Advertising

And the 2014 Super Bowl Winner Is…GoldieBlox

By Delphine Hirasuna | February 5, 2014September 4, 2014

Unbeknownst to most sports fans was a completely different Super Bowl competition being played out on the sidelines. Sponsored by Intuit, maker of QuickBooks, TurboTax, Intuit and Quicken software, the contest drew 15,000 small business contenders who vied for the chance to win a free 30-second spot during the big game last weekend.

And the Intuit winner was GoldieBlox, a startup that offers construction toys strictly for little girls. A Kickstarter-funded project, GoldieBlox was founded by Debbie Sterling, a Stanford-graduate engineer who was disturbed to learn that 89% of all engineers in America were men. Taking a walk through a toy store, Sterling noted that the “blue aisle” was lined with construction toys and chemistry sets, while the “pink aisle” had lots of princesses and dolls. Sterling vowed to redecorate the “pink aisle” with construction toys to send little girls the message that they could pursue a career in science, engineering, technology ad math too. San Francisco-based Sterling developed an interactive storybook series with a companion construction kit. The book’s heroine is a girl named Goldie who likes to invent mechanical things and seeks the assistance of the young reader to build them using pieces from the project kit.

Advertising

Carlton – The Big Ad

By Delphine Hirasuna | January 31, 2014September 4, 2014

Since the Super Bowl puts most sports fans in the mood for beer, we thought we’d bring back an old beer ad favorite — The Carlton Big Ad, created by George Patterson and Partners (Young & Rubicam) of Melbourne in 2005. An epic parody of Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” battle sequence, the commercial, also filmed in New Zealand, shows men in maroon and yellow choir robes rushing and leaping across a sweeping rugged terrain, while resolutely singing new lyrics set to the medieval tune “O Fortuna” from Carl Orff’s cantata “Carmina Burana.” Although the commercial looks like it was made with a cast of thousands, it actually only used 350 people, with the crowd replication software, Massive, filling in the rest of the extras in post-production. “The Big Ad” went on to win numerous awards, and undoubtedly paid for its production costs and then some through the millions of times it has been viewed on the Internet.

Pop Culture

Marketing a Pagan Holiday

By Delphine Hirasuna | October 30, 2009September 4, 2014

In the United States, Halloween is an $8 billion a year industry – and growing. It is second only to Christmas in terms of generating sales, and it ranks No. 1 in candy sales, topping even Valentine’s Day. Halloween is also the third largest party occasion, after New Year’s and the Super Bowl. And it is not just kids who celebrate. More than 62% of American adults between the ages of 18-24 say they wear Halloween costumes; 44% between the ages of 25-34, and 40% between the ages of 34-44.

The demographic spread of Halloween revelers gives mask and costume makers a lot of latitude. Adults tend to favor masks of the real heroes and villains in the news; teen boys go for gore and gorillas, and little girls are drawn to storybook heroines like the Little Mermaid. Celebrities rating their own mask is nearly the equivalent of being honored in a wax museum.

The reason we find this relevant to our business/design blog is that Halloween is a tribute to marketing genius. It’s not a patriotic holiday, not a religious holiday, and not an historic commemoration. Like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, it’s a “merchant-promoted holiday” devised largely to sell more products.