Times Square Is A Big Stage, But The Ads Still Have To Be Interesting
from the mr-whipple dept
The advertising world is undergoing something of a sea change, as traditional methods like TV and print ads lose their effectiveness with consumers. One of the biggest challenges for advertisers is how to take advantage of blogs and other so-called social-media sites where people are spending ever-increasing amounts of time. For some companies, gaming the system to gain attention is the preferred method, but others are figuring out some different, indirect ways. For instance, marketers are discovering that by advertising or staging marketing stunts in places like Times Square, photos and videos featuring their brands are showing up on sites like Flickr and YouTube. The ad industry is looking favorably on experiential marketing, which the IHT describes as campaigns "intended to give people something they can try out and photograph." Experiential marketing is nothing new, but it's taking on a new life thanks to these media-sharing sites, in a further reflection that advertising is content. People are taking pictures and videos of this stuff not because it's advertising, but because it's satisfying content that they want to share with others. Putting it in Times Square or another high-traffic location, provides it a big stage, but doesn't guarantee its success. Advertising that's intrusive, annoying, or simply uninteresting is becoming unviable -- whether it's in a traditional ad, or in a "marketing experience".
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Super Bowl Syndrome
Consider Darin on Bewitched, and how the ad industry looked in that day. Now ads are cranked out like oatmeal. Come on, guys. Let's have a little creativity.
My other gripe is about companies that advertise products that:
a. limited audience - such as the old BASF ads, targeting company bosses.
b. drug company ads that make you want to toss your cookies. I don't appreciate dancing nose boogers.
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Monitoring the Internet
Some large international companies are paying them big bucks to track and data mine mind share for brands, issues, and other things. Through other sources I've found that they worked for some foreign presidential campaigns.
I tried to get in touch with them but it's real hard to get a response - - - they only seem to to work through referrals from people they know.
In asking around the word of mouth marketing people; they've heard of them, but don't seem to know much about them other than they seem to be doing a lot of strange work for the ad agencies as well as some secret stuff for the government.
Some ad agencies are paid on the measurements picked up by this company.
They're at www.BuzzAnalytics.com and won't return any of my calls.
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Commercials
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