Tag Archives: Advertising

Why Your Campaign Won’t Go Viral

Posted on by
Reply

I was read­ing The Viral Mar­ket­ing Cheat Sheet from KISS­met­rics, which turns out to be not a bad guide to viral cam­paigns. Ana­lyz­ing as I read, I came to the graph of the top ten viral cam­paigns of 2010, and noticed that the list con­sists of gen­er­ally well-known brands. Ones who can afford to drop some coin on a cam­paign that doesn’t adhere to an age-old for­mula, and have it flop. They can afford to experiment.

What about the rest of us, the smaller brands with less name recog­ni­tion? When those brands spend money, they want some assur­ance of return. They want some­thing tried-and-true, and don’t want to pay the cost of exper­i­men­ta­tion. As a result, it’s pretty hard to hit it out of the park. It just doesn’t happen.

Con­tinue Reading →

Simple Rules: Creating Viral Anythings

Aside

Reply

There’s a sim­ple rule about rules for cre­at­ing viral any­thing, whether it’s viral video or tweets or pho­tos or what­not. The rule is this: any­one who tells you how to do it in a step-by-step way is just blow­ing smoke. If they could do it that eas­ily, they wouldn’t be talk­ing to you about it, they’d be off using their pixie dust to com­mand obscene amounts of con­sult­ing fees — and there’s no way they’d give away the secret sauce for free.

Classic Advertising: DDB & Volkswagen

Posted on by
Reply

DDB Volkswagon Lemon Advertisement If you lis­ten to Terry O’Reilly’s Age of Per­sua­sion on CBC radio, you will have heard about the famous Volk­swa­gen ad cam­paign by DDB in the 1960s, as this is one of Terry’s all-time favorite cam­paigns. It remains a clas­sic adver­tis­ing cam­paign to this day.

Volk­swa­gen signed with DDB in 1959, appoint­ing them to han­dle their account in the USA. Some say Bill Bern­bach’s result­ing cam­paign for the Vok­swa­gen Bee­tle per­ma­nently changed the face of adver­tis­ing as it handed a whole string of awards. Today, it’s even the sub­ject of a book.

Con­tinue Reading →

Cheesy Advertising Fail

Posted on by
Reply

Take a good look at this ad and tell me there’s noth­ing creepy about it. Seri­ously? That kid looks just a lit­tle pos­sessed, which dis­tracts you from the woman’s abnor­mally long fin­gers and the fact that the bread in the ad is “98% delicious!!”

Really? 98%? I’m won­der­ing what the other 2% tastes like, and if that’s bet­ter than the competition.

But really, the look on that kid’s face is deeply dis­turb­ing. I’ll never look at grilled cheese the same way again.

Not Online? Not A Real Brand.

Posted on by
Reply

Terry O’Reilly writes:

A strong sign of television’s slow fall from media supremacy came in 2005, when I was hon­oured to rep­re­sent Canada on the first-ever Radio Lions jury. There we were told of two inter­est­ing trends: that entries in the TV ad cat­e­gory were down and that entries for the “Cyber Lions” category–that’s for online marketing–were up. To put this in per­spec­tive, the Cannes Lions Inter­na­tional Adver­tis­ing Fes­ti­val was founded on tele­vi­sion and film in 1959, and those two media have been the flag­ships ever since. Until now.

Con­tinue Reading →

The Demise of the Yellow Pages

Posted on by
3

It’s not a new story, but more and more regions are mov­ing away from print­ing and deliv­er­ing a tele­phone book to every­one, every year. In Canada, the list includes
Toronto, Van­cou­ver, Cal­gary, Edmon­ton, Ottawa-Gatineau, Mon­tréal, Que­bec City, and Win­nipeg, all of which will sup­ply a tele­phone book only upon request. In many cases, one can prob­a­bly expect that the edi­tions to only be updated bian­nu­ally, which makes sense when the dis­tri­b­u­tion has sud­denly dropped to 0.1% of what it was previously.

Con­tinue Reading →