On our commute to the city we are bombarded with adverts promoting miracle anti-wrinkle creams or a cure to male pattern baldness. Usually we never give these ads a second glance, probably because we know better than to believe that such a magic elixir exists (well, not an affordable one anyway!). So how do marketers draw the astute commuter's gaze from their smart phone or free newspaper? A spot of humour and elaboration can do the trick!

Stubhub Advert: "They can't go, so you can"

Stub Hub is a very simple idea; when someone can't make a concert, you can buy their tickets via their website usually at a discounted rate. While the site is highly profitable, trying to communicate such a basic message in an interesting way can be tricky. Even if you have the best website in the world, unless people are aware of it, it's useless. So how did StubHub overcome the simplicity of their marketing message? 
By throwing a little elaboration and humour into the mix. 

Firstly, the advert is not a visual display of Stub Hub's desire for someone to be hospitalised so that they would be forced to sell their tickets on StubHub's website (well, I hope not anyway!). The point of the advert is to get your attention while making the marketing message clear and concrete.The ad is clearly designed with tongue  firmly in cheek and is a bit far fetched, but has successfully made a straightforward, simple message funny and engaging! Putting out an advert featuring the typical reasons for selling your concert tickets like needing extra cash or having a cold, is either to difficult to communicate in print or too boring. So in this case a slight, humorous elaboration on the truth has worked wonders.

Scimx #Bossit advert
The protein shake market is saturated and with a thousand and one different market offerings, it's hard to know which one is the best. In such an environment brands need to look to creative advertising to stand out when their USP or positioning are ineffective. The image above is part of Scimx 's #bossit campaign to promote their new range of health supplements.

 Demonstrating the functional attributes of its product is nothing new for a sports nutrition company. We have all seen the image of a ripped topless man holding a protein shake in one arm while flexing the other. While all these adverts seem the same, promoting the physical benefits of usage is the best form of advertising for products of this nature. But that does not mean all the adverts have to be predictable or boring.

By Scimx displaying a picture of a destroyed punching bag demonstrates the physical benefits of their product but in a novel way. No one is expecting that after drinking one protein shake they will be able to destroy a punching bag, but the image is certainly a head turner. Men are becoming increasingly immune to the use of the "ideals" of male beauty in adverts. This is because everyone seems to be offering the same thing, a big muscular body. When this happens the "ideal" is no longer associated with one specific product thus diminishing its effect on buying behaviour. 

In order for advertising to utilise the power of these ideals they need to make them realistically unattainable, yet something to strive for. Having a muscular body is something we can all obtain with the right exercise and diet, but punching your way through a punching bag is something reserved for the Gods. The bait of self improvement can be a powerful tool in marketing when it is used correctly, and this is an excellent example of that.We know that are not likely to ever attain such God- like strength. However, by pairing the aspiration with their product in our heads, Scimx are using "fantasy" to crave out a distinctive position for themselves in the marketplace. Well it certainly got me daydreaming! 

Mcdonalds Sexist Sausage and Bacon Sandwich

Whenever you advertise sex-typed products you need to consider how it will be viewed by both sexes. By suggesting a product should only be used by one gender you are naturally inviting backlash from the excluded sex. Now, this is obviously not the problem when it comes to products which are biologically designed for one gender e.g tampons. However, when it comes to food it's very hard to determine which sex should be eating what. In today's enlightened society, a persons biological gender does not wholly determine whether they will exhibit sex-typed traits. In other words, people do not always conform to the behaviour, or possess the characteristics typically associate with their sex.

Mcdonalds seem to believe that eating a sausage and bacon sandwich is something reserved only for the male population, and is a symbol of their "maniliness". So if we go along with this false logic and say that women don't like eating bacon or sausage sandwiches (sorry ladies), why would Mcdonalds present the sandwich so "effeminately"? In the photo the sandwich is very neatly presented with each layer of filling clearly visible . This is far from the "manly" image you would expect to see of a burger that Mcdonalds claim is a right of passage for any human possessing a Y chromosome! I think there must have been a bit of miscommunication between the concept team and the visual department (or maybe visual team were playing a joke on their backward thinking co-workers!). But not only have Mcydees ignored the fact that females also enjoy a nice fry up on the weekend and have made an odd image choice, the print advert is rather offensive too!

Left is a picture of the Mcdonalds advert whereby they poke fun at the male commuter for engaging in "female" pass times. Here we have "Looked at the horoscopes this morning? Reclaim your manliness". I have also seen one which castrates men for reading the gossip columns. Now as a man I am slightly offended by these remarks. I personally don't read the horscopes, but on the train I will often glance over the guilty pleasures column. As the title of the section illustrates, it is fun to read about what crazy antics the celebs are getting up too, and reading it I for one feel no less manly.What Mcdonalds seem to be forgetting is that masculinity and femininity are not biological characteristics. 

