If you’re expecting to read something about Tom Cruise, “tighty whities” or dancing with shades you’re just another victim of a marketing stunt to promote this blog. After internalizing and accepting your weakness for false advertising, it’s time for business.
Today’s demographics are way more diverse and extended than the usual; gender, age and economic status. Our market is full of different niches, which divide into sub niches, groups and cliques. Most people see this as a problem while others see it as an opportunity, which translate into different ways of advertising products and the creation of new products.
I once heard a celebrated ad-teacher say, the creative process of an agency stops when the rules and regulations of the FCC start. Lets face it, this isn’t Europe, where creative is a no-boundaries department that can use a topless woman to sell milk or create a whole interactive veggie-city, like the case of burger king’s ad agency in Amsterdam, to take the whopper experience out of the restaurants. We live in a conservative society, with conservative values and conservative regulations. We are accustomed to dull ads that rarely over-pass the “noise” that is created by all the media surrounding us. Even when your product or ad campaign can be better represented with that great idea that is not so “conservative”, you have to be satisfied with what the mass media lets you communicate to your client. Let’s take ZUJI’s, an online travel agent from Australia, help a friend take a break campaign as a perfect example on how a company can interact, in a humorous non conservative way, with its clients through the internet to pursue their “take a break” concept. We don’t have to go to the farthest corners on earth to find some innovative and risky ads, Samsung’s London based agency just caused buzz all over the web with its, YouTube streamed, HD camera trick challenge which couldn’t be aired on any other medium due to its long running time, and other media’s lack of interactivity. Samsung caught viewer’s attention span for more than one minute and half paying only for production.
Even locally the Internet has been able to generate excellent traffic results with relatively minimal effort. During this year’s Fiestas de la Calle San Sebastian, Open Mobile hired us and our sister company WiFiwyg, to stream live from the festivities. We set up cameras around San Sebastian street capturing all 4 days, real time, day and night, and transmitted it through fiestasdelacallesansebastian.com, which directed to a SanSe themed version of Open’s website with the Live streams running on it. By streaming live, straight from the street without censors or delays, Open ran the risk of capturing all sorts of non-PG content from the revelers down below, but through the combined efforts of a premiere domain, compelling content, and a little risk-taking, Open received over 20,000 unique visitors during the weekend (orders of magnitude above their regular weekend traffic) which resulted in a considerable spike of phone calls and conversions.
Instead of kneeling down and cutting short the creative process, agencies should try different solutions and methods to get the clients’ message out. We should start following high end marketer’s trends like Nike and Sony’s Europe web methods.
The internet is our savior, with channels like YouTube, networks like twitter and thousands of sites with advertising space our imagination can go wild without leaving out the strategy.
Its time to start selling creative solutions here in Puerto Rico. Where there’s a will, the internet is the way.
