Adver-Whatever

Mind Control?

Well, folks, there appears to be an entirely new form of advertising on the horizon that is going to solve all of our problems. It no longer matters that people don't watch television, listen to the radio, or read the newspaper. It doesn't even really matter that no one looks at banner ads online. All this is thanks to Prof. Olaf Prilo PHD from the Mind and Brain Institute of New South Wales and his new Trust Banners.

These amazing high frequency (90fps) banner ads "stimulate specific regions of the visual cortex (Visual area V5/MT) producing instant effects on consumers."

In fact, after seeing a Trust Banner:
        -  87.9% average increase of product desire in test subjects.
        -  76.4% switched brands after seeing a single TrustBanner
        -  63% purchased consumable products within 7 days.
        -  No Click / CTA required. Can be applied to any banner ad.

Be sure to check it out for more of the amazing details.

Happy April Fool's day, and thank you Avenue A Razorfish, for making my day a little brighter.

Desperate Company Uses Free Student Work: Eh, nothing new

So AOL, that company that is perhaps best known as the one that gave us Instant Messenger and truck-loads of wasted CD's, is going to hell in a hand basket. That's not really news, but according to today's NY Times, "Jeffrey L. Bewkes, the chief executive of Time Warner, AOL’s parent company, acknowledged weakness in the business and said he was open to combining AOL with another company." Their entire business strategy at this point is to sell advertising on all of their extremely disjointed websites, by buying up and rolling together 7 different advertising companies that previously had nothing to do with each other. They are calling this random mash-up "Platform A." Randy Falco, the chief executive of AOL, says that The management changes were necessary to be able to move quickly. "After spending dearly to amass assets, the trick was to get them working together and integrated in a very meaningful way.”

The problem is, their strategy of just buying up random companies and hoping that it will all somehow work together is pretty much all that they have been doing since the 90's, and it hasn't been going very well for them. Anyone ever heard of AIM Pages? How about AIM Groups? Userplane? People Connection? The list goes on for about, well, forever. Every time something new and interesting comes out, such as social networking sites like Myspace, AOL's reaction is to buy another company, and then let it sit, just hoping that it will catch on. Now, AOL’s Web sites may attract 112 million visitors a month, but if you consider the sheer number of websites that they have, plus the fact that one pops up every time you open AIM, it's really not that impressive and is no indication that they have a healthy, thriving business on their hands.

The reason why this sad story caught my interest is because I (as part of a team of 22 senior marketing majors at Ithaca College) am participating in this years AAF National Student Advertising Competition, and the sponsor for the year happens to be none other than AOL. So while AOL employees hold "screaming matches" in their offices about how to get their company off the ground, hundreds of college students from around the country are busy trying to fix this mess (and don't get me wrong, despite screaming matches of our own, it's a lot of fun).

Look for our brilliant solutions this June, at the NSAC finals in Atlanta.

The Obligitory Super-Bowl Post

I thought I should hold off on saying anything about the Super-Bowl until I actually had something to say. So I did a little experiment - I watched the game like I normally would (well, suffered through the game is a more accurate description of what I did), with friends talking all through the most important parts (the commercials), and tried to see which ones I actually remembered the following morning. The following morning has now arrived in all of its cold and snowy glory, so here I go:

1. The extremely weird car commercial in the beginning about an old man waking up in his bed covered in mud next to the front of an old car - I think it was for Audi?
2. The people falling asleep - Diet Pepsi Max.
3. The giant birds - FedEx.
4. The talking stain - Tide something-or-other.
5. The lizards dancing to "Thriller" - Sobe Smart Water.
6. Shaq in a horse race - ...some drink at the end, I think - too busy watching Shaq on a horse.
7. Stewie and Underdog blimps fighting for a bottle of Coke - Coke.
8. The one that opened with Marilyn Monroe, and thereby immediately won my heart - Sunsilk.
9. The talking baby - eTrade
10. Victoria's Secret
11. Breathing Fire / Flying - Budlight
12. Man attacked by a giant mouse? - Doritos
13. Danika Patrick - Go Daddy
14. Girl singing - Doritos

(After watching them again on Myspace, I found that the first one was for an Audi R8 and number 6 was for Vitamin Water, of all things.)

I have proof that at least two of them worked - at least on some people. My dad reported that after the game he went to the Doritos site because he liked the Kina Grannis song, and wanted to see what else she had done. Also, after the Go Daddy commercial, two of his friends rushed to the computer so quickly to see Danika Patrick's "exposure" that one of them ended up with a bloody nose. Wonderful.

Over-all, though, I was really disappointed this year. I remembered several more than I thought I would, and I know that none of my roommates remembered more than 3 or 4 of them (though I'm sure if prompted to think about it, they could probably have come up with a few more). There were a few good spots that I enjoyed, but no great ones - not a single ad that really stood out and made a big impression. The consensus among most of the people that I have talked to seems to be that this year was an all-time low. In fact, the thing that I enjoyed the most in the whole 4 hours of misery was the terminator robot coming out and fighting the Super-Bowl mascot robot every once in a while at the bottom of the screen.

Come on, guys - If you're going to spend close to 3 million dollars just to place an ad, you'd think you'd take the time to make it good. What a waste. The next time I am forced to sit and watch FOUR BLOODY HOURS of large men knocking each other over, there had better be something that stands out and keeps me entertained in between.

The Harry Situation

So, during the first free time I have really had in the last two weeks, I stumbled across L'Oreal's new online viral campaign done by one of my favorite agencies to follow: Avenue A/Razorfish.

It basically consists of a television producer who is angry because the show he created, called "The Harry Situation", has too much product placement. He has created a blog ranting about the legal proceedings and the whole process that lead to his beloved show turning into a 30-minute horribly innuendo-ridden commercial for Garnier Fructis Style Bold It. The blog contains clips of the show and some footage of the taping, showing one of the characters getting hit in the head with a light, which I found funny.

But how well will it work as a viral campaign? As an advertising student, I thought it was hilarious and wanted to show every last one of my friends. But not only do I not count as a normal human being by virtue of being an advertising student, but I'm not even the target market. Sadly for me, it's a men's product. So really, I'm probably not the best judge of whether or not it will catch on.

What bothers me a little is that it's just so obviously an advertisement. The blog is very obviously fake, and the show very obviously never existed. The people they're targeting know when they are being advertised at. I don't know how well this kind of fake communication will go over. Maybe if they just released the clips by themselves on youtube, without giving them the elaborate back story, or actually made an entire episode of the show, they would have more success.

Also, where's the follow-through? Guys like humor - everyone knows this. But the Garnier website doesn't mention anything about their little side project. The characters from the show should be on the site along with the products. I can imagine someone checking out the website because they saw the viral thing, and then immediately being turned off by the lack of funny. It won't hold their attention - the brand as a whole doesn't meet the viral campaign half-way.

Still, it kept me entertained for a while, and It seems like a good start as far as catching the attention of young men. I'll have to watch to see if it really catches on.