Analyzing Ads in the Wild

Advertising is everywhere. This is a fact of life we have come to realize and deal with. You can't even watch your favorite shows and movies these days without some form of product placement. But all we do is view them, accept them, and then decide if we care about their product or service or not. So step into my jeep. We shall hold a safari adventure right here in the city as we analyze ads in the wild.

Lounging in the pages of magazines and newspapers is the common print ad. In my household, we don't actually have any newspaper or magazine subscriptions, so it was rough trying to find something that wasn't your run of the mill junk mail coupon clippings. This ad is about Box Tops for education. It is simple in it's design, showing the logo at the top against a vibrant blue backdrop. In the middle are a wide range of brand name products as the centerpiece. Between the logo and this spread of food and snacks are a few tag lines. "the difference 1 can make," with the 1 enclosed in what I assume to be the symbol and point value of some sort that you'd find on the box tops. Below that is "Savings for the whole month of September!" in a black board type font, complete with a dashed line below it. Underneath it all, at the bottom of the ad is some fine print about where you can find box tops, and the General Mills logo. It's a simple ad; not a whole lot going on, but it doesn't need to be. Box Tops for Education is about helping schools get money. It's an innocent cause, and with how comforting the ad is, it gets the point across. The chalk board font feels like you're in a proper classroom, and the spread of General Mills products in the middle show you how common their products are and that you don't need to go out of your way to help a good cause.

Next on our ad safari is the wild television ad. With how much television people watch these days, these are aggressive ads that try to make you pay attention even if you don't care about the ads in between segments of your favorite show. It's a hard world to compete in, so these ads have to try harder. Let's look at a KitKat commercial. It's Halloween and we see some kids in costumes running up to a house to ring the doorbell. Inside we also see a woman preparing her candy bowl. She opens a bag of KitKats and pours it into a bowl. The kids ring the doorbell and yell "Trick or treat!" The woman smiles as she answers the door with a witch hat and we get a close up of KitKats dropped into the kids' waiting candy buckets. Once the door is closed, the kids run off and stop back on the sidewalk and open their new candy bars. Cut back to the woman in the house and she's opening a KitKat of her own. Everyone eats their KitKats and the kids make "Mm!" noises of sweet candy satisfaction. Throughout this commercial, the only things we hear are the kids and the sound effects. KitKats getting dropped into buckets and bowls, the doorbell ringing, wrappers getting torn, and the KitKats breaking. It is all done to the classic KitKat jingle. "Gimme a break, gimme a break! Break me off a piece of that Kit-Kat bar!" The commercial doesn't need the music or the lyrics. They know that people have heard it enough to know the tune just by properly timed sounds. Otherwise the commercial is completely feel good and happy. It's an innocent childhood tradition and we see everyone taking part with a smile as KitKats are enjoyed by both the young and the old. You don't need to be a kid to enjoy a KitKat.

Finally we come to the elusive public ad. These can be found on the sides of bus shelters, billboards, and even on the ceiling of the bus itself. I myself frequent the bus so I see plenty of ads like this on my daily commute. I saw a simple one recently. It had a hazy gray background and a young, sad looking child on it. Beside his head were the words "He can feel your cozy wood fire. In his lungs." It was an add for spare the air day. Something about this ad always strikes me as terrifying. The implications here are rather clear. It's trying to imply that with all the emissions we put into the air--car exhaust, smoking chimneys, etc.--it's like we're making choking people as though everyone's got their head down a chimney. And of course our hearts always go out to sad looking children. "This poor kid can't breathe because of our pollutant ways!" There is a certain amount of shock value in play here, implying that our forms of comfort are hurting small children.

And so ends our safari analysis of ads in the wild. Please watch your step as you leave the jeep and have a nice day. This has been another lesson in selling stuff.

The Agency Your Agency Could Market Like

If the world could agree on anything, it would likely agree that the Old Spice campaign, "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like," is one of the best marketing campaigns in recent history. The commercials are random and bizarre, but in a charming way. They make us look up and pay attention to figure out what's going on. The line delivery has a brisk pace that requires us to pay attention to keep up. No time to think about why Isaiah Mustafa is suddenly on a horse when he was stepping out of the shower mere seconds ago. Just let the random wash over you and hop on the crazy train. We have shirtless men who smell good.

But let's back up a bit. How does someone hear "men's body wash" and think "thirty seconds of non sequiturs?" Well let's ask Wieden+Kennedy, the geniuses behind the marketing campaign that took the internet by storm.

On their site, they mention that they are "an independent, creatively driven" group that focuses on forming bonds between the client and the consumer. Wieden+Kennedy also believe that it doesn't matter how you express an idea as long as it's good. Just looking at the Old Spice ads carries all this across, as they are certainly creative and succeeded in drawing the audiences attention to the point where everyone knows and loves them. Parodies of the campaign have been done in multiple forms of media, even showing up on Sesame Street of all places.

(And yet the target audience probably doesn't even know what Old Spice is.)

To have a truly good marketing campaign, you need to have ultimately succeeded in three areas: The market needs to remember your campaign, it needs to like your campaign, and it needs to remember your product. Old Spice is truly the crowning jewel of good marketing for its massive success in all three of these areas.

And with that, I leave you with the whistle. Yeah, you know the one. You're playing it in your head right now. I don't even need to post a sound clip here. I'm on a horse.

A Best of (and Worst of) in Advertising

(Billy Mays, rest his soul. Infomercials aren't the same without you.)

Nothing makes class fun like open group discussion, and nothing gets a group talking like our favorites in a topic. In this case, advertising. But I'm sure you already knew that.

When it came to the best, a theme in my group was good mascots. The ones we enjoy seeing onscreen because they're pleasant and likable. The Geico gecko, Jack from Jack-in-the-Box, Flo from Progressive. And of course Billy Mays, the king of informercials, made our list just for his memorable way of pitching his products. Humor was another one. We like to laugh and have fun. If a commercial can make us laugh, they're halfway there. And the more we like your commercial, the more likely we are to remember it.

Picking the worst ads was surprisingly difficult. We tend to want to forget the bad stuff, so a commercial has to go above and beyond in terrible to get remembered, something that's actually easier said than done. We did manage to pick out a few though; the "winners" being GoDaddy.com for commercials of mass confusion, and Dr. Pepper Ten for making a campaign sexist enough to piss off the internet. You know you've done something wrong when people are putting up youtube videos just to rant about your advertising campaign.

(You've just told half your market to piss off because this is a "man's drink." Nope, no way this will attract feminist backlash.)

So, to recap: We like mascots. We like funny. We like it even more when the two come together. We also like it when ad campaigns actually tell you what the product is. Though people tend to not like being told they can't use/eat/drink your whatever because they're girls like a five year old saying girls aren't supposed to play sports.