Advertising can be a bloody nightmare, especially if HBO has anything to do with it. The broadcaster is behind a selection of faux adverts aimed at generating publicity for the second season of vampire series True Blood about to be screened on HBO.
It convinced household brands such as Mini, Gillette and Harley Davidson to roll out adverts with a gothic twist. All brands targeted were big, iconic advertisers that were felt to be a good fit with the True Blood series.
Mini showed a Count Dracula clone leaning out of the car window; Harley Davidson encouraged vampires to “outrun the sun” and Gillette went with the strapline ‘Dead Sexy’. Perhaps the most innovative was job site Monster’s: ‘If you sleep in a coffin, it’s easy to think outside the box’.
HBO says the campaign works because the adverts are not what you would expect from these brands – it catches people by surprise. Each advert gave a unique URL that directed traffic straight onto the True Blood website.
HBO also bought up Bloodcopy.com, a website loaded with all things gothic, from Campfire last year. Fans of the True Blood will be able to interact and watch specially created videos promoting the series on the site.
Advertising Agency: IMPACT BBDO, Cairo, Egypt Chief Creative Officer: Ali Zein Creative Director: Nevine Nour Art Director: Christine Bebawy
Original
Advertising Agency: Winsper, Boston, USA Creative Director: Steve Bautista Art Directors: Brian Fandetti, Mitch Lunsford Copywriters: Steve Bautista, Chris Lee Photographer: Ed James Retouching: Act Two Um/Stuart Callow Published: March 2009
Men and morning beauty routines aren’t natural bedfellows. This was the problem Neutrogena faced when marketing its new Cooling Cleansing Gel to Hong Kong’s male population.
It wanted to interact with men at a time when they would be most likely to use the product – in the morning, but felt the usual outlets of breakfast and radio TV were too passive. Neutrogena wanted to speak to men in a way they would remember.
Enter Elanne Kwong, Hong Kong’s hottest celebrity. A dedicated mini-site set up by Neutrogena encouraged men to enter their phone number and receive a wake-up call from Elanne herself. In the call Elanne tells the men to get up and use the new Neutrogena gel. To drive traffic to the mini-site, Neutrogena set up a profile for Elanne Kwong on Facebook. The profile was managed internally and once word got out the superstar was online, her number of friends quickly spread virally.
So far, 1,300 men have signed up for an Elanne Kwong wake-up call. The fact that Neutrogena now has telephone numbers for its target audience offers a great opportunity for building a lasting relationship in the coming years.
The kingdom has prohibited the import of cars which are older than five years. The move is expected to adversely affect a lot of car dealers, reports Arab News
The Saudi Customs Department has started implementing an official decision banning the import of cars older than five years into the kingdom. “The ban is on used cars, buses and other light goods vehicles more than five years old. Heavy vehicles more than 10 years old are also not allowed to be imported,” Suleiman Al-Tuwaijeri, director of the Customs Department at the Jeddah Islamic Port, told Arab News.
The ban does not, however, cover spare parts for old vehicles in use, Al-Tuwaijeri said, adding that a six-month grace period has been granted to importers to set matters straight.
More than 140,000 used cars valued at SR17.5 billion ($4.6 billion) were imported in 2008. This accounted for 24 percent of total cars imported during the year.
“I don’t know what I am going to do next as the ban is a blow to my business of 24 years,” said Mustafa Baqsha, an importer of used cars.
He estimated 80 percent of workers in the used car market would become unemployed as a result of the ban. “I hope the authorities would review or at least relax the decision to make the ban applicable to cars manufactured before 2000.”
Saleh Abdullah, another trader, said that because of the ban, he had to dismiss some of his workers, and was also moving to a cheaper building. “I used to spend SR500,000 ($133,300) on rent and salaries a month, but now I have to move to cope with the falling income,” Abdullah said.
Several used car showroom owners told Arab News that the prices rose 20 percent over the past two months and that they believed they would remain at that level because of the upcoming summer vacations.
A meeting of the Automobile Committee of the Eastern Province Chamber of Commerce and Industry urged the authorities to relax the rule and ban cars older than eight years.
Ali Hussain Alireza, the chairman of the Automobile Committee at the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce and Industry said that 50 importers annually imported a total of 400,000 cars to the kingdom from various parts of the world and that stiff competition sent prices falling to the lowest possible levels.
“Some people expected the prices to fall by 30 to 40 percent. This is not true as prices of steel, aluminum and other metals used in manufacturing car parts did not fall. Hit by the financial crisis, international car companies suffered heavy losses last year and in the first quarter of the current year. They have cut down the volume of production to grapple with higher production costs,” Alireza said.
He said he believes the sale of cars in the kingdom will fall by 20 to 25 percent, particularly as new models are to hit the market soon.
Marketers spend enormous amounts of time and money looking for arcane reasons behind consumer behavior. In fact, about 90% of consumer behavior is perfectly obvious. They buy stuff because it tastes better, looks nicer, is more convenient, or costs less.
