Sex in advertising

Sex sells claims the old and undeniably true adage. We are sexual beings. Advertisers use this attribute by trying to associate their products and services with sexy imagery hoping that some of the hotness gets attached to their brand in the consumer's subconscious mind.

However abusing your audience's attention is a dangerous thing. Showing skin to get attention and then trying to sell completely unrelated products like hearing aides, touch-typing courses or car-rental rental services (like you will see below) may backfire. The reader feels cheated and talked down to. Another thing to be cautious about is how much nudity is sufficient to grab eyeballs and what is too much thus considered offending. This is of course a cultural question. Usually the more religious your target market the less accepted it is to show bare body parts. For these reasons one needs to be careful where and how to use sex in advertising.

Yet there are many brands that are brave enough to take the risk and celebrate sex as any other source of joy in life in their ads. Decide what works and what not for you and presumably for the target within this pool of several dozen campaigns collected over the last few years. Check out the images below or watch the video on YouTube.

Food and drinks

Fashion

Automobiles and car rentals

Technology and gadgets

Travel and tourism

Health & Beauty

Detergents

Magazines

Public interest

Various others

Finally this is how you sell lingerie in Saudi Arabia. The campaign is mocking the censorship that exists in the Kingdom.

Totally busted… McDonalds France

McDonalds France / BETC Euro RSCG is copying Lebanese promotional idea…I see it as disgrace from the famous fast food brand o go such low, the featured campaign is in it’s core the same communication tonality is used by Crepway back in 2005.

The McDonald’s France marketing team responsible for the campaign were Grégoire Champetier, Nawfal Trabelsi, Nathalie Le Garlantezec and Amaya Fournau.

Advertising Agency: BETC Euro RSCG, France
Creative Director: Stéphane Xiberras
Art Director: Jean-Michel Alirol
Copywriter: Dominique Marchand
Assistant AD: Pierre Boutin

STC ripps off an ad to mock competition?

I can’t believe it for STC brand to go this low , It is beyond doubt that STC is busted with two major offensive actions, Is STC planner’s bankrupted to the extent of ripping off an ad to mock competition? Hope this get to the ears of Vodafone Netherlands and they file a case against STC Vodafone ad STC Ad

To know more about telecom war in Saudi Arabia, see http://advertiser-in-arabia.blogspot.com/2009/09/competition-centric-strategy-mobily-stc.html

2020 update.

This time STC hijacked a full identity from an American IT company to develop its new strategic move to digitizing age.

Dulux :::Bright idea for paint brand

It’s quite difficult to get excited about paint – hence the English expression that describes a boring pastime as “Like watching paint dry”.

Brazilian paint brand Coral (known as Dulux in most parts of the world) wanted to promote its premium decoration line, “Decora” and encourage people to be experimental with the colour of their walls at home. Traditionally, paint brands sell small quantities of paint as colour samplers, so that people can apply small swatches on their walls to compare different potential colour schemes.

However, it is hard to envisage the effect of an entirely new wall colour from a foot-wide square patch of paint. Coral therefore created a range of light bulbs in Coral colours, which when illuminated and pointed towards a white wall would show people what their room would look like if painted in that colour. These were packaged up to look like mini paint tins and distributed and demonstrated in various shops.

"Here we see a humble promotional giveaway creating a really valuable consumer experience which truly highlights the benefits of the product in a way that doesn't require consumers to get their hands and clothes messy."

BRAND: Dulux

BRAND OWNER: AkzoNobel

CATEGORY: Household Goods

REGION: Brazil

DATE: Sep 2009

AGENCY: Leo Burnett

MEDIA CHANNEL

Royal Mail:::Delivering business expertise

Royal Mail was a company dangerously close to becoming unnecessary. Liberalisation of the monopoly markets meant it had new competitors able to provide customers discounts that it was barred from offering, whilst email and online activity had become the far more popular means of written communication than posting a letter.

However, another significant aspect of Royal Mail business is the assistance it gives to SME owners (Small Medium Enterprise), helping them to grow their companies. Although SME owners are the most receptive target audience to growth messages, as they have a personal commitment to their business, they are also the most difficult to engage with for that very same reason.

