Interactive advertising makes inroads at America’s malls

It had only been a few weeks since my last visit to Sun Valley Mall in Concord, California, but during our trek this weekend, we found that the mall had added two interactive installations that foretell part of the future of advertising.

On entering the mall, we saw a Fox-sponsored “Stop. Scan. Shop.” display driven by both QR codes and proprietary Fox images. The display featured a video monitor playing clips of movies, along with movie ads the featured QR codes. Passers-by could scan the codes with their phones and order the movie for delivery to their homes.

When I got home, I did a bit of research and found that Fox began in… Read More »

Horrifying images make for good headlines, but won’t get people to quit smoking

After October 22 next year, if you want to buy a pack of smokes in the U.S., you’ll have to put up with some pretty distasteful images on the packing. You may, for example, see a smoke-ravaged lung, the corpse of someone who died from smoking, or an image like the one at left. These will be coupled with in-your-face copy like, “Smoking can kill you.”

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has implemented the requirement, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, “to encourage smokers to quit and prevent children from smoking.”

The goal is admirable. (In case you’re wondering, I’m an ex-smoker who hasn’t… Read More »

Groupon ad shows that “wait-and-see” can beat “jerk-the-knee”

One of the great benefits of the real-time web—instant feedback—is also one of its hazards. People react oh-so-quickly to anything that tweaks them the wrong way. Circumspection and patience are words that may vanish from the lexicon. On the other hand, we now know what hundreds of thousands of knees jerking simultaneously sounds like.

It happens when companies introduce new logos, start blogging or tweeeting, or make acquisitions. With few facts and a gutful of emotion, we rip into what we see, often jumping on a bandwagon already teetering under the weight of the me-too crowd. The Judgment Rush is so fast it makes the Gold Rush look… Read More »

The new public relations gut check

Since the advent of public relations, there has been an easy way to explain the profession and differentiate it from marketing and advertising. In fact, I used this method many years ago when I first described what PR to my daughter. My explanation went something like this:

“Advertisers and marketers pay to get their messages to their audiences. In PR, we don’t pay. We earn coverage of our stories.”

The line between paid and earned media was, for a long time, inviolate. There was never any doubt when you crossed the line: If you paid for coverage, you had breached the boundaries of ethical behavior.

Today, a lot of practitioners… Read More »

Lessons from The Gap logo debacle

UPDATE, 10/12/10: While The Gap has announced that it will scrap the new logo in the wake of online criticism, a survey of Gap customers revealed that 17% even knew the company had posted a new logo. For details, take a look at the eConsultancy post that raises the same question I did: Is the online reaction to a design change really representative of your audience?

People don’t like change, or so the old saying goes.

In general, I disagree. People love change. They buy new cars, new clothes, new houses. They try new hair styles, grow mosutaches or beards, get better jobs, want their teams to play in new stadiums. What people don’t… Read More »

Are you ready to incorporate QR codes into your communications?

The surge in smartphone ownership seems to be supporting a parallel rise in the use of QR tags. Marketers, advertisers and communicators should start incorporating tags into their planning now. The cost is minimal and the benefits could be huge.

A week or so ago I was shopping for a TV stand, that piece of furniture that supports a flat-panel television and the various devices (cable box, DVR, gaming console, DVD player, etc.) that stream content to the TV. At Best Buy, the small cards that displayed the price also featured QR codes. Using a free app called BeeTagg on my Android phone, I was able to scan the codess and get more… Read More »

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