Meet the most offensive ad of the weekend:
"Dad is Making Dinner"
Bravo to this ad. In one fell swoop, it successfully offends both men and women. According to the ad: dad's are lazy and have no clue what to do in the kitchen. And by process of elimination, mom's place is in the kitchen. Oh yeah, by the way mom, your stuff is shit, that's why we're not excited when you're cooking. Sorry, meant to tell you earlier.
InfoWeek had an excellent article on Second Life a few weeks ago. Some choice quotes:
Well, in theory...
Do you think we could have gotten more PR if we gave away $1million in Times Square?"Having trouble understanding what your customers really want in a pair of jeans? Let them design the jeans personally. Ditto a car. Or a new kitchen. Want to increase brand awareness? Open a storefront where shoppers can virtually browse your products, "engage" with them, and become more loyal. Hope to convert browsing into real dollars? Add a link that sends them to your Web site, where they can hand over their credit cards.
It sounds good. The problem is that none of this is happening. The virtual stores are empty."
Linden Lab's traffic counter--which awards points based on how residents divide their time within each 24-hour period--showed total traffic at Reebok's store, which opened in August 2006, at 741 in mid-January. The Sears store, which opened in early January in partnership with IBM, was at 964. Toyota's showroom opened in November and topped the corporate retail destinations at 1,955. By contrast, Second Life's Elements Lounge--one of the most popular sites--displayed 133,217 traffic points.
I give up control all the time, I let my agency think for me.
"Companies need to investigate before they jump in ... try to understand what the community values, and how to give it to them," says Garrett French, a partner with Bold Interactive, a community marketing incubator. The first thing businesses must do is give up control, he says."Littering is bad, mama didn't teach you that?
One of the most disconcerting aspects of wandering through the beautiful but vacant commercial spaces of Second Life is that none of the major companies has bothered to "staff" its virtual space.
The Battle of YouTube
Winter 2007
On a crisp Winter morning in 2007, the air carrying a metallic hint of silicon, the most significant battle in the War of Media began. On one side stood the stoic and stubborn Old Media. Armed with their front row of lawyers, mounted copyrights and broadcasting lobbies. On the other side stood the band of rebels, New Media, with their unorganized but passionate mob. They were armed with nothing more than sheer numbers and momentum. Their contingent of lawyers strong but ill-equipped.
As the sun rose higher, revealing to all the dark day ahead, the combatants charged. Viacom hit the enemy lines first, thrusting a lawsuit at YouTube for $1 billion. The assault reverberated throughout the New Media ranks and even those in the back felt it's sharp sting. Wave after wave of lawsuits on lawyers charged. Survivor accounts say it was a tidal wave too fast to run from and so large that hope itself was inadequate to cling to.
Yes, the battle was brutal and though New Media outnumbered Old, it looked like all would be lost. Until...
A band of consumers breached the horizon. These consumers were a pissed off bunch. They had found New Media to be good to them. Old Media were friends as well but at times, was downright rude to New Media. Consumers, like all of us, don't want to choose between friends. The sight of New Media bloody and near defeat while knowing that Old Media picked this fight was enough for the Consumers. They charged towards the offenders.
The Consumers' tactic, it should be noted, is a simple one. They cut off supply lines. In the first attack, they boycotted all the advertisers running lifelines to Viacom. Of course, the first Consumers were not very effective and the next few dozen hardly made a dent. But gradually, as more and more Consumers got in the mix, Old Media began to pay attention.
You see, Viacom is powerless without a fresh supply of resources from advertisers. Advertising fuels their army, fuels their lawyers and their thirst for power. Cut off the advertising and you suddenly get their attention.
It starts with one crazy fool that throws himself head first down the hill, armed with nothing more than stupidity. What Viacom is doing is pig-headed and so as Consumers, we should boycott their advertisers. Not every advertiser, that'd be too tough. But if we ignore enough of the big ones, they'll pay attention. If Pepsi advertises on Viacom, then buy Coke. If they both do, drink tap. If Target runs an ad on Viacom, shop at Walmart. If both, buy online.
New Media is the industry to back. It embodies the spirit of our country by democratizing choice and control. It distributes wealth to those that are brave enough to explore new lands (including those converts from Old Media such as NBC.com). Old Media needs to learn to adapt, not employ book burning tactics to suffocate change. We need to send them a message and we need to hit them where it hurts.
MTV and Comedy Central are the flagship properties of Viacom. Visit the sites, take note of their advertisers. Don't buy those products. Save YouTube.
Jeep hijacks your childhood memories to create the most cringeful online automotive campaign this year...
