July 14, 2006
Million Dollar Homepage .... Building
The web imitates life imitates the web. The milliondollarhomepage.com concept has apparently been adopted and adapted by the Netherlands-based Sandberg Institute, which is selling space on its building facade, imitating the pixel-based ads of the Million Dollar Homepage.
Read more.
Posted by richard ting at July 14, 2006, 05:30 PM
July 13, 2006
The Consumer: Application Nation
by Paul Parton, July 2006 issue of MEDIA
Is there anyone in media, advertising, or marketing who hasn't heard of Burger King's Subservient Chicken? Is there anyone who hasn't marveled both at the cojones of the client who approved the idea and the genius of the team who had the idea in the first place? A simple but deliciously entertaining little software application, it demanded to be sampled at least once. I know we've thought about it a lot down here at The Brooklyn Brothers, and it led us to wonder, in classic Carrie Bradshaw fashion: Are applications the new advertising?
They're certainly popular among consumers. Anything that lets people take part in their own entertainment seems to be hot at the moment.
This season of "American Idol" was a classic illustration. That chipper rascal Ryan Seacrest proudly boasted that with more than 63 million votes cast through a simple SMS-based voting application, "Idol" performed better than any president in history. The ratings were impressive enough, but 63 million votes is a big number.
Posted by richard ting at July 13, 2006, 07:45 PM
April 05, 2006
Chevy Slammed By Consumer-Generated Ads
[from MediaPost]
Perhaps Chevy is getting what it deserves by asking consumers to create ads for them, writes Stuart Elliott of The New York Times. As a new means of "engaging" consumers with brands, some advertisers have asked consumers to make their marketing messages for them, offering some kind of incentive to the user who creates the best ad. Chevrolet, using video shot for a 30-second TV commercial for its 2007 Tahoe, in which the vehicle careens down a sunflower-lined country road, did just that, and some of the responses they've gotten haven't exactly been what a media agency would like to see consumers doing with their client’s brand. At the end of the video clip, one consumer posts, in white lettering: "$70 to fill up the tank, which will last less than 400 miles. Chevy Tahoe." Part of the idea here is that consumers will share their video creations with friends--but not these kinds of creations, which, the Times says became the most widely-circulated videos of the Chevy Tahoe on the Web. Says another, using an image of the Tahoe driving through the desert: "Our planet's oil is almost gone. You don't need G.P.S. to see where this road leads." Advertisers, who've become enamored of late with user-generated content, "buzz," and engagement, are learning the hard way that these opportunities can be a double-edged sword. The lesson here: there is a context for consumer engagement and viral marketing; just because consumers don't necessarily hate advertising doesn't mean they love plugging your brand for you, either.
Watch the Chevy Tahoe videos on YouTube.
Posted by richard ting at April 05, 2006, 01:02 PM
March 22, 2005
The New Pitch - Do Ads Still Work
[from the New Yorker]
THE NEW PITCH
by KEN AULETTA
Do ads still work?
In the introduction to his 1963 best-seller, “Confessions of an Advertising Man,” David Ogilvy apologized for writing “in the old-fashioned first person singular.” In the intervening decades—the years of, among others, Madonna and Donald Trump—that modest impulse has faded. The inclination now is more toward emphatic self-promotion. Linda Kaplan Thaler, who today enjoys an Ogilvy-like reputation as one of advertising’s creative talents, co-wrote a book on marketing in 2003, and advised her peers, “Don’t worry about whether the news is good or bad. Just get covered. . . . PR breeds PR.”
I thought of Thaler when I began to look into whether advertising, which plays such a large role in the American economy, might be ailing, and how it was being affected by new media and by new technologies. (Last year, more than five hundred billion dollars was spent on advertising and marketing in the United States—half the worldwide total.) Thaler still believes that the old-fashioned advertising model works; and it seems to work for her. Although the industry’s growth has slowed in recent years and profit margins have shrivelled, the Kaplan Thaler Group, which she founded in 1997, has flourished.
Thaler, who is fifty-four, has been around long enough to have seen the business change. In Ogilvy’s day, within a single mile of Madison Avenue one could find America’s—and therefore the world’s—most celebrated ad agencies: Ogilvy Benson & Mather, Young & Rubicam, McCann-Erickson, Grey Advertising, Ted Bates & Company, J. Walter Thompson, Benton & Bowles. Agency people saw one another while dining or drinking at Pavillon, “21,” and other establishments. The business was romanticized and mocked in popular culture, sometimes as a trade where failed poets became embittered copywriters and had too many Martinis along the way. It was portrayed as manipulative, in books like “The Hidden Persuaders”; as ruthless, in movies like “The Hucksters”; and as innocent (or sinister) fun, in the memoirs of some of its practitioners.
The path to profits was once fairly straightforward: clients paid agencies fifteen per cent of each advertising dollar, and most of those dollars went to the three television networks. In 1965, advertisers could reach eighty per cent of their most coveted viewers—those between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine—just by buying time on CBS, NBC, or ABC. “You could put together a media plan in an hour,” Roy Bostock, the former chairman and C.E.O. of the MacManus Group, recalls. “When we introduced Scope, in the mid-sixties, we were able with television advertising in the first four weeks of the ad campaign to reach more than ninety per cent of U.S. television households ten times.”
By the late nineties, some clients began to rebel against paying a flat commission, preferring fees, usually billed by the hour. (Linda Kaplan Thaler says, “I sometimes worry that clients are paying us for the hours we spend working on projects rather than the worth of the ideas.”) And the agencies have long since left Madison Avenue—a street now frequented mostly for its luxury stores—for other parts of Manhattan and the rest of the world. But the name remains a synonym for an industry that bears little resemblance to what it once was.