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A lot of good, horrifying stories begin with “I was drunk, so I got on the Internet…” and go downhill from there. Some people even shop online while sloshed:
“I have my account linked to my phone, so it’s really easy,” said Tiffany Whitten, of Dayton, Ohio, whose most recent tipsy purchase made on her smartphone — a phone cover — arrived from Amazon much to her surprise. “I was drunk and I bought it, and I forgot about it, and it showed up in the mail, and I was really excited.”
And online retailers have noticed:
At QVC, the television shopping channel, traffic and viewers rise around noon, then quiet down until after 7 p.m. Then items like cosmetics and accessories sell briskly. “Call them girl treats — they seem to attract a really strong following once you get past dinnertime,” said Doug Rose, senior vice president for multichannel programming and marketing for the company. “You can probably come to your own conclusion as to what’s motivating her.”
Still, the nighttime spike requires delicacy among retailers: for reasons of propriety, they do not want to be seen as encouraging drunken shopping, and many people who inadvertently buy products in that state would most likely return them at high rates. On the other hand, a happy customer can lead to higher sales.
“In a shopping context, alcohol would lift people’s moods and make them feel more relaxed,” said Nancy Puccinelli, an associate fellow at the Oxford’s Saïd Business School who studies consumer behavior. “If we see a product and we feel good, we will evaluate the product more positively.”
Link -via Marginal Revolution | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user somegeekintn
This young champion of justice is named Riley, and she’s sick and tired of all the toy marketing gimmicks that keep girls from buying the superhero toys that they really like.
Watch as she explains what all the pink at the toy stores really means, and I’m sure you’ll agree that she is totally right. Let girls enjoy their superhero toys already, or Riley’s going to grow up and take you all down!
–via ComicsAlliance
Each year, America spends about $250 billion on marketing and advertising — more than the entire GDP of Thailand. Too bad most of that money is a complete waste. For an increasingly savvy, TiVo-equipped public, our brains seem to shut down whenever something registers as “advertising.” Which means all those marketing creatives at the big ad firms have had no choice but to, well, get more creative.
Some advertisers have relied on product placement (think James Bond stopping mid-gunfight for a refreshing sip of Heineken). Others have attempted to make their ads so entertaining that people will watch them in spite of the sales pitch. And then there’s the more mischievous route — the grassroots, take-it-to-the-streets method — and that’s where guerrilla marketing comes in.
Dirt-cheap and chock full of trickery, guerrilla marketing is advertising with a wink. The successful campaigns usually corral attention through subversive means before revealing their true purpose, and they distinguish themselves by being so clever that even once the bait and switch is revealed, there’s no negative outcry.
In other words, even though consumers know they’ve been duped, the reaction amounts to nothing more than a bashful, “Oh Pepsi! We can’t stay mad at you!”
And it’s with that good-humored and awe-inspired mindset that we pay homage to the best “gotcha” moments in advertising.
1. The Blair Witch Project
Arguably the most important aspect of a successful guerrilla campaign is staying one step ahead of the public. As consumers become more attuned to ad agency efforts, marketers have to figure out how to attack the mob from unexpected angles. The brand standard for catching the public off guard? 1999′s The Blair Witch Project. With no stars, no script, and a budget of around $50,000, University of Central Florida Film School pals Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez successfully scrubbed out the line between reality and fiction.
The film’s tagline set the stage: “In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later, their footage was found.” Audiences were expected to believe what they were watching — shaky, low-quality videotape of three runny-nosed kids weeping in the woods — was an edited-down version of real recovered footage. And while it was certainly an inventive way to challenge the boundaries of cinematic storytelling (not to mention justifying the low-budget look of the film), Blair Witch didn’t exactly seem poised to rival Titanic. That is, until an inventive guerrilla marketing scheme was devised.
To ease the suspension of disbelief and stir up some buzz, Sánchez created a Web site devoted to the Blair Witch — a fictitious, woods-based specter who’d been snapping up Maryland kids for the last century. Although the legend was created out of whole cloth, it was soon snapped up by gullible Interneters everywhere, and a first-ballot hall of fame urban legend was born. Pretty soon, thousands of people were terrified of the Blair Witch. Even when the actors who played the “film students” started showing up (alive) doing interviews about the movie, many across the country refused to believe the Blair Witch wasn’t real.
