Mark Wieczorek

In direct contrast to the previous article, in what looks to be an entirely unscientific survey, women say that shopping makes them happy. I wonder what a study of women who spend “at least £2,000 on a single item of clothing or an accessory” vs. women who don’t wound find about overall levels of happiness in their lives - taking into account income & age bracket, of course.

One in 10 women have spent at least £2,000 on a single item of clothing or an accessory, according to a new survey.

Half the 3,792 women aged 20 to 40 quizzed about their shopping habits said they shopped to cheer themselves up.

Read: Sky News: Shopping Means Happiness

"Tragedy is bad things happening to good people. Comedy is bad things happening to bad people." - Aristotle’s Poetics

Jim Halpert is that loveable everyman from The Office (US). He has two hot girls chasing after him, he has to deal with idiots at work, and most importantly, he always turns to the camera and makes goofy faces. The faces says, "Oh my God, he’s such an idiot, I can’t believe he just did that." It let’s the audience know that they’re in on the joke. It lets them feel superior, and a lot of comedy is about feeling superior - watching idiots do something stupid & laughing at them. It’s what Seinfeld did, Alex Reiger did it in Taxi, however subtly. Seinfeld chose his friend, though - he loved their zaniness. Jim Halpert, like Alex Reiger use the job as an excuse to keep them around these entertaining simpletons.

When the Volkswagen "Zero Ego Emmissions" commercials came out, I said to myself, "they just gave away the keys to the castle. They just said explicitly what’s implicit in every VW ad." But nobody else seemed to catch on, at least, nobody I talked to said something like that.

Nearly every VW ad says "We’re not stuck up, we’re just better than everyone else." What better message for a "German Engineered" car that’s not that German Engineered car to send? You’re better than those that can’t afford German Engineering, and you’re better than those that go for the obvious choice because of their own insecurities.

The Mac vs. PC ads are iconic & by the 2nd paragraph you knew I was going there. Something about the Mac guy just makes me want to smack him around, though. His smug superiority & PC’s sincere attempts at coolness just doesn’t do it for me. If PC was like Dwight and almost malicious in his stupidity I might buy it, but PC is just PC. Mac’s exasperation at PC’s shenanigans quite obviously convey a sense of superiority. It’s not even hidden here, it’s palpable.

If you don’t think Mac is Jim Halpert, take a close look at Mac in the Mac vs. PC Vista ad. Just as PC’s personal bodyguard says "You are coming to a sad realization, cancel or allow?" Mac looks off and makes a face. In fact, he spends much of the commercial making funny faces.

Look at the Zero Ego Emmissions ad again, it happens at least 3 times. They make a face while staring directly at the people who are acting crazy, the female passenger looks at us/the driver and makes a face, and then they shrug as they toss out their megaphone.

This we’re better than you attitude isn’t just the purview of shiny toys for metrosexuals with too much money on their hands, the "we get it, we’re with you, this is stupid" attitude has been around for a while.

I’m not sure who did it first, but I first became aware of the general technique of "letting the audience know you’re in on the joke " during the Sprite "Image is nothing / Obey your Thirst" and "Make 7-Up Yours" campaigns. These were ads that said "Yeah, advertising is stupid, we get it too. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. See, we’re one of you." These didn’t have a Jim Halpert-esque character in them, but like the Peter Stormare "Unpimp Your Auto" VW ads, they’re pure camp and acknowledge that on some level, all ads are artificial.

The Jim Halpert is all over this early Washington Mutual ad (one of the first with "The Banker’s Pen"), and indeed all the WaMu ads. The Geico Caveman is a master at it, but does it more as indignation at the stupidity of those around him. In a clever twist, the Caveman is superior to the people whose product you’re being sold, disarming the Geico folks and making them seem more approachable for their fallibility. This hearkens back to the "Make 7-Up Yours" ads where we’re being told that ads are stupid. Even though it’s a Geico representative that’s being an idiot, he really represents all the old stodgy insurance firms.

Let’s review the ingredients for a Jim Halpert.

1. You have to have a character the audience will identify with.
2. He (or she) has to be surrounded by idiots.
3. He has to react to the idiots. Preferrably by looking aside, possibly even straight at the camera, and making a face.
4. Optional. For "cleverness" brownie points, make the people selling your product the idiots.

It’s a really fun way to make ads - you can have a lot of fun inventing all sorts of idiots, and by putting someone in the ad who realizes they’re idiots, you can make your customers feel superior to everyone else.

