Tag: advertising

Gorilla marketing

Guerrilla marketing is all the rage. Sneaky. Subvertive. In your face and yet subtle at the same time. Gorilla marketing is another area all together – Cadbury tried it with their virally popular drumming gorilla – and who can forget Yogo (the chocolate yoghurt and its mascot Yogorilla).

Now, a health insurance company is in on the act. Gorillas don’t like eye contact. Apparently an escaped gorilla attacked a zoogoer for making too much eye contact recently. FBTO, this Dutch health insurance company responded by handing out these innovative zoogoing goggles. Found here.

April 22, 2009

Please take one

Celebrating ads in bus shelters is easy – but what about ads that people put up illegally on walls and legally on notice boards? The tear off ad is time honoured, and tried and true.

Here are two that I like.

From Flickr.

Free paper.

April 11, 2009

Something fishy…

I like good bus stop ads. I admit it. I think they’re great. Especially when they take the form of novel installation art. Like this bus stop ad with a fish tank featuring live fish, advertising an aquarium product manufacturer…

Found here.

April 9, 2009

The Chicken Dance

This “Subservient Chicken” will do just about anything you ask it to. Provided you use words that can be generally applied and don’t want him to adhere strictly to a literal translation of your instructions.

chicken

It’s clever. And an ad for Burger King. Tell him to punch himself in the head. I did. And was pleasantly surprised.

April 2, 2009

Piece offering

How would you advertise Lego? It pretty much sells itself. Here are 39 clever Lego ads. A mix of inspirational and controversial. And a periodic table for good measure.

March 25, 2009

Alien v Predator

Finding a new angle to promote a movie franchise that has been around for a long time and received a big budget campaign to begin with must be tough. So kudos to the company behind these ads for upcoming screenings of Aliens v Predator on Sky TV in New Zealand.

March 22, 2009

Election Scorecard: Change, can we believe it?

The latest roundof election ads are out – the ALP has gone negative. They’re telling us that despite poll results the other guy – Lawrence Springborg – is not ready to lead us. 

Labor seems concerned. Government media releases (still being sent via Government distribution lists despite “caretaker mode” being in full swing) are consistently refering to the LNP as the Nationals. 

Springborg on the other hand is trying to claim the “change” mantra. I just saw an ad that pretty much ran with the “time for a change” motto. 

LNP: B+:  change + positivity + pointing at debt as an indicator of bad economic management are winners as we’ve seen in other elections (for example the US Presidential Election and last Townsville City Council election). 

ALP: C+: Uninspired rhetoric – except perhaps the ad where Anna Bligh acknowledges that a deficit is needed to fight recession. Brave. Also somewhat reckless in the face of poll results and the LNP’s relentless use of debt as a campaign issue. 

In other news – we are running a campaign on our website that emails candidates with respondents feelings on the Flinders Street Mall within a form letter. Clever hey. But Labor had the email addresses for Mandy Johnstone and Lindy Nelson-Carr wrong on their campaign page. They don’t even know how to spell Johnstone’s surname. Fail. D-.

March 11, 2009

Ad value

Tim Challies is one of the world’s preeminent Christian bloggers. Today he wrote about advertising and the church – mostly advertising but this was a great quote about his approach to ads:

“I guard against this because I’ve seen what happens to churches when they adopt a marketing mindset. Every church markets; the moment a church places a sign outside or puts an advertisement in the phone book or the local newspaper, it is marketing. But some churches go far further, adopting a kind of marketing mindset that makes the church functionally not much different than a business. After a while every decision comes back to the bottom line, whether that is a dollar figure or an attendance figure. This quickly sends churches into a tailspin, a downward spiral that draws them further and further from the Bible. It is inevitable, really.”

I’m still not sure where I sit on the issue of church marketing. I’m not as sold on it as churchmarketingsucks.com – who despite the name actually encourage churches to do better.

Challies also asks a question about whether or not we should ethically watch ads when consuming content – and thus whether ad blocking is immoral.

March 11, 2009

A rivers runs through it

I love the Rivers clothing shop ads. I love how understated they are and how they bag out their own products. Particularly the latest ads for the $3.90 pairs of “Ugly” crocs. The whole family can be ugly together. Brilliant.

February 7, 2009

Sport’s psychology

Great little article from Paul Sheehan at the SMH on the way the sports invented by a country speaks to its culture and the psychology of its populace…

Can you imagine the Americans coming up with a game where the score was commonly 0-0 or 1-0? Or inventing a game that could be played over five days, with numerous meal breaks, and end in a draw?

It’s actually a promo for the Superbowl, this year featuring an Australian. While Sheehan seems to be lauding the excitement contained in US sport he neglects to mention that the Superbowl is essentially two coaches playing chess with the pieces wearing body armour. Chess has built in timed pauses  in which the players make their moves. The superbowl is the same, only the pauses also allow advertisers to get the best bang for their buck.

January 22, 2009

Targeted ads miss the mark

The amount of information stored about us online – through Google and Facebook and their ilk is incredible. It’s meant to lead to brilliantly targeted advertising with content so compelling that clicking links is irresistible. I haven’t been one to click these links too much. Sometimes I do it in order to penalise the company – they have to pay per click.

Today Facebook tried to lure me to a site for “Liberal theologians” a celebration of liberal theology where fundamentalists don’t belong. Needless to say, I clicked. I feel like I have more in common with atheists than liberals – at least the atheists are logically consistent in their beliefs. 

I hope the guy behind that site thinks it’s money well spent. I can’t help but wondering why this guy is paying to advertise his blog on Facebook. 

I wonder if my generic “religious belief” was instead set to “intolerant fundamentalist Christian” what sort of ads would pop up? Probably not all those Christian dating service advertisements I’m inundated with. Surely those advertisers on Facebook should be targeting people listed as “single”.

January 21, 2009

Read this post – free

Mozilla – the development company that brought you such products as Firefox 1, 2 and 3 – has performed an interesting test on content writing for websites . The general rule is that a link should essentially ask to be clicked. Your link should be compelling and descriptive. Basically you shouldn’t ask people to “click here” for more information. Anyway, Mozilla ran a test where their Firefox 3 page would present alternate options in the download button text – “Download now – free” and “Try Firefox 3” and the first option was “significantly” more popular (well a 10.07% conversion rate as opposed to 9.73%). So there you go. Boring reading – but I hope the title was compelling enough to bring you here… and that’s what counts.

November 22, 2008