the thought

Kathleen Destino

In an earlier blog, I wrote about the negative perceptions surrounding television advertising. Essentially, according to a Mintel International study, people are just not “fans” of the medium. It got me thinking about commercials in general, and I had to ask myself (as well as the office) - is it really that bad? Aren't there some commercials that we really like and look forward to seeing?

So I asked myself first, and concluded that I happen to really like plenty of television ads - especially the ones that make me laugh. My better half gets a kick out of watching me laugh out loud - even at the “bad” funny TV commercials.

Below is a list of some of my favorite funny (to me) commercials:

Sonic
Two guys talk about pretty much nothing while waiting in the drive-thru.

Capital One “NO” commercials
The commercials with David Spade – I especially crack up at the red-head guy who gets the brunt of the beatings. (I know what you are thinking -- why are you admitting to this?)

Budweiser
The Magical Beer Fridge. View it on You Tube.

Geico
Newlyweds live in a tiny house for a reality television show. This is “NOT AWESOME.” View it on You Tube.

I then asked around the office, intrigued by what TV advertising stuck in other people’s brains. Here is a short list:

Volkswagen
Passat - Low Ego Emissions – People with megaphones announce their egos. View.
GTI - German Scientists trying to speak hip hop. View.

I received an email that said the following:
“I love the commercial where the business owner is trying to make a presentation and he's really small and the old-fashioned bankers are looking at him through a magnifying glass and accidentally set him on fire. Of course, I can't remember the name of the bank.” (Capital One again) View.

Ameriquest
“I’m Her Daddy” - Part of Ameriquest's "Don't judge too quickly" campaign. View.

I had a lot of laughs taking another look at all of these commercials on You Tube . It’s amazing how many videos you can find there!

Besides giggling at my desk, this exercise reinforced my notion that not all advertising is created equal and certainly not all television commercials produce negative feelings or thoughts. If a commercial has an emotional purpose (such as making someone laugh, cry, or think) and is perceived as being produced with that purpose and quality in mind, viewers will be less likely to harbor negative feelings toward the advertisement.

01:41 PM | Permalink

Elizabeth Rector

Back when my parents were kids, blowing their allowance at record stores, music genres were served up in sharp and simplistic forms: Rock, Pop, Jazz, Classical, Country. Perhaps these buckets were, as they most definitely are now, all too encompassing.

But when did music genres become as abstruse as the word sounds?

I recently attended the Westword Music Showcase to see three local Denver bands - Mr. Pacman, Machine Gun Blues and Reverend Deadeye. While perusing the performer details I found that Mr. Pacman, a wild assortment of electro reverie and golden-ager calisthenics, classify themselves as Video-game Gangster Rock. That’s a tidy description for a band that makes their music from 8-bit computers and draws inspiration from video game soundtracks.

Reverend Dead-eye, my favorite local act, partakes in an equally exhaustive scrutiny of their art resulting in the Punk-Rock Hillbilly Gospel Blues genre. Other performers included:

Josh Ivy - excelling in Booty Junk Funk
Deviant - mixing the sound of Dark-edged Electro-Rock
Oakhurst - homegrown Rocky Mountain Guerilla Grass

Pacman don’t preach…

…but the Reverend will.

To my surprise, Machine Gun Blues consider themselves a Rock n’ Roll band. It’s not a novel concept, but still begs reflection – how rare it seems to run across something as simple and straightforward as Rock n’ Roll.

It seems like everything my parents know musically has been lovingly slaughtered, dismembered and mended back together in hopes of creating something unique, at the very least listenable, and at it’s best embraced.

Someone get this man a drink!

So while new genres and bands spawn (Gogol Bordello, Eastern European Gypsy Punk) the old genres and bands don’t go away - no matter how much time passes (i.e. the Rolling Stones). This is why the theory of the Long Tail (less huge/mainstream hits and more niche options) is so vital to new music development and propagation.

Fragmentation of music + new genres + hard costs associated with brick n’ mortar establishments could result in new music deficiencies and/or limits. There just isn’t enough room on the CD rack for all the music that already exists and all that is in development.

It would be a hopeless task to look for the High Energy Celtic Pirate Folk Punk Rock section at the local record store (there is perhaps only one band that stakes this claim - the Potcheen Folk Band). What brick n’ mortar is going to assume the cost of housing space for that one band for the ridiculous genre that maybe only a handful of people are genuinely interested in? Everybody loses in that situation – the band, the fan and the music industry.

