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to November
October 31, 2003
Ahh, trends. Gotta love ‘em. And, in advertising, it pays to stay on top of them.
Here’s a wonderfully appropriate aroma trend, as reported in the Washington (D.C.) Post:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Will pumpkin scent be next season’s lemon? Will the aroma of pumpkin migrate from
candles and breads to dishwashing detergent and air fresheners? Maybe - the rising
popularity of pumpkin scent is linked to an increase in consumer desire for nostalgia and
a return to safer, cozier times. Watch for those attitudes to be reflected soon in ads
targeting you. Happy Halloween!
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October 29, 2003
What makes an advertising jingle so catchy? BBC News has a story about research
that says earworms - those maddening tunes that you can’t get out of your head -
create a “brain itch,” analagous to actual histamines, that can only be
“scratched” by continued repetition of the tune:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Repetition and simplicity are two common elements in earworms and successful
advertising jingles alike. However, and perhaps thankfully, it is difficult to
deliberately create earworms, because of the individual and idiosyncratic nature of the
phenomenon. Of the Top 10 earworms in the U.S., the #1 item is “other.”
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October 28, 2003
A new study of 13-24-year-olds indicates that humor aids recall in advertising.
Here’s a press release, published in (appropriately enough) Transworld
Snowboarding:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
While young people are savvy - and in many cases downright cynical - about advertising,
they are also more likely to view ads as entertainment. As such, “creativity,”
“real to my lifestyle,” and “irony” have the most appeal. One note on
the “real to my lifestyle” facet: people of all ages are turned off by ads that
smack of insincerity - there’s nothing new there. What is new, though, is
the speed and depth of the backlash that develops against a brand or advertiser who, in
the eyes of the young, “doesn’t get it.”
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October 27, 2003
No link, just a comment relating to the wildfires raging throughout San Diego County. The
Cedar Fire, which is the one that forced my family’s evacuation, is now the largest
fire in San Diego County history, with some 207,000 acres burned and hundreds of homes
destroyed. We’re fine, by the way, having returned home this evening.
How is this relevant to advertising? Well, most television stations pulled all
advertising. But, we all knew - I mean knew - that the worst was over when, after
many hours of continuous news coverage, the first tv commercial came on. Used car dealer
Cal Worthington was never so welcome.
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October 24, 2003
What I like about this article, from the Toronto (Canada) Star, is how the
contribution of advertising creative is put into perspective, as part of a chain of
innovative thinking, in a brief look at two Swedish companies, IKEA and Absolut:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Both IKEA and Absolut are marketing success stories, and creativity played a strong
role in defining what the companies stood for to consumers. But, they are also business
success stories, and that’s the part that many advertising creatives overlook.
Advertising is the most-visible expression of a company’s marketing strategy,
especially to people in the ad industry, but it’s not the only (or, in many cases,
even the most-important) component to building a successful brand.
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October 22, 2003
From the Associated Press via FOX News comes this blurb about Medicare spending $600,000
on an advertising ... blimp?:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Okay, I’m not going to take the easy copywriter-shooting-from-the-hip shots at
this concept. Instead, I’ll wheel up bigger guns and aim at the strategy. The
objective of the $30 million advertising campaign was to make Medicare benefits better
known to its 40 million participants. The blimp (which only features the 1-800 number) is
supported by newspaper ads and television commercials. Now, how does a blimp or a
television commercial communicate a relevant healthcare benefit to a real-life program
participant? The answer is, it doesn’t. With 75 cents per person to spend on
advertising, direct mail might have been a more targeted and cost-effective way to reach
program participants and educate them about their benefits. Why didn’t the
ad agency recommend this? I hope it wasn’t just the media commission or the coolness
factor. Or is that naïve of me?
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October 20, 2003
Ms. co-founder Gloria Steinem says women need to get mad about the expectations
advertising creates for themselves, in a keynote speech to a symposium examining how
advertising shapes the image of women, sponsored by the Advertising Educational Foundation
and held at Northwestern University in Illinois. Here’s the article, in the Daily
Northwestern:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
The counterargument, that advertising merely reflects societal beliefs, is irrelevant. What’s being discussed here is advertising’s effect on expectations, and managing expectations is unquestionably an effect of advertising. Not a primary effect, in most cases, but definitely an effect.
A second argument, that mass-media editorial content is as unbalanced a portrayal of
real people as advertising, is true but weak. Yes, news anchors appear as attractive as
anyone in the television commercials surrounding them; yes the people on the covers of
magazines (including Ms.) are typically Beautiful People or Powerful People or
both. However, advertising is aimed at real people. People watch news programs or buy
magazines because they’re interested in the content; people watch or read ads because
they’re interested in themselves. How people and products are portrayed help
create that connection. When the portrayal doesn’t ring true, the connection is
weakened. And this is where advertising creative, in many cases, misses what could be a
huge opportunity.
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October 17, 2003
Dated tomorrow (because it already is in Asia) comes this article from the Asia Times.
Apparently, massive ad agency Dentsu will start offering a third-party service in which
the effectiveness of advertising campaigns will be measured by asking consumers whether
advertising influenced their behavior:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Three comments. First, post-campaign research should be standard operating procedure,
and for one of the world’s largest ad agencies to announce a results-oriented tool as
a newsworthy breakthrough is proof of the insularity with which many ad agencies have
surrounded themselves of late. Second, the service sounds less like a specific ad campaign
effectiveness analysis and more like a media channel analysis, a vital tool but one that
ignores the power of creative to transcend the channel. Third, $182,000 to $273,000 to
interview 500 to 1,000 consumers? Wow.