To generate publicity, Royal Mail ran an extensive TV ad campaign designed to shift attitudes about what its brand stood for. The TV ads directed people to royalmail.com where they could answer questions and generate a bespoke growth print, including case studies and product recommendations. To further promote the service, Royal Mail integrated its brand with MSN Office space, distributing content through special reports and channels within Growth Business and Fresh Business Thinking.

It also sponsored The Sunday Times’ Fast Track – an annual league table of the UK’s Fastest Growing Private Companies – and their Best Customer Service category. In addition, Royal Mail created a ‘Helping Hands’ channel within The Guardian online, a bespoke area containing case studies and commissioned content in the form of Q&As with business luminaries.

Overall, appeal for the Royal Mail brand has grown from 38% to 55%. SME owners claiming that Royal Mail is ‘providing new information’ grew from 20-47%, ‘better than other suppliers’ from 26-37% and ‘can help businesses grow’ 36-41%. There have been 216,000 visits to the website and, just 5 months into an 18 month campaign, revenue in the sales pipeline is already in excess of the media investment to date.

BRAND: Royal Mail

BRAND OWNER: Royal Mail

CATEGORY: Corporate

REGION: UK

DATE: 2008

AMEDIA CHANNEL

Nortel::: Head to head

Nortel wanted to expand as an organisation but found its core telecoms business was shrinking. Determined to achieve growth it decided to instead focus its efforts on the entertainment networking sector, dominated by Cisco Systems.

With a 74% market share - in comparison to Nortel’s 4% - and an ad spend several times larger than any of its competitors, Cisco could out-manoeuvre and out-muscle the competition. Cisco’s key strategy was to ‘rip and replace’ companies’ existing systems, thereby providing an easy all-in-one solution for the busy decision-makers responsible for the purchase. Nortel discovered, however, that Cisco’s all-in-one solution was ‘energy expensive’, costing considerably more to run than its own offering, and creating a larger carbon footprint.

Its launch took place in the form of side-by-side comparisons at tradeshow Interop, where energy consumption meters were used on both Nortel and Cisco switches. Nortel’s product advantage was accentuated by the strategic placement of Nortel’s booth right next to Cisco’s. Print and TV ads asked provocative questions such as: “How much is your network costing you?” But rather than drive people to a website, consumers were encouraged to enter ‘Cisco Energy Tax’ into search engines. Optimised results would bring up a raft of blogs, IT Papers and Videos discussing the issue. An online energy efficiency calculator allowed IT staff everywhere to determine the potential cost savings of Nortel over Cisco.

The results of the campaign were emphatic. A $2 million order for Cisco was pulled and instead invested with Nortel – and this became the trend rather than an anomaly. The campaign resulted in a 46% in sales, over three times the stated goal of 15%, taking Nortel’s baseline from $722,000,000 to $1,055,000,000.

Nortel "Piles" Commercial



Nortel "Holes" Commercial

BRAND:Nortel

BRAND OWNER: Nortel

CATEGORY: Computers/Software

REGION:Global

DATE:May 2008 - Dec 2008

AGENCY:N/A

MEDIA CHANNEL

APG Creative Strategy Awards - The New Volkswagen Website

A Continuous Focus on the Ideal Visitor Experience

Summary

In this paper we show how account planning kept a continuous focus on visitors’ needs, helping Volkswagen.co.uk reach its highest share of visitors for automotive manufacturers’ websites. By 2007, the Volkswagen.co.uk website was six years old and needed a redesign. Besides, customer behaviour online had changed. Visitors had become more demanding of their online experiences as more of them got online; the web had become more sophisticated and so had visitors’ skills. In the automotive category, more people than ever were researching what car to buy online and manufacturers’ websites, to a degree, had taken on the role of dealerships. We identified insights for each of the key stages most people would pass when buying and owning a car. Our website had to help people progress to a further stage by addressing unmet needs. Through a continuous focus on the visitor experience and a planning effort to remain involved throughout the eighteen months of the project, we ensured that the website delivered at the end was aligned with our initial vision. Every part of the site is built around the ideal experience that online car buyers would expect from Volkswagen and makes every stage of buying a car more intuitive.