More Seth Godin Goodness. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, create micro hysteria. Remember earlier where he said that people like to talk about the toxic & the trivial? It’s much better, he says, “To find pockets of the population that interact with each other and create” a great experience for them - either so safe everyone can agree with it, or controversial enough that everyone will be talking about it.

Far better to obsess about owning the micro audience, at least for a moment, then to waste your energy trying to be everything to everyone.

Read” Seth’s Blog: Micro Hysteria

Something tells me this isn’t a first. Lexus paid for a series of pulp novels to be published featuring their automobiles. I used to wonder if radio stations could get rid of ads altogether if artists just wrote songs around products… but that would never work, nobody wants to buy an album from a band that too obviously sold out.

Subtlety is one of the keys to placing a product name in media aimed at sophisticated consumers, says Richard Nelson, head of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. “If it’s so heavily overloaded that it’s basically a commercial, people aren’t going to want to read it, and they won’t buy it.”

This has led to the increasing popularity of softer marketing ploys, such as event sponsorships (think: author readings hosted by a local dealership, or an art installation commissioned by a major automaker), “webisodes” and “advergaming.”

Read: Read Any Good Ads Lately? - washingtonpost.com

(Via: AdPulp)

I reported on this before. Even bricks & mortar stores can no longer ignore the call of the internet. A good percentage of people who walk in your front door have already done the research online. Your website has to be not just informative, but interactive too.

Retailers are taking a page from MySpace. They know that customers, especially the younger and more Net-savvy, want to be heard, and they also want to hear what others like them think. So increasingly, retailers are opening up their Web sites to customers, letting them post product reviews, ratings, and in some cases photos and videos. The result is that customer reviews are emerging as a prime place to visit for online shoppers.

Read: Retailers Take a Tip from MySpace

(Via: AdPulp)

This is a really cool ad for Orange phones, all done the old fashioned way - no computers necessary. Watch the ad:

Watch the making of:

(Via AdFreak)

This is a really cool approach go designing with restraint. Any decent musician can tell you that you can’t make everything loud and still give emphasis to the beat. There need to be spaces or nothing will have impact. The same goes for design - the more space between objects, the more emphasis each object can have.

This, then, is an exercise in restraint.

The difficult part about designing for attention isn’t deciding what to talk about—it’s deciding what not to talk about. Because you only get a potential customer’s attention for a few seconds (if you’re lucky enough to get it at all) you don’t have luxury of rambling. You have to cover your key points with both speed and strength.

Read: Forty - Business Blog - Attention Mapping: The 10-Point Exercise

I read a Seth Godin piece recently that challenged advertisers to behave more ethically - advertising as a whole isn’t always something to be proud of, and let’s face it, the core tenets of advertising haven’t really changed much since people realized that brand comfort (I think I just invented that term) was the most important factor - being exposed to a brand enough that you feel comfortable picking it up in the store. So advertising has become lots of flashy ads that do silly things & then show the product.

By listening to the consumers they tell you that only 2% of women are prepared to call themselves beautiful, you can become a force for social change and produce memorable, meaningful, and perhaps even important ads.

After all, the Dove campaign for real beauty is a great example of marketing that works with contemporary culture, not against it. Dove was prepared to capture the tremendous energy coming off a trend that many brands just looked through or tried to work around. In point of fact, ideas of femaleness had been “under review” and deeply contested in our society at least since the ideas of Susan B. Anthony. The tide had come and gone several times by 2003 and now it appeared to be prepared to transform our culture’s most fundamental ideas of what beauty is.

Read:  This Blog Sits at the: 7 Branding lessons from the Dove campaign

I try to figure out the subtle message I want to convey & then hit J.I. Rodale’s Synonym Finder and stick words into excel & use the randomize feature to find intersting word combinations (though by the time I get to that step, a few key words usually pop out at me).

But just because this method works for me doesn’t mean it’ll work for everyone else. Here are some great tips on How to Name Your Company.

When you start a company, eventually you are going to have to choose a company name. You may not take the decision that seriously - but trust me, a great name can make all the difference.

Read: Vitamin Features » How To Name Your Company

This is pretty cool. By using the yellow spectrum, which people don’t see very well but cameras can pick up just fine, they’ve managed to embed a few bits of data (about as much as a bar code - enough for a phone number or web address) in images that appear in stuff like magazines. Sort of reminds me of those secret decoder toys of yesteryear.

Japanese firm Fujitsu is pushing a technology that can encode data into a picture that is invisible to the human eye but can be decoded by a mobile phone with a camera.

Read: BBC NEWS | Technology | Hiding messages in plain sight