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Chip Heath, professor of organizational behavior in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and author of Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, took issue with Marshall McLuhan in a recent interview with McQ:

In truth, the message is the message. People who think too much about the medium—opt-in newsletters, the Internet, Web 2.0—are making the same mistake that people have made for years in education. Remember how the 8-millimeter film was going to revolutionize education? Then the VCR? Then the personal computer? The medium can certainly help, but an 8-millimeter film didn’t salvage a bad math lesson.

Case in point, the new advertising campaign for the Sony Walkman is claimed to be the first ‘monophonic ad’, created by deconstructing an original musical work into individual notes, then recruiting 128 musicians and giving them each just one note to play, thereby re-constructing the original melody, in spectacular waves of sound and movement.


Advertising that entertains, delivers the message and gets talked about - it can’t get any better than this.

Sir John Hegarty of BBH puts forth his point of view.

Nick Padmore has analyzed the 20th century’s 115 best slogans, straplines, taglines, and headlines, as nominated by some of the stars of creative advertising, and tried to find a pattern that spells out how to do this successfully.

1. Be five words in length.
2. Not mention the brand name.
3. Be declarative.
4. Be grammatically complete.
5. Be otherwise standard.
6. Contain alliteration, metaphor, or rhyme.

Of course, there are exceptions to these rules, but the analysis shows that the majority of the best slogans et al. do fit this pattern.

Here’s a provocative chart from the analysis:

In the same vein, here’s an interesting excerpt from MIT’s Adverblog:

Match these brands - Sony, Hummer, Mercedes, Haagen Dazs - with their slogans: “like nothing else”, “made like no other”, “like no other”, “unlike any other”.

Two seemingly unrelated articles from MIT’s Adverlab point to the future of advertising.

 ”Sony Corp. has been granted a patent for beaming sensory information directly into the brain.”
– Reuters

Wired writes on emerging mind control ad technology that lots of people are dismissing as bogus science (a recent conference on neuromarketing had to be canceled due to lack of interest): “Scientists are scanning brain activity in the hopes of catching sight of the physical mechanisms that determine whether you prefer Coke over Pepsi. The nascent research, known as “neuromarketing,” could one day lead to new advertising strategies that directly stimulate hard-wired mental reflexes rather than appealing to fuzzy consumer attitudes.” It’s interesting that CalTech is already in the game.

Is another “creative art form” going to become a mechanistic, computer-driven science?

Much of the past one year’s debate and discussion at various marketing fora, real and virtual, centres on “new media” or “digital media”, meaning the Internet and Mobile/Wireless media. This is my personal selection of some of the best uses to which it has been put:

1. BMW Films
Using the insight that 85% of their target consumers used the Internet before buying a BMW, a series of short films were created by some of the greatest action movie directors, aired only via the Internet (and widely distributed over e-mail). Read the entire story here.

2. Dove Evolution
A 75-second film released only on the Internet, it showcases the typical make-over of a model into the unreal yet so-familiar beauty that we see in cosmetics advertising. Over a million views on Youtube, deep penetration of the blogosphere, and tremendous impact for the brand. Read here for the full story, including a very detailed analysis of the campaign and its impact.

3. Toyota Scion in Second Life
The first brand to enter the virtual world of Second Life, with a virtual dealership featuring customizable versions of the cars. All the details are here.

Two articles at Cool News caught my attention recently, being about developments in advertising at opposite ends of the spectrum:

The first was about YouTube. Lee Gomes recently scraped it and discovered some interesting statistics:

• There are more than 6.1 million videos on YouTube now.
• The number is growing at about 20% per month.
• The most popular titles include the words ‘love’, ‘music’ and’girl’.
• Nearly 2000 videos have ‘Zidane‘ in the title.
• 70% of users are American.
• Nearly half are under 20 years of age.

The second was about advertising on the London Tube, which is a $3 billion, 8 year contract won by CBS, whose innovations include:

• A glue-less dust-free poster co-created with 3M.
• Cascading flat-panel TVs adjoining the escalators, which are capable of showing a series of rubber balls bouncing from one screen to another, following commuters as they ride down the escalator.
• Super-strong screens for the TVs which can withstand 5 blows from a sledgehammer.
• Lightboxes for the corridors leading to platforms.

