Category: Advertising

Humor

Sienna Minivan Video Taps Your Inner Rapper

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Few things say that you spend most of your time driving kids to soccer games and making cupcakes for bake sales than being seen behind the wheel of a minivan. It fairly shouts that you have a house in the suburbs with a square patch of lawn in front and a kid’s swing set in the backyard, and are more likely to spend weekends at a petting zoo than at a trendy art opening. Parenting is cool, but it isn’t COOL like Kanye West, hip-hop, rapper cool, if you know what I mean. This funny video ad tackles this stigma head-on by having a middle-class, middle-aged couple rap proudly about making jell-o molds, changing diapers and owning a Toyota Sienna Minivan, which they refer to as their “Swagger Wagon.” Created by Saatchi & Saatchi, the video has gone viral and spawned a whole series of new Swagger Wagon commercials.

Advertising

Right Pitch, Wrong Product

By Delphine Hirasuna |

These cigarettes ads would be funny if they weren’t so unsettling. It goes to show the power of persuasive advertising. What’s interesting is that the advertising geniuses of yesteryear knew every emotional “button” to push to get consumers to buy their product – advice of medical experts, cute babies, celebrity endorsements, stress relief promises, sex appeal, rugged men, debonair men, sophisticated ladies, fun-loving physically fit youth, even Santa Claus. All the themes of universal desire were wrapped into the brand pitch. Arguably, no other product has been advertised as effectively as cigarettes. That’s all very admirable until you remember that the product itself is one of the leading causes of cancer even today.

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Advertising

Education First’s Live the Language

By Delphine Hirasuna |

EF International Language Centers, a Swedish-based company that offers study abroad programs and language courses in some 50 countries, has just launched a new series of short video ads that have no voiceover sales pitch, no mention of what the school does or how to enroll, and no mention of Education First at all except for flashing EF briefly on the screen with a website address at the end. Elegant typography displays choice words in the language of the featured country with the phonetic pronunciation spelled out underneath, but there is no translation of what the words mean nor what they sound like when spoken aloud. And yet, it all works. The commercials aren’t about the process of learning a language, but the life-enhancing benefits of studying abroad. The message conveys the atmosphere of the culture, the experience of being there, the promise of friendships, and the carefree joy of discovery. Directed by Gustav Johansson and produced by Camp David Film, the EF “Live the Language” videos say a lot without uttering a word.

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Humor

“Adios L.A.” – an L.A. Romance Gone Bad

By Delphine Hirasuna |

When L.A. artist Jon Jackson got a job offer in New York, he jumped at the chance to move to the Big Apple. He didn’t just pack up and leave town quietly. In true L.A. style, Jackson announced that he was ending his affair with L.A. by advertising the news on 10×23 foot billboards that stood next to carwashes, palm trees, parking lots, and outdoor cafés where thousands of total strangers driving down the freeway could learn that he was so done with the City of Angels.

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Advertising

Now You See It, Now You Don’t

By Delphine Hirasuna |

To get the full impact of this BMW commercial, you have to watch it in a theater and close your eyes.

What BMW has done is utilize a phenomenon called the after-image effect. At the end of the commercial they use a powerful photo flash to literally imprint the BMW logo into the viewers’ eyes, so when viewers close their eyes they see “BMW” in afterglow. This would be subliminal advertising except that BMW told the audience in a German theater what they were about to experience.

That apparently wasn’t the case in a 1957 experiment conducted in a movie theater in Fort Lee, New Jersey. There, a man named James Vicary claimed to have placed a tactistoscope (a device that flashes a series of images rapidly onto a screen) in the projection room. During a screening of “Picnic,” it flashed the messages “Drink Coca-Cola” and “Hungry? Eat popcorn” on the screen every five seconds. The messages lasted 1/3000th of a second, too fast for viewers to register the messages consciously, but still trigger an overwhelming urge to go to the refreshment counter. He claimed that Coca-Cola sales increased by 18.1% and popcorn sales jumped by 57.8%. About five years later, Vicary admitted his “experiment” was a hoax, but the concept of subliminal advertising lived on.

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