Ways of skinning a cat
I recently finished Steven Pinker’s excellent ‘The Stuff of Thought’, which 
amongst other things made me think about taboos and advertising.
Eg:
I can think of three ways the ad industry has tried to sell bog roll (by ‘sell’ I mean build a brand, as opposed to accept that a category is commodity-driven). The most famous involves a cute puppy; a second uses a cute toddler; a third uses a bear. Puppies, toddlers and bears: all socially acceptable ways of broaching the… err…. defecation taboo.
Toilet paper maybe an extreme example but perhaps there are other categories where the number of brands is constrained by the number of ways of talking round a taboo…
Posted by: Sam at pre-lunch on Friday, 25th July 2008
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Power politics
Any political scientist will tell you: where a single player looks to
be in a position to impose their will on the rest, the other players have a clear incentive to redress the balance of power [define].
On Friday Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo! Without ever using the G- word, Microsoft have made little bones of their rationale: to create a more effective competitor to Google and thereby grab a (much) bigger slice of the growing digital advertising pie.
The overall growth in digital is such that it can be easy to overlook just how dominant Google is: in the UK the total online advertising market in 2007 was worth around £2.7bn; Google’s share of this was 43%.
And yet it is Google who argue that a combined Microsoft-Yahoo juggernaut would be anti-competitive and stifle innovation.
Posted by: Sam at Lunch time on Wednesday, 6th February 2008
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The finest eloquence
I recently encountered the ad in the photo, nestled by Waterloo roundabout, and was struck by the shining brilliance of the copy.
1 million rooms for £26.
(Each).
Surprising but straight-as-a-dye, flippant and yet ultimately earnest, it does what all good ad copy does: says a lot in very few words.
Why do you never see copy of this quality in banner ads? We can make them expand, spin and wobble; you can play with them and write in them; they can be video or Flash (or Flash video).
In other words we have invented any number of ways of multiplying the minimal attention people pay to banners. Perhaps instead we should just focus on writing really top-notch copy.
End of rant.
(P.S. – I would happily be proved wrong on this: can anyone remember any outstanding banner copy?)
Posted by: Sam at pre-lunch on Friday, 9th November 2007
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