Post2000

Pulsating product names

Siemens is working on some sort of e-paper that is going to make names of products pulsate, on package boxes, on supermarket shelves. Siemens says the paper may be ready in about two years and will flash special offers, prices and images [Source]. Welcome to Las Vegas, ladies and gentlemen, what'll it be?

Siemens' paper-thin display -- composed of a polymer-based photochromic material -- is capable of displaying digital text and images when prodded by an electrochemical reaction powered by a low-voltage charge. When the electric charge is no longer applied, the chemical reaction is reversed, and the electronic ink is no longer visible -- which is how a flashing effect is created. The power source is based on commercially available, ultra-thin batteries. Electronic memory strips store the images [Source].

The firm says it does not expect kids to ask for a particular cereal that uses their e-paper, but to say, "I want it."

That hardly sounds like a long-lasting product, does it? I bet the one that remains video-less will acquire a certain air of aunthenticity and longevity. Kalle Lasn, of anti-advertising Adbusters Foundation, doesn't think the idea "is great for the mental health of the population [Source]."

PVRs, VCRs and Time-Shifting in RSA

Later this year, new video recording technology will be introduced in South Africa. It goes by the name of PVR, or Personal Video Recording. And it has advertisers trembling because viewers will suddenly be able to effectively skip ads.

In all honesty, we've always had the capacity to do so with VCRs, but this new gadget here can record and playback at the same time, giving viewers the ability to skip commercials at will. Imagine stopping a live program, doing an errand, and coming back to watch it at a later time. This is called time-shifting and implies reduced viewing of TV commercials.

What's the difference between a PVR and a VCR? PVRs record TV data in digital format, as opposed to VCRs, which do so in analog format. VCRs use analog cassettes to record and play TV programs, whereas PVRs store data in MPEG format and deposit the data on a hard drive. In essence, then, PVRs are similar to VCRs in functionality (recording, playing back, fast forwarding, re-winding, etc), but can also instantly jump to any part of the program without re-winding or fast-forwarding the data stream. Bye ads.

Will time-shifted viewing reduce the effectiveness of TV commercials in South Africa? It remains to be seen. Has it reduced the effectiveness of TV commercials in America and Europe?

To prevent ad-skipping, advertisers may need to shift their focus to live TV shows or even consider other media options. This means that sport and news slots as well as ads positioned first and last in the break, will be sold at a premium, due to the greater likelihood of them being actively viewed. The number of ads in a break is also expected to diminish.
[Source]

Mute Salesperson?

Can a mute salesperson be efficient? You got the basic idea, but the question refers to marketing and selling at every level. It is just simpler to visualise and exploit the analogy of a door-to-door salesperson.

What if after knocking at a door and having it opened, he or she at last stands before the potential buyer, but is speechless? What other tools would a good seller turn toward? Perhaps a wordless demo would be in order. After all, and according to the old dictum, actions speak louder than words. I'm afraid that in such a predicament our door-to-door salesperson would just have to start vacuuming the stoep.

Have you ever bought anything on the weight of the seller's words alone?

The same salesperson might decide to leave the vacuum cleaner with you - the potential buyer - for a week or two, then return to see if you aren't bowled over enough to spend good money obtaining it. Today this particular strategy is ubiquitous. Any web presence worth the name resorts to it. It is easier and faster to hook the potential customer with freeware, adware, nagware, shareware or demoware. Mind you, freeware isn't necessarily free. It's there either to place something of marketing importance on your computer (a spy, for example), or to convince you to buy a more robust version of the product, or to at least speak of it at the next session of your knitting club.

That would be our salesperson leaving you with a vacuum cleaner that, using hidden sensors, measures the percentage or thickness of dust on your floors against a given standard, then tells the salesperson. "0.35 inches of dust at 12:01 on 14 July 2005!" Or the vacuum cleaner could suck up dust quite well, only to keep telling you each time how many kilos af acarians are living happily on your floors; "0.098 kg of acarians at 3:23 pm on 12 October 2005!" You'd be advised that for a mere $29.95, you could get the Pro Version which of course sucks up acarians as well. Or the vacuum cleaner could suck up both dust and acarians marvelously, but only for the first two weeks, after which it is restrained.

Of course, the poor salesperson would run the risk of your finding and neutralising the hidden switch that either prevents the cleaner from vacuuming acarians, or blocks it after the first two weeks, or does any number of restraining actions. The law would have to get involved. Money would have to be spent tracking vacuum bandits who, apart from tinkering with the machines themselves, are doing their own door-to-door to sell fully unrestricted machines, or "crackz" to unlock cripple-chines, nag-chines, demo-chines, free-chines, ad-chines or spy-chines embedded somewhere in your product. Or worse, giving the dreaded "crackz" away for free!

If the big guns are ready to spend big money hunting down those who sell or give away keys and other openers, is this mode of marketing and advertising worth it? In short, does this kind of marketing and advertising produce results? How much does the maker of such a product actually lose? After all, the product had to be made and in making it time and money had to be spent. Forget the vacuum cleaner. Imagine a carmaker giving you a car that works for two weeks only, before blocking all mechanisms. You wouldn't have a car then, but the carmaker would have lost both the time and the money spent making it.

