A Better Course

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”. […]

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The tube station near where I work has had advertising screens installed. The best adverts for these are ones which depend on four screens (about as many as I can take in at once) showing different parts of an advert for the same product. One of those was on the screens today; it was for […]

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Two charity campaigns have been interesting in the last few months. The most recent is Oxfam’s “Rubbish Presents” campaign: Advertising their line of gifts in time for Christmas. It’s likeable because it’s obviously self-mocking; the celebrities in the advert look genuinely distressed, the language used (“Speak out against the horror of”) is an exaggeration of […]

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A Photo Editor shows the new adverts for Getty Images today. The comments on these ads are so far negative, but I think they’re wonderful. Getty seem to be referring directly to the fact that they’re seen a sinsiter brand and that this is a function of their being a huge corporation. There’s no question […]

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There’s been a lot written recently about the advertising model of Facebook and other online social networks. A lot of this is concerned with the lack of success banner adverts have on these sites, and whether all of the billion dollar valuations are predicated on banner adverts starting to work or the development of a […]

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Following yesterday’s post I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative; both the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the stories we tell our (potential) customers about our products. Some marketing or advertising seeks to fit their stories into existing narratives – innocent do well at marketing to those who already identify as “a healthy […]

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Another interesting post from Neuromarketing, this time about subliminal branding – how one’s positive feelings towards a brand increase after viewing the logo a number of times at a millisecond level. It’s interesting in terms of Free Rice, another site that’s been doing the rounds – there’s a really uncluttered interface, but once you’ve answered […]

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According to a recent Neuromarketing post, the worst way to respond to an allegation about your product is by referring to it in order to refute it; that repeating allegations only reinforces their existence in people’s minds – and in some cases, presumably, introduces the rumour as new information. By this reasoning, are the current […]

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If there is a single thing I thoroughly dislike about alcohol advertising, it is the ideas of authenticity and purity as criteria for choosing a bottle of spirits. They are, essentially, bogus criteria; your whiskey might have been made by a company that’s been around for 200 years, but it’s not been aged for 200 […]

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Sometimes, adverts succeed in saying the exact opposite of what they meant. One of Sky’s “Believe in Better” adverts – generally quite a good campaign – achieves this: It wants to be about Sky’s multicultural credentials – that it shows a lot of non-English-language programming. However, the advert is entirely in English, but some of […]

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