Introduction

In this paper we will show how account planning kept a continuous focus on visitors’ needs over eighteen months of website development, helping Volkswagen.co.uk reach its highest share of visitors for automotive manufacturers’ websites (from 9.2% in 2007 to 10.4% in 2008).

Making the case for a new website

By 2007, the Volkswagen.co.uk website was six years old and ancient by web standards. It was time for a redesign. While the current design had been efficient at delivering information to visitors, it didn’t provide a brand experience and didn’t help move people towards purchase as much as it could.

The first thing we had to do was to make a case for why Volkswagen should go to the expense of creating a new website from scratch rather than keeping the one they had.

The business case was largely already made: we had just finished writing an IPA award paper in 2006 showing how a more engaging experience for Volkswagen’s Golf GTI resulted in more profitable configurations for Volkswagen; we forecasted a similar improvement in profitability for other models if we were to build a new, more engaging website.

More compelling, however, was the evidence that buyer behaviour had changed in the six years since the last design. The arrival of the web had transformed the car buying environment. More people than ever were researching what car to buy online.



In fact, by 2007, the Internet was the first source used to research cars. 57% of all buyers tried online research before using other media. 80% of consumers used the Internet as an information source during the vehicle buying process. Prospects spent more time online with the brand than in any other medium; of an average nineteen hours researching their next car purchase, eleven of them were spent online.

As a result, visitors knew what they wanted, how they wanted it, and what they were prepared to pay for it. Manufacturers’ websites, to a degree, had taken on the role of dealerships. Rather than visiting a selection of dealerships, people visited a selection of websites; according to a study published by Network Q, the average customer visited less than three showrooms before buying in 2007 (compared to six in 2001).

How the competition reacted

Despite an opportunity to address these issues, most manufacturers’ websites simply continued to use their websites as a confusing hard sell environment. A typical competitor’s website bombarded visitors with hundreds of choices, thousands of pages and cluttered imagery, with small cars fighting large cars and luxury cars for page space, with navigable items and links inserted for fear of what might happen if customers weren’t told to do one thing or another.



Understanding people and modelling their behaviour

Similar to the process that Volkswagen takes when building its cars, building the new Volkswagen.co.uk site started with a thorough understanding of people. By modelling the behaviour of different customers, we were able to build a website that makes every stage of buying a Volkswagen more intuitive.

Even though people had changed their research methods, the stages of the buying process itself remained similar. We visited dealerships and interviewed people. We also drew on New Car Buyer Survey results and 39 years of agency experience of speaking with car buyers.

This allowed us to identify thirteen key stages of purchase and ownership. These were not a linear journey that all people took, but were rather important stages most people would pass when buying and owning a car.



The brand experience had to help people progress to a further stage, particularly through bridging the gap between consideration and purchase. Having customer insights for each of the key stages helped us to come up with features that would address unmet user needs.

We also looked at the shopping experience on other websites outside of the automotive category. Visitors had become more demanding of their online experiences as more of them got online; the web had become more sophisticated and so had visitors’ skills. Though mainly driven by other industries, innovation was on the rise.

Our strategy, therefore, considered three major behavioural frameworks: the shift in the car buying process towards online research; the 13 stages of car purchase and ownership; and increasingly sophisticated user expectations.

Planning the ideal experience

Based on our research and insights, we created a video briefing to inspire our team by outlining how we could take an approach different to that of our competitors. This was our challenge to the team:




Our idea was to put the customer, not the brand, at the centre.

This was translated into an overall conceptual model for how we wanted people to experience the site.



Keeping the focus on the visitor

The true value of account planning was shown in the eighteen months between the development of the vision and delivery of the website. Planners sat amongst user experience architects, creative teams and developers throughout.

Making the video briefing and creating the conceptual model had been vital steps towards designing the right experience on the website. We knew, however, that the project would take at least a year to complete, so we translated the vision and conceptual model into a set of user experience principles, which allowed us to remain involved throughout the project. In this way we would ensure that the website delivered at the end was aligned with our initial vision.