From that point, the “I’ve got to see for myself” effect took over, and Blair Witch dominated at the box office. Considered the most effective horror hoax since Orson Welles’ The War Of The Worlds broadcast, the film grossed $250 million worldwide. Not a bad return for Artisan Entertainment, which paid only $1 million for the flick after its Sundance screening.
2. Acclaim Entertainment
Nowhere are the semi-criminal aspects of guerrilla marketing more important than in pitching to video gamers. Regular folks might occasionally enjoy being duped by an unusually clever campaign, but gamers seem to suck down daring and deception like a Big Gulp of Mountain Dew. The more the stunts flaunt the law, the more the gaming demographic seems to like them.
The undisputed high-score holder in this renegade arena is Acclaim Entertainment, a plucky little company that began as a one-room outfit in Oyster Bay, New York, and bloomed into a multinational juggernaut. Eschewing artistry in favor of an “all publicity is good publicity” philosophy, Acclaim stirs up the stuffy types — and then laughs all the way to the bank. One of its bedrock tactics is to offer people money for performing some insane stunt on behalf of its upcoming game. Prior to the release of “Turok: Evolution,” for instance, the company offered £500 to the first five U.K. citizens who’d legally change their names to Turok. (Almost 3,000 people tried to claim the prize.) Later, promoting the release of “Shadow Man 2,” Acclaim announced it would pay the relatives of the recently deceased to place promotional ads on the headstones of their dearly departed. The company said the promotional fee might “particularly interest poorer families.”
The latter campaign was, of course, shouted down. But Acclaim blew it off and said the whole thing was a joke — right after its name had been conveniently plastered all over the headlines. In fact, many of the company’s schemes are designed to die on the vine that way. Acclaim actually counts on law enforcement and city officials to shut down their antics — preferably as publicly as possible. In 2002, the company announced its plans to promote “Gladiator: Sword of Vengeance” using something called “bloodvertising.” Touting it as the bloodiest game of all time, Acclaim said it was developing bus shelter ads that would seep a red, blood-like substance onto city sidewalks throughout the course of seven days. Officials thought that might not be in the best taste, so the campaign was aborted, as the world looked on. Also in 2002, Acclaim offered to pay all speeding tickets incurred in the U.K. on the day its racing game “Burnout 2″ was released. Naturally, the bobbies balked, feeling that removing the consequences for speeding might encourage people to speed. Acclaim judiciously rescinded the offer, but, yet again, not before the name “Burnout 2″ was burned into the public consciousness.
3. Half.com
We’ve all heard a marketing campaign at some point and thought, “that is just stupid,” but most bad advertising strategies just result in a few less sales than a successful campaign would have brought in. Sometimes though, a company will run a campaign that’s so idiotic that the company ends up losing thousands, if not millions of dollars. Take, for example, the Silo marketing campaign that said customers could get a new stereo for only “299 bananas.” When customers started actually showing up with bundles of bananas, the store had no choice but to give them stereos in exchange for fruit.
The saddest part? Silo couldn’t even get rid of the bananas (they had thousands of them sitting there, presumably attracting fruit flies), as the local zoos stopped taking them and the food bank didn’t take perishables.
If you want to make an attention-grabbing ad, you have to do something really outrageous these days. That being said, these 10 ads on Oddee -all featuring kids- are utterly disturbing.
If you thought that diamonds are rare or that halitosis is a real disease, then congratulations, you’ve bought in to some of the most manipulative business practices of the last hundred years. Cracked has even more on these practices and the companies that instituted them and the article is simply fascinating.
Jonathan Stark is either a marketer or someone performing a strange social experiment. Either way, he has offered up his Starbucks card for free public use. Surprisingly, people have continued to add money to it, so the card has continued to be useable for a long time now. You can even check the balance on the card before you order up a drink by following the automatically updated Twitter feed.
Link Via The Consumerist
If you’re unfamiliar with the concept of an Alternate Reality Game, essentially, it’s a viral marketing campaign mixed with a scavenger hunt. Users have to unlock clues to be able to move on to the next step of the puzzle, which almost always involves deciphering even more hints. Over at Cracked, you can learn about the 5 craziest alternate reality games ever played…and discover what Halo has to do with bees.
