Category: Advertising

Advertisers Fight the Filters: The Battle Continues

For years, consumers have sought ways to avoid and filter out advertising. And advertisers have fought back with ways over, around and through the filters. Here are two recent developments in the battle:

Product placement: as TIVO has damaged television advertising by allowing viewers to fast-forward past commercials, product placement has become an increasingly important source of revenue for broadcasters. Allesandra Stanley of The New York Times, tongue perhaps slightly in cheek, suggests an Emmy for the Product Placement category, and rates many recent efforts to integrate products into shows.

Twitter Advertising: meanwhile, Tech.blorge points to an AdWeek report that Pay-Per-Tweet is coming to Twitter. According to AdWeek:

Izea, formerly called Pay Per Post, is readying a Twitter ad platform called Sponsored Tweets that will offer Twitter users the option of sending their followers messages about brands and products. Twitterers will get paid based either on the number of clicks they receive or on a flat fee per Tweet.

In a test campaign, Blockbuster tweets carried the hashtag #spon to indicate a sponsored message. Tech.blorge points out that this may give Twitter users a way to filter the messages right back out again:

Twitter users have been notoriously fickle about spam entering the site, but so long as the Tweets carry a hashtag, there will be solutions beyond simply unfollowing the user putting out the messages.  Thanks to third-party services such as TweetDeck, a method for users to read the messages on their desktop, you can set up filters to hide any messages with specified hashtags that you want.  It’s easy to imagine that the #spon posts will quickly get filtered out by the majority of users, which leads one to believe the system will either be a failure, or users will just conveniently forget to include the tag.

Someone, no doubt, is working on a way to beat the filters. And so it goes.

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The Power of a Good Radio Jingle

When I lived in New York (1986-1994), the Kew Motor Inn in Queens was a regular radio advertiser.

The Kew offered “short-stay” rates — if you were looking for a discreet, 2-3 hour staycation with someone special, The Kew Motor Inn had a theme room for you.

The commercials often ended with a short jingle. This afternoon I asked my wife whether she remembered the lyrics. I had to start it off, but three words into it she started singing along:

Our summer romance always begins
With me and you at the Kew Motor Inn!

Neither of us ever went there when we lived in New York (at least I know I didn’t…), but nearly fifteen years after having last heard the jingle, we can both still sing it from memory.

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Check out Phil Bernstein’s Facebook Fan Page — and become a Fan – here

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Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert, at 503-323-6553.

Brochure Copy Word Choice: A Nice Example

While sitting in the reception room of a local med spa (a sales call, I assure you), I picked up a brochure for a product called Radiesse.

wrinkle correction

The key word here is “correction”.

They could have said “filler”  (in fact, they do, in the inside copy). Or “smoother”. Or “eraser”. But “correction” gives the process a completely different implication.

You correct an injustice. You correct poor vision.

“Corrected” changes wrinkles from a natural result of the aging process to a medical problem. And using Radiesse is converted, in the target’s mind, from an expensive exercise in vanity to a necessary treatment of a health condition.

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Check out Phil Bernstein’s Facebook Fan Page — and become a Fan – here

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Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert, at 503-323-6553.

It’s All About the Story

Over the last 14 years, I’ve met with hundreds of business owners. It’s my job to learn as much as I can about the business, figure out what’s special about it, and effectively communicate that story to customers and prospects.

A couple of guys named Rhett and Link somehow crossed paths with TDM Auto Sales in High Point, North Carolina. The business itself appears to be nothing out of the ordinary — it’s just another used car lot in a small town. But Rhett and Link found something special: Rudy, a Cuban immigrant with a thick accent. Rudy’s last name is never given. He may or may not be the owner.

But Rudy has a story — he was once a gynecologist in Cuba — and a sense of humor.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b5CKSqlz60&feature=fvw]

Don Fitzgibbons, the Guru of Ads, likes to say that there’s only one way to tell a good ad from a bad one — find out if it worked. So I’m asking:

If I have any readers in the High Point, NC area, please advise — is this commercial driving genuine car-buying traffic to TDM Auto Sales?

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Check out Phil Bernstein’s Facebook Fan Page — and become a Fan – here

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Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert, at 503-323-6553.

What Business Are You Really In?

From Dan Kennedy’s recent book No B.S. Marketing to the Affluent:

An excellent lesson in selling a gift of any kind comes from the mail-order jeweler Karets and Facets, which target-markets to the mass affluent. A page of outstanding sales copy from the company’s catalog… is headlined “Guaranteed Gasp or Your Money Refunded.” This company understands that it isn’t in the jewelry business, but in the gasp business.

I’m in the attention-rental business. How about you?

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Check out Phil Bernstein’s Facebook Fan Page — and become a Fan – here

Click here to learn the shocking truth about Phil Bernstein

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Request your free copy of Phil Bernstein’s white paper, The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes and How to Fix Them here.

Got a question? Call Phil Bernstein, Portland’s Advertising Expert, at 503-323-6553.