It has been two weeks since the World Cup has begun. Chances are, like many people around the world, you have been trying to catch every game and by now have a pretty good idea of the sponsors and as well as have many of the commercials memorized.
Well, the ongoing battle between Nike and Adidas is one to be watched. Adidas, the official sponsor of the World Cup, is at center stage providing the game balls as well as outfitting the game officials. But don’t let their status fool you, Nike is answering with a strong force, and studies have shown that between social media, blogs and message boards, Nike is talked about twice as much as its German rival. What has caused all of this success? Much praise is going to Nike’s, “Write the Future” ad.
Nike has also gone sky high, installing a LED display on a Johannesburg skyscraper in South Africa, which projects short messages that can be sent via social networking sites from avid soccer fans. Eric Dobson, a Nike spokeswoman says, “It allows people to feel like they’re part of World Cup no matter where they are in the world… The whole campaign is about engagement.”
So does having the title “official sponsor” always guarantee the greatest bang for your buck? Nike gives that question a run for its money.
What does the government do with all that census data?
Advertising Age’s own Bradley Johnson recently released information about what the census means to marketers. Johnson states, “The 2010 Census is expected to find that 309 million people live in the United States. But one person will be missing: the average American.”
He explains that the ‘average American’ is increasing “multi-dimensional,” making it more and more challenging to adapt to shifting and often difficult to contain consumer wants and needs.
Peter Francese, demographic trends analyst at WPP’s Ogilvy & Mather, predicts three major findings. He suggests only 22% of Americans live in an “iconic American household” consisting of a married couple with children. This slipped behind the now popular Dinks (Double Income; No Kids). Two incomes and no kids makes for a very attractive consumer. The Cleaver’s are even a distant third behind single-person households.
Secondly, he describes, “minorities are the new majority,” emphasizing the expanding diversities of our nation. Finally, Francese describes how “our nation will be older and more diverse, and consumer markets more complex.” So what does all of this mean for marketers? Understanding and adapting to these changes and consumers is necessary when considering where the consumer marketplace is moving and how we must adjust when targeting our growing country.
With the help of YouTube, more and more advertisers are turning from 30-second spots on television to three minute mini-films. YouTube is now among the most influential advertising mediums around. Videos, the YouTube variety, transformed advertising’s landscape.
Maybe viral videos don’t outright promote a brand and so become more guerilla than its older, more traditional television borther.
Take the recent video hit, “Liquid Mountaineering.” Posed as a documentary, the film was made by advertising agency CCCP to promote Hi-Tec, an outdoor footwear company. They only mention the brand once in the video, and subsequently, the mini-film has become a viral hit. Viewers can also witness a making of the video on YouTube as well.
This clever form of advertising is not as obvious as product placement and not as overbearing as traditional advertising. The entertainment value makes YouTube a place where the new cool advertising resides.
The advertising industry is taking a step in the right direction towards ethical standards. Ad Age reported that the American Advertising Foundation and the University of Missouri’s Reynolds Journalism Institute are teaming up to create the Institute for Advertising Ethics.
This may not completely change society’s perception of advertisers, but it’s a start. It’s astonishing to think that in the early days of advertising, the industry professionals were one of the most well respected people in the business society. Over the years, the public perception that advertisers exaggerate the facts is now accepted as, well, a fact.
Could the Institute for Advertising Ethics be a turning point for the ad business, or is this just another sales tactic? Is advertising even measured by ethical standards outside academia, or by hits on YouTube?
Google rolled out its new feature, announced last week, that generates default backgrounds on what was once their infamous white homepage. The new option allows users to personalize search, giving you the option to put kids, pets or favorite landscape in the browser. Brilliant, right? Chances are you already use Google, but it’ll be more fun now that it has your cute little kiddos staring back at you. Well done, Google!