Return to Astoria
Loosely basing a concept on the Goonie's movie, they create an online advergame that is truly delightful to despise. It is so bad and poorly done that I'm sure it's already become a Friday night cult phenomenon. I would provide you pictures but I decided I didn't want to stain this blog with such malodorous content, lest it invade like a Seinfeldian valet.
In case you start to think I'm just full of criticism without any substance, here's why it's so awful and what you (if you're an auto advertiser) can learn from it:
via the NY Times
The most erudite top ten list in Gameropolis this year (created via committee of course) was the "canon" (that's a fancy bejeweled way to say "list") grandly known as: The Most Important Video Games of All Time. That's right, of All Freak'n Time!
Three in the list: Warcraft (not world, the OG RTS). Super Marios Bros 3. SimCity.
In this quite serious exercise to gain recognition of games as historical cultural artifacts, we resort to yet another top ten list. I'm going to stick my head in a microwave.
Sony grabbed a couple headlines a few days ago when they announced "Home", their PS3 virtual portal/world for console owners. I like Wire's coverage best.
Most interesting to me, of course, is the advertising potential of Home. From the Wired article:
But nothing is truly free, Home included. For one, the version of Home that Harrison showed was positively slathered with advertisements -- giant billboards that constantly looped video of new PlayStation games, a movie theater that showed trailers of upcoming Sony Pictures films. Even the television sets in the rooms were virtual Sony Bravias.From Kotaku's coverage:
It's also possible for companies or publishers to create their own spaces. For instance Electronic Arts could create a space that shows off their current and upcoming games in a virtual world that looks more like a mall than a store.What's interesting is that a lot of people have compared this to Second Life. Perhaps it's because of the free roaming avatar in virtual world (when did SL own this idea?). This is much more simple though and probably therefore, a lot more valuable to general consumers. The most relevant similarity, however, is the inevitable rush of marketers into this world.
Bollywood makes me giggle. You'll never ever ever guess the product and by the time you get there, does it really matter?
I wish I was at the agency when they pitched this.
"Right ok, so one more time, what happens after the flying old ladies?"
According to Engadget, via Slashdot, and probably via someone else...
The Commodore company, the same name that made PCs 20 years ago, is planning on competing with the likes of Alienware in the high-end gaming hardware industry. Now this is, of course, probably not the same people or "company" from way back when. People come and go, the brand survives. However, owners do drive the direction of their brand and this particular move perplexes me.
It's very similar to Acclaim. Acclaim Entertainment was the company behind Turok and all those games in the 90's. That company went bankrupt for multiple reasons. The brand, however, was alive if only in the minds of gamers. When Acclaim Games started, the company I was involved with, we leveraged that brand recognition. Sure, the last memory of Acclaim in most gamers' minds wasn't pretty, but the brand still have value in that it was built on better days. It worked for us because Acclaim is associated with games, good or bad and was relatively a fresh brand (only a moderate level of brushing off the mold was necessary).
What baffles me about the Commodore move is that the Commodore brand has quite a different background. Fresh it is not. It is connected to games (it was Atari's competitor) but again, those were different days from long ago. For those of us that even remember a Commodore, do we have any feelings whatsoever about that brand other than nostalgia? Therefore, can a nostalgic brand really compete in the same space as a cutting edge technology brand? I'm doubtful. It would be like Sony digging up the Walkman brand to sell high-end phones.
Brand recognition is valuable but don't forget the details of that recognition. If the generation that knows your brand is associating you with the wrong things, you have no value. If the current generation doesn't even know your brand, except in passing during some garage spring cleaning, you have no value. From there, you might as well just start from scratch and not carry the baggage of the brand.
Wishlist: The New Atari X9 with Blu-Ray. Classic controller optional.
The Internet's Worst Landing Page EVER belongs to Flyff (the name says it all)
Here's the ad in-situ on GameSpot:
I wasn't too impressed with the ad. If I didn't make a living in this industry, I probably would have ignored it. But it does its job.
"Flyff: Fly for fun"
"Free to play"
Can't really get a softer sell than that. If you're a pushover and were so inclined, what would you get when you clicked?
Well you'd run into this:
Meet the Flyff campaign landing page.
I recommend clicking the image I have here and taking a closer look. You'll see three major elements to the page. To the upper right is a half-nude child/woman with a gigantic cheese knife. Ok.
To the upper left resides the logo and instructions to get started. "Play for Free in Three Easy steps", it says. "Steps", apparently, is not a word important enough to capitalize. By the way, if you're interested, the steps actually take you off the landing page, wherein you lose the nice "three easy" part of the whole matter. Also, in an attempt to show you what the game is about, a video trailer is available to view. Sweet! ....But you have to leave the landing page. Oh yeah, don't bother with the trailer, it shows grainy demo footage that I'm sure someone at one point used to get more funding.
