Category — Experimental Ads

Human beings tend to think they’re rational creatures, and that they make sound decisions based on all the available facts. They think their memory is an accurate record of things that have happened to them. But the reality is that we all have a slew of cognitive biases that can alter our thinking… and even our memories.

Psychologists have names for all the different fallacies and biases that influences our thinking: cognitive dissonance, inattentional blindness, blind spot bias, better-than-average bias, introspection illusion, self-serving bias, attribution bias, representative fallacy, availability fallacy, anchoring fallacy, hindsight bias, and the one I’ll be talking about here: framing effects
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The Economist is one of my top five favorite magazines, I read it regularly. I also live in the Philadelphia area and eat pizza quite often. So I’m excited about The Economist’s new advertising plan: they connected with over 20 pizzerias in the Greater Philadelphia area, most of them near college campuses or dorms, and supplied them with Economist-branded pizza boxes. Each box has a pie chart that connects pizza consumption with global economics and politics. They encourage people to “Get A World View”.

This kind of ambient advertising is always interesting. Publipizz, a maker of advertising pizza boxes, estimates that a box of pizza is looked at by 3 people for at least 8 minutes and results in an 80% memory retention rate. Plus, boxes with advertising on them are less expensive for pizzerias, which makes them more likely to join in.
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Episode III: Raising the Stakes

The final episode of the Audi’s Arrested Development inspired advertising campaign, Meet the Beckers, has been released, and I’m excited.

In a world without new episodes of Arrested Development, it doesn’t take much to excite me. Even a commercial that’s vaguely similar to the greatest show of all time can give me a reason to get up in the morning.

Anyway, in the first episode, we meet the whole family. Jason is the regular guy, and the Audi driver of course. He’s bringing his girlfriend to meet his dysfunctional family for the first time. His aggressive brother Billy drives a BWM cuts off a Prius. His drunken, country club-visiting father (The Commander) drives a Mercedes. And his doormat brother (or brother-in-law, maybe) Lewis, drives a Lexus. It’s hilariously accurate and has lots of subtle jokes you may miss if you’re not paying attention.
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I still have a scar on my finger from when I sliced it up with a scalpel while trying to open the absurdly difficult packaging around a pair of Sennheiser headphones. Gadget packaging is notoriously difficult to open, especially headphones. In 2004, around 6,500 Americans went to hospital emergency rooms because of injuries they received while trying to open their newly bought gadgets and toys. Being a consumer can be dangerous business.

Companies design their packaging that way to deter shoplifters from just popping open the box and making off with the goods. But with more and more commerce happening online as opposed to in an actual brick and mortar establishment, shoplifting is becoming irrelevant. Amazon.com has realized this and started a new packaging initiative that they hope will not only please customers, but also help the environment.
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My vote for the most deluded advertiser of the month goes to Michael Maguire, the CEO of Structural Graphics for his ideas on the future of print magazines.

If you haven’t already seen it or heard about it, the October issue of Esquire is “battery-powered”. Yeah, it’s just as tacky as it sounds. It cost Esquire $250,000 dollars just to get the technology to do it and it falls completely flat. I think it may just signify the jumping of the shark for print media as a whole, or maybe not, who knows.

Michael Maguire had some pretty lofty things to say about it though, like the cover was “heralding a new era in the use of technology in magazine advertising”, and he played the futurist, saying that “there are a number of steps that we’re going to see unfolding in the years to come… like animated color video in printed media, etc”. I’m not so sure. People may cling to magazines the way we’ve clung to books, but I think it’s just as likely that some sort of product like the Amazon Kindle could become mainstream and people could buy magazines for their Kindle and download them directly. Who needs paper, anyway?

What do you think AdSavvyites? Esquire’s electro-cover, lame or not?

Barack Obama has become the first presidential candidate to advertise in a video game. The Obama campaign purchased ad space in the Xbox live versions of 18 different video games. The ads will run up until Nov. 3, and only be displayed in 10 major swing states.

The ads show that Obama is willing to embrace new technology, and that may be the most important aspect of this whole video game campaign.

Obama’s face and name will be on billboards and signs in “NBA Live ’08″, “Burnout Paradise”, “Nascar 09″, “Need For Speed Carbon”, “Need For Speed Pro Street”, “NFL on Tour”, “NHL ’09″, “Skate”, and “Guitar Hero”, among some others. And the 10 states that are targeted include some major battleground states: Ohio, Iowa, Indiana, Montana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, and Colorado.
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Blip Festival 2008: The Promo from Richard Alexander Caraballo on Vimeo.

The BLIP FESTIVAL 2008 is a four-day (Dec 4-7) event showcasing nearly 40 musicians and visual artists in the lo-fi chipscene. It’s presented by the Manhattan art organization THE TANK and NYC artist collective 8BITPEOPLES.

The chipmusic phenomenon is like 8-bit punk. They essentially use old video game equipment and home computer hardware as musical instruments. The NES, Commodore 64, Atari ST, Nintendo Game Boy act as the lo-fit, low-res, high-impact electronic music makers.
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Yes yes, the chill is in the air now, fall is here and retailers are humming holiday tunes and setting up lights, reminding us all exactly how many days we have left until the ultimate deadline. They need to put on the pressure to make it feel like an obligation and not just an optional gift-giving occasion. And I don’t feel the pressue until I see Nieman Marcus peddling overpriced fantasy gifts via catalog.

And look at that, Nieman Marcus put out their annual holiday gift guide, called the Christmas Book, just the other day. It’s jam packed with things even the top 1% of the American financial elite would think twice about buying. These are difficult days economically, not the best time to be putting out catalogs filled with $110k dollar motorbikes and $45k dollar gold rings owed by 12th century Vikings. Some people may take offense. Not me, I think it’s fine reading and enjoy it thoroughly. Some people, though.

Here’s a sampling of some of the contents:
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Remember this?

I had no words for these commercials. I hesitated to even write about them since I thought there would eventually be some sort of punchline commercial to cap them off. But no, they were just odd for the sake of oddity, and now they’re canceled. The internet spoke unanimously and Microsoft listened. It might just have been the worst way to spend $300 million dollars in the history of the modern era.

Maybe that’s what Microsoft was getting at: “We’re so successful, we can spend $300 million dollars on a meaningless ad campaign, suck it Apple”. If that were the tag line, I’d at least respect their testicular fortitude.

But it’s over and done with, a thing of the past. What we’re interested in now is the future. Thankfully for Microsoft they have a new series of commercials that are actually good. Check out the video after the jump I’m A PC
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For years, heroin dealers have used “brand stamps” as a way to inform customers of their quality. Even before Frank Lucas’s “Blue Magic” in the 1960s, “good” dealers have found ways to make their product stand out among the poorer quality majority. Once the high quality dealers started doing this, everyone else started as well since it was a low cost way of increasing the apparent quality of the bags. For only the cost of a stamp and ink, a dealer could copy the stamp from the highest quality heroin on the street.

This lack of copyright laws made the high quality dealers constantly have to shift their brand names and stay topical, since the best brands were copied within days. Illustrating this: just recently, 52 glassine bags of heroin stamped both with “OBAMA” and an image of Sen. Barack Obama were confiscated following a routine car stop on Interstate 95 in Upper Chichester, according to Pennsylvania State Police. That’s an interesting way to support your candidate.

Examples of heroin brand stamps:
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