ESPN and Wieden+Kennedy have created a campaign unlike any other to promote the 2010 FIFA World Cup, which starts on June 11th. The series of advertisements, perfectly titled ‘One Game Changes Everything,’ is entirely focused on promoting the intensity of the games.
The campaign consists of mural-like posters that pop in uniqueness and focus on their niche target audience. Posters were designed for the 32 countries involved in the tournament with an emphasis on the passion and traditions of the countries’ dedication to soccer.
Not only do the posters maintain an excellence in design, but so much thought was put into making each poster specific to the particular country. Their insight to the passion of each country and dedication on their target audience is executed to perfection, making the campaign a class of its own.
With more people turning towards electronic devices to get their news, stay connected, and even read their books, advertising agencies have adapted by creating new, interactive ways to reach their customers through the introduction of digital magazines. Becoming especially popular amongst iPad users, Wired has teamed up with Adobe to create an app for $4.99 that takes you into the virtual magazine. This app allows you to seamlessly flip through the pages, watch movie trailers, and even take a 360 degree view of the cars in the advertisements just by a twirl of your finger. Will this gain more readers? The answer is yet to be determined but the optimism is high.
It’s easy for advertisers to get caught up in winning awards or creating ads to satisfy their personal egos. Lets face it, most people who work in the advertising industry think and act extremely alike. We’re all creative, emotional, passionate people and the ads we create are a reflection. Advertising objectives sometimes succumb to creative envy. According to Advertising Age, Xyte Technologies recently created a behavior-based segmentation model that breaks down personality traits into 16 different categories. They divided the 16 groups evenly into four separate segments for a more simplified model, which is represented by “mind,” “word,” “body,” and “hand.”
Advertisers and marketers are most commonly grouped into the “word” category, which is the smallest percentage of the population at 18.5%. As marketers and advertisers, we need to focus on not just pleasing ourselves with our creations, but begin to think like the consumer. The perception of an advertisement may not appeal to the remaining 81.5% of the population if it is positioned to our own satisfaction. The focus needs to be on the target audience and the consumer rather than making the advertisement appeal to our personality.
Put yourself in the clients’ shoes, or better still in your clients’ customers’ shoes.
Of course we’ve known for five years that YouTube has changed virtual life as we know it. So long are the days where we ask someone “Did you see that last night?” and are out of luck if they didn’t. Within thirty seconds we are pulling a video up on our smartphones and watching it live. What has this meant for adverting? For one, viral videos are becoming household names. You are considered an outcast if you haven’t seen the latest YouTube hit and even the national news programs are showing some of YouTube’s greatest hits on occasion. But the real question is, have you ever noticed just how many of these hits were born out of advertisements?
Advertisers these days are creating ads with the virtual market in mind. They know how significant the replay of their ads on hubs such as YouTube can be and the jackpot it creates if they can produce a “viral ad.” Even the target audience has been geared towards the teenaged techies; take the new (and slightly bizarre) Old Spice campaign for example, adopting the group who are constantly browsing the latest YouTube hits.
So there has been a shift: no longer are people straying away from ads, they are searching for them, trying to find the funniest ones, sending them to their friends and watching them over and over again. Ads can’t be boring!!
Have Americans’ obsession with brands gone too far?
The NBA has released a series of basketball related food products: a toaster that burns a team’s logo into bread, NBA Gourmet Coffee and edible team logos for…a pizza? The toaster and gourmet coffee are currently for sale at store.nba.com. The edible logo will be available for all 30 teams by next season, but they won’t be sold directly to consumers. Instead, the NBA will be selling the logos to individual pizza places nationwide for a lovely logo delivery.
This may be the next step to becoming more of a brand-crazed society. Will food products become the next popular promotional tool for advertisers? This phenomenon just goes on to show that as Americans, we are obsessed with brand identification. Creatively breaking through the clutter is a key element in today’s advertising world, but resorting to utilizing space on food may be taking it a step too far. It’ll be interesting to see if these new NBA products will be successful.