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I’m sure you guys all are familiar with the Scope’s Monkey Trial, but did you know that the whole thing was actually just an overblown publicity stunt to help attract travelers to visit the town of Dayton, Tennessee? Learn more about the trial as well as other irresponsible publicity stunts in this great Cracked article.
You’ll find Ed’s Martian Book on Hudson Street in the West Village neighborhood in New York City. It has piles of books to sell, but they are all the same title: Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days With the Phoenix Mars Mission by Andrew Kessler. There’s no Ed, either. Kessler runs the store.
The book is Mr. Kessler’s account of NASA’s 2008 Phoenix Mars Lander mission, reported during 90 days inside mission control, in Tucson, alongside 130 leading scientists and engineers. Publishers Weekly calls the book a “slightly offbeat firsthand account of scientific determination and stubborn intellect” that “delivers a fascinating journey of discovery peppered with humor.”
The store is part marketing ploy, to be sure (Mr. Kessler is a creative director at an advertising agency), but also part meditation on the meaning of the book in an age of e-readers and a bankrupt Borders.
“This makes books feel like an art installation,” he said. “We should care about them.”
Mr. Kessler said he was inspired by restaurants like the Meatball Shop on the Lower East Side. “I was thinking about people that just sell one thing really well,” he said. Religions, he reasoned, ply a single book. Why can’t a bookstore? He calls himself the Monobookist.
The store will be open until mid-May, when the new (paying) tenant is scheduled to move in. Link -via the Presurfer
(Image credit: Guy Calaf for The New York Times)
It sounds like a simple pun to accompany a funny picture, but Vader’s Dark Side Roast Coffee is a real product. It’s just one of 17 Weird Examples of Star Wars Merchandise listed at Oddee (some of which are available in the NeatoShop). Some will make you laugh, and others might make your wish list! Link
There’s a cunning new marketing strategy in which some fashion firms are engaging. They find a celebrity that they think that people dislike and send their competitor’s products to that person. This is, allegedly, how Snooki from Jersey Shore ended up with an expensive Coach handbag. It was sent to her by Coach’s rivals:
Allegedly, the anxious folks at these various luxury houses are all aggressively gifting our gal Snookums with free bags. No surprise, right? But here’s the shocker: They are not sending her their own bags. They are sending her each other’s bags! Competitors’ bags!
Call it what you will — “preemptive product placement”? “unbranding”? — either way, it’s brilliant, and it makes total sense. As much as one might adore Miss Snickerdoodle, her ability to inspire dress-alikes among her fans is questionable. The bottom line? Nobody in fashion wants to co-brand with Snooki.
Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo by Flickr user university.unions used under Creative Commons license
Viral marketing has become so commonplace that it is now a household term even in the least media-savvy households. Even so, many marketing agencies have managed to fool the world into thinking that certain outrageous stories are genuine articles and not simply a clever ruse to bring nationwide attention to a product or event.
These viral marketing campaigns have managed to trick their way into the public eye and managed to fool us all into believing their ads were real.
One of the first and most famous viral marketing campaigns was the one involving the promotion of The Blair Witch Project. Those of you who remember when this film hit the theaters likely remember at least one person you knew thought this was a real documentary and that a group of student film makers was really killed while getting the footage. Some people were so terrified of this mediocre fear-fest that they actually lost sleep after seeing it.
It was so successful that the maker of the movie, Eduardo Sanchez claimed, “One of the guys from Artisan told me the other day, ‘Everything that could possibly go right on the film has gone right on this film, and you’re never going to experience that again in your career and I’m never going to experience it again in my career.’”
Sources CNN, Viral Blog
More recently, you probably remember the video featuring the hipster who was apparently stupid enough to get Buddy Holly sunglasses tattooed on his face. This one spread throughout the web before anyone started realizing that maybe, just maybe, he was actually working with RayBan. Humorously, even after everyone discovered he was working with the company, no one has yet proven if the tattoo is real or not.
This wasn’t the first time RayBan managed to fool the masses though, remember the two guys who managed to keep catching RayBans on their faces?
