skilled and social-media nuanced PR practitioners.

fwiw, ymmv*

Just a test message to see how posterous handles some stuff

Regards,

Lee