Advertainment, The American Way

American Eagle is getting pretty sly with their marketing tactics, as of late. Their newest television advertainment idea has been creating quite a buzz. Entitled “It’s a mall world,” these are 3 and 4 minute-long episodes, or vignettes, or what have you, which basically show a bunch of good looking people walking around a mall wearing all the new fashions…which just happen to be American Eagle.

Naturally, there is some heavy brand spiraling going on here too, but it is very clever brand spiraling. The video shorts refer you back to the website, www.ae.com, where you can click on the "Get the looks" page and buy the same clothes that the people in the videos wear. See, you can be just like the people on TV, neat, huh?

Is this really going to get some high school or college kid to check out the web site and buy some clothes? I would say that it will do so much more than any traditional advertising, especially traditional TV commercials. A&E is definitely on to something here. What a clever way to reach an advertising-averse group of people…make ‘em think it isn’t an ad…but, rather, a decent show to watch. It works a hell of a lot better than their competitor’s advertising, some of which depicts people in extremely bright clothes dancing around aimlessly singing about slacks or Capri pants or whatever other style is in season…cough…old navy and the gap.

And also, the videos are actually pretty clever. They mainly follow the exploits of “Dean,” a shy kid (who is awkward, and lacking in the self-confidence department) who works at a record shop, and is interested in a good-looking girl who works at, you got it, American Eagle, across the way in the mall. The videos are rather done rather well overall, they are pretty funny, and quite captivating. They even begin with a small intro. and cast list…which makes it seem as though it is an actual program on TV. Oh, and I neglected to mention the good placement by AE, or their firm, or what have you; they run during a break in MTV’s “Real World: Sydney.” Though this is probably pretty pricy placement for A&E, I think that they are likely hitting the nail right on the head in terms of reaching out to their demographic here.

You can check out the videos at www.ae.com, where they have some other nice interactive “It’s a Mall World” stuff going on too; on YouTube at This Link, or Wednesdays on MTV during the Real World, if you are in to that kind of thing.



Some of the info. on this post came from Mike Antonucci over at the Mercury Post. Check out his article on this subject Here.

Skyworks: Father of Advergaming?

Ever been curious about why to use advergames to sell your products? Or, do you know that you want to use advergames, but you just need some statistical evidence that it actually works in order to coax management, or a higher-up into seeing things your way? Or, are you just curious about using a videogame for an advertising purpose, and you want to learn a bit more about it? Well, then check out www.advergame.com.

This website is home to Skyworks, the company that (self-reportedly) pioneered the concept of advergaming. If they didn’t start it, they sure fooled me, because their initial advergaming concept suite, lifesavers’ candystand.com, which was (and, still is…I suppose) a highly-interactive site with numerous games available, all of which tote different lifesavers brand product names. This site was initially launched back in 1996. Today, according to the "Why Skyworks" section of their web site, “Over 40 Million client-branded games developed by Skyworks are played on our clients' websites each month. That's over 800 per minute and over 1 billion to date!” Pretty impressive, eh? If that is the kind of number attached to one company, imagine what the overall statistic would be for the total amount of people playing branded games…nearly unfathomable.



Here are some more handy-dandy stats provided by the fine people at Skyworks that you can use to wow anyone who wants to listen to you:


What’s more…Skyworks goes ahead and breaks down some of the individual demographics for you, giving statistical evidence to back up their claims, and citing sources for the stats. Not bad at all. Advergames are truly part of the future of advertising. As the customer becomes more and more of a king, and the audience decides when and where they will listen to brand messages, maybe it would be wise to jump on the band wagon and promote your brand in a way that people will pursue on their own, rather than throwing it at them whether they like it or not. Well, are you convinced yet?

Halo 3: Believe

The soon-to-be-released, highly anticipated X-Box game, Halo 3, was recently given an incredible promotion tool. This tool is a new web site called “Halo 3 Believe.” It is an amazing, interactive experience in which the user on the web site is basically able to fly around a massive, Halo-3 inspired environment. The environment itself is actually a real diorama that was hand-built, and is 12 ft. tall by (many) feet wide. The amount of detail and intricacy involved in the structures, characters, and scenes in the diorama is nothing short of fantastic. In addition to simply viewing the diorama, you can also view some of the recent Halo 3 TV commercials, the Making-of (the diorama) video, and read character’s stories and the general story of different parts of the scene itself. This is some great advertainment, folks.