The good news is that subscription–based services like Napster and Rhapsody and vertical search engines like iTunes allow bands of all genres, no matter how obscure, a place on the digital CD rack.

So get out there and find new music. A good place to start is Pandora, a site that lets you create a radio station based on a particular artist(s) and then plays similar artists as well. Also check out allmusic and NME for band biographies, contemporaries and breaking music news.

10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This article sparked an email chain among our office regarding how Internet sites like MySpace and YouTube make money.

http://blogs.mediapost.com/online_publishing_insider/?p=49

02:59 PM | Permalink

Katie Bastian

I was reading through my Marketing Daily online, when I came across a great viral marketing success story.

Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the creative agency of record for Volkswagen US, created a very successful viral marketing campaign for the re-release of the Volkswagen Rabbit. According to an article published on ClickZ.com http://www.clickz.com, the purpose of this campaign was to position the Rabbit as an ideal vehicle for city drivers.

The project centers around Steve, a filmmaker from Colorado, who has never driven in New York City. He drives around The Big Apple, in the Volkswagen Rabbit, that is outfitted to look like a NYC cab. As he drives around the city, the hidden cameras on the dashboard capture the distinctive qualities of city driving.

For example, he picks up the “Classic New-Yorkers”, college students who move to the city for the summer, and a pair of traveling foreigners from Switzerland who are pure entertainment in the back seat. Steve has 14 days to complete this documentation. These videos can all be seen on the Gypsy Cab Project website http://www.gypsycabproject.com.

Why was this such a great example of viral marketing success?

Viral marketing can be defined as a marketing technique that seeks to increase brand awareness through word of mouth. In order to be successful, it must be attention-grabbing, entertaining and engaging. The point of viral, or word of mouth, is to get people talking about the product or service – both socially and in the media.

This campaign proved to meet the goals of a successful viral marketing campaign by being attention grabbing (the name itself is intriguing), entertaining (videos involving real people creating comical situations), and engaging (the internet was the perfect medium to facilitate engagement because people navigate the website themselves).

In addition, it garnered plenty of media attention. Just Google “The Gypsy Cab Project” and you will find plenty of outlets that covered this story.

After I heard about The Gypsy Cab Project, I was curious to see what the car itself was all about. The marketing-masterminds enticed me enough to check out the Volkswagen website http://www.vw.com.

But did I tell my friends about it?

Well, I’m writing about it on a blogsite – so I guess that is proof enough.

11:18 AM | Permalink

Stacie Bogan

I always thought of myself as a level-headed person…until last Saturday.

I like to think that I am not the type of person who sprints out to the store to purchase the next great product just because I see it on TV or hear about it on the radio. Maybe I would if I didn’t have a husband that jumped online everyday to see what purchases I have made (tight purse strings).

Last Saturday, I was watching the Food Network http://www.foodnetwork.com, which is my new favorite channel (again I’m behind the trend). What’s interesting about this fact is that I do not cook. I hate it. But I do love to eat. So I’m watching the Food Network and there is a segment featuring Haagen-Dazs and the search for the next fantastic flavor.

Who doesn’t love ice cream? I was immediately sucked into the two hour show.

Haagen-Dazs http://www.haagen-dazs.com asked consumers to send in their unique ice cream recipes in hopes of finding the next flavor sensation. Behind the scenes they narrowed it down to five people. Each person created their flavor in the Haagen-Dazs labs and went through various rounds of judging before a winner was chosen. It came down to these three flavors:

 Toasted Sesame Coconut something
 Canolli
 Sticky Toffee Pudding.

Of course I was rooting for Sticky Toffee Pudding… the name alone had me salivating like my two dogs. Finally, after two hours of torture, the VP of Marketing at Haagen-Dazs announced (drum role) the winner is… Sticky Toffee Pudding.

Yes! (I actually shouted at the TV) What a delicious choice! As soon as I heard those words announced I immediately forced my husband into a trip to Safeway to see if they had the “limited edition” for sale.

