What is advertising? A one man multinational company?

In a continued effort to question and define the business we work in, here is another edition of What is advertising?

Product demonstrations are almost as old as time itself. Sure Ron Popeil might have popularized the method with his late night infomercials, but demonstrating a product to help sell it, dates back ages. "Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to show you the greatest device ever made ... the wheel. Get from here to there in no time flat. Step right up and give it a spin". Despite all that, product demonstrations don't often get much respect in the ad world. Until now.

Sydney based agency The Hallway is looking to create the worlds smallest multinational company. They've tasked an entrepreneur with creating an empire in three using and do so by using Servcorps' Virtual Office product. And the best part is, he only has three weeks to do it.

What is advertising? A Ghosterbusters reenactment?

So this video is a few months old, which in advertising years works out to be about lifetime. However, I still wanted to share it since it's what spawned the What is advertising? series here on Chocolate Microscope.

Faced with serious budget cuts, the New York Public Library didn't turn to an ad agency to remind people what a great place it was. It didn't even bother with an interactive shop either. Instead, they hooked up with Improv Everywhere. If you're not familiar, Improv Everywhere is a group who "causes scenes of chaos and joy in public spaces". They're probably best known for creating the No Pants Subway Ride.

To generate some buzz about the library the group was asked to recreate the famous opening scene from Ghostbusters. What they lack in sophisticated costumes they make up for in just plain awesomeness.

What is advertising? Burning a logo onto peoples' eyelids?

In a continued effort to question and define the business we work in, here is another edition of What is advertising?

Sometimes it's just a little thing that can take a piece of creative from being just another ad, to something really interesting. Sometimes that little thing can literally happen in a split-second without people even realizing it until they close their eyes. That's the case with this seemingly simple cinema ad for BMW from Serviceplan in Munich. A brief flash of light is used to temporarily imprint the automakers logo onto the eyelids of unsuspecting moviegoers.



(via AdFreak)

What is advertising? Personalized gifts based on Tweets?

In a continued effort to question and define the business we work in, here is another edition of What is advertising?

KLM is the worlds oldest airline, so it's nice to see them taking on such a progressive marketing approach. The Netherland based carrier recently looked to location based social media to help strengthen ties with existing clients. KLM used Foursquare and Twitter to track down passengers who were waiting to depart and gave them small gifts based on their status updates.

For example one traveler was surprised by a KLM rep at Amsterdam Schipol Airport, just as he was about to board, with a voucher for the App store since he had updated his status from his iPad.    

The one-to-one aspect is nice, but the brilliance here comes from who they were targeting. The type of person who would let their network know that they're about to board a flight is the same type of person who'd Tweet about a warm'n'fuzzy moment with a big corporation.

Despite giving out a relatively small number of gifts, in the end this campaign garnered over a million impressions.

What is advertising? A movie filmed by cats?

In a continued effort to question and define the business we work in, here is another edition of What is advertising?

More and more we find ourselves competing for consumers' attention. It's rare that people sit down to watch TV and are solely focused on the TV itself - especially when it comes time for the commercial break. So having people engaged with a marketing message for thirty seconds is harder than it's ever been. Now what about something longer than thirty seconds? Like, I don't know....four minutes and eighteen seconds.

Check out RePURRters. The first movie shot entirely by cats. It's well done, engaging and being a cat lover I watched the entire thing. All four minutesand eighteen seconds of it.

Brought to you by Friskies.

What is advertising? A new file format?

This is a pretty amazing time to be in the ad business. What is being required of us as creatives is being redefine almost on a daily basis. To help explore this, we're going to start a regular series on Chocolate Microscope called, What is advertising? where we look at things that sit outside of traditional advertising and even tradition-non-traditional.

This piece for WWF (the animal people, not the wrestler people) is further proof that a smart idea can easily make up for a lacking budget. Gone are the days when you needed a big TV budget and a huge media spend to get noticed around the world.

To send a message about saving trees and not wasting paper, WWF has created its own unprintable file format. Essentially, it's a modified PDF.

Think about the long term implications here. A more traditional ad might do a good job encouraging people to save paper, but this piece (can we even call it an ad?) actually helps people do it.