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October 16, 2003
The First Amendment and its construed relationship with advertising (both political and
corporate) get the once-over in this article, from the Dodge City (KS) Daily Globe:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
The author raises an interesting point about just how radical our Founding Fathers
really were. The notion that an election, or a market, could be influenced through sheer
money would have been something to revolt against. Yet, commercial speech clearly existed
back in the late 1700s, in advertising handbills, clacks, and newspapers to name a few
media channels. In They Laughed When I Sat Down (Bonanza Books, NY, 1959), editor
and advertising historian Frank Rowsome, Jr. identifies the first known American magazine
advertisement as “a tiny notice, soliciting the return of a runaway slave, in
Benjamin Franklin’s General Magazine & Historical Chronicle for May 10,
1741.” The issue of commercial communication was one that Madison chose not to
address. And here we are today, with freedom and capitalism - and advertising -
inextricably tangled. Could that be because, at least partially, they are?
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October 14, 2003
A lot of great advertising concepts never make it past the creative team’s trash can,
and many of the ones that do don’t get exploited fully. This article, from
Canada’s National Post, reveals one ad man’s idea of transforming
recycled ad concepts into licensed gold:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
It’s an interesting idea, and many people have tried to franchise stock and
semi-stock ad concepts before. In fact, I was involved with one such effort more than ten
years ago. The problem, is that even if advertising concepts seem similar (and they
frequently do), advertising is essentially a hand-crafted solution built to meet a unique
set of needs. While entertainment-oriented concepts, such as mascots like the Pets.com
sock puppet, could have other applications, no one stops to think that maybe, just maybe,
that lack of focus was part of the reason the marketing and advertising failed in the
first place.
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October 13, 2003
A recent survey claims that television advertising does not influence car buyers.
Here’s the article, from Ad Age (QwikFIND ID AAP06S):
Advertising
copywriter blog link
The survey found that only 17% of respondants said television ads influenced their car-buying decisions. Compare that to 26% saying they were influenced by the Internet, 48% by a direct mail offer, and 71% by word-of-mouth.
Key criticisms: first, this was a survey (of a mere 700 consumers, no less), not
a traffic or sales study. How many people will admit that their buying behavior is
influenced by television advertising? Not as many as truth would have. Second, the
Internet and direct mail may provide prospective car buyers with the information (or
rationale) to make or support a buying decision, but the trigger for the search
is still likely to be a mass-media advertising message.
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October 8, 2003
This article, from the Wichita (KS) Eagle, discusses the challenges of boosting
tourism to Kansas in part through branding:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Smart comment: “If we’re going to be flat, then we're going to define what
flat means.” In other words, create strengths from the qualities people already know.
Which is exactly what most of the other slogans listed don’t do, like
“Simply Wonderful” (simply unbelievable) and “The Real Experience”
(the real bad ad slogan). That might be because, like most political bodies, the tourism
department is trying to satisfy too many constituent groups. Unfortunately, the primary
target for tourism messages lies outside their constituency.
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October 6, 2003
I’m an advertising copywriter who’s also a California resident, registered to
vote in the upcoming Special Election. That said, I thought this article from Editor
& Publisher was interesting in terms of the future of political advertising - and,
indeed, advocacy advertising in general:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Not a lot of news - the Internet is fast becoming the information dissemination vehicle
of choice. Six out of ten respondents said that negative advertising made them feel less
positive about the candidate running the ad than about the candidate targeted.
77% said they weren’t swayed by candidate appearances on entertainment-type media
vehicles such as talk shows. Finally, a meager 2.3% feel that political advertising
is a reliable source of objective, unbiased information. Now, my family has watched
perhaps three hours of television over the past few weeks, but we do read the newspaper
daily and get online on an hourly basis. We have been exposed to very few campaign
messages from any candidate. And, we’ve received only about a half-dozen mailers over
the past several weeks. If we were waiting for the ads to tell us how to vote,
heck, we’d never make up our minds.
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October 2, 2003
Ad slogans don’t work, according to this unreleased consumer survey from a brand
consultancy group. Here’s the article, from USA Today via the Arizona Business
Gazette:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Any copywriter worth his or her salt already knew that flaccid, vapid, emotionally
disconnected ad slogans with little to no marketplace equity don’t work, any
more than flaccid, vapid, emotionally disconnected ads that change with every year or CEO.
This is, however, apparently news to brand consultancy groups and ad agencies.
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October 1, 2003
The results of the latest client-agency survey are in. Here’s the article, from the
New York Times:
Advertising
copywriter blog link
Not a lot of good news here, for advertisers, ad agencies, or the advertising industry
in general. Clients are less convinced that their ad agencies have their needs at heart,
ad agencies feel more like vendors than marketing partners, and both sides agree that
there’s too many layers of executive-level second-guessing on both strategy and
creative. At a time when ad budgets are down and every marketing dollar counts, these
trends increase costs and reduce effectiveness.
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Backwards in time to September 2003
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An advertising copywriter’s bookshelf:
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How to write a brochure: advice from an advertising copywriter
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Long John Silver on writing ads
More career advice: what’s it like being
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Napoleon’s advice to entrepreneurs,
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Napoleon’s advice to entrepreneurs,
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Napoleon’s advice to entrepreneurs,
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The economy (and what to do about it)
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Marketing project
Advertising copywriting
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Phone and fax: (619) 465-6100
John Kuraoka, freelance advertising copywriter
6877 Barker Way
San Diego, California
92119-1301