John Winsor

Election Day Goodies

Starbucks gets it right by giving away a free cup of coffee to anyone who voted. It's amazing the power that comes from doing the right thing.

The Inescapability of Advertising

Going through security at the San Diego airport I saw this ad in the bucket for my computer. I'm not sure this kind of interruption makes me want to order anything from Zappos.com.

The Hook

I had a wonderful conversation recently with fellow CP+Ber Katie Kempner on her podcast radio show, The Hook: On the Bleeding Edge of Advertising and Public Relations. If you haven’t had a chance to check it out, do. It’s good.

Advertising, Wasted

Over the past few months I’ve been hearing the buzz, as I’m sure you had, about GM’s re-entry into the electric car market with the Chevrolet Volt. I guess I didn’t realize that the Volt is at least three years off. You see, the battery technology that Gm’s planning to use is still not ready. Once that’s dialed they’ve got to build a plant to make the batteries, then construction on the Volt can commence two years later, if then.

So, why advertise the Volt? You’d think after all of the bad press GM received over the recall of their first electric car, the EV1, and the movie “Who Killed the Electric Car?” GM would be focused on getting the Volt to market without much fanfare.

Congratulations, Cal?

I was watching the Rockies/Padres playoff game last night when I caught a Chevy Truck ad featuring lots of old images of Cal Ripken, Jr. and the copy of "Congratulations, Cal."

Congratulations, Cal?

It seems like Chevy is only 6 years late. What's up with that? Were they trying to say congratulations for becoming a TBS color commentator? If so, it still didn't make sense.

Rob Reilly on Nightline

Check out ABC's Nightline segment on the connection between Burger King and The Simpson's. Fellow CPBer, Rob Reilly, has a nice interview talking about "The King" and the success of Burger Kings' advertising. Rob, Bill Wright and the rest of the creative team continue to do a great job of keeping "The King" culturally relevant.

Real Time Ads in Video Games

A fellow CPBer, Andrew Goldin just sent me a link to Underdark with this article:

Real as in streaming advertisements piped dynamically to games like EA’s forthcoming Madden 2008, NASCAR 2008, Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008, NHL Hockey 2008, and Skate. An extension of Microsoft’s game ad company Massive Inc. (purchased by the Redmond software leviathan last year for $200 million), the new EA/Microsoft deal will allow advertisers to feed changeable ads live to virtual billboards or other promotional in-game constructs. Goodbye static, built-in, quickly outmoded huckstering, hello voguish virtual real estate with advertising space for sale by the hour, day, week, etc.

It’s working by tracking the number of seconds players have seen an ad, and then switch it every 10 seconds. 10 seconds of ads view in a game would cost 10$, to be view by millions of players around the globe. Yeah, it’s more advertisements (and who needs those?), but it will also make car-driving video games much more “life like”, when you’re driving through town and the billboards are advertising things that are actually relevant, or at least produced in this decade.

“We’re thrilled to be EA’s trusted partner for dynamic in-game advertising for these products,” said Cory Van Arsdale, Massive Inc. CEO. “The addition of EA’s leading titles to our network represents a tremendous opportunity for brands targeting the youth demographic and sends a clear message that in-game advertising has arrived as a compelling medium for marketers,” he added.

Yankee Group estimates indicate around $26 million was spent in 2006 on dynamic in-game advertising, with the number expected to rise up to $100 million before the end of the year - and up to $650 million within three years.

As gaming becomes even more dynamic they look for them to relace stortelling as the paradigm used to describe human communications in advertising.

Advertising, Past Tense

The Break Up
Uploaded by geertdesager

Kudos to Whilst Geert Desager, Trade Marketing Manager for Microsoft, who created this video and started the blog, Bring the Love Back.

Geert just made Microsorft way cooler, in my book.

Word is that Geert was inspired by David Armano's recent Businessweek article entitled, "It's the Conversation Economy, Stupid."

Genius

I love the way these ads shift the conversation from just being about the product to talk about a service, as well.

Seth on the Future of Ad Agencies

Seth always gets to the heart of the matter.

“What ad agencies ought to do, in my opinion, is not focus on selling ads anymore. And instead, focus on getting in deeper within the clients, and help the clients make products that people want to talk about.”

“The problem is that ad agencies have defined themselves as the people who take the mediocre products and add interesting ads to them, and washed their hands and say, we can’t do anything about what the factory brings us. And my answer is, of course you can, and the clients actually want you to, you’re just not working hard enough to get that piece of business.”

“Style and fashion spread through the ad agency business really fast. But they’re very bad at changing what they do for a living, they’re very bad at any form of new media, they’re bad at pushing clients to really dramatically, fundamentally reinvent themselves. What they’re very good at is adopting a new slogan or a new look or a new image. That’s deckchair re-arranging.”

“The way to get promoted in an ad agency is to get a new client who spends lots of money on television. Well, if that’s the way you get promoted, what do you think people are going to do all day?”