With newspapers struggling with declining sales and subscriptions, it seems that a few of the major newspaper chains have realized that when they have a newspaper with something of real value to a lot more people than usual, perhaps it makes sense to bump up the prices. Both Tribune Co. and E.W. Scripps are planning to raise the newsstand price of Thursday's paper, treating it like a standard Sunday paper, recognizing that many people want the paper just for the ad circulars that detail "Black Friday" sales. In some ways, it's yet another point of evidence that ads (relevant ones) represent content -- in this case, content that a lot of people are apparently willing to pay for.
One of the things that gets people upset when we talk about advertising being content, and content being advertising is that they think this means advertisers tricking users into viewing their ads. That's not true at all. It should be totally upfront. People who pass along a cool commercial are doing it because they know exactly what it's advertising and they know that it's still cool. The idea is to create content that's so good that even though everyone knows it's advertising, they don't mind. If you have to "trick" people into viewing your ad, then it's bad content.
But the whole thing is fake. It's really an ad. And, to make it worse, the company behind it is taking out ads on real news sites and trying to make it look like news -- thereby tricking people into reading their ad. The whole scam is to get people to sign up for info on how to make money from home -- for which they're charged $2... but then suddenly many claim they started finding additional "surprise" charges on their credit card, which the company says they actually agreed to in the fine print. That's an old scam, but using real-looking news articles is the new twist. So, while content is advertising, misleading or sneaky advertising is bad content.
We talk a lot about the idea that advertising is content and content is advertising, and there are always those who get confused and insist that they hate advertising... and that if they see content as advertising they won't pay attention. But explain that to the millions of folks who tune into the Super Bowl each year to watch the commercials rather than the game. If the content is good, no one cares that it's also advertising. Of course, usually when we talk about this sort of thing, we're talking about content/advertising that goes outside the usual boundaries of advertising -- since the traditional forms of advertising have been so overdone and are so painful that people instinctively ignore them.
But could the banner ad, for example, be rescued? I still remember, way back in the early days of banner ads, actually paying quite a bit of attention to an HP banner ad for the Mopier. In fact, I remember the ad so much, I still remember the name of the product it was advertising. That's because the ad itself was fun. It was a game of Pong within the ad itself, with the paddles controlled via mouseovers. That was advertising that worked... But, for the most part these days, banner ads are either boring or intrusive. Yet, sometimes, people still do creative things. Mike (different one, obviously) pointed me to an award-winning banner ad from Pringles, which is quite silly, but fun to click, because it tells a story (and does so amusingly) and you want to find out how it ends. I don't know if the initial call to action is enough to get people to dive in, but if advertisers actually put more thought into making their ads interesting and fun, perhaps people wouldn't just ignore them all the time.
It's no secret that we're not big fans of the banner ad business -- and, in fact, part of what we're doing with Floor64 and the Insight Community is helping to offer companies alternatives to wasteful spending on straight banner ads. Just a couple months ago, I moderated a panel at a marketing conference, where we talked about "the death of the banner ad." And, while every person on the panel admitted that banner ads aren't particularly effective, they said they still bought them, just because it's part of what you do. However, that may soon be changing. The first hint may have come earlier this year, when people started realizing that banner ads on hot social networking properties were worthless. And, now, with the financial crisis freaking people out left and right, some are considering pulling back on their ad spending.
And, if they needed any more ammunition for that, a new study from Jakob Nielsen shows that ad blindness is more widespread and more comprehensive than almost anyone realized. Almost no one looks at banner ads. The only "advertisements" that people look at are search ads, because in those cases, people are actively looking for something, and the ads often provide it. In other words, in those cases, the ads are good content.
This doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense to reach out to the people who make up your market. It just means to stop thinking about just bombarding them with meaningless "push" messaging that they'll ignore completely -- and start actually engaging them and providing good content.
So, we were a little confused recently when Toyota sued a nude model for using the name Alexus, as it seemed difficult to believe there would be any "confusion" between the two. However, who knew that Lexus was getting into the entertainment business? We've talked in the past about BMW's famous BMW Films effort, as an example of how the future of advertising needs to recognize the blurring lines between content and advertising. In BMW's case, each film was directed by a famous filmmaker, starred actor Clive Owen, and included a BMW that tended to act as something of a co-star. The films were entertaining as pure content, rather than as traditional advertising.
