A Better Course

Julia Roberts

Originally uploaded by Alexandra Mitchell

Of all the adverts I’ve seen this year, I think this (late entry) surprised me the most. Not because of the concept - the hilarious coincidence that sometimes people who are not famous share names with people who are famous has been used before - or the clumsy copy. It [...]

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Nivea advert
Originally uploaded by Alexandra Mitchell

One of my most hated adverts of the moment is this one, for Nivea moisturiser. It is unreadably bland - what is actually going on? How does it relate to the tagline, “Look ready to face the day”?
There are some conclusions that we can draw about what’s going on here. [...]

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Bad copywriting is something I complain about quite a lot - sometimes it’s because it’s poorly proofread (and I start planning the Alex Mitchell School Of Copywriting), sometimes it’s trying too hard to be something it’s not, sometimes because one tiny phrase just annoys me. Today, I’ve seen two bits of copywriting I really liked.
The [...]

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Matterbox is one of the more fun marketing ideas I’ve seen recently:
Matter is a collection of a dozen or so enticing or intriguing physical things, each one from a different company, occasionally delivered to your house in a distinctive box on a Saturday morning.
I was going to describe it as one of the better ideas, [...]

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Seminar at work today by Nader Tavassoli on “mere exposure” versus “mere neglect” in advertising and brand liking.
We are used to blocking things out given the constant competition for attention. Does the act of ignoring something mean that we are biased against what is ignored - in other words, is the statement any exposure is [...]

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The best advertising campaign I’ve seen recently comes from match.com. Instead of focussing on the benefits of a happy relationship (which, despite their “find someone special in six months” guarantee, no-one can actually guarantee), it posits a single alternative to joining match.com - waiting for Cupid and Fate, which the campaign helpfully personifies.

The main conceit [...]

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I honestly don’t know how I would have reacted if I’d been part of Orangina’s marketing team and the agency had presented this concept:

It looks like it came from a brief that asked for a change (probably for the ’sexier’) to the previous staples of Orangina’s advertising (happy oranges, attractive people in rural France). The [...]

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It would be interesting to see how many people went to the Overstock website from a Facebook Beacon news item, versus how many people went there from an article or blog post complaining about Facebook Beacon.
Given the degree of closeness of most people on Facebook to most of the people on their friends list [...]

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Lovely IKEA adverts (via swissmiss)

I like the way IKEA are (or seem to be) responding to the perception of their furniture as entirely generic by placing the home as a site of creativity; as well as the above, the UK “Not For Sale” campaign puts their products in a similar space.

It’s an well-timed branding campaign, [...]

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Russell Davies writes about the personalised advertising promised by social networking that “the people who can be arsed to do a little bit of research [...] plunge into a kind of direct marketing uncanny valley where the more desperately they try to personalise their message the more I’m reminded that they’re not really my friend”.
The [...]

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