Source: Mashable
Levis had a similar success story as RayBan when blogs across the net picked up on this clever video showing a guy jumping into his pants. The commercial isn’t branded, but people started being tipped off when they heard the comment on the tape that mentions “at least there’s no zipper” and then noticed the video was put on YouTube by “unbuttonedfilms.” Levis is the only jeans company that markets their button-up flies, which really helped limit down the choices when it came time to figure out who made the promotion.
A while later the company tried to pull a similar stunt with their helium-inflated pants video, but no one really picked it up because it was a) obviously impossible (there’s no where near enough helium in his pants to lift him off the ground) and b) an obvious advertisement. Instead the company decided to just use the ad as a television commercial.
Sources: Trend Hunter, Gawker, Adrants
What happens when you combine illegal activities, extreme sports and poor video quality? You get a surefire viral video hit that’s sure to spawn some idiotic imitations. That’s how Quicksilver landed a major success with this questionable video showing someone surfing in an English river thanks to a hefty load of dynamite.
Source: Daily Mail
This video was obviously branded for Guitar Hero, but it originally seemed to be a fan project. It also made its rounds on the blogosphere before someone discovered it was created by an advertising agency and not “Kevin in Indiana” like the YouTube profile page indicated.
Source: Multi-Player Blog
Do you remember when everyone thought for a split second that cell phones popping popcorn with radiation could be the new Mentos and Coke? That is until people actually tried it and realized it was a complete hoax.
Then the news quickly arose that the video was actually created by a Bluetooth headset company called Cardo. Lets just hope people were smart enough to test this bunk science before running out and buying a headset.
Sources: Boing Boing Gadgets
Now it’s your turn readers. There’s been thousands of these promotions in the last ten years, most of which were unsuccessful. But I’m sure many of you have fallen for these tricks at least once? What was the most convincing viral ad you’ve seen?
The New York Times has a set of infographics showing the popularity of certain movies distributed in the zip codes of several cities, based on their incidence of Netflix rental. Netflix provided this data on the fifty most popular movies of 2009. Hover over each map to see what movies were the most popular in neighborhoods of a city. The infographic above shows the distribution of Yes Man rentals in Atlanta, Georgia.
Link via Fast Company
This past week we purchased the bottle on the right above – French’s “Classic” Worcestershire sauce, in the 15 oz. size – to replace the old one on the left with the “New and Improved!” label.
The label of the new bottle indicates that it has 50% MORE* (with the asterisk). I can’t reproduce the letter size here, but it’s approximately a 48 point font.
On the right below that in bold italics is Excellent Value! in a ~14-point font.
And beneath that the clarification *Compared to 10 FL. OZ. products. in ~12-point italics.
One can’t argue with the mathematics. The question is whether this is deceptive advertising. Does this labelling cynically take advantage of inattentive shoppers, or is it a truthful, clever marketing ploy?
The market research firm Mindset Media studied the cultural and economic behaviors of beer drinkers and discerned certain trends among buyers of particular beers. Among the brands studied are Budweiser, Bud Light, Corona, Heineken, and Blue Moon. Beth Snyder Bulik wrote about the study in Ad Age. Here’s what she wrote about Budweiser drinkers:
True to form, Bud drinkers are sensible, grounded and practical. They are the polar opposite of daydreamers and don’t easily get carried away. These beer drinkers also don’t like authority—can anyone say union?—and are emotionally steady people who live in the here and now. However, what may be a bit surprising is that people who prefer Bud can also be very spontaneous and tend not to do much advance planning.
Budweiser drinkers are 42% more likely to drive a truck than the average person, 68% more likely to choose a credit card with flexible payment terms and 42% more likely to use breath-freshening strips every day.
Link via The Presurfer | Photo: U.S. General Services Administration
Ah, misogyny, one of the final frontiers of terrible, terrible inequalities in our society. It’s amazing that only in the 60′s sexism was so prevailent in advertising. Sometimes you see ads these days and think how prejudiced they are, but seeing these makes me think “thank god for the advancements in our society.” Maybe in another 40 years sexism really will be totally gone from the marketing industry, but I doubt it.
