Archive for February, 2008

Target billboard

Here’s the sequence of events. (1) Last January Target mounted a billboard campaign in Times Square that showed (among other, more innocuous images) a young woman spread-eagled on the retailer’s bull’s-eye logo.

(2) Amy Jussel, the founder of ShapingYouth.org and writer for that group’s blog, placed a call to Target to ask about the female objectification in the image, adding in a blog post that as an ad executive, she couldn’t understand how the image passed through layers of approval without being flagged.

(3) Three days after her call, Jussel received an e-mail from Target saying the company was unable to respond to her request for more information about the ad because “Target does not participate with non-traditional media outlets. This practice is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest.” more

Tide

The temptation is probably hard to resist. You’ve developed your creative idea for the Super Bowl. You’ve storyboarded the spot and seen the idea through to execution. You’ve signed that big fat $2.7 million check for thirty seconds’ worth of the national attention span. Now it’s time to sit back and enjoy the limelight. It’s Miller time… or rather, this being the Super Bowl, Budweiser time.

But Tide wanted its first-ever Super Bowl commercial, for the Tide to Go instant stain-remover pen, to do more than simply provide a first-quarter laugh. So the Procter & Gamble brand used the ad, from agency Saatchi + Saatchi, as a springboard for a much fuller and more engaging online campaign. more

Anti-smoking cartoon

You know the ads from Truth, the youth smoking prevention effort funded by a big 1998 master lawsuit settlement between the tobacco majors and 46 states? Since 2000 they’ve been educating young people about the dangers of smoking by publicizing tobacco industry marketing memos and analyzing the actual contents of cigarettes for elements such as ammonia and arsenic. Necessary work—but also necessarily grim.

So for its 2008 campaign, Truth has opted to lighten up and speak its piece through musical numbers and cartoon characters. Needless to say, the “Sunny Side of Truth” goes heavy on the irony, with TV spots feature use dancing leprechauns and speculate that 5 million tobacco-related deaths around the world in 2007 may just be a typo.

The campaign also relies heavily on online components to drive viral spread: so much so, in fact, that for the first time Truth isn’t including any print in its media buy, just TV (primarily cable channels such as MTV, VH-1, Fuse and ABC Family) and the Internet. more

Pleo

A two-part study of how some online brands are using social media to build customer loyalty finds that friendship can involve a lot of work—and some companies just aren’t putting in the time.

Online marketing agency OneUpWeb started before the Christmas shopping season by singling out a dozen brands that seemed either to have social communities in place around their products or appeared to be poised to build them in time for the holidays. The study analyzed the potential each brand could maximize by using social media of various kinds, from social networks and virtual reality to blogs, podcasts, consumer reviews, user-generated video and interactive tours. more

Much to the surprise of everyone except some New York die-hards, an actual football game broke out last Sunday while viewers were trying to watch some very expensive commercials.

Budweiser

By now you’ve seen all the write-ups about which TV spots scored and which ones fumbled. Both Nielsen and USA Today’s Ad Meter anointed Budweiser’s “Rocky” takeoff as the game’s most popular ad among live viewers, while E-Trade’s barfing baby and Pepsi’s Timberlake torture scored highest with TiVo’ers.

But another way to look at the ad contest is to see who did the best job of driving viewers from those pricey $2.7 million 30-second spots to a more engaged relationship with their online sites, either. Marketers had the chance to build on the buzz a Super Bowl ad draws by creating a site or Web page that spoke specifically to their ad content, driving viewers to that Web location through their ad creative, or using search marketing to deliver pay-per-click text ads on the terms game watchers would be most likely to search online. more

Everyone can point to disappointing sequels that failed to re-capture the excitement of the original: “Fantasia 2000”. “The Two Jakes”. “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo”. When you’re creating a product for popular culture, it’s just hard to put that second bottle of lightning up on the shelf.

Apparently Office Max and the agencies behind the “Elf Yourself” viral campaign haven’t heard about the sophomore slump. The team scored a big holiday 2006 viral success with the campaign, in which users get to download their face to a spindly elfin body and then shake their groove thing for e-mail friends. So when the holiday season rolled around again in 2007, OfficeMax, ad agency Toy New York and digital content company EVB decided to up the ante to four elves per e-mail and add some showier dance moves and voice capability but essentially keep the rest of the campaign the same. more

When it comes to interactive tie-ins with live events, there are two schools of thought. You can basically fish where the fish are and link your digital content to Web sites that are already seeing traffic from the event. On the other hand, there’s a lot to be said for building your own fishing hole and controlling both the experience and the visitors.

Last year, Totino’s Pizza Rolls took a fairly sedate approach to its sponsorship of a decidedly non-sedate event: the ESPN Winter X Games for extreme sports fans, held annually in Aspen CO. The General Mills-owned brand created TV spots and print ads that drove viewers—mostly 13-to-17 year old males– to a Totino’s-branded page on the ESPN.com site. There they were able to vote on their favorite moments from the games and to enter a sweepstakes to win a Jeep patriot packed with sports gear. Totino’s also used competing pro snowboarder Danny Kass as a brand ambassador, putting a logo on his board and posting his daily blog entries on the branded page. more

What do you do if your condom company keeps coming up short in testing among the 18-to-24 year old demographic—the ones who are the most frequent users of the product? If you’re LifeStyles, you re-brand with a campaign that uses Web video and in-bar promotions to stir up some buzz and build a hipper, more personal reputation. more