So there I was, sprinting out of my door to purchase the next great product. Wait, this isn’t me! What am I thinking? I’d like to chalk it up to a few key factors:

 It was triple digit heat
 We don’t have air conditioning
 I have a sweet tooth (it’s medically impossible to eliminate)

I would like to point out that if the factors above were not in play I would NEVER have fallen victim to the media. So let me ask you this… have you ever fallen victim to the media? Was it worth it?

I’d have to say congratulations to Haagen Daz – their marketing efforts through the Food Network had me not only buying their ice cream, but changed my whole predictable persona to do so.

11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kathleen Destino

It’s a whole new spin on TV dinners, people. Burning the pages of the monthly Mediaweek http://www.mediaweek.com magazine that gets dropped off on my desk, was a short article about restaurants offering personal televisions and Internet access at their tables.

Remember when TV dinners used to be frozen fried chicken and mashed potatoes that families ate on TV trays in front of their favorite Cosby, Family Ties or Full House episode?

Now, apparently, TV dinners are coming directly to a restaurant near you.

The Mediaweek article says that “one in four people say they would watch a small TV while seated at their favorite table service restaurant, and 27 percent say they would have no problem cracking open their laptops if wireless Internet access was available.” I don’t know how everyone else feels, but my intuition tells me this doesn’t seem like the best idea dreamed up by marketers.

Does it make sense for a restaurant to drive people out of their home to spend money at a place that offers them exactly what their home offers? Isn’t part of the “going out to eat” experience getting out of your home, away from your TV, turning off the email and chatting with a friend, relative or spouse?

As a society, we tend to view eating as accomplishing one of two things.
1) Consuming calories, and consuming as many as possible as fast as possible
or
2) Social hour – we’ve been doing this since the grade school cafeteria

So, this TV and Internet idea might be counterintuitive for a couple of reasons. The first being the nature of restaurants, especially in the quick service or casual dining realm. Restaurants want to turn tables. They want you to eat and leave so the next party can sit down. It’s one way they make more money.

I recently heard that one local Denver restaurant actually told their staff NOT to offer dessert. If they offer dessert, the cost of the dessert did not compare to the cost of a whole new table sitting down. Get ‘em in and get ‘em out seemed to be this restaurant’s philosophy. On the same token, customers want to eat and move on. We are not a similar society to Europeans, who can make the dinner hour last for three or more hours and still be at total peace.

If you introduce a television or Internet connection, the customer is probably going to linger longer. They may sip their Diet Coke a little slower or order another round of French fries, but they probably are not going to continue running up a tab (unless you have alcohol and that is a whole other blog). In addition, while the customer lingers at a Village Inn http://www.villageinn.com/ watching a personal TV, a Denny's http://www.dennys.com/en/ commercial might be shown on the program they are watching, and any marketer can see the danger zone that this is leading to.

The second reason is that those that go out to eat for social reasons and to get away from their television and Internet connection are not going to be pleased when they sit down at their table and it is staring them straight in the face. Talk about hitting where it hurts. The concept completely contradicts their expectation.

So, either the TV stays out of the restaurant or the nature of restaurants has to change. Out of necessity, restaurants would have to go from being a function of fulfilling a need – calories or social time – to being that of a “home away from home”. Perhaps like a Starbucks – comfy chairs, nice aromas, laptops, but with burgers, French fries, pizza, ketchup, noodles, pasta sauce the list goes on. I’m just not picturing it.

02:23 PM | Permalink

April Thayer

What was the article I read that said 18-24 year olds consume 20 hours of media inside of seven hours? (The operative word being “consume,” of course.) Could we change that to “witness” or “are washed over by” or “are in the same room with enough devices all running at once to eat the power required to run a Smart Car?” What are we talking about here?

Just because someone can talk on their cell phone and IM with their cousins in DC and have the television going at the same time doesn’t mean they’re consuming media. Just watching my son, I know that one of the three devices would have to stop working to get his attention. Absent a power failure, he’s in another world.

I don’t know what we should call that – partial attention deficit disorder comes to mind - but if that’s going to be the definition of media consumption, a lot of advertisers are going to get mighty short-changed and plenty pissed off!

It comes back to the concept of impressions and the value of an impression has to be protected under some rule, doesn’t it?

All the new media types still have to deliver an impression. All the traditional media types have to deliver an impression. The creative has to be good enough to be engaging. The advertiser has to get his or her money’s worth. And then all will be right with the media world. Provided we don’t have a power failure.

02:14 PM | Permalink