M.I.A. has a new track on her album coming out this summer that was inspired by her “Three-Hour Verizon Tech Support Call.”
Gizmodo also says
She actually got Filipino Verizon workers to sing the hook
(heart) M.I.A.
A blow by blow of Hyundai’s dominating 2009.
It strikingly highlights the difference between people who create things and the people who sell them: Apple could see they had a brilliant product, but a terrible way to sell it. TBWA saw a terrible product, but had a brilliant way to brand it.
1% of Retailers have no plans for a Facebook fan page.
These numbers are simply crazy.
Q: (Reader)
My question is about Viagra ads. I just don’t understand the two bathtubs: what does that mean? I’ve been baffled, but didn’t start looking for an answer until my wife started asking the same question. We’ve puzzled over it together.
A: (Stuart Elliott)
The two bathtubs have long been the symbol for Cialis, a drug to treat erectile dysfunction that competes against Viagra (as well as Levitra). I would imagine, dear reader, that the people at Eli Lilly, who have spent billions of dollars to market Cialis, will be profoundly depressed that you confused the two brands.
In any event, the bathtubs have been featured in Cialis advertising since the product came out. The tubs are symbols of relaxing, taking your time, not hurrying, in that a bath is more relaxing than a shower. They reflected that from the start, Cialis advertising was warmer and gentler than ads for Viagra — more feminine, as it were. Other cues included a color scheme of yellow and pastel green and the name, pronounced “See-Alice.”
The differences are meant to underline a basic difference between Cialis and its rivals: while Viagra and Levitra provide a four-hour window during which a man can get and keep an erection, Cialis opens that window to 36 hours.
The continuous presence of women in Cialis ads is a subtle signal that the drug can help them set the pace with their partners, in contrast to the primarily male-driven imagery for Levitra and Viagra. For that reason, Europeans have called Cialis “le weekend” drug.
The longtime agency for Cialis is Grey New York, part of the Grey Group unit of WPP.
Funny, NASCAR works the same way.
“A single shirt worn by one of our athletes on a Sunday afternoon winning a tournament can raise sales 10 percent,” said Tiss Dahan, the senior director of global apparel at Adidas Golf. “We see the influx online, and our customer service phone line will get the calls from retailers who are reacting to requests from consumers. You get somebody playing well in clothes that look good, it really moves the needle for apparel.”
A new anti-premature ejaculation pill, if the FDA ever approves it, is a Johnson & Johnson drug with a marketing plan:
The key words were the last two, “self esteem.” Could this pill really be positioned as a cure for low self esteem? Yup. That’s because Priligy (or dapoxetine) was originally developed as an antidepressant. The sex-extending properties of the drug initially manifested themselves as a side effect.
AdAge has a nice write up on the state of QR/two-dimensional barcodes for mobile marketing. It goes through the blah-blahs on Japan, the current practices by Qdoba, Microsoft and others but omits one glaring point; if Apple puts QR as a priority tomorrow in the iPhone 3.0 spec, it will be the single biggest thing to happen to the QR platform in it’s history. It’s unclear what Apple will do but enabling the iPhone crowd to interact with QR codes right off the bat will be a huge step in making QR marketing mainstream.
If I had to guess on tomorrow, this is not happening but I would love to be surprised.
This is the second beginning of Hulu. When they first started, I and many others, mocked the unnamed joint venture mercilessly but it turned out that they had a working growth model. They’ve added a big backlog and thrived during the election season with an expansive amount of next-day content (hello, BSG). Primarily, they’ve spent a year now working on the kinks and solely relying on word of mouth and they’ve achieved some very impressive growth. Yesterday was effectively Hulu switching on the afterburners. A site that has done almost no advertising whatsoever went out and made a splashy ad on the biggest television stage of the year. Not only did the get one of the hottest television celebrities, Jack Donaghy, but it’s full of fancy CGI and cute lines. Regardless of the ad itself, Hulu has had a lot of magic going for it, the model is working, content is exploding and it’s becoming more useful everyday. To introduce Hulu to everyone beyond the word-of-mouth audience means the beginning of serious hockey-stick growth. This is a very exciting beginning when everyone says Hulu and people wonder why it’s not standard in their setup boxes and TVs themselves.
50” Samsung LCD 1080p with integrated Hulu player? Yes please.