I am a pretty big Halo buff. Back when I had X-Box live, which enables you to play online with people around the world, my girlfriend found herself in a constant struggle with a tiny black box and a controller for my free time. And that was with Halo 2…Halo 3 stands to be much better, with far better graphics, a great storyline, and an overall improved experience. However, I believe that even someone who isn’t a big Halo fanatic would still love the Believe web site. It is definitely worth checking out, mainly because it is unlike anything you have seen before. It is taking the old, seemingly outmoded craft of diorama building, and bringing it to a new medium on the ‘Net. This is worth checking out if you have the time to roam around and really get a feel for it.



Kudos to Marka at Adverblog, who brought the new Halo 3 Believe web site to my attention. And even more kudos to Dustin Burg, who wrote a Blog Article about it that had the correct link to the web site, and gave some valuable insight as to what the site is all about.

Scion's "Little Deviants" Advergame

In 2005, Scion set a sales target of 125,000 units, and ended up selling 156,485 units. In 2006, Scion set a sales barrier, rather than a target, of 160,000. They set the barrier so that they wouldn’t become too mainstream, in order to remain cool, hip, and trendy in the eyes of the fast-paced, traditional advertising-averse generation Y (Find stats Here)While Scion did spend $42.8 million in traditional, mass marketing efforts ($29.5 million on TV, $5.9 on print, $2.9 on the radio, $2.5 on the internet, and $2 million on outdoor advertising), they have made it a point to target Generation Y through unconventional methods (Stats are Here). Innovative campaigns and advertising messages, guerilla marketing, viral marketing, event sponsorship, and staying on top of technology and consumer trends in general have made Scion a success. Also, what hasn’t hurt: an Advergame that they set up called “Little Deviants.”

Scion’s Little Deviants campaign was created by an ad firm called “The Attik.” The campaign, so far, has generated quite a bit of word-of-mouth due to viral marketing, but it has also been promoted through traditional advertising including TV ads, print ads in magazines, internet banner ads, and outdoor advertising via billboards. The ads feature little, large-clawed, hellish, demon-looking creatures. Sometimes the ads show the creatures, the “deviants,” slaughtering little defenseless-looking sheep-people, called “sheeple.” All of the ads brand spiral the audience back to the hub of the Little Deviants campaign: www.littledeviant.com. Simon Needham, group creative director of The Attik, best explains this campaign’s concept:

“What we’re doing here is presenting the car as a little deviant, a little bad-ass. The brief was essentially, ‘Here is our new xD, how are we going to sell it?’ We reviewed the car, and we felt that the model was very aggressive-looking. We’re very familiar with our target audience, where they hang out, what they do and what they see. So the marketing campaign was based around a young trendleader and what they tend to be doing. The whole principle is telling a story. And we figured that presenting a book of the Fable of the Deviants was a really nice way of delivering our message (Digital Arts Online).”



On the website that all of the ads lead to, the user is cast into a first-person interactive advergame, where they are placed in this virtual world of deviants and sheeple, and they live out a fable, or a storybook, with nine chapters. The general premise is that the sheeple have been painting the city gray (literally); they have made the city gray and brown, boring and predictable, and the game’s player must kick them out of the city to save it. In each of these chapters, the player has a series of tasks that they must accomplish, most of which usually involve hitting, kicking, decapitating, dismembering, or otherwise killing the sheeple, all-the-while making little hidden references to the featured car, the Scion xD. It is definitely a violent game. However, the Little Deviants ads, and the Little Deviants game’s messages are clear, they are telling the audience to be different, to be cool, and to rebel against the ordinary. This is a great message to market to Generation Y, which has the highest generational trait of having high self-esteem; the majority of the members of Gen Y think that they are special, unique, and cool, and they strive for ways to show their peers this fact. Scion wants their cars to be one of those ways.

Disney, High School Musical 2, Advergames

So, I must confess, I don't know much of anything about the increasingly-popular "High School Musical 2" beyond what I have heard about it shattering some Nielsen records, and beyond what I see on the teenie-bopper celebrity magazine covers at the check-out aisle in the grocery store. It is obvious, however, that many people out there are much more into it then I am. In fact, according to the article that I read in MediaPost, interest in the show brought more than 23 million 'unique visitors' to Disney.com in August, breaking its all-time traffic record.