These were the five user experience principles we set for the broader team:

• The site will be a destination for anyone interested in buying a car and become the most visited automotive website in the UK with its new features and functions as the main attractions.
• The car models are the heroes of the Volkswagen brand, each with its own features, benefits and personalities. Each will be given a separate pedestal to stand on, even though the site is not about creating model-based campaigns.
• The site will become the hub of Volkswagen; bringing together the brand, their retailers and customers, and strengthening the relationship between the three parties.
• The site will reflect the brand essence by demonstrating Volkswagen’s better thinking in all business areas and through all page details.
• The site will recognise the distinct needs of different audience groups. We will not try to be all things to all people.

From these principles came a wall of briefs.



Every corner of the website experience was subject to planning scrutiny; each stage of the visitor’s journey was issued a flexible brief. The cascading nature of the different experiences created dependencies between each brief that required day-to-day attention.

An added benefit to having the living wall of briefs came during measurement phase. When it was time to work with the website measurement technology provider, we knew exactly how we wanted each part of the site to be measured because we knew how visitors would ideally behave.

The creative result

After eighteen months, the result is a site that looks and behaves in a markedly different way. Right from the homepage you can see that the experience is designed around visitors’ needs. We don’t bombard our visitors with hundreds of choices; instead we highlight the five most important ones.



Another example of our visitor focus is the model search and selection function. Where our competitors ask you to select models for inspection simply by model name and shape, the Volkswagen site allows people to find a car suitable for their needs using a series of easy-to-understand filters based on key criteria such as shape, size, price, engine type, performance, or fuel efficiency. As you change your criteria the relevant models appear or disappear, leaving you with only the Volkswagens that are right for you.



Once you’ve selected a model, the website presents you with a bit of the ownership dream. During our research we found that people need to imagine what it might be like to own a GTI, or in this case, a Touareg 4x4. Within the thirteen stage buying process, this is our opportunity to build additional consideration and desire for a model.





The true heart of the website experience, however, is the configurator. The configurator smoothes out the complexity of buying a Volkswagen and presents the customer with a personalised, enjoyable experience. A fully animated interview process allows you to watch your dream Volkswagen being built, from getting the chosen paint colour sprayed on to finding the right finance package.



Finally, we knew that if the website was really replacing showroom visits, the following stage would be buying a Volkswagen. It was therefore important for us to allow visitors to find a retailer, choose one based on location or other customers’ recommendations and book a test drive, all directly on the website.



In the end, the creative result was a predictable outcome of our process. Every part of the site (of which we’ve only shown a portion) is built around the ideal experience that online car buyers would expect from Volkswagen. On launch Volkswagen.co.uk looked and behaved like no other manufacturer’s website. The constant focus on visitor experience has paid off.

The results, so far (2007 vs. 2008)

Despite car sales being down by 11% year over year in the UK, we have seen noticeable improvements since launch. With visitors up by four percentage points, Volkswagen.co.uk became for the first time the most visited automotive manufacturer’s website in the UK in November 2008, beating industry sales leaders Ford and Vauxhall.

The people who used the site are now more likely to buy: the ratio of online test drive requests to retail sales went up by 8%.

According to Psyma, a cross manufacturer website survey, between October 2007 and October 2008 overall satisfaction was up by six percentage points (from 70% to 76%). The number of people agreeing with the statement “The website makes me feel positive towards the VW brand” increased by five percentage points (from 68% to 73%) and the number of people agreeing with the statement “The site has exactly the information and function that I require” was up by seven percentage points (from 54% to 61%).

The initial results are encouraging despite the current economic climate. But what excites us most is that we have established a visitor-focused planning process that will continue building on this early success.

VIA

Historical Social Media (Marketing) Moments

1. Amazon Review Section May 15th 1997*

One of the antecedents to ‘Web 2.0’ people were given the facilities to produce content online, in the form of reviews for products. This little application would change the way that people would buy products and the way that marketers communicated their products.

2. Friendster March 22 2002
The launch of the first of the big social networking sites, the site was modelled on dating sites and lost its popularity when they started banning music bands and fictional characters from creating profiles. Myspace encouraged bands to create music and the fans moved with the decision.