Today, what it means to be a man or a woman is in a constant state of flux, for example, metrosexual males.  I think Mcdonalds made a mistake with this advert and I even think that the team behind it weren't able to agree on the concept based on the photo's mix message. Going forward maybe the golden arches should just say "Hey, here's a new burger", and avoid trying to give a burger a gender!

Celebrities endorsing products or starring in commercials is something that we have become accustom too. But is it something we have also now become immune to? The logic behind utilising star power to sell a product or service is straightforward. Celebrities embody cultural meanings, they symbolise important categories like status (eligible bachelor, such as George Clooney) or even personality types (the geeky but endearing Simon Bird from the Inbetweeners).

The brand/advertiser first decides what meaning the product wants to convey, i.e how it will positioned in the market place, then chooses the star that embodies that meaning. The idea is that the celebrity will be used as the vehicle to the communicate that meaning to the consumer.  This is exactly what happen when Giorgio Armani chose Waiting All Night singer Ella Eyre to be the new face of his perfume. According to the infamous designer  Miss Eyre "perfectly embodies the creative and musical spirit of the  Emporio Armani Diamonds fragrance" due to her "individual style and..personality."

In theory then every one of these types of partnerships need to make sense. In other words, there needs to be a logical connection between the two with their brand images complimenting one another's. This is related to the consistency principle whereby we value harmony in our lives and the things we see around us. In that respect we respond better to these brand partnership when we can see this connection. Sadly, this not always case and this is why this 'star power effect' is waning.

Nowadays celebrities as sticking their name on anything and  the logic behind these partnerships has been thrown out of the window. The effect of this is twofold. Firstly, the brand is not getting any benefit from the partnership if the message they wish to convey is not clear due to a poor choice of celebrity. Let's take the recent collaboration between Avicii and Volvo. Apart from their shared heritage (both are Swedish) their brand images are so missed matched. Volvo is marketed as a safe, reliable family car company, and Aviicii a dance music producer wouldn't like to think that his personal brand meets any of that criteria. Secondly, due to the vagrancy with which celebs use their name, the influence they have on our purchase decisions is decreasing. Recent studies suggest that by enlarge "celebrity endorsements [are] largely ineffective and fail to yield the benefits popular wisdom promises".  In fact, these studies have shown that ads featuring the average user are significantly more effective.

So what is the reason for this shift? Well, compared with ten years ago consumers are more sophisticated and are less easily persuaded. The ubiquitous nature of the internet and social media have caused this change as consumers have become more autonomous buyers. Instead on relying on what an ad tells them about a brand, they can discover this for themselves on their phone, tablet or laptop. This information however won't only come from the companies website but from their peers on social media. Those with a big social presence have usurped the influential position that celebs once occupied. Vloggers, Bloggers, Instagrammers are the new celebrities as consumers are influenced more by someone more like them than someone that they have very little in common with. Today, consumers are in the driving seat when it comes to their purchase habits, and adverts need reflect this change.  The information and entertainment value of an ad needs to be more significant than the air brushed celeb on screen. In other words, consumers want to see how the product or service will enrich their own lives, not the celebrity's!

Big companies has recognised this chang and have reacted accordingly. Apple Watch ads feature the average user and imaginatively demonstrates how the product would fit into our to day-to-day lives. In a similiar vein, Google did this with their new app advert. This Ad features 'normal' questions being posed by  'normal' people.

Now, should celebrity endorsements be a thing of the past? No. But they should be used strategically. Celebrity endorsements can fulfil a our basic need, the need to belong/to fit in. Nike, for example, does this so well. Celebs are represented as being "cool" so if  you want to be cool wear Nike; if you are cool, you are probably wearing Nike. 

Another occasion when star power is useful  is when the nature of product the deems them necessary. Nike is first and foremost a sports brand, and in any sport everyone vying to be the best. The athletes featured in Nike's adverts are at the top of their respective fields, a position that all budding athletes aspire to be in. Therefore by associating the successful star with the brand, the brand becomes the brand of the winners, which is something the consumer can buy into.

So what's the moral of the story? Make sure the celebrity represents what your brand represents!

Just when I thought the Iphone 6 was a massive leap forward in technology, along comes Persona Synthetics. Over the weekend I was captivated by their adverts featuring Sally Synth, "the help you have always wanted".

While we watch her perform a number of household tasks - cooking, cleaning, caregiving- the voiceover describes Sally as "a teacher, a helper, and a friend". But before I could tell my mum that she no longer has to put up with my poor attempts at mowing the lawn, twitter burst my bubble. Eager to share the news I took to social media, but before long I had found out that this was nothing more than a marketing stunt for Channel 4's new drama #Humans.Words couldn't surmise my disappointment, but before I resign myself to a lifetime of chores I thought I would share with you the merits of this marketing campaign.

