Help Make Better Ads

Sometimes advertising can leave you speechless. I guess that...

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 12:34:22 -0400

Sometimes advertising can leave you speechless. I guess that would be called a “better ad”.

Eichborn’s “smallest commercial gimmick in the world” was simple: attach physical banner ads to actual flies. Yes, they somehow tied small red Eichborn banner ads to flies and let them loose in the Frankfurt Book Fair. The result was flying advertising that nobody could miss.

(via Mashable)

Nice Compete analysis of a display brand campaign by Ford on...

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:20:58 -0400

Nice Compete analysis of a display brand campaign by Ford on Yahoo!. I think the impulse to move beyond the click is gaining steam and we’ll see more messages like this one. Advice from the Compete post:

Marketers can and should still look for early indicators of success. But rather than click-through or even short-term view-through, the best view of immediate impact will utilize different metrics: new data like user interaction and duration of exposure, as well as old measuring-sticks like message recall and brand favorability.

I completely agree.

geisen: I went on an “autumnal beer cruise” last night hosted...

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:19:26 -0400

geisen:

I went on an “autumnal beer cruise” last night hosted by Kelso Brewery based in Brooklyn. Pretty tasty beers, definitely recommend checking them out if you’re in a bar that serves Kelso beer. Was looking around their website today and came across this video. In my view, this is probably as good as television advertising gets.

via @bmorrissey This is contextually relevant, but there’s...

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 15:32:19 -0400

via @bmorrissey

This is contextually relevant, but there’s no chance it was intentional. Obviously his main point is that “in-stream” units that appear more like the actual content both from a design and copy standpoint are apt to be more successful. I agree with that point, but the only reason this particular execution stands out is because it’s randomly contextually relevant.

Most examples of the “in-stream” unit that you’ll find on Gawker will be like this execution from Pepsi: completely unrelated to the actual content people are there to see outside of conforming to the basic design of the blog.

Thanks to Mashable for the h/t on this campaign. Many of you...

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:22:13 -0400

Thanks to Mashable for the h/t on this campaign.

Many of you have seen the video above circulating around the Internets of late. What a great example of creating an experience that aligns with a brand’s core value (i.e. VW is more fun to drive) without it feeling contrived or forced. Hats off to VW and DDB Stockholm for using a social media channel in YouTube to push a brand agenda to support a microsite.

I haven’t, and doubt I ever will see, an actual paid placement supporting this campaign, but that didn’t stop nearly 2 million people from viewing the first of a series of Fun Theory videos.

Most “viral” campaigns rub me the wrong way from the start. This one, however, is straight up delightful.

Pixelize This: Sanyo Camcorder Ads

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:55:34 -0400

Sometimes I’ll see a TV commercial, print ad or billboard and think, “how could I make an interesting online execution of that?”. So why not take my random thought and turn it into a running feature here on Help Make Better Ads.

In our first installment of Pixelize This, I give you a Sanyo underwater camcorder campaign by Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand (h/t BlogLess).

and

These look primarily like print ads, thought they could be serving as fodder for multiple campaigns in multiple mediums (hard to tell from the info directly at hand).

If I were to “pixelize this” campaign, I would play off the space provided in a leaderboard (728x90) format with the water line being the bottom of the creative. I would likely have the “top words” bobbing slightly on the horizon to showcase the water and create some visual appeal. But like the “ice/berg” the creative would have more content than first met the eye. This seems like the perfect time to leverage an expand ad to reinforce the campaign’s overall message that there is more to be seen under the water with the Sanyo camcorder.

I would use a call to action similar to the copy in the bottom of the print ad; “Rollover to see what’s under the sea” upon which the reveal would give you the “underwater counterpart” to its bobbing partner.

Thoughts? How else might you transfer this campaign online creatively?

When an ad is too similar to the editorial content, it almost...

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:17:58 -0400

When an ad is too similar to the editorial content, it almost looks like house ad content for the publisher promoting the content itself instead of for the end brand. All I see is Teddy Bruschi, not SBLI.

Apple may not have exclusive rights to tastefully integrated,...

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 11:31:00 -0400

Apple may not have exclusive rights to tastefully integrated, high impact custom rich media executions with tier one publishers, but they may be the best at it. Following up on their Mac vs. PC TV commercial extensions into the online display space, Apple has once again recreated their TV campaigns online.

There are two things I really like about Apple’s approach to their display campaigns.

Extend your TV brand creative online for reinforcement and engagement. Don’t put different messages in different mediums, use consistent messaging across your brand campaigns to reinforce the message. There are plenty of companies that use the same imagery, fonts and language in their static display campaigns as they do on TV, but Apple excels at bringing the intangible emotional connection to an audience that a great TV campaign can induce along with the nuts and bolts of the design.
Leverage the 1:1 relationship with the publisher in custom and tasteful ways. We saw how an egregious site skin can be so damaging to the publisher’s brand identity on their own site in Tim’s most recent post. Apple integrates their brand into CNET in a creative way that plays with and off of CNET’s brand identity (i.e. the Red Ball) that adds value to the CNET brand as well as the advertisers. This is an example of 1+1=3.

Thoughts on Apple’s online executions? Anything that you would do differently?

As a publisher, where do you draw the lines between playful and positive interaction with your brand and the advertiser’s content and a potentially negative brand experience?

I think, when done well, site skins can strike just the right...

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 13:33:54 -0400

I think, when done well, site skins can strike just the right balance between catching your eye and being unobtrusive. From a design standpoint, Stereogum’s promotion for Tosh.o just overpowers the content on their front door. Perhaps some sort of tie-in to music would’ve made this execution more contextually relevant, but as it’s currently constituted it’s both distracting and doesn’t relate to Stereogum’s content whatsoever.

(H/T YM)

When mobile ad targeting got scary. The following ad was...

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 10:37:21 -0400

When mobile ad targeting got scary. The following ad was delivered to me in the TuneWiki app on my iPhone while I was on the Acela from Boston to NY.

Coincidence right? Presense isn’t that contextual (yet).

Is "Sponsored Content" the next iteration of display media?

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 08:39:00 -0400

As I read the front page of Wired.com this morning, I noticed something that caught my attention. Within the right rail below the fold, I found this “sponsored content” box.

Interesting…clearly paid for as it’s called out as “Sponsored Content” but there is no outward brand attribution (aside from the product shot itself). It’s programed more like an editorial feature than an ad placement.

The destination takes you to a richly branded Samsung LED TV promotion that engages users to “tell us what you would like to see from future TVs” using Reddit voting to bubble the best responses to the top.

The concepts of content as advertising and conversational marketing are “all the rage”.

This experience certainly provides a richer context to the product and brand as the future of TV and leading the industry in innovation. But only those people that navigate to the end destination are exposed to that message.

Given that the promotional “sponsored content” space isn’t free (no matter how the media plan was structured), did Samsung extract greater marketing return for their dollar by sacrificing scale of message to a targeted audience for a richer, deeper experience with a smaller segment of that same audience?

The website was clearly an afterthought in promotional...

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 21:52:52 -0400

The website was clearly an afterthought in promotional materials, but the “Twiter” reference is nothing but bandwagon jumping (a) just because its a made up word, doesn’t give you the right to misspell it (b) referencing “Twiter” alone doesn’t give enough information to respond now does it? User name anyone?