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.

-Chris

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.

-Wes

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.

-Wes

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?

-Chris

Chili’s has recently done some really smart media buying with their new “P.J. Bland’s” campaign. They decided to premier this new commercial during Saturday Night Live on April 11th. “What’s so smart about that,” you might be thinking. Well, the interesting part is that they bought the very first time slot, directly following the SNL opening monologue. This time slot is usually reserved for SNL spoofs and sketches.

Still not sure why this is such a “smart media buy?” If you watch the video below, you’ll see that the Chili’s name is not even mentioned until the last 3 seconds of the commercial. This means that viewers who usually leave the room during commercials to use the bathroom, grab something to eat, etc. probably stayed and watched the commercial in its entirety, thinking it was produced by SNL. One blogger who confessed that she usually fastforwards through commercials when watching SNL on TIVO, actually rewound the P.J. Bland’s commercial, thinking that she had missed a funny spoof made by SNL.

Not only did Chili’s place this P.J. Bland’s campaign all over TV, but it also has its own web page, Flickr, and even a Twitter account! Check them all out. They are quite interesting.Overall, I think this is a great campaign. Chili’s did a great job with getting eyeballs to watch their ad on TV, with their strategic time slot. They’re also doing a great job with getting exposure to the campaign with an interactive website and Twitter page. My only criticism is “Great strategy, wrong message.” Chili’s is trying to position themselves as the brand that “isn’t bland like the others,” but does this make you want to get up right now and go out for a meal at Chili’s? Just hearing “We’re not bland” isn’t enough to create action. Those cardboard burgers are pretty amusing, but they sure don’t stir up my appetite for Chili’s.

-Chris

Much has been blogged about the Two Things campaign, so I almost hate to jump on the bandwagon. That said, I was thumbing through a recent issue of Rolling Stone when I saw the print version.

I don’t quite get it. The ad’s message, I think, is to equate Old Spice Double Impacts combination of body wash and moisturizer to something else that would be awesome if combined.

But why a centaur? I could think of a dozen other things that would be more awesome when combined.

A bar stool and urinal. A buffalo wing stuffed with blue cheese (this is what happens when I blog too close to happy hour on Friday).

I was reading one of my favorite magazines when I can across this ad for the Scion xD (Scion is a marque of Toyota). I must admit that I thought the car looked pretty sharp (despite the fact that I am a little older than the target demographic.)

Then I read the fine print. And laughed.

Vehicle show is a special project car, modified with non-Genuine Scion parts and accessories. Modification with these non-Genuine Scion parts or accessories will void the Scion warranty, may negatively impact vehicle performance & safety, and may not be street legal. (C) 2008 Scion is a marque of Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc.“]

In the advertising biz, an ad like this one uses a motif we callproduct-as-hero. As the name would suggest, the ad’s creative focuses the viewer’s attention almost exclusively on the product being promoted.

That’s why this ad fails. It shows a product that (a) the consumer can’t buy; (b) if they actually try and modify the xD to resemble the car shown in the ad, they will have voided their warranty and potentially made the vehicle unsafe; (c) the car shown probably isn’t even street legal.

There are times when advertisers may embellish on the positioning of a product to generate an emotional response. No one expects that drinking Pepsi will make them hip, attractive, and surrounded by friends. But depicting your product in a way that is unattainable by the very consumer you’re attempting to woo is just dumb.

Ultimately, we’re left wondering how cool the Scion xD is without all of these non-Genuine parts. The intrepid bloggers at BeSeen captured a purported spy-shot of the misfit of the Scion family:

’nuff said.

Carl