Marketing executives and ad agencies like to pretend they don't know this and they focus on the 10% about consumer behavior that actually is mysterious. It makes them appear to have some magical knowledge and insight.
Most marketers would be way better off sticking to the 90% we understand and forgetting about the 10% we don't
2. Mass Marketing Is Dead Tell that to Wal-Mart and McDonald's. This nonsense is being perpetrated by new age marketing gurus who need something new to sell (usually something related to the internet.) If they tell the truth -- marketing is pretty much what it's always been, plus search-- they're out of business.
3. The Purpose Of Advertising Is To Change Consumer Attitudes Wrong. The purpose of advertising is to change consumer behavior. You don't make a nickel until someone buys something. The fact that they think highly of your brand is lovely. But until they buy it, you haven't done a thing.
Check this out http://www.hoffmanlewis.com/PBA_EBook_3_2009.pdf
4. The Future Of Advertising Is Online No one knows what the future of advertising is. Not me, not anyone. Those who say they do are full of shit.
But I do know what the current status of advertising is, and it ain't online. The only online advertising methodologies that have proven to be consistently effective are search and email. The rest is all talk, ideology, and wishful thinking.
5. Consumers Want To Have Conversations With Brands Most consumers, wisely, don't want to have conversations with their husbands. Why in the world would they want to have conversations with the makers of mufflers and vegetable oil?
KMart has long been associated with providing inexpensive clothes to the lower and middle classes. Trouble is, consumers associate ‘inexpensive’ with unfashionable. With Levi Strauss and Jaclyn Smith now being stocked, the perception, rather than the clothing range was out of date.
KMart saw its target as a young multi-ethnic, passionate shopper - an indulgent dreamer who craves self-expression through fashion. It devised a two-tiered approach to hook in its intended demographic.
First, it held a ‘Style Showoff’ in fashion capitals New York and LA. Participants were invited into a massive warehouse full of unbranded KMart clothes that they could create outfits from. Participants were only told afterwards that the clothes they had been wearing were from KMart.
The most stylish entrants were then used in online and TV adverts encouraging other wannabe fashionistas to upload a photo of their best effort at a vogue KMart ensemble, along with a 50-word blurb, onto a custom-created microsite. The winner received a $10,000 gift card for the store.
Online, KMart’s campaign reached in excess of 21 million people through Yahoo’s network. 26 milli
After two years of advertising inactivity, Sprite found itself in a position no brand wants to be in – it lacked an identity. It had lost its ‘cool’. Sprite wanted to define itself in order for it to be seen not simply as a product, but a lifestyle choice.
Sprite identified ‘piss-taking’, ribbing friends about certain home truths, as being nothing short of a national past time amongst its target audience, Australia’s Generation Y. Deciding this fitted with its already established “Thirst for Truth’ tagline, it aimed to engage its target demographic on this level.
Initially cranking up the ‘piss-taking’ for comic effect, Sprite rolled out a campaign ‘exposing brutally honest truths’ about Australian culture. It also put together a team of funny but quite real Generation Y Aussies called ‘The Truth Hunters’, who served as the spirit and voice of Sprite. They went out on the streets with cameras to interact with members of the public about their humorous "truths", such as "People will take anything if it's free". The Truth Hunters went out and distributed old newspapers, bits of food and used soap to see whether people on the streets would take it. People were also invited to submit their own videos via a YouTube channel.
The campaign was rolled in cinemas and gym changing rooms, on websites and mall tabletops – in short, anywhere Generation Y existed. The experience was interactive, with a full-time editor responding to the banter and continuously integrating consumer brutal truth ideas into the campaign.
Some 5.5 million video views, 5,000 posts and over 50,000 interactions were achieved through the campaign that saw Sprite win back its ‘cool’ image.
Carrying the strapline seriously mixed up fruit, the spot sees three CGI fruit characters on a trip to the fairground.
Agency: Driven
Advertiser: Vimtо Project: SMUF Client: Neil Gibson, head of marketing, Vimto Brief: Combine the product truth of mixed fruit with a brand attitude that will appeal to teens. Writer: Driven Art director: Driven Planner: Driven Media agency: Mediaedge:cia Manchester Production company: Passion Pictures Director: Against All Odds Post-production: 422 Manchester Audio post-production422 Manchester Exposure: National TV
The rise of the beer behemoths in America—and those seemingly limitless TV advertising budgets—steadily wiped out the diversity of beer brands available to consumers as brewers shifted to mass production to cut costs and take advantage of economies of scale.
How does one explain this huge shift in the marketplace? Was demand fundamentally altered because of a change in the supply side, instead of the other way around? Did the big brewers win dominance by unfairly altering the distribution system and, therefore, the economics of the beer business?
Those are just some of the questions raised in the quirky, low-budget documentary Beer Wars, released recently. It weaves a classic David v. Goliath narrative about the struggle craft brewers face when growing a brand and trying to steal share from the beer behemoths like Budweiser, Miller and Coors. The documentary aired in more than 400 theaters in mid-April 2009, a one-night event that included a live panel with the filmmaker, independent brewers and industry experts moderated by an ever-snarky Ben Stein.