Diving straight into the deep end with the consumer behaviour jargon, let's discuss message-response involvement. The amount of information we process from an ad depends on our levels of involvement. This can range from simple processing, when you consider the name of the brand, all the way to elaboration whereby you fully engage with the ad and add new bits of information to your memory. These differing levels of involvement are often mediated by the media platform on which you are exposed to the marketing message. Print is a high-involvement medium because the reader must first choose to actively process the information, and can revisit a parts of the ad before moving on. In contrast, television is a low-involvement medium. Apart from the ability to flick to the next channel, we possess very little control over the adverts we are exposed to.So therein lies the question, "How do marketers get people "involved" with their TV advert?" Well, one solution is to incorporate novel stimuli or do something out-of-the ordinary  like...I don't know.... have and ad about the latest generation of Human Snythetic?

With the sheer amount of adverts that we are exposed to on a daily basis, creating one that is both visually and mentally stimulating is essential if you hope to cut through the clutter. Creating an advert which appears to be promoting a mysterious new line of human robots will do exactly that! The mystery and confusion helps to increase our level of involvement as we pay more attention in order to work out what this ad is really about. But this ad is not only engaging, it also is "sticky". Sticky ads are ones which the audience remember and can effect their behaviour. This is exactly what these adverts were able to do as people took to twitter to voice their confusion and in some cases- horror- at the adverts.

By producing an ad shrouded in mystery, the architects we able to create a "buzz" about their advert. Buzz marketing, a facet of viral marketing, is about getting people to share opinions or information about a certain brand or event on the internet. This is mostly done via the social networks like Facebook and Twitter and is typically, as in this case,  all about increasing awareness. This sort of marketing can be positive or negative, or as you can see from the tweets above, a bit of both. But as the saying goes any publicity is good publicity, and while most people were a bit freaked out they could appreciate the novelty. Using controversy to create a buzz can be risky, and if there is too much controversy the buzz will turn into backlash against those who initiated it. Luckily for people over at Channel 4, they found the "sweet spot". There was enough controversy to incite debate but not enough to cause mass outrage at the human synths (remember Irobot?). Viewers were more intrigued than offended by Persona Synthetics first TV advert. Furthermore, the website and apparent opening of the flagship store on Regent street only served to pique our interest.

Setting up an official looking website and having billboards on Regent Street advertising the launch of a store might seem a step too far, but its all part of an effective marketing campaign. To ensure that the maximum amount of people were exposed to the Human synths, this was part of Channel 4's 360-degree branding. People respond differently to different marketing communications tools.So by having a variety of touch points, people have the opportunity to engage with the marketing message in a way they deem to be most useful. Beyond this Integrated Marketing Communication practice, it also makes the campaign more immersive! Coming back to this idea of involvement, making an advert which people feel they can engage with beyond the parameters of social media, brings it to life and is 100% more thought provoking. Making the transition for advert into real life can be hard but when its done well it can lead to a stage of narrative transportation, whereby people are fully engrossed in the campaign.

A perfect example of how effective this cross over can be are the Comparethemarket adverts. They feature the Russian meerkat Aleksandr Orlov, the founder of comparethemeerkat.com. Launched in 2009, its centres on the meerkat's annoyance at humans mistaking his website for comparethemarket.com due to the similarity between the words "market" and "meerkat". You can actually visit the website and they have recently given you the opportunity the get your very own Orlov toy when you buy the from comparethemeerkat..... sorry Orlov......... comparethemarket. The interactive campaign increased the sites market share in 2010 by 76% and in April of this year, compare the market launched Meerkat Movies offering customers 2 for 1 cinema tickets.

So while this Channel 4 campaign will probably run for no longer than a month, they imaginative blend of realism with traditional advertising is a refreshing way of promoting a TV series at a time when a new series seems to start everyday. I just hope they follow in the footsteps of Comparethemarket and offer free human synths when you watch the show!

User-generated content is nothing new, but where once it was just integrated with the marketing strategy, it has now become a pivotal part of it . People are becoming immune to the traditional marketing communications. You can flick through a magazine or surf through the internet without noticing a single advert or banner, so how do marketers get your attention? Well, that's where content marketing comes in. The practice 'attracts and retains customers by consistently creating and curating relevant and valuable content with the intention of changing or enhancing consumer behaviour.' Bit of a mouthful? Put simply, content marketing is the art of communicating with customers and prospects without selling anything. But this communication is even more effective when its comes from the customers themselves. 

The source of a message greatly affects how well it is received. In the age of retweets and shares, marketers have realised that people want to engage with the marketing messages they see in the media. More than that, when these messages are C2C rather than B2C, they are more convincing. This is why every marketing touch point has little social media icons or a hashtag. Existing customers will tweet, or post about the campaign, and prospects can see what their peers are saying about the product or brand by simply searching for the hashtag. But user-generated content goes one step further by getting people to make the content themselves. 

