On Being Positive

First of all, thank you so much to Geoff Grimble from DDB for taking the time to present your take on marketing for my Marketing Communications class on Wednesday. The presentation was fun, engaging, and informative! Also, thanks for reminding my friend and I to attend the Advertising Club of Edmonton's student event yesterday- it was a good time and I met a lot of professionals with plenty of great industry advice.

Geoff's rules for being a great marketer:

1. Be positive
2. Be generous
3. Be social
4. Be unique

All of these seem fairly straightforward right? Not so fast! Being positive in public interest marketing is actually really hard. If you're focusing on getting people to wear seat belts, for instance, you'll likely come out with the same sorts of things that people always come up with, like this graphic ad:

OR you could think outside the box and go for something positive, like the Embrace Life Campaign

Both are good ads, but which one of them are you more likely to shut off halfway through, or avoid watching?

How about an ad making people think about how they should use public transit in order to help the environment? Sure, you could tell them about all the damage and pollution that is going on in the world, but big overarching problems tend to make people feel overwhelmed and think "how can I make a difference anyway?".

So then we have the Bussen er Cool ad:

If that didn't make you smile, you don't have a single funny bone in your body.

Isn't it nice to watch a public interest ad that actually makes you smile???

Then there's anti-smoking campaigns. Actually, believe it or not you could make them positive! They don't all have to look like this:

Or, take a look at this campaign by the Hearth and Stroke Foundation of BC & Yukon:

At Quittersunite.com, people are encouraged to post videos about their "Smoke Free Lifestyle", outlining how they live their lives with $300 extra per month. It's positive, and focuses on the saved money and enhance lifestyle that quitting can offer people.

Try being positive!

On Gangnam Style

Heyyyy sexy lady! Op-op-op-op Oppa Gangnam Style!

If you haven't seen this hilarious, mega popular South Korean pop video, featuring invisible horses and dancing in buses yet, here's my gift for you:

Although, if you haven't seen it, where have you been?? It has over 220 million hits as we speak.

It's even on the radio here now, which has to be a first (non English music on the mainstream radio in NORTH AMERICA?!).

I'm really happy that it made it mainstream, because Nicki Minaj is starting to make my ears bleed. 

And why are we so insular with our media anyway? Why are foreign movies only shown in tiny hipster theaters? Or maybe it's just our universal hate for subtitles when dubbed versions aren't available. My parents recently tried to watch Girl with the Dragon Tattoo with their friends, only to find they'd accidentally rented the Swedish version. It wasn't worth it to read the subtitles- "so much work!!", so they played cards instead. (But Mom, this one's worth the reading...)

Not only is this a great leap for foreign media, but it's an indicator of how far we've come bringing viral into the "traditional" world. Psy (the artist from above), was even on Saturday Night Live this week :)

He danced out from behind a wall in a Lids store (for some reason). I'd show the video here too, but all the ones I seem to find "can't be shown in my region". Bah

Happy Father´s Day! Here are some Dad Ads!

Happy Father´s Day! In honour of this, I might just get down to business and write about marketing (the point of this whole blog after all). Here is my favourite marketing campaign based around fathers.

more at canadianclubwhiskey.com

You knew this one was coming didn´t you? While this Canadian Club whiskey ad is 3 years old now, it´s the very best example I know of capitalizing on the age and tradition of a brand in a new and fresh way. Even more luckily, it was timed perfectly with the start of Mad Men and a rise in interest in that time period.

Canadian Club realised they were looking old and stodgy, that young men weren´t interested in whiskey and whiskey martinis like they were in the 60´s and 70´s. The years of James Bond stylishly drinking martinis in rock glasses, while making eyes at busty ladies, is past. And while I´d say CC wasn´t able to make martinis a whole lot less of a menacing word for guys, they did make their brand seem pretty damn cool. Instead of pulling the usual "we're not your dad´s insert oldies product here", they decided to capitalise on the dad you never knew, the cool dad, the player dad. They also played up the manly men stereotype of the 60´s- martini a girl´s drink? No way!

Plus, these ads are a lot of fun to play with. People started making their own (not all of them very flattering, but many very funny). Needless to say, the ads spread all over the place.

and many more of various levels of inappropriateness here

Edit:

Thought I´d just add this campy version of the exact opposite campaign by oldsmobile. This is from the late 80´s - "not your father´s oldsmobile". Except apparently it was, with all the same old problems. So this is an example of not just turning your back on your valuable tradition, but pretending to be something you´re not. Bad, bad marketers!

The Internet is for...Rage?

How good does it feel to find something on the internet that you can rage about? That reinforces your previous preconceptions and prejudices of the world, of a group of people, of a company, of one person specifically? But how likely is it that this is just a hoax or an exaggeration meant to rattle up some righteous anger?

It's very very easy to be deceived by the internet (okay, not such a news bulletin), and it's interesting how much more likely people are to believe something they've seen or read on the internet from an unknown source than something they've been told in an advertisement. I think this is because people understand the motives behind advertising and are suspicious how they are being played for revenue, and because a lot of advertising in the past has been dishonest. But at the same time, companies are accountable for what they present to the public, anonymous internet users are not.

But take this interesting hoax that just broke over the weekend (yes I'm late)

This picture started circling around the internet and twitter.

This turned out to be an obvious hoax, having originated about a year ago from the 4chan forum site. The whole hoax never became as big as it could have, thanks to quick response from McDonald's. It convinced a ridiculous number of people though (and I will admit myself as well), simply because it's so fantastically wrong, so unexpectedly unfair, and against a strong company whose reaction would be very intriguing.