The narrative in Beer Wars focuses on craft brewers’ fight for retail shelf space. It’s a battle any upstart brand understands and, in the consolidated retail landscape of today, must overcome to be successful. In the beer business, the gatekeepers are the beer distributors, who have longstanding relationships with the major beer companies.
Beer Warsexplains this distribution system and offers a lengthy digression involving a trip to Washington, DC, for an inside look at lobbying. Big brewers hold parties to ingratiate themselves with members of Congress and other Washington insiders—for the sole purpose of protecting the so-called three-tier distribution system. (A system where brewers make the beer, wholesalers distribute it, retailers sell it and none of the three can do one of the other two things at the same time.) Beer Wars argues this favors the powerful big brands that can command retail shelf space at will and therefore take advantage of the “billboard effect.”
Beyond the conspiratorial lobs thrown at big beer brands and nasty insults about the watered-down taste of mass market beers, there is a moment in the film that poignantly addresses what could be a time bomb for major beer brands: the problem of commoditization. The scene takes place in a nondescript bar that could be in any city in America. The film’s moderator is conducting an admittedly unscientific taste test of sorts. Paper bags are placed over three beers—Bud Light, Miller Lite and Coors Lite—as the beer drinkers confidently proclaim allegiance to a particular brand (as in “I’m a Bud man”).
All three beer drinkers fail to pick their supposed favorite beer, proving that the taste testers are susceptible to marketing and packaging (although it’s hard to discern how many other unscientific taste tests ended up on the editing room floor). If we believe it took only one take to find three beer drinkers who really didn’t know what they were drinking, one can only conclude this: All is not well in mass-market beer land.
Despite dominating the beer category with a 78 percent market share, the three major beer brands in the US—Budweiser, Miller and Coors—are arguably suffering from a dangerous brew of sameness and commoditization.
Is that what explains such lackluster beer sales, essentially flat in 2008? It’s still an enormous category, with total sales of US$ 101 billion last year on 210 million barrels of beer. But could the big brands now be paying a price for all this uniformity in taste and mass-market dominance?
The beer category’s only hot spot for growth is in the craft beer category, which grew by 5.9 percent in 2008, according to the American Brewers Association. Meanwhile, sales of imports declined 3.4 percent and non-craft domestics (a category that includes the likes of Bud and Coors) were essentially flat, at 0.6 percent growth. (The ABA defines a craft brewer as small, independent and traditional, with annual production of less than 2 million barrels annually.) Nevertheless, the top three brewing companies in the US—Anheuser-Busch InBev, Miller Coors Brewing Co. and Pabst Brewing Co.—remain firmly on top of any list of annual sales.
But fourth place belongs to a once tiny little brewery based in Boston, Mass., started in 1985. The fast-growing Boston Beer Company manages the now well-known Samuel Adams line of 20 beers, and in 2008, the company logged sales of US$ 398 million, up from just US$ 217 million in 2004. The branding question for the category is clear: Can the feisty upstarts in the craft category take advantage of this opening in the market?
With shoestring marketing budgets and limited distribution, new beer brands must rely on the sheer force of personality and a dedication to authenticity, quality and uniqueness. Commoditization was never an option. The big brewer brands, however, aren’t idling either, but are responding to shifts in consumer tastes by launching new product lines and by importing and distributing foreign brewers’ brands.
Beer Wars exposes a clear and lasting dichotomy of cultures between the big brands and the smaller upstarts. In interviews with big beer brands, the executives and brewmasters come off as stuffy, establishment types. On the other hand, the craft brewers—among them Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head, Greg Koch of Stone Brewery Co. and Jim Koch of Boston Brew Company—are passionate, fun, anti-establishment and maybe even a little eccentric, the kind of guys you’d want to sit down and have a beer with. Just consider the self-deprecating tagline for Dogfish Head beer—“Off-centered beer for off-centered people”—not exactly in the same vernacular as the boastful “King of Beers.”
Dogfish experiences a growth tear throughout much of the film, and Calagione is depicted managing the opening of a newer, larger brewery operation to keep up with demand for his product. Greg Koch of Stone Brewery talks unabashedly about his feisty “angry” beer brand based in San Francisco, CA, a line of beers known for strong biting flavors and caustic names like Arrogant Bastard Ale.
Despite the arguable unfairness of a distribution system that favors the big breweries, the unbridled lust for growth by the Goliaths of the world isn’t keeping down the indomitable Davids like Stone Brewery, which saw sales grow by an astonishing 47 percent in 2008.
Maybe the three-tier distribution system is unfair, but it isn’t preventing these upstart brands from finding a niche and, perhaps, radically changing the demand side of the business in the process.
According to USA Today, the ad "features 1,000 dancers directed by three choreographers, including Sun Yupeng, who helped create the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony." The commercial, which takes places in an expansive field, shows the dancers forming circles around actress Tamara Hope, who sits on a rock and operates the new phone.