What if after knocking at a door and having it opened, a salesperson stands before the potential buyer, but is suddenly speechless? What other tools would a good seller turn toward? Perhaps a wordless demo, and nothing else, would be in order. Nothing else. As we said, the dictum is actions speak louder than words, not half-actions speak louder than words. So the door-to-door salesperson vacuums your stoep like a charm and goes on to the next house, if you're not interested. Full-stop. Many software makers are jumping on this bandwagon and following the likes of Macromedia whose star editor, Dreamweaver®, used to be shareware but is today strictly demoware.

Have you ever bought anything on the weight of the product's performance alone?

Selling noise

There is a humorous story of a man who lived near railway tracks. The train passed by his shed every day at 3:49 a.m., but after a few weeks he had got so used to the ruckus that he didn't wake up anymore. One morning, after the man had lived there for three years, the train didn't go by because there was a worker's strike. At 3:49 a.m. on the dot, the man awoke with a start and screamed, "What was that?"

Sometimes when I'm driving, in town or along the motorway, I suddenly get "pulled" into looking at a billboard. Those that "pull" well, at least in my experience, are the empty ones, the ones between the previous advert and the next one. They usually just have a simple temporary message, or just a telephone number, should the passer-by be interested in placing an advert there.

That characteristic "pull" is what interests me. Does absence really make the heart grow fonder, as they say? The man asleep in his shed pulled out of his sleep by absence rather than by presence, much as I, and perhaps most of us, am pulled by the same force. Is this phenomenon used in advertising? Are there brands that deliberately absent themselves (from advert studios and the media) for a time, with the aim of exploiting this characteristic "pull" during that down-time?

Can the advertiser successfully use the customers' sick-and-tiredness (make your right hand flat and rigid, then run it from left to right across your neck) to get more visibility for the very product customers have had enough of? If you sold noise, could you make it more noticeable by silencing it?

An Eskimo Customer

Can everything be sold? In order to sell a product, it has to be marketed somewhere upstream, and somewhere downstream the buyer has to be convinced into spending his or her Shekels. Convincing buyers to do so carries some sort of risk, a risk of failure for the seller and a risk of a rotten product for the buyer, which further implies that in order to cancel that second risk in the buyer’s mind, the marketer has to be damn good.

In the Queen’s language we say that people who can perform such a feat, even against the odds, can sell an Eskimo snow. But back to my question: can everybody sell an Eskimo snow, provided they are truly convinced the Eskimo needs more snow? Provided they’re convinced that the snow the Eskimo already has can perform only some of the required tasks in Alaska, and not all?

I think the answer is a resounding Yes. Everything can be sold, and any marketer and seller can sign a contract to sell an Eskimo snow, provided that marketer and seller are good at what they do.

However, some marketers and sellers do have a head-start, so that others have to be much better than them, before they can sell the same snow in quality and quantity to the same Eskimo.

N°5

Wal-Mart déploit dans ses 2.600 magasins US sa chaîne de télévision interne et devient directement le 5ème réseau TV américain avec 130 millions de spéctateurs par mois. Avec une moyenne de 7 minutes par spéctateur et par passage dans le magasin.
L'IHT rapporte également les programmes diffusés: bandes annonces de films, extraits de programmes sportifs et musicaux mais essentiellement les spots publicitaires en provenance de Kraft, Unilever, Hallmark et Pepsi. Les marques investissent entre USD $137,000 à $292,000 pour une présence média de 4 semaines.

La puissance est dans le réseau ?

Où sont les hommes ?

Publiée par Mediapost, une enquête Nielsen Entertainment pour Activision démontre la selectivité médias des hommes de 18 à 34. L'impact des jeux vidéos est sensible dans cette tranche d'âge et les conduit à délaisser la télévision. Autre résultat étonnant, les 8 à 17 quant à eux ne connaissent pas cette même inflexion.

A recouper avec l'analyse média dans les jeux vidéos.

Les valeurs de la tortue

A voir sur AdAge l'association inhabituelle entre une marque (Coca-Cola Light) et une tortue. Si l'animal ne véhicule pas de valeurs particulièrement adaptées au soda, elle rend la relation à la marque sympathique et propose une différenciation forte avec la communication soda vue à ce jour.

La marque propose en outre un  mini-site présentant la bio de la tortue : www.forthosewholovelife.co.uk

Le spot Tortoise, la signature "for those who love life" et "live well in your shell".

Vos réactions, welcome...

Papier creatif

Vu depuis quelques numéros dans le magazine (version papier) Etapes, l'initiative de la manufacture de papier Lana qui offre l'espace libre sur son encart papier créatif aux designer et illustrateurs.
Bonne idée pour Lana d'associer ses différentes matières à la créativité de jeunes designers. Bonne visibilité pour les créatifs...

Inscriptions ouvertes sur le site Lana.

Les pixels dansent

AdAge revient aujourd'hui sur le concept des VideoMods initié par MTV2. La chaîne qui se définit elle même comme “cross-breeding bastard” mélange cette fois clips vidéos et personnages de jeux vidéos dans un objectif promotionnel.
La chaîne parle bien entendu de marketing mais dans un effort de créativité, pour renouveller un genre.

Bientôt, pendant le clip vidéo, les personnages des SIMS habillés Prada qui boivent du Coca-Cola en jouant sur la Xbox...

Liens : les vidéos sur MTV2.