There has been a lot of noise recently about advertising needing to re-invent itself to stay afloat in today’s times. Advertising nowadays has to work much harder for my attention, as it probably does with a lot of people, just because there is so much of it. I subscribe to the logic that necessity is the mother of invention – and from that point of view, the financial crisis seems to be bringing out the entrepreneurial side in some (such as Hank Leber and Agency Nil, about which I wrote recently for PSFK).
Not completely related to the recession but still interesting are the advertising methods employed by a few brands, such as the US TV channel Showtime, who are using Amazon’s Kindle as an altogether different way of advertising by making the pilot script of their to-be-premiered series ‘Nurse Jackie’ available for free download for a limited period. That’s a first for that medium. And a few days ago I read in Campaign the news of an Israeli advertising agency that used last week’s Champions League final to superimpose a medical product ad at a relevant time for the brand during the match. Whenever a player fell down and got injured or otherwise experienced pain, the ad for Optalgin would flash across the screen. That kind of manual synchronising of ad placements (the agency worked with Israel’s Channel 2 to capture what they thought were the ‘most effective shots of fallen players’, apparently, as insensitive as that sounds!) is definitely not very common as far as I am aware. Here’s a clip:
I’d probably be irritated if ads flashed across the screen during a television serial that I was watching (Jimmy Choo ads during Sex And The City, anyone?), so this kind of ad placement needs to be meticulously planned and researched – repetition of a potentially irritating ad can be a death knell for a brand, and I’m sure that while it may have been accepted in Israel, something like that will not go down too well with British football fans AT ALL!! Priyanka, that’s you!
One Size Fits One 