Category — Advertising Philosophy

The point of copyright law is to give the author of some work control over who copies it. The problem is, today, enforcing copyright law against individual users is virtually impossible. Anything in digital form can be copied quite easily one way or another, and there are 200 million+ consumers able to do it in this country alone. The law just doesn’t work in the here and now.

As a society, we’ve outgrown our copyright laws. They’ve become irrelevant and lost whatever previous value they had.
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Everyone knows that KFC uses a super secret blend of eleven herbs and spices to make its fried chicken ultra-delicious. KFC goes to great lengths to keep that formula secret. In fact, one company blends a formulation that represents part of the recipe while another spice company blends the remainder. And a final computer processing system is used to standardize the blending of the products to ensure neither company has the complete recipe.
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Sometimes, a good part of the time actually, marketing is just creating a need for a product where no real need exists.

A good example of this is Febreze. In 1996, Procter & Gamble launched a product called Febreze, which is basically just perfumed water. P&G developed Febreze to spray on clothes that smelled of cigarette smoke or things like that. It flopped initially.
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Twenty years ago, if you told any ad exec that there would be nationally televised advertisements selling pills that enlarge your penis, during prime time TV no less, they would have guffawed their Cuban cigars right into your coffee cup. And yet, here we are. What happened?

The success of Enzyte is due entirely to marketing. It doesn’t matter if the pills do nothing, it doesn’t matter if the founder gets serious jail time. All that matters is public perception, and that’s what marketing is all about. A catchy jingle and the go-with-it attitude wins every time. So despite all the negatives, we have to tip our hats to Smiling Bob for taking advantage of the insecurities of a entire nation’s male population.

Well done, Bob. You win the Best Marketing of a Shit Product Award.

One more reason that the EU freaks hate freedom: Some of them want to take a “zero tolerance” approach to sexist advertisements. Any time I hear the words zero tolerance, it gives me the willies, in any situation.

Anyway, various women’s rights groups and Members of European Parliament (MEPs) are suggesting guidelines and regulations which would end any type of advertising that portrayed women as sex objects or reinforced gender stereotypes.

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If you haven’t already heard of Julius von Bismarck’s Image Fulgurator, then welcome to the internet. According to his website, it’s a “device for physically manipulating photographs”.

But what does it do? How does it manipulate? And what the hell is a Fulgurator? Well, it comes from the Latin word for ‘lightning’ – fulgur. Fulguration means the act or process of flashing like lightning. And the name fits. It’s essentially a projector that senses the flash of a camera, then quickly projects an image onto the object being photographed for a split second. The whole action is invisible to the naked eye, and results in a photograph with some image or text added.
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Let’s say you’re a marketing executive for a billion dollar company and an intern approaches you with an idea. She says, “I have the perfect commercial concept for our product. Let’s put a few kids together and have them dance with their backpacks.” You’d probably think the intern was crazy.

Or, back to reality, you might think I’m crazy for naming this one of the best TV commercials ever, but I really think it is. Here’s why.

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The best advertisements, whether TV Commercials or Print Ads, create desire within the potential customer. The goal of an advertisement is to motivate action. Nothing motivates action like desire.

There are many strategies for creating desire in the customer. An ad usually has about 10-30 seconds to accomplish the goal. During that time, here are 5 things that all good ads have in common:

1. Attention Grabbing
Catchy music, a beautiful woman, repetition, loud sounds, visual humor. These all appeal to basic sensory perceptions and if done right, they work simply because we’re human.

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Advertising Age currently has an article up discussing how traditional marketers and advertisers are struggling to predictably leverage social media marketing. The major point of the article is that the best social media systems have become quite good at avoiding repeatable manipulation.

But does this really prevent one from “getting a firm grip on social media”? At AdSavvy we have quite a bit of experience with social media and the one lesson we’ve learned is that to be successful, you need to 1) Adapt quickly 2) Get a feel for the psychology of users of the social media platform (learn what they like) 3) cater your content to the users and 4) network like hell with other social media users.

With these 4 steps, social media actually becomes quite predictable and can even be mastered. But that doesn’t mean being successful 100% of the time. Rather, it means building failure into your system, while doing everything in your power to minimize it. Michael Jordan can be said to have “gotten a grip” on the art of basketball, but that doesn’t mean that every shot he took went in.

One of the pillar strategies of marketing and branding is repetition. Repetition creates brand awareness. Brand memory is strengthened through repetition.

Most marketers use subtle repetition. A TV commercial here, a print ad there, a billboard somewhere else. That’s not what I’m concerned about in this post. Rather, I’m going to address the use of in-your-face, tacky, repetitive marketing (just watch the commercial above to see what I’m talking about) and whether it works.

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