The TFL Travel Better London campaign uses poems to explain how passengers can reduce disruption and make the travelling environment more pleasant. Have you seen them? They are quite amusing. Back in February, TFL invited commuters to write a rhyme about a travel habit that can be changed, such as dropping litter. This not only got their target audience, the commuters, engaged with the campaign via the hashtag #helpie, it encouraged active participation. As the campaign managers released "We know that the real champions for considerate commuting are commuters themselves. So we set up a competition where they could submit their own poetry about travel etiquette". 

But the best example of user-generated content are the "Shot on Iphone 6" adverts. Apple are displaying mesmerising photos taken by ordinary people using their Iphone camera.  While it might seem that the marketers over at Apple are running out of ideas, it's the simplicity of the campaign that makes it work so well.
People can see the functional capabilities of the Iphone 6 in one single photo, without Apple having to spend any time or money on a traditional TV advert.  I don't know about you guys but after seeing the clarity of these photographs, I am really considered getting an Iphone. Apple know that in today's society everyone is an amateur photograph, and when it comes to buying a new phone, camera quality is a big consideration! These outdoor adverts are therefore tailored to the needs of existing customers, but also to the millions of people in search of the perfect selfie! Apple also invite us to view their world gallery on their website. It features a Tumblr style gallery of equally beautiful photos taken by Iphone users around the world. So with one single photo Apple has effectively communicated their products' photographic capabilities, engaged their target market and driven traffic to their website where you can purchase the phone. Genius! 

As you can see when content marketing is executed correctly, especially when it is user-generated, it can be a brilliant marketing tool. My only worry is, as consumers become more involved in the marketing strategy, us marketers might find ourselves out of a job!

Last month Jay Z unveiled his new streaming service, Tidal, alongside some of his fellow investors. Hov has managed to convince some of the biggest names in the music industry to invest in his new enterprise with a 3% share in the company. But things are not going swimmingly for Tidal (pun intended), and it looks like Mr Carter will have a very empty grammy's table next year! Despite promising high quality streaming  and exclusive content from the signees themselves, Jay Z's Tidal dreams seem to be crashing down around him (last one I promise). So why is it going so wrong?

Well to start with, enlisting some of the richest people in music to talk about how they don't get enough money for their efforts, isn't the smartest move! The artists said that they wanted to take charge of streaming's future, amid criticism by musicians -- including Taylor Swift -- that industry leader Spotify offers insufficient compensation. But couldn't they see that an argument based on "insufficient compensation" wasn't going to convince the millions of people who barely make ends meat! Perhaps they should have listened to British band Mumford and Sons, who voiced dismay at the sight of highly paid stars complaining about payments during Tidal's launch party. In a recent interview, lead singer of Death Cab for Cutie, Ben Gibbard, gave his thoughts about the plight of these celebs;

“I think they totally blew it by bringing out a bunch of millionaires and billionaires and then having them all complain about not being paid....That’s why this thing is going to fail miserably.”

A little harsh in my opinion, but I can see where he is coming from. Tidal don't make their case for fair play when unlike their main rival Spotify, it doesn't have any free level to subscriptions. This means even if you just want to get a taste of the new streaming service, you need to be prepared to part with at least £9.99 a month for the pleasure. Tidal is also relying on quality over quantity, as Tidal's count of 25 million tracks is 5 million less than Spotify. I don't know about you, but I would much prefer a bigger music catalogue than a marginal improvement in sound quality. I mean, how many times have you heard your friends complain about the sound clarity on Spotify? Despite these criticisms, Jay Z is still adamant that his high quality service will be successful, it just needs time.

"We are here for the long haul. Please give us a chance to grow and get better" 

But the biggest problem facing Tidal going forward is how similar it is to the other streaming platforms. For a new business to be successful it needs to fill a gap in the market. So what gap is Tidal filling? Russ Crupnick, managing partner of streaming industry research firm MusicWatch, sums up the lack of innovation;

"..the product is pretty good, but there’s nothing special about it. Where Spotify has a free option and allows users to create on-demand playlists with a social element, and Pandora generates free custom radio stations, Tidal is just an app that streams music – for a hefty price."

Jay Z hopes to differentiate Tidal from competitors by locking down exclusive streaming windows with artists. The service will be signing first-window deals with artists, wherein music would be made available on Tidal first before being released on other streaming services. The other incentive is its exclusive content. But this might be good enough.

According to The Wrap, people don’t seem to care much about exclusive content – or they find ways to listen without paying.  For example, Beyonce's new video 'Die with you' was only made available to Tidal subscribers, but ended up on Youtube one a day later! So no offence to the n**as in Paris rapper, but he is going to need to come up with something a lot better if he is going to convince me to put my hand in my pocket!