But how do you retain interest once people are on the website? Games. Disney has perhaps the largest arsenal of comic characters out there availble to them to use in their online gaming. For Disney, online gaming is a win-win situation, as they are not only generating interest in the web site, but they are also simultaneously promoting their brand. Due to Disney's media giant status, the entire website is all about promotions, cross-promotions, and more...the entire web site recently went under a full revamp, and now, with the help of the teen music kids there, it is getting more hits than ever, which is great for Disney, and also for their other corporate content sponsors, such as HP and General Mills. Disney, and its mass of subsidiary companies, is so vertically integrated now that it has begun to sell integrated advertising packages that span across their enormous media offerings, including network and cable TV, the internet, and radio and print, to partners such as Visa. These multi-platform buys take a lot of the guesswork out of media placement.

All in all, Disney is making some smart moves.

The majority of the information in this post came from The MediaPost Publication article entitled "Disney.com Sets Record Propelled By 'High School Musical 2,' by Tameka Kee, dated Thursday, 13 September, 2007.
Link to it here: http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=67350

Advertainment & Advergames Defined

As everyone in-the-know…knows… there is a panoply of jargon available in the marketing and advertising vernacular war-chest…so to speak. Did you have a bit of trouble making sense of that sentence? Good…because it just goes to show that, often, the more jargon (and/or other complicated words) that you use…the more complicated things become. However, there are a few terms that I believe are worthy of addition to any Marketer or Advertiser’s verbal repertoire. These are Advertainment, and Advergames. The marketing concept, customer relationship marketing, one-to-one marketing…what is it all about? It is about building relationships, hopefully for life, it is about getting a captive audience to show an active interest in your company and its offerings, it is about connecting to people on a person-by-person basis rather than by trying to hit everyone as a single, mass audience. So…word-of-mouth, viral marketing, guerilla marketing...what are these all about? These are about generating interest through (usually) non-traditional media means, these are about generating enough interest in a company, or a company’s message, that the audience may even seek out information about the company on their own, rather than having the message thrown at them along with the other 3,000 brand messages that they receive daily, and often ignore. So where do all of these terms converge, what is a cost-effective way to reach a large audience that includes numerous active participants? Advertainment. Advergames. These usually internet-based forms of marketing are a genius answer to the marketer’s dilemma.

But what are they? You won’t yet find a concise definition for these on Webster’s or in the Encyclopedia Britannica, but you will find their definitions on the traditional encyclopedia’s Web 2.0 counterpart, though often cited as being less credible due to its mainly user-generated content, Wikipedia is more widely used today than any of its traditional predecessors. Wikipedia gives great definitions for both terms. It defines Advertainment as “a marketing method which distributes an advertising (commercial) message via an entertainment content or format [which has] a main objective of transforming advertising into something attractive and desirable instead of just interrupting people to sell something in 30 seconds.” This definition drives home the main points of this obscure, new-age means of reaching people. Wikipedia describes Advergaming as “the practice of using video games to advertise a product, organization or viewpoint.”

These two forms of marketing are to be the main focus of this blog, so please stay tuned, as I plan to further define and analyze these two enigmatic fields as much as possible.

Strengths and Weaknesses of Different Mediums for Media Planners:

TV

TV has a number of strengths for media planners. It has traditionally been viewed as the most ‘effective,’ however, it has also traditionally been the most expensive. Broadcast, cable, and satellite TV placements are all quite expensive. Advertising on this medium is perhaps the most effective for a large company that wants to reach a large number of people (a company that can afford to target the masses, and aim for a high CPM). Overall, it is a highly saturated medium, and the ever-increasing amount of channels available makes it even harder to break through the clutter. However, a number of satellite channels are highly specialized in terms of interests, so this may make targeting a specific group or demographic a bit more easy. For a smaller company that only wants to get their message out to a certain geographic area, it is more expensive to buy placement regionally than it is (on a CPM basis) to simply place an ad to be aired nationally. This is why most of what is seen on the larger network stations are ads that are relevant to the entire continental U.S.

