Dan writes: Identity Crisis??
A while back, Steve posted regarding the oddness of the Ask.com Algorithm ad campaign. Last night, I finally had the camera handy and snapped this shot of the company’s latest TV ad:
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the spot features a William Hurt-esque everyman doing a Busby Berkeley number, as he celebrates the success of a search he has just done for “Chicks With Swords.”
Does this seem like a really odd choice of content to anyone else? The ad has me wondering: how would you parse the factors that separate “offbeat and interesting” from just plain “out there?”
Tags: ad, ask.com, offbeat, parse, TV
What are you selling?
I’m impressed and concerned by these ads for air travel that show the boarding bridge, only. Sitting on board a plane pretty much sucks, so why show that part of your experience? Show what you get, instead, by sitting on a plane - you get to be someplace else. This idea is not new, of course, but the choice to show the physical equipment being used with the deliberate exception of the plane itself is striking. How challenging it would be to try and sell people on the riding-of-planes, rather than the arriving-at-destinations.
Tags: ad, advertising, air travel, airplane, boarding bridge, communication, flight, flying, jetway, message, plane, travel
newspaper ad synchronicity/This Week In God
Two items across the gutter (in the business section of the SF Chron, of all places) that use similar exercising imagery. One is literally for exercise gear; the other is a metaphor.
The left-hand ad is for a Soloflex gizmo that vibrates. And you stand it on and lose weight.
?
Sounds like something from The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices! Soloflex, supposedly a brand we’re familiar with (the first TV infomercials on film, the earliest users of infomercials for exercise equipment), offering ridiculous quackery!
The perhaps ironic/perhaps not references to God are also strange.
Tags: ad, advertising, exercise, exercising, God, newspaper, quackery, soloflex, vibrate, vibration, wbv, whole body vibration
Brush with greatness?
Two years ago I blogged about a strange ad for Ball Park Franks
The Ball Park Franks ads running now feature a guy with a pretty serious gut, working on his backyard BBQ, talking in goofily intense tones about meaty, juicy, and….girthy. I guess since no English speaker has ever heard or used the word before, he says “girthy” like 8 times, each time with a silly-but-frighteningly intense growl, drawing it out….Giiiirrthy! he exclaims, with manly satisfaction. Is he talking about the food, or himself? Or what the food does to him? Either way, it’s clearly okay with him. And so it should be with us, no doubt.
I often talk about that ad in my presentations to illustrate the shifting boundaries of normal in our culture, including the different vectors for men and women in terms of health and body image.
Last week I was speaking to sensory scientists at a seminar in Toronto, and afterwards, two different women who had been involved in that product came up to me - one had been involved in the user research (I only got the quick story - but it involved a shift from the product as a mom-for-kids to a Grilling Experience), and one had worked on the campaign. The actor, it seems, came up with Girrrthy himself, and the team looked at each other, wondering if they could actually use that. They did, and like it or not, the ad got a lot of attention. Seems like there’s new folks behind the product and the campaign nowadays and they’ve reverted back to their previous family-friendly positioning.
I was quite excited to meet these folks! How often do you get to give an example in a meeting and have someone tell you that they were behind that very example?
Tags: ad, advertising, astm, ball park franks, ballpark, girthy, presentation, seminar, toronto, user research
Silly AT&T ad
From the outer ad in a recent issue of The New Yorker.
The hang-tag reads:
THE WORLD ACCORDING TO JASMINE
I get 14 days,
336 hours,
20,160 minutes,
1,209,600 seconds of
DO-NOT-DISTURB-ME-I’M-ON-VACATION
time a year.
And I’m going to enjoy every one of them.
And, we see Jasmine, lying in a hammock, reading a book. No laptop in sight. But this is an ad for AT&T. What are they telling us? In teeny tiny type at the bottom, we see
Jasmine relies on the most complete and secure network from AT&T so she can have DSL high speed Internet access to find more unique and exciting places to relax and unwind.
So, what’s this an ad for? Using the Internet to find places to sit and relax? Or, in fact, using AT&T’s secure network (and it’s also a complete network) to access the Internet? In order to find places to relax and unwind?
It just doesn’t really cohere for me. It’s almost a good effort - showing the benefit of using a technology by showing what it enables. But the claim that somehow DSL (and not just DSL but the special kind of quality DSL that AT&T offers) has afforded her sitting in a hammock is just too disjointed, and not very credible.
