Here’s another one of those Tab Cola commercials from the 70’s early 80’s (previously). Same premise—
Genius!
Hit play or watch Tab Cola at YouTube.
“Great taste for beautiful people.” Check out this crazy Tab Cola ad from 1982. These were simpler times.
Hit play or watch TaB cola ad 1982 at YouTube.
In his radio show, O’Reilly and the Age of Persuasion, Terry O’Reilly explores the countless ways marketers permeate your life—from art, media, and language, to politics, religion, and fashion—and he does it in a way that makes you crave episode after episode. You’ll never think about advertising the same way again.
I highly recommend you subscribe to the unofficial O’Reilly and the Age of Persuasion podcast.
Something to brighten your day.
It’s a shame the program planners don’t put more science based shows on the Discovery Channel (TLC). I mean, the house renovation/tattoo parlour/chop shop shows might get high ratings, but they don’t come close to making me sing.
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I’m doing some experimenting with advertising on the RSS feed. I have noticed a steady decline in ad revenue over the past year and I’m hoping this will help things out, though I’ve heard it’s generally new visitors that click links, not your regular audience.
Google Reader is my RSS parser of choice, but take a look at this Lifehacker article that gives an overview of many popular RSS reader choices.
For those of you that haven’t subscribed, why not do so right now?
Update: I took the code down until I have time to go through it properly… it was kind of messing up the regular pages.
I usually don’t like to send on viral marketing links, it feels like I’m doing someone else’s job for them, but I liked the creativity used in this online store (not sure what language it’s written in). I think they actually sell everything you see. Here’s the link, and just to warn you, there is a bit of audio.
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Hungry? Eat Popcorn
The interesting thing about the claim of a subliminal influence contained within popular music when played backwards is that the messages are very difficult (if not impossible) to discern unless you’ve been primed to hear them on a conscious level.
I’ve been receiving emails wanting to know how this apparent lack of influence ties in with research that demonstrates subliminal messages can coerce unwary buyers into making purchases they would not otherwise have considered?
A short story is in order, (stop me if you’ve heard this one) Fort Lee, N.J., 1957. Unsuspecting film goers are enjoying “Picnic”, with William Holden and Kim Novak. In the projection room, an important marketing experiment is being staged. Researcher James Vicary has installed a tachistoscope, a machine that can inject subliminal images of tiny fractions of a second—far below that of a person’s conscious threshold. Every five seconds and for a duration of just 1/3000th of a second, Vicary alternated two messages. One read, “Drink Coca-cola” and the other, “Hungry? Eat Popcorn”.
Vicary’s results were spectacular! Coca-cola sales jumped 18.1%; popcorn sales 57.8%. Vicary dubbed this “subliminal advertising”, the practise of manipulating consumers to make purchases they might not normally make.
And if you believe that, I’ve got a pet rock I’d like to sell you.
The great popcorn experiment was a fraud.
Advertisers and regulators doubted Vicary’s story from the beginning, so another researcher, Dr. Henry Link, duplicated Vicary’s experiment and found no evidence that people reacted to the messages. In a 1962 interview, Mr. Vicary admitted the data was all fabricated to gain attention for his business. Some critics have since expressed doubt that he ever conducted the experiments at all.
However, the legend lives on. To this day a great many people still believe Vicary’s claims and will apparently never be convinced otherwise.
As numerous studies over the last few decades have demonstrated, subliminal advertising doesn’t work; in fact, it never worked, and the whole premise was based on a lie from the very beginning.
It is possible to prime the unconscious.
According to a recent experiment, psychologists at Yale were able to alter people’s judgments by simply priming them with either hot or cold coffee.
The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee—and asked for a hand with the cup.
That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.
As improbable as it may seem, findings like this one have continued to pour forth in psychological research in recent years.
New studies have found that people tidy up more thoroughly when there’s a faint tang of cleaning liquid in the air; they become more competitive if there’s a briefcase in sight, or more cooperative if they glimpse words like “dependable” and “support”—all without being aware of the change, or what prompted it.
The article goes on to remind readers that, “studies of products promising subliminal improvement, for things like memory and self-esteem, found no effect”.
If you’re interested in this sort of thing, I recommend reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink—here’s a very short audio snippet from chapter 2 (650k mp3).
Today I stumbled on a video that shares an inside look into 24 The Game’s “integrated marketing campaign”, a kind of viral/interactive mystery created to help generate buzz on the new Sony Playstation game.
I’m not a fan of the show, in fact I haven’t ever watched a full episode, but I found the intricacies of the marketing campaign fascinating. I have to admit, if I had received one of their emails, I would have been intrigued.
Last week I received an email touting the great benefits of a new kind of web advertising for eBay auctions, called “Auction Ads”. The email stated that just for signing up I’d get a bonus of $5 put into my account within two business days. Well four days passed with nothing, so I emailed them. They responded by saying it takes a week for the money to show up on my account. It has now been about a week and two days. I’ve given them over 24,000 ad views and they’ve given me nothing.
My advice… don’t waste your time with auction ads.
Here is an interesting use of camera tracking, 3d animation, and possibly some motion capture: Snickers Stop and Go ad. It scores points for being new and different, but as Matt Haughey observes, “the message is: nothing makes me hungrier for a Snickers bar than beating the piss out of someone within an inch of their life.”
Snickers: Stop and Go, uploaded by Razorbuzz.
Hit play or watch at Daily Motion.
With a wide spread of PVR adoption comes a new form of “subliminal advertising”. Ads that last only 1 frame (that’s 1/24th of a second) probably aren’t able to influence viewers even subliminally, however, the following McDonald’s ad works because it is noticeable enough that someone watching on TV might pause, rewind, see the ad and then talk about it or better yet, post it on YouTube and create an instant viral ad.
Click play or watch at YouTube.
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I love this teaser for Seinfeld’s new CG animation Bee Movie. It based on the premise that the movie was originally live-action and we’re seeing how the shooting was going.
See the ifilm clip, the official site, or USA Today’s article about the ad.
I like the combination of new media skills that were used to create this interesting Toyota commercial.
Back in New York City for post production, the most interesting challenge was to design the type. We ended up designing just one custom-made alphabet for all the cars, but made all sorts of letter-like shapes for everything else. We made fun letters looking like buildings, trees, clouds, leaves and birds. We made letters carved into a cliff, and a flock of sheep forming a sentence. None of it could have been achieved with off-the-shelf fonts.
After watching the video, take a second to go back and pan through the video to see all the creative font placements. Also check out the this second ad in the series.
The creators of Futurama have whipped together a little teaser promotional animation for Al Gore’s new documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth”.
Futurama, by the way, is coming back for an additional 13 episodes.