Yesterday while checking my personal email account, I found this advertisement for a delicious looking mini wrap from KFC. Being the food enthusiast that I am, I needed to find out more.
After doing some research, I came to find out that this mysterious new menu item was only 99 cents at participating locations. What a steal! Unfortunately the list of participating locations was only limited to two states, Virginia and Florida. Looks like I won’t be getting my hands on this wrap anytime soon.
But the real reason as to why this advertisement has been keeping me up at night is the name that KFC has chosen for this menu item to bear. Get ready for this…The “iTwist.” Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the i”Fill In The Blank” branding system pretty much owned by Apple? It all started with the iMac, where the “i” stood for “Internet.” Yes, it has evolved quite a bit over the years to include brands like the iPod and iLife, which don’t require an Internet hook-up, but there is still a strong sense that “i” branding system is appropriate for all things electronic.
I’d be curious to find out why KFC’s marketing team chose a brand name with such an electronic feel to it. Does the name “iTwist” make you hungry? Apparently it does for the Germans.
Audi’s new Super-Bowl commercial has been floating around and has managed to cause a stir… for no reason at all.
This is for the A3 TDI… it’s meant to be a green (environmentally friendly) car. Hence the Green Police. If you are wondering why I have to explain that it’s because people like to make big deals out of nothing.
There was a once a police force for the Nazis that wore green. Audi is a German company. Are they making some sort of reference to the Nazi agenda? Is Audi a terrible company planning WWIII and trying to take of the world?
No, most certainly not. Green is the popular word to use for environmentally friendly right now. Everyone uses it for everything. We all know what a police officer is. The commercial is very clear on it’s motives and they have nothing malicious about them.
The only crime here that it is such a boring commercial. I feel like it wants to be a funny ad, but just listing off food is not all that funny. Sure, they found a reason to say “fish taco” in an Audi commercial, but that alone does not a funny commercial make.
Everyone should stop worrying about Audi’s Nazi agenda and change the focus their strange decision to spend so much money on a Super-Bowl spot and fill it with such a lame commercial.
Great commercial. The whole line-up of PS3 commercials has been awesome. This is a great gig for any of the games they work with, as the game company doesn’t have to worry about getting good creative. The commercials for the PS3 itself have all been hilarious, for example:
The commercials for other games, besides the MAG one above, have also been great. They almost always offer a laugh and are geared at adults. These are the perfect video game commercials. An example of one of the commercials for Uncharted 2 and PS3:
Keep up the good work Sony, you are doing something great for video game advertising. I haven’t enjoyed game commercials like this since the old, and ridiculous, Crash Bandicoot ads.
There are some foods that have a lot to gain from a texture enhancing close-up. Mousse is not one of those foods. Especially when that mousse is by itself on a spoon.
I understand it’s from Jell-O so maybe they didn’t want to fancy it up, but I know I’ve seen pudding ads where they put some raspberries or something else with the pudding. It may not seem like much but that can make a difference.
The way the ad is now it just looks like… well, we all know what it looks like and it’s very unpleasant. My sisters initially found this ad and I overheard them laughing and talking about how awful it looked so, naturally, I went over to see what the fuss was about. Sure enough, it was pretty bad.
A much more effective ad would be the mousse looking all fancy but with the Jell-O container in the background… or maybe the the mousse looking all fancy IN the Jell-O container. How this made it out the door we may never know.
This ad is hilarious. Knowing what they do DOES melt my brain… but not because it’s complicated. Because it is the biggest rip-off I have ever see. They will charge you $130 to plug in your PS3. Kotaku got it right when they said this should be illegal.
In case you don’t know, setting up a PS3 can be as simple as plugging in 2 cables. You take the power cable and plug it in to an outlet and then, here’s where it gets tricky, you take the HDMI cable and plug it into your tv.
5min operation at $130 is… $1560 an hour. Yep, my brain is officially melted.
Sometimes a product is just crazy enough to open the floodgates to all sorts of wacky and creative ads. Sadly, sometimes these opportunities are missed.
One such example is this ad here for Fairytale Fights, a not so great video game where various characters from fairytales battle to the death.
The copy reads:
“Once Upon A Time, far far Away…
If You Go to the Lumberjack Village…
You’ll Never Believe You Eyes!”
Ok… what? First of all the tenses are all messed up there, it starts in past tense and decides to become future tense. The screwy tenses blended with flat-out poor copy make it a jarring and painful read. It’s just three lines but I grimace trying to get through them.
The imagery is funny enough but the attempt to tell a fairytale like story fails terribly. Is that really the best they could come up with? They’re given murderous fairytale characters and three lines to make a funny story and all they could come up with was this senseless copy.
Who knew that Raisin Bran Crunch could have such a dramatic effect on someone? Take this alien for example. I suddenly have a newfound respect for these slimy, big-headed creatures who somehow happen to speak with a British accident. I never knew life was so hard for them.
