everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Tag: advertising

  • If Doritos are your thing. . .

    If beaming messages of Hope and Beauty are not your thing – through December 4th you can try your hand at creating the next advertisement for Doritos. Win prizes (cash and a trip to Miami for the Superbowl, having your video shown on TV during one of the coveted million dollar ad spots).

    More info on the Crash the Superbowl site which gives you access to high quality graphics, music, and video clips that you can mix into your home movies using Jumpcut, the online video editing tool recently acquired by Yahoo.

    Maybe we should beam this stuff into space as well.

  • Cellphone Banner Ads – interesting data

    The average price for a four- to eight-week-long banner ad campaign on a content provider’s wireless Web site is now $75,000 to $150,000, up from $25,000 to $50,000 last year. About 3% to 5% of phone users click on banner ads on their screens — higher than the 1% click rate of computer users, says Jeff Janer, chief operating officer of Third Screen Media.

    – from today’s WSJ story, Coming Soon to Cellphone Screens — More Ads Than Ever

  • Why I cancelled my Bank of America Visa card

    Despite the fact that I’ve got more pieces of plastic than I really need it really irks me that in order to activate the new card B of A sent me I have to listen to a two-minute spiel about why I really should consider signing up for a credit protection service.

    No option to <press #> to opt out or even skip the message. I had to listen to two messages (the second slightly more shill than the first) in their entirety. Only after the lecture on dangers of identity theft could I proceed and activate my new card.

    I put my trust in a bank to protect my identity in the first place. Something just doesn’t sit right with this very same bank saying “it would be a good idea” if I signed up for their service just in case. It smacks of protection money.

    Credit is due to the B of A customer service rep though. He was nice enough to cancel my account without too much hassle (unlike other organizations) and when I suggested they go easy on the marketing messages in the future, he sighed with a knowing verbal wink.

  • Billboards as Ambient Graffitti

    So this is cool. deinde posts a photo (above) of a billboard in Manhatten that you can SMS to register your vote on the live updating counter.

    Here’s my idea, add technology that senses nearby bluetooth or wifi-enabled devices and asks permission to read their preferences or log file. The billboard then becomes a realtime, updating display of the aggregated interests of anyone that comes in contact with it.

    You could pull the last five songs played and show the album cover art pulled from Amazon.com. You could show a spider-graph drawing six degrees of separation between everyone’s friends network.

    Logos of the company domain names on the email addresses in your address book, lehman.com > lehman brothers, ms.com > morgan stanley, etc.

    Give the billboard your Yahoo or claimID and it can pull all sorts of information you already publish.

    It’s an invasion of privacy if it’s tied back to the individual but it’s a group art project if it’s mixed together and anonymized with everyone else on the big screen like a big, collaborative screensaver.

  • How to make an impression

    Enough of this online advertising stuff, sometimes you need to jump into the real world to make an impact.

    Flickr user Live U4 is uploading photos of various super-sized building mods as part of the promotion. I think I can make out the Spanish enough to figure out that this is a Nike campaign in conjunction with the local JWT advertising offices in Mexico.

    Be sure to also check out the giant, diving goalie by Adidas in Germany too.

    UPDATE: Bummer! I just read elsewhere that this “crash ball” is just a photoshopped concept. But the diving goalie is real and this one of a giant ball crushing a Mercedes is real as well.

  • Tivo serving up advertisments to 30-second skippers

    tivo-commercials.jpgDavis Freeburg has a long post about Tivo’s new Product Watch service which allows people to subscribe to advertisments. I’ve signed up for the service and will post more about it once I’ve had a chance to try it out.

    Davis writes:

    Advertising, ironically enough for an ad zapper, is probably more important to TiVo than just about anything for them right now. While TiVo makes far more money from a standalone subscriber, the explosion of TiVo users in the years ahead are more likely to come from the major cable deals that they are striking with folks like Comcast (and many more surely to come shortly). In these deals TiVo makes much less money per subscriber but is entitled to valuable advertising revenue from a far greater audience.

    We’re seeing an honesty in the dialog between advertisers and their audience that I hope will unleash a new wave of innovation in marketing. Tivo teaches us that people resist interruptive advertising. This tends to be the case with most advertising (that’s why we have pop-up blockers on the web) unless it is highly relevant or entertaining.

    If you want to reach a specific audience for your products, why not just ask them to identify themselves? If I understand it correctly, Tivo’s Product Watch is giving advertisers room to stretch out their creative and offering 2 – 6 minute segments. In return, users are directing their interest and are explicit about what products they are interested in. Tivo’s already got the “thumbs up/thumbs down” rating buttons on their remote and this feedback can be used by the system to serve up suggested advertising just as they do with their existing programming suggestion engine.

    Just as we all went to the web to view clips of the best Super Bowl commercials along with commentary and discussion, Tivo’s Product Watch has the potential to be the place to go to view the most informative or creative advertising on television. Instead of being something you skip, this showcase may actually be a reason to sign up to Tivo.

  • Are you engaged?

    Certainly people want good deals, but a good deal is sweeter when it’s available someplace where people can engage. That’s why even small efforts to facilitate shared moments of self-expression make sense for PopSecret at Whatsyourpopsecret.com, or for Saab at Maintainyouridentity.net, or for msn.com at Whatsyourstory.msn.com (sponsored by Volvo), or for Tazo Tea at Tazo.com, where Tazo encourages visitors to "enlighten us." These campaigns aren’t about engaging consumers with the brand. They’re about brands enabling people to engage with one another in new, often quirky, but always meaningful ways.

    – J. Walker Smith in Feb. 2006 issue of Media 

    Amen to that! The more marketers understand that the new web is about two-way conversations, the less we’ll hear from the klaxon horns of the likes of x-10

    For a sampling of some of the more engaging advertising efforts, check out Random Culture. 

  • Julia on the big screen

    Julia on the big screen

    On a lark I uploaded a recent photo of Julia I had posted to Flickr to Nationwide’s Life Comes at you Fast site. In return, I got an email with a link to their site telling me when the photo would run on the big screen outside the Reuters building.

    If you’re curious, check out the site between 4:40 – 5:00 pm (NYC time) each day this week.

  • Why you will no longer skip the ads on “Lost”

    If you’ve been following the ABC television show Lost, you may know that they’ve been building up to a season finale that would integrate the internet and game play into the viewing experience. Tonight the game launched itself with a non-descript advertisement from "The Hanso Foundation"

    Any regular viewer of Lost knows that this is the Hanso Foundation plays a key role in the show and the phone number at the end of the commercial (1-877-hansorg) is the first clue. What follows is a trail  via a voice mail tree that brings you eventually a website that’s been set up for the game.

    I’m a bit lazy and shortcutted my way to the site via The Lost Experience which is doing a great job documenting the twists and turns of this very immersive "alternate reality game." I’m really interested to see how this all turns out but one thing is certain, by running an ad with clues to kick this off, ABC has skewered my reflex to zip through the commercials on my Tivo.

    Brilliant.