All told, CBS has invested “about $136 million on new advertising equipment in the Tube, including 8,300 glueless poster sites, 150 projectors, about 2,000 video screens and 4,500 light boxes.” (From Reveries.com )

That’s a lot of money bet on the next 8 years. Clearly CBS expects the Tube to be generate a considerable return on this investment through advertising to the captive audience travelling to and from work. It’s a vision of the future that is quite different from the one over at YouTube. Which one do you think will come about?

More life beyond the 30 second TV spot:

Tray table ads on airlines

Mood-sensing advertisements

Ads in the toilet

Plenty of life beyond the 30 second TV spot!

Car windshield fliers

Coffee cups

Life-like ads on transparent doors

Shopping bags as outdoor advertising

Ultra-violet entry stamps on people’s arms at nightclubs (this one is for the Sony PSP)

Lord Leverhulme supposedly said, "I know half my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half."

A recent paper titled "The Future of Advertising is Now" by Christopher Vollmer et al attempts to solve his lordship's dilemma, at least for the automobile industry. Clearly, Lord Leverhulme's assessment remains remarkably accurate, as this chart from the paper shows.

What's even more interesting is the huge impact that the Internet plays in consumer's purchase decisions. It seems that marketeers at the car companies don't understand this just yet.

We decided to buy a video camera a month ago. When we bought a digital camera a couple of years back, we went to a store, looked at all the options, talked to a friend who is a bit of an expert on photography and another friend who is an expert on gadgets, decided which features were most important to us, went back to the store, shortlisted two models, went to a few more stores, compared prices, chose the store with the lowest prices and then finally decided which camera to buy.

This time it was quite different. We did talk to our friends, but most of our research was on the Internet. We found a couple of sites with expert reviews on video cameras as well as actual user post-purchase feedback and decided which brand and model to buy based entirely on this research. We determined the lowest price by looking it up on eBay. We didn't even go to a store - the video camera was delivered to our home by the dealer.

The key factor in both purchases was the experience of actual users. The Internet enabled us to find people who had used the latest models. Therefore we were able to make a very well-informed choice. The role of advertising? A priori, none! Even in-store advertising didn't count in the second case. In reality, the brands we considered - JVC, Sony, Panasonic, Nikon, Canon - have been advertising their technical expertise and quality for years. The advertising ensured that we considered their offerings. But that's it.

You can now find user opinions on everything from beach sandals to golf clubs on the Internet. Even mundane everyday products like soap are written about online by passionate users.

What are the implications for marketeers? I can think of a few:
1. Old-school mass communication will have less and less of an impact on purchase decisions. (Nothing new there, but it's still true.)
2. People are looking for the most credible source of information. The higher the involvement, the greater the investment in research. Figuring out how to engage with this research, to be aware of what actual users and influencers are saying about your brand or product is going to be critical, not in the future, but right now.

3. The Internet is a technical library where people can figure out how things really work, how much they really cost, how good they really are and where to get the lowest price. It is a democratic community where everyone can have their say and probably will. It is an entertainment & leisure medium where highly focused targeting is possible. It is a boundaryless, global network where national boundaries don't count.

Let me know if you can think of any more implications. Also, which firms really get this already? Do share any good examples that you can think of.

We went to see X-Men III today (decent time-pass, but very ordinary compared to the excellent X-II) at a nearby multiplex cinema. During the intermission, an attendant came up to us in our seats and asked if we would like to order snacks or drinks. We declined as we weren’t feeling hungry. After a couple of minutes, the projector stopped showing commercials and shifted to an advertisement for the snack bar, with lots of mouthwatering photographs and a voice-over exhorting the audience to try each of the snacks. This went on for nearly ten minutes. It must have affected us because we now felt like eating something! So we called the attendant and bought some snacks.

Peter Drucker famously said that “the purpose of a business is to create a customer.” And that’s exactly what the advertising for the snack bar did to us. It turned us from uninterested non-customers who didn’t even feel a “need” for their product into customers who wanted and demanded it by simply stimulating our appetites visually, repeating a call to action verbally and eliminating the need for any effort on our part (other than taking twenty bucks out of my wallet).

This made me think about the frequent questionnaire-based polls that marketeers use to figure out what people need and how many people need it. If the snack bar had polled us before showing that advertisement, we would undoubtedly have said that we were not at all interested in buying their offering. Any decision based on such a poll would have left money on the table. The question to ask is: what would make people buy the offering? Another useful question is: why aren’t people buying it? In the case of the snack bar, the second question might lead to the insight that many people don’t like queuing up in a long line for their popcorn which may have led to the idea of in-seat service. The first question may well have led to the advertisement that turned us into paying customers of that snack bar.