3. Technorati 20th November 2002
Technorati launched and helped to create a metric that goes beyond traditional measure of effectiveness of media channels (reach measures). They help to measured the influence of a media channel (blogs) through how many people were speaking about a person ideas (Authority), a very BIG step in the right direction.

4. Mysace Fox Interactive Media pays $580 million for Myspace July 16th 2005
Booyah, Social Media is worth money! ... or is it?

5. The first viral Youtube clip - Evolution of Dance April 06 2006




6. Jaffe Juice holds Curry to ransom September 7th 2006
Jaffe Juice holds Adam Currie to ransom for not giving any link love to Jaffe after Adam appeared on his show and made no mention of the episode in his own podcast. Only Joseph Jaffe could peform such a stunt and get away with it. Read story here

7. Transmedia Planning: Idea Propagation October 3rd 2006
Not really about the content (which is an amazing piece) but through the propagation of the message, he published the idea on his blog in the form of a post and it spread across the internet like wildfire!
October 3rd 2006

8. Dove Evolution Viral wins Cannes Ocotber 7th 2006
Dove Evolution helped to show that social media was valued by the old advertising heads picking up the Grand Prix Cyber Lion.

9. The first flog:Fake McDonalds Monopoly winners blogOctober 31st 2006
One of the first cases of abuse of Social Media by a Advertising Agency. The interesting thing was not that marketers would do such a thing but the punishment that was dealt to McDonalds at the hands of real bloggers. People now have more power to make your mistakes visible.

10. Dell Ideastorm launches February 16th 2007
Dell capatalised on the power of masses to help innovate and develop new ideas for Dell products. Social Media is now seen to change the research and development stage for businesses. The product was a creation of Salesforce who created the platform for themselves first with Salesforces Ideas

11. The Age of Conversation March 22nd 2007
The post between Drew McLellen and Gavin Heaton which was the catalyst for the book The Age of Conversation. Taking the Dell Idea one step further and created a product from the collective content of social media participants.

12. Power 150 ranking moves to Ad Age August 7th 2007
Todd And Power 150 moves to AdAge and boasts over 700 blogs now, a huge step in connecting the Marketing Community.


13. Time Magazine announces YOU (Social Media) as the 2006 Person of the Year December 13th 2006
Thanks for the hat tip Mike Kuhl

901 Silver Tequila:::Executive Vice President of Big Ideas

01 Silver Tequila announced its first-ever contest on 9/01 at 9:01pm on www.901.com via a video call-to-action engaging consumers to come up with The Big Idea... Is it a major ad campaign? The next breakthrough promotion? A viral video? To kick off the 901at901on901 promotion and to celebrate the day and time of the brand's namesake, 901 CEO and founder, Justin Timberlake, and President, Kevin Ruder, toasted the crowd at LAVO at the Palazzo Las Vegas at 1:09am Pacific time this morning.

To apply for the job as the Executive Vice President of Big Ideas for 901 Silver Tequila, applicants are asked to submit their big idea for 901 Silver and a photo or video to support their concept via www.901.com. The applicant selected as Executive Vice President of Big Ideas will receive a VIP trip to Las Vegas, including roundtrip airfare for two, hotel stay, two tickets to the Justin and friends concert, and VIP access to any and every party, an annual salary of $0 with a one time bonus of $25,000, the opportunity to get coffee for the other 901 employees and of course, bragging rights about being the Executive Vice President of Big Ideas for 901 Silver Tequila. "We like to incorporate consumer feedback as part of our normal business practice at 901 Silver.

We've turned that premise into a contest," said Kevin Ruder, President of 901 Silver. Official rules of the 901at901on901 Contest are available at www.901.com. No purchase is necessary to participate and the contest is void where prohibited. Participants must be 21 years of age and legal residents of the United States or the District of Columbia. From September 1, 2009 through November 30, 2009, all entries submitted during the 90.1 day promotion will be reviewed by a panel of experts, who will choose the winner on December 4, 2009. For more information about the 901at901on901 Contest, visit www.901.com.

About 901 Tequila

It's Always.....made from 100% Blue Weber Agave

It's Always.....triple distilled

It's Always.....hand crafted

It's Always.....ultra smooth

It's Always Being Responsible