Since then, we've seen plenty of other companies try similar things, with varying degrees of success. For example, the recent set of Microsoft ads involving Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates received a very mixed reaction -- in part because people expected them to be like traditional ads, pitching a specific product, rather than creating a story line that was entertaining in its own right.
Now, one of our readers, William Jackson, points us to an experiment apparently by the car company, Lexus (a part of Toyota). It's called L Studio, and appears to be something of a web video platform, showing a bunch of professionally produced videos. As Jackson notes, some of them do involve a Lexus, such as this documentary about an artist creating a piece of artwork out of a Lexus:
However, others seem to have absolutely nothing to do with Lexus automobiles at all, and often star recognizable actors, such as this video starring Famke Janssen trying to juggle her dating life with her dog:
I'm sure some will complain that these sorts of videos don't make any sense, as they do nothing to promote the vehicles -- but it may be worth seeing where this campaign goes from here. Some of the videos are entertaining and help put Lexus' brand around "lifestyle" content, and that could get people to start associating the Lexus brand with a certain type of lifestyle. Sure, it might not be as "in your face" as sponsoring a TV show or doing product placement, but if the content is good and gets people to seek it out rather than intrude on what they're doing, this could be a very effective branding campaign.
The Eepy Bird guys are, of course, most famous for their Diet Coke + Mentos video which kicked off quite the international phenomenon. One of the less-well-documented aspects was what happened after the video became popular. For a while, neither Coca-Cola nor Mentos was particularly thrilled with the idea of associating themselves with the video. Coca-Cola specifically distanced itself from the phenomenon initially. Mentos took some time, but quickly embraced the phenomenon, agreeing to sponsor future Eepy Bird projects. And, with a little pushing, Coca Cola also came around.
So, now we've got this new video, and it's definitely entertaining. Using hundreds of thousands of Post-It Notes forming paper "slinkies," the video demonstrates that recognition of how advertising and content are becoming one. The video is certainly entertaining and fun to watch -- so it's likely to attract many viewers. However, there's also plenty of advertising built into it as well. First, most obviously, it continues to build up Eepy Bird's reputation for quirky fun video "experiments." But, the video also "debuted" on television on the ABC Family channel as a part of that station's TV show Samurai Girl. So, it was also an advertisement for that show as well as the ABC Family network. On top of that, the video was sponsored by Office Max (who sells Post-It Notes, obviously), but not in a particularly intrusive or annoying manner. And, while it was not overtly sponsored by 3M, you have to imagine that the maker of Post-Its can't be particularly disappointed by the additional publicity. And, oh yeah, the best part is that video also contains a note at the end (not sure if it's an "ad" per se) from... Coca Cola, the very company that had been so hesitant to embrace Eepy Bird.
So, here we have a very entertaining video that doesn't "trick" anyone, isn't intrusive and still helps "advertise" a whole variety of different things without being annoying about it.
One of the points we've been making for years is that advertising is content. That is, as people have more and more media options, advertisers can no longer assume they have a captive audience who will watch ads because they have nothing better to do. Rather, advertisers have to make their ads entertaining, so that people will want to watch them. The latest example of this is a New York Times article about how TV networks are bringing back the live commercial. For example, Jimmy Kimmel has been doing amusing live pitches for Nikon, Pontiac, and Quiznos on his late night show, and Jay Leno hosted a silly American Gladiators segment on his show to sell Klondike bars. Hollywood executives have a bad habit of viewing commercials as the spinach viewers have to eat in order to get the content they're actually interested in. But these examples illustrate that commercials don't have to be boring. With a little ingenuity, and funny pitchmen like Kimmel and Leno, commercials can be made interesting enough that consumers are actually interested in watching them. Part of the reason people hate commercials is that they're so repetitive, but live pitches can help break up the monotony by performing the pitch differently every time. And once commercials are actually interesting, the TiVo "problem" goes away, because even most consumers who have PVRs with commercial-skipping functions won't use them because they're actually interested in watching the commercials.
