Archive for the ‘Televison’ Category
By Paul Dumouchelle, Management Consultant, ADVISA
Apple’s advertisements for the video calling feature on their latest iPhone have caught my attention. While elusive, the promise of combining a video feed of the person with whom you’re talking via a phone has been around at least since Dick Tracy’s fancy wristwatch. Technology that actually delivers on this promise has blockbuster potential.
Apple had done a good job of focusing on the human element of its technology – a grandfather viewing his newborn grandchild for the first time – a woman telling her mate that she is pregnant (though she describes their efforts at achieving this status as “work,” a term that is at odds with my personal experience). It is this human touch that makes the promise of the technology so powerful. In this disconnected age, anything that brings people closer together has tremendous value.
This makes me think of Aldous Huxley’s “Feelies” described in his 1932 novel Brave New World, one of my all-time favorites. When will Hollywood transcend “moving pictures” to create actual experiences and transmit feelings directly? The recent success of 3D is a step in this direction. Virtual reality devices are another stab at this. Someday, perhaps, we’ll be able to experience love scenes where we feel everything, including the hairs of the bearskin rug on which the movie stars lie, as Huxley described it.
Huxley’s future was largely dysfunctional, of course, but I don’t foresee sinister implications from video calling – it looks like a great thing!
Andrea L. Crabtree
Injecting a sense of urgency into your customers is more important than ever and I will never argue against this time-honored marketing tradition.
Andrea L. Crabtree MS
Anyone who has spent time with young children knows that kids absorb television commercials quickly and thoroughly. Two summers ago, I watched a six year-old play while he repeated a number of television commercials.
He sang all the jingles. He knew the entire script. He had memorized every word.
K. J. Dell’Antonia wrote a recent article in Slate describing studies on young children and branding. The article doesn’t suffer from a knee-jerk reaction to the exposure of children to advertising.
There is a nice description of what kind of young children understand branding, how they understand it and how branding could be used to actually encourage children to live healthier lives.
Previously, I could not imagine any advertisement clever enough to convince non-vegetable-eating kids to embrace spinach.
It seems I am probably wrong.
Andrea L. Crabtree MS
Tragedy highlighted much of the celebrity world in recent weeks with the passing of former teenage stars. Happily, a very different kind of story emerged in the past few days to provide fodder for water cooler chats across the country.
Lindsay Lohan is suing the E-Trade folks over one of their baby commercials and she is asking for a cool $100 million dollars in damages.
If you do not already know about the lawsuit, you might remember the boyfriend-stealing/milkaholic baby named Lindsay from one of the many baby-themed E-Trade commercials. Lohan’s attorney asserts that her client is recognized on a one-name basis like Oprah or Madonna and, thus, the lawsuit.
Really, it does not even matter if you remember the commercials or even if you agree with my friends and me that the lawsuit is ludicrous. (We all agree that, in all the times we have viewed the commercial, we never once thought of Lindsay Lohan.) There are two important marketing side notes to this story.
E-Trade is probably overjoyed with the free publicity (lawsuit notwithstanding) and Lindsay Lohan believes she has branded herself so thoroughly that she has joined the ranks of Oprah, Madonna and Elvis.
Only in Hollywood.
(Or a New York courtroom.)
Andrea L. Crabtree, MS
It is difficult to miss the recent wave of advertisements promoting products alongside messages centered around how consumers are saving money.
A woman in a recent television ad is shown walking into a train car while explaining to a friend that she helps herself to all of the available hotel bathroom toiletries. The ad then goes on to show a number of people discussing various ways to save money. Sadly, I remember the commercial but could not tell you what company sponsored it.
Speaking broadly, companies have reshaped their advertisements to reflect the new economic reality while still driving home branding messages.
It is in vogue to have a savings account again.
Flashy spending seems vulgar.
Given the speed of the economic recovery, it appears this new advertising direction is here to stay.
Andrea L. Crabtree, MS
Admitting you offered a poor-quality product to your customers in a national advertising campaign requires tremendous belief in your new brand message.
Domino’s Pizza recently took that leap of faith in their reality television-like commercials using quotes from focus groups. The ads hold nothing back and clearly indicate how low Domino’s pizza scores on taste. Finally, the commercials end with the Domino’s chefs singing the praises of the new pizza recipes they developed and offering discounted prices for the new pizzas.
Whether you like the new ads or not, no one can deny that the ads have a number of people talking, tweeting, and blogging. I typed “dominos pizza ad cardboard” into a Google search and several online articles discussing the advertising campaign showed up on the first page of results.
I’ll leave the pros and cons of the campaign to those articles.
Instead, I feel the Domino’s television ads essentially pay homage to the fast-paced world of the Internet. In the commercials, a company receives feedback directly from customers and responds (what seems like) immediately with a vastly improved product.
I realize it probably took Domino’s several months to develop their new products. However, consumers today want lightning-fast responses and the Domino’s ad reinforces this new expectation.
Will any other companies follow Domino’s lead into this edgy, new form of advertising?
By Bridget Weizer Granger
Whether you’re managing the production of videos, events or interactive media, your mission should be the same: to meet communication objectives in inspiring ways, on time and on budget.
According to Mike Yearling, owner of the Yearling Media Group, great creative and outstanding talent are critical, but behind every success there’s typically something deeper at play: the production process itself. Yearling notes, “Show me a project that aligns the warring siblings of quality, cost and speed, and I’ll bet there is a production process behind it loaded with wisdom.”
Through the years, Yearling has come to define ”wisdom” as the ability to avoid the following seven deadly sins of producing:
- Not asking the right questions up front. “I’m always struck by how many downstream production issues can be avoided by just asking the right questions before the spending begins,” Yearling noted.
- Not squashing creative ambiguities early one. In discussing creative, words are never enough. He advises using images or reviewing past projects as frames of reference.
- Basing your budget or timeline on a Utopian dream. “If you know executives will make a lot of changes, plan for it,” said Yearling. “Nice surprise, if it doesn’t happen!”
- Not getting work in front of key decision makes early. Better to avoid a complete project reversal days before the project is due.
- Spending 80 percent of your budget on the first draft or cut. Rather than build the whole house at once, show rooms along the way.
- Not seeing the forest while gazing at the trees. “Approach your communication initiatives as a comprehensive annual program, and not a bunch of separate projects,” noted Yearling.
- Not learning from your mistakes. Before rushing off to the next project, take a moment to reflect frankly on this one first. “Your next project will love you for it,” he added.
With a fear of spending firmly instilled, advertising pocket books have gone from being lined to being stitched closed. Hear how one media company is answering their clients’ demands — without breaking the bank.
AMA International Leadership Summit is this Weekend
This weekend, many of the Columbus AMA officers will be attending the AMA International Leadership Summit in Chicago, Illinois. The Summit, which is totally paid for by the chapter if you are an officer, will be held at the Westin O’Hare. AMA International expects 75 chapters across North America to be represented and 300 marketing professionals to attend. Check back here over the weekend to see their thoughts.