Radio

Radio is, debatably, a dying medium. Obviously, TV took over the radio’s spot as the main American living-room centerpiece a long time ago. The availability of other entertainment mediums, such as TV, CD’s, and MP3’s and the iPOD for music have also made the radio somewhat obsolete in many respects. Nonetheless, radio is still much more cost effective than television advertising. Radio is also, by its nature, usually regional in its broadcasting, which makes it more accessible to smaller companies that only want to hit a certain geographic region. Radio also leaves a lot more to the listener’s imagination than TV does. However, it certainly lacks the visual capabilities of TV, so it may be harder for a radio commercial to retain attention, and maintain a captive audience. Also, Sirius, XM radio, and “high definition radio” have become new mediums within the overall radio medium that are somewhat untapped in their potential, partially due to the fact that they have not been as successful as they were projected to be at their conception.

Magazines

Magazines are a pretty good way to cater to a specialized target market. Most magazines, or at least those than span beyond the scope of a simple general interest magazine, are, themselves, highly specialized. Due to this fact, it is possible for a company to place something in a magazine that they know is more likely to be reached by the actual target market. By cutting out many of the sets of eyes that would not even give an ad another second of their attention (upon realizing that the ad isn’t about a product or service that interests them), an advertiser may have more luck actually generating interest in their products or services through a mag. ad. Due to the aforementioned fact, it may also be more possible to take a less peripheral route in the ad’s message, and, rather, to be more central to the function of the product or service, as the reader may very well already know more about the market for said product, and thus be more interested in hearing the more intricate details of its workings, etc…

Billboards

Billboards can be extremely effective in generating brand awareness, at the very least. If they are placed effectively, especially in a place where there is a high amount of traffic, preferably traffic that is stopped for some of the time, like rush hour traffic in a city. Unfortunately, they are most often placed on a quickly-moving highway or smaller road, and, for this reason, they are passed by (literally) relatively quickly, and, the driver or passenger in a car may not give them a second thought. For this reason, you cannot have an extremely wordy billboard, which makes conveying a concrete message about a product pretty hard. If you want to generate brand awareness, or point out the location of something, such as a restaurant, hotel, or ski mountain, near the billboard, then they can be pretty good. Also, if people are able to come up with clever ways to catch a driver’s attention, a billboard can be extremely effective due to the fact that it is innovative and different. Here are a few examples (and their verbatim write-ups) that I found on Adverblog last summer, that I think are amazing:

“You can think of Orwell's Big Brother or, as you prefer, of Dick's Minority Report. Whatever the case, it's no longer science fiction, it's real. MINI Usa has launched a scary (sorry I must say it) outdoor campaign targeted at MINI owners. In cities such as Chicago and Miami they have installed digital billboards who are able to receive identification messages from the MINI's passing by. As the car is tagged with information about the owner, the billboard is able to recognize the driver and greet him/her with a personalized message.



This campaign sets a new frontier in 1to1 marketing, but it's also important to say that the drivers involved in this promotion actually opted-in to be part of the game. Fools or curious it's impossible (yet) to say. However the campaign is rising comments and polemics not only for the extremely personal yet public relationship MINI wants to establish with its clients, but also for the potential risks of such campaign in terms of driver distraction and road safety.”


McDonald's solar clock



"Via Brainstorm #9 a great outdoor for Mc Donald's created by Leo Burnett. Look at the sun, check the time and find your perfect McD snack!"


Youtube

Youtube is a crazy (relatively) new medium that has taken the nation, and the world, by storm. It is extremely effective for generating interest through word-of-mouth, and other viral and guerilla marketing campaigns. The tremendous amount of content available on the website makes it another saturated medium, but if an ad’s creator is clever enough, and generates enough interest in a video, it can reach thousands, if not millions of people, and these are people who are not having the message in the ad or video thrown at them, like in traditional advertising, but rather people who seek out the video, and eagerly watch it. There are numerous examples of successful videos of this nature, one of my favorites is Smirnoff’s Tea Party music video. The other nice thing about this kind of video is that after it is made, you don’t have to spend money to air it…you may want to promote it one way or another, but you don’t have to constantly pay for placement on TV. Also, the amazingly large amount of user-generated content on Youtube can be either positive or negative for a brand or product…depending on what someone is saying about it.

Blip.TV

I knew nothing about this site before it was mentioned for this assignment. From what I can see, it is a medium with tremendous potential for advertisers. However, judging from the fact that I had never heard of it, and the people that I asked about it haven’t heard about it either, it may not be a good way to get your message out right now. Perhaps if it gained the kind of fame that Youtube has, it would be a bit better.