In some weird way, I find this ad quite humorous. My favorite line has to be “You miss people. I miss a lot of people. Mostly because I ate them.” I must admit that Copywriter Colin Selikow of Leo Burnett Agency in Chicago did an excellent job writing this ad.
While this ad may create a few chuckles, my only concern is that it doesn’t do a great job of building the brand. Read Kellog’s Raisin Bran’s brand description below.
Make yours a Sunny™ day! The Kellogg’s Raisin Bran® cereal you’ve loved for years has been loving you right back, with over 25 percent of your recommended daily value of dietary fiber in every bowl. With so many raisin bran choices, what does one smiling sun offer that generations have loved? Why, Two Scoops® of delicious raisins, of course!
Yes, I can see how this alien’s day has become “Sunnier” as a result of switching his diet from “red meats and cerebral fluids” to a delicious crunchy cereal. But I have to ask the question, was this really the best way to deliver the message? It’s very easy to watch this ad, laugh at the domesticated alien, and then completely forget which company it was promoting.
Looking to buy a Nintendo Wii? Also in the market for a brand new rubber duck? Look no further! Gamestop is running a special offer just for you!
Maybe a rubber duck isn’t your thing. Maybe what would really push you over the edge to spend your hard earned money would be a small water-gun. No sense shelling out $250 for a video game system if you aren’t able to squirt someone afterward. Gamestop has you covered.
What if you’re a hard-edged pirate who has no use for squirt guns or ducks? What if you need a pirate tattoo but nothing too permanent? Well then Gamestop has just the…. Oh come on now. Really?
Sure enough people like to get free stuff. It can sway a consumer from one retailer to another. That free stuff, however, isn’t usually a completely unrelated item that someone found in their basement. What is Gamestop thinking with these promotions? Whoever came up with these ideas should be fired.
I wonder what kind of research the marketing guys did before they gave these promotions the thumbs up. Maybe there is some sort of study out there that says people are 300% more likely to buy a video game console if it comes with a rubber duck.
Or maybe not.
The Nintendo Wii is already an extremely well selling item. I am at a complete loss as to how a $0.50 squirt gun or rubber duck are going to help it sell any better.
File this in the ‘What Not To Do” section of your marketing guidebook.
While perusing my usual video-game news sites I came across this little gem:
The Red Faction: Guerrilla team came up with a mighty creative method of advertising their new game. The game itself is all about destruction. It is a game where you are able to destroy anything you can find. If you can find it in the environment, you can find a way to break it. What better way to get this message across than to allow people to do some destroying of their own?
The team placed a vehicle in the middle of London and filled it with 100 copies of their game. Then they attached a sledgehammer to it and left.
So simple and so smart.
The plan is not get the name out by having those 100 people take their game. It’s about the word-of-mouth and coverage this is going to get afterward. Many of the people that came by didn’t even take a game. In fact there were hundreds of people who stopped to participate. They just wanted to smack a car with a sledgehammer, and who can blame them?
That first person was a brave soul. Just because a car has a sledgehammer on it does not mean you should hit it. At the same time, I guess this acts as a sort of social experiment. If you leave a sledgehammer on your car someone WILL smash it.
At the end of the day this creative social experiment/advertising stunt will get plenty of publicity. Friends will be talking about how they got a free copy of Red Faction by smashing a car and the stories will spread across the internet. I can’t think of a more appropriate or creative way to advertising a game about destruction. Bravo.
With more and more ways to advertise your brand each year, exposure seems to be growing at a rapid rate, but unfortunately clutter is as well. Walk through somewhere like Times Square and you immediately become overwhelmed by the amount of brands that have flashy signs and LCD displays. Your brand gets lost and overlooked very easily.
So how does a company cut through all this clutter and present their brand in a way that engages its viewers and engrains their brand into the mind of the consumer? Take a look at what McDonald’s is doing at Piccadilly, London (the UK equivalent of Times Square).
McDonald’s said the reason why they created this interactive sign was to “give something back to the 34 million people who pass it every year.” And that’s exactly what they did. By allowing a passerby to take pictures of their friends and loved ones interacting with the sign, it’s creating a memorable and fun experience that has the golden arches logo conveniently placed in the bottom of the picture. It’s not overly-aggressive. It doesn’t come at you with a message. It simply invites people to play and have fun.
Perhaps the best part of this interactive tactic is the fact that photographers will soon after be posting their funny pictures all over their facebook, twitter, flickr, and youtube accounts. This ends up being free exposure for McDonald’s. Better yet, it’s positive exposure that it is being generated by ordinary people, rather than the usual exposure coming directly from the company, which can often result in a lack of credibility.
So McDonald’s seems to be doing a great job at creating happy feelings through their advertisements, but I’m still confused….Why do I feel like I’m about to go into a coma each time I finish eating there?
