Archive for February 19th, 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