Category — Marketing

Let me refresh your memory:

Agent Provocateur constantly pushes the envelope when it comes to sexy advertising. This Kylie Minogue ad came out in December of 2001 and caused a huge hullabaloo. It was banned by UK TV networks (all 1 of them, the BBC), and it ended up only able to be shown in movie theaters.

Luckily it made it’s way to the internet and became one of the most viewed videos ever. Some estimates say this particular video has been viewed over 360 million times. Sex sells.

Finished watching? Ok, stand up…

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
[Read more →]

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.
[Read more →]

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.
[Read more →]

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.
[Read more →]

-Some people would say it’s a person’s civic duty to vote
-That’s very much like saying that its our civic duty to give surgery advice…

It’s almost sacrilege to say “Don’t Vote” in the US these days. People are shamed into voting by the loyal minions of mainstream politics. But does a higher voter turnout actually help society? In Bryan Caplan’s book, Myth of the Rational Voter, he explains in great detail, and with extensive citations and statistics, how the average voter has certain cognitive biases that cause him to vote in ways that have a net negative outcome for society (they’re not uninformed, Caplan argues, they’re misinformed, which is much worse). And since the solitary goal of politicians (the successful ones, at least) is to get elected, their policies are based on pandering to the misinformed public. So their whole ideologies, the ideologies of both major parties, have come to represent policies that are damaging to society as a whole. In effect, democracy is destroying the United States.

[Read more →]

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?

This is a great talk by Philip Zimbardo about what evil is. Evil, he says, is not a individual condition, it’s the result of circumstances. He cites the Stanley Milgram’s experiment on human behavior, and the Stanford prison experiment and the problems at Abu Ghraib, all leading up to the conclusion that all humans are equally capable of evil.

What does this have to do with advertising? Advertising is social psychology. To understand how advertising affects people, you have to understand why people follow the group and how the brain works. This is a wonderful video on that subject. Check it out.

In the 1950′s, psychologist Solomon Asch performed a series of now famous experiments on social conformity. In the re-enactment video above, you can get a good idea of what they were about.

All of them involved a group of participants answering some very simple questions about their perception (for example: which line was longer than the other?, which lines were the same length?, etc.). All but one of those participants were “confederates”, meaning they were in on the experiment, and were asked to give the same incorrect answers. Asch wanted to see how the remaining subject would react to the rest of the participants behavior.

The results were startling: When they were surrounded by participants giving an incorrect answer, 75% of the subjects followed along and gave the same incorrect answer at least once, and 37% of the subjects followed along and gave an incorrect answer the majority of the time.
[Read more →]

Proctor & Gamble’s logo

During the early part of 2008, Proctor & Gamble topped all other advertisers on Nielsen’s list of top advertisers, with a total of $1.179 billion spent. They were followed by General Motors, which spent $646 million.

Here is Nielsen’s complete list (in millions):

1. Proctor & Gamble: $1179
2. General Motors: $646
3. AT&T: $579.1
4. Verizon: $489.2
5. Pepsico: $455.0
6. Johnson & Johnson: $427.3
7. Toyota: $406.3
8. Time Warner: $391.1
9. Ford: $373.8
10. GlaxoSmithKline: $373.2