Thursday, January 13, 2005

:: adgruntie :: Well, alrighty then.

+ Clay pointed me to Dr. Gary's Jivedecoder, the world's first ad agency translator. Check it out.

+ A lack of creativity seems to be engulfing most advertising.
Does creativity sell? What an utterly ridiculous question. It blows my mind that there are still people who even ask it.
Of course creativity doesn't sell. Bland, boring advertising with strategically relevant messages...now that sells.
Consumers are just sitting at home, bored as hell, just waiting for your advertising to tell them something fascinating about your product. They love learning stuff about products. It's way more interesting than anything else that's on TV. Way more interesting than playstation or rented videos, more interesting than magazines and books, or anything else that could possibly be happening in their lives.
If research was done on this subject, I'm pretty sure that 95% of all respondents would express a craving for product information more than any other life experience.
So there's really no need to make advertising entertaining in any way; that would just detract from the incredible product benefits you have to communicate. And because people are basically cerebral, rational beings, the unique selling features of your product will sell it all by itself. There's no need to appeal to anyone on any emotive level. Consumers are just pliant, sponge-like vessels with nothing else to do but soak up your advertising message, and then react exactly as you'd want them to react - by rushing out and buying your brand. What role could creativity possibly play in selling a person anything?
Beautiful sarcasm! Although I would bet that there are some out there that might think this is really true. Which is extremely scary. There's more to the article. Read the rest, it's very good.

+ Debra Scheufler is suing Estee Lauder and several other companies, charging them with advertising false claims of their products' "anti-aging" properties.
Scheufler denies that she was overly gullible or vain.

"As a female, society encourages us to always look our best," she said. "Once we hit 21, the skin starts to show the effects of aging, and I wanted to do everything I could to look my best."

According to La Mer's advertising, the cream makes skin "softer, firmer [and] virtually creaseless. Aging lines and pores are noticeably less visible."

"I'm not a doctor or a chemist, and neither are most of the women purchasing these products," she added. "At what level are we supposed to research these things before we buy them?"

Scheufler said La Mer made her skin "rougher" and clogged her pores - a disappointing result for a cream costing over $100 per ounce.
Just more proof that Dove's campaign is on the right track. God forbid a woman looked slightly older or even had, *gasp*, a couple wrinkles! *wink*

+ Animal-rights group PETA's suit against a "state milk board for its "Happy Cows'' advertising campaign was put out to pasture Tuesday by a state appeals court, which said state agencies can't be sued for false advertising." Something in that is scary. I'm actually a fan of those ads-they are very well done. But, the fact that a state agency cannot be sued for false advertising is a bit strong of a position to take. Is it perhaps the same as political advertising which has no standards and can blatantly use false information without penality? Perhaps. But that is wrong as well. There's more reason for state and political advertisements to have a stronger set of standards and practices to live up to than the average product advertisement. I'm disappointed that the courts have gone along with that in this case.

SuperAdgrunts can view the ads at AdLand here:
Sheep, Rooster, Breaking Out and Spritz.

+ Tabasco returns to Super Bowl with a new ad this year. Their last SB ad was in 1998, titled "Mosquito", which they got a lot of milage out of. I saw it just the other day in fact. This new spot is titled "Tan Lines." "The only hint lies in the message on the altered diamond-shaped label on bottles of sunscreen the company sent out promoting the ad: "From sidelines to tan lines Tabasco has you covered like SPF 100 sunblock." The coconut-scented potion was shipped in the red-capped bottles that usually contain Tabasco sauce." The spot will air in the beginning of the 3rd quarter.

+ Google AdWords- the new grammar police.
Since when does anyone care about grammar and style on the Web? Would my little colloquialism really bring so much chaos to the searching experience of Googlers?

From Google's point of view, the answer is yes. Clarity is more important than tone.

Is Google an Internet incarnation of the grammar prescriptivist, insisting that language has rules and that communication without those rules leads to confusion and the decay of civility? Could advertising's dangling participles and the unrelenting trend of sentence fragments be at the root of our collective information overload? I consulted a leading prescriptivist, Robert Hartwell Fiske, the author of "The Dictionary of Disagreeable English: A Curmudgeon's Compendium of Excruciatingly Correct Grammar." This is a man who does not confuse lay and lie, a man who describes as boneless those who too readily expand their lexicon to include misusages. Yet Mr. Fiske shrugs at sloppy usage in advertising.

"Advertising is a creative profession, so I feel copywriters and the like should be allowed a certain license that others - in more staid jobs, let's say - are not permitted," he said. "If a misspelling or questionable grammar serves a purpose, I have no objection whatever to em instead of them, or, say, like instead of as. Your em, I gather, is meant to suggest a tone, a friendliness that them would not so easily convey."
Kinda amusing actually. I guess in some ways it does make sense but at the same time, if there is no ability to insert tone in google ads, how do you keep your branding (and corporate tone) throughout your advertisements? I suppose then it might require a bit more expertise from professional copywriters rather than someone just throwing something together. heh.

No comments :

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...