How on earth would we ever be able to relax out in the wild if we didn’t have DSL?! Lame and confusing ad, I think.
Tags: ad, advertising, at&t, confusion, dsl, hammock, magazine, relax
LG advertising
(click on picture to see it full-size)
Here’s an ad for LG mobile phones that I pulled out of a recent issue of SPIN magazine. It’s sort of odd/interesting to see the rhetoric of design and marketing used to create content for advertising. I’m referring to the need to create personas that represent some aspect of the user category that can be designed for, or marketed to. And sometimes the distinction between designing for and marketing to is blurred through the use of personas. And sometimes the personas represent an aspirational statement of the manufacturer -who they’d like their customers to be, or what they would like their products to be used for. Whether or not the products actually achieve that doesn’t seem to matter, as long as there’s a catchy phrase to represent in the simplest terms possible some key attributes.
Maybe I’m being too harsh on this approach and on LG-specifically. I have no idea if an ad creative repurposed actual content or just picked up on the approach because it reads well and maybe moves product. It’s always interesting to see one form of internal company behavior make its way into advertising, though.
Tags: ad, ads, advertising, cell phones, design, marketing, mobile phones, personals
Kiss Your Beer - Kiss Budweiser
Kiss Your Beer, Hong Kong, January 2006
Here’s an amazing advertisement for Budweiser, from Hong Kong. With the phase American Kiss across the middle, and the slogan Kiss Your Beer - Kiss Budweiser.
Drink it, if I have to, but kiss it? No way. Perhaps it’s a great image for Hong Kong, but it’s amazing how wrong it seems for us here.
Tags: ad, advert, advertising, american, beer, bud, budweiser, king of beers, kiss, poster, sign
Wendy’s Ad
This post-Spurlock ad intrigued me. A sick amount of food/calories/fat, but suggested as an occasional indulgence, with a pointer to their other products for regular consumption (everyday? Yikes). Giving permission to indulge, and somehow if you don’t eat this gross beef explosion daily, then it’s okay to eat their other burgers daily? And toss in an macho appeal (as if finishing this burger is some kind of impossible accomplishment) and you’ve got a timely story that takes on the obesity/SuperSizeMe meme and deftly turns it around.
Do a Classic Triple from Wendy’s: We don’t recommend you eat this all the time, unless you’re an offensive lineman or a Kodiak bear. For everyday use, try the Classic Single or Double. But since you probably won’t climb Everest, it’s nice to tell your friends you’ve had the Triple. It’s prepared fresh, the way a hamburger should be. Do a Wendy’s Classic Triple and do what tastes right.
Tags: ad, advertising, beef, burger, classic triple, food, hamburger, meal, meat, message, morgan spurlock, obesity, supersize me, triple, Wendy’s
Where’s the Mall?
Simon Malls shows amazing chutzpah with this Black Friday ad, placing the viewing of the Statue of Liberty in horrific context. “Very inspring. Now, where’s the mall?”
Tags: ad, chutzpah, mall, shopping, simon malls, statue of liberty, tourism
How do the spammers know I’ve always wanted to travel to Turkey?
From: “Hotel Asena Beach”
To: steve
Subject: sales dep.
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2002 02:33:16 +0200
Dear Sir/Madam,
We are hotelier in Turkey / Fethiye
our hotel is by the Oludeniz which is the best beach choise in Turkey.
We woul like to work with your company for summer 2002.
For more information please contact us.Here are our room rates for your company
PER�YOD DBL.PP.HB SING.SUPP. EXTRA BED CHD 7-12
APRIL 10 EURO FREE %50 FREE
MAY 18 EURO %50 %50 %50
JUNE 25 EURO %50 %50 %50
JULY 37 EURO %50 %50 %50
AUGUST 37 EURO %50 %50 %50
SEPTEM 27 EURO %50 %50 %50
OCTOBER 18 EURO %50 %50 %50
PS:PLEASE REPLY TO FAX:+90 252 617 0487
With Sincere Best Wishes
Suleyman BUYRUK
Reservation Supervisor
HOTEL ASENA BEACH
Belcekiz mevkii
Oludeniz/Fethiye
48340 Mugla/Turkiye
TEL :+90 252 617 0154
FAX :+90 252 617 0487
GSM :+90 533 650 0239
http://www.asenabeach.com
e-mail :info@asenabeach.com
Tags: ad, email, hotel, spam, travel, turkey