But wait a second, let's not rush into things. Who the hell are you and why should I go down three easy steps with you?..... Ahh there we go, the last part of the page: "What is Flyff?" I'm so glad you asked, anticipating I'd ask. How clever of you.
Blah blah, yadda yadda, it's a flying game? An MMORPG flying game? I'm so confused. Can you tell me more?
"Problem with Registration?"
No, not really. I'm not really ready to commit yet. I was trying to find out about your game. Besides, I'm still trying to figure out if "Launched the game and log-in to play!" is grammatically correct. And can you tell me why your girl/woman's sword has feathers wings on one side and dragon wings on the other?
Hey, for the sake of argument, let's assume I was ready to register, what are these "problem" you speak of?
"Your username must be all lowercase, and may only contain letters and numbers"
"Since you only have three hours from when you create the account to activate it, the account has most likely already been deleted."
"There is currently a bug where you cannot have anything except letters, numbers, and spaces in your address."
Oh, those problems eh? Those sound more like your problems than mine. First, you probably want a system that can read capitalized letters. I promise not to use "steps", I know how you don't look fondly upon it. Second, you really shouldn't try to limit me to three hours, I type real slow and it takes me a while to understand you. Third, that's a bug and you really should fix it.
Boy, you guys have problems. First, you're seriously making a bad name for Korean games. I guess this does explain why you guys haven't taken over the US market. But hey, I do applaud you guys for attempting a landing page. I guess someone told you it's a best practice in online advertising. Did they actually tell you how to make one? You see, the landing page is supposed to make someone WANT to play your game. Let me help you. Here's a few tips:
Vibration is coming to the PS3. For a mere $172.5 million dollars, Sony has settled with Immersion on the patent dispute regarding vibrating handheld devices. Bleh. Vibration is overrated. Every time the damn thing goes off, I think about my batteries.
From a business perspective though, this is a sad day for Sony. This payoff says one thing to me, "We don't care to innovate our controllers, we just want to keep up." Couldn't that money have been better spent on some R&D? Do we really need more vibes in our controllers? I really rather have seen some more motion sensing or a really revolutionary controller. Here's a free idea for you: make a controller than can adjust physically, like go from horizontal to gun shaped (transformer style). First one's free, the rest will cost you. I am, afterall, a consultant.
Anyways, it's depressing to me that they're paying so much just to go backwards.
via MarketingVox
Anatomy of EA's YouTube campaign for SSX Blur:
In the world of online advertising, there's an arsenal of tactics that you can use to hit your audience. There's search marketing, the sniper rifle of advertising, where you buy ads to show up when someone search keywords that you've picked. There's banner advertising, the selective target bombing of sites. And then there's the homepage takeover: the nuclear option, the equivalent of dropping a big ass bomb in a civic center and trying to take anyone with a heartbeat.
It's expensive and it's inefficient but damn does it get some attention! The homepage takeover can come in many forms, from a relatively innocuous box ad on the homepage to multiple ads and areas taken over for maximum exposure. I'm not a fan of this tactic because it's really wasteful and can be annoying to irrelevant audiences. Case in point: today's homepage takeover on Gamespot, brought to us by Battlestations Midway.
The game appears to be a WW2 sim that allows you to play on air, sea and undersea. At least, that's the only pertinent information I was able to get from the advertising. The major message from the ads can be summarized as this: "Check out all the great tits and ass artwork we can make".
I'm male and I'd be a damn liar if I didn't say I appreciate the female form. However, there's a time and place for this type of thing (late at night, candles lit, a bottle of CabSav and a dimly glowing laptop) and it is not in a homepage takeover for this game. It doesn't make sense in several levels.
First, from a gamer (male) point of view, it's insulting. Are we really so Neanderthal as to buy a game merely in the hopes of seeing pinups? Surely there are easier ways to get our flesh fix (where are my candles?). I'd like to think it'd take a bit more convincing for us to plop down money on this game. I'd like to think we look for things like... I don't know, gameplay?
Second, from a marketing point of view, this takeover will no doubt get a ton of response and some awareness for the title. However, a majority of that response is going to be the wrong kind. Will the game, like the fine stitching on a bra strap, really get any attention? Will they actually be able to push units? I really don't think so. No doubt the agency responsible for this takeover will tout the incredible response delivered by this campaign BUT... like most agencies, they'll never make the connection to actual sales.
I do have to credit them for knowing how to use a homepage takeover. If you're going to bombard everyone coming to a site, regardless of interest, you might as well find a common denominator. MMO guys, FPS guys and RTS guys will all take notice. In the narrow scope of the actual tactic, this will no doubt be wildly successful. But unfortunately, that's all.
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