Smartphones & Tablets, Apples & Oranges

Clients and just about everybody else seem to be confused about advertising on all these new-fangled gadgets.

Added to the mix are odd, stupefying concepts like digital and mobile and native. Most of this stuff is gobbledygook, but I’ll try to separate the chaff from the chaff:

07 December 2012
What is Digital Advertising?
… The newest buzz-phrase has me completely baffled: Native Advertising.  One social media guru described it as advertising that is ‘baked into’ the content. I guess it’s sort of like the old Burns & Allen Show where  one episode had Gracie baking a cake using Betty Crocker Cake Mix, a sponsor…

Television is now digital, commercials are shot with digital cameras – so are all  commercials digital advertising?  Are digital spots on digital radio digital advertising?  Print ads are created on computers, usually rendered as PDFs, delivered digitally. Digital advertising?  Magazines, both editorial and ads, are digitally produced.  Digital advertising?

07 January 2013
Tablets
Moses and the pharmaceutical industry once had exclusive dibs on this word.  Nowadays, tablet commonly refers to a specific type of computer doodad technology.

… The mobile/social media soothsayers will have you believe that there is this unknown, magical mode of persuasion that has never been thought of before – and will reveal itself any day now. 

If you believe that, I have a Blackberry in Brooklyn I want to sell you…

23 October 2012
The Future Of Consumer Doodad Technology
… You should stop thinking about the next big thingamabob and whose will be best.  In five or ten years there will be all sorts of thingamabobs for just about everything.  You’ll have two or three or ten thingamabobs.  Tablets/Smartphones will be big, small, thin, simple, complex, active, passive, out the door in your purse or pocket, lost in your couch cushions.

What is mobile advertising?  It used to be placards on the sides of buses.  Some people still think so.

If I tuck a magazine under my arm and take it with me, is that mobile advertising?  If I’m home on my couch flipping through Flipboard on my tablet that I don’t take anywhere anymore because the thrill of brandishing it is gone, I just use it at home - would those big, almost full screen ads be traditional advertising?

I’ve written about this before:

01 May 2010
Foretellings
…That silly retronym “traditional advertising” will remain the premiere force for introducing people to a product or service, along with sustaining its shelf life. Television, print, radio, and billboard ads will continue to have the visceral power they’ve always had – if only for their sheer size, simplicity, and cutting-edge audio/visual qualities.  Advertising on smartphones will be considered an annoyance, invasive, and rather dinky…

And this:

15 April 2007
Positioning Magazines for Baby Boomers
There are active and passive parts of our day. Without getting into too much psychobabble, as you get older the passive side needs more nourishment. It’s not really passive. It’s focused absorption. At some point you have to climb out of your frenetic digital nest and concentrate on one thing. It might be reading a book, watching a TV show or movie, listening to music, looking out the window.

Or immersing yourself in a magazine.

Tablets are getting bigger, lighter, faster, easier to handle.

Those 6.4 ounces make all the difference when, as you recline while reading or watching a movie, you conk out and the iPad falls forward to bonk you on the nose. The Air won’t hurt you the way the old iPad did.

Smartphones will stop getting bigger – unless some evolutionary quirk transforms human hands to the dimensions of baseball mitts. 

Advertising on smartphones?  Only if you think something half the size of a matchbook cover will catch and hold anybody’s attention. 

Smartphones & Tablets.  Apples & Oranges.  Don’t confuse them.

$10,000 of Free Marketing Down Under

Gill Walker & the folks at Evergreen Marketing in Australia are offering $10,000 of their services for free:

Celebrate our 10th Birthday and win a $10,000 campaign
The winning organisation will get to work with the agency to best spend their $10,000 credit. On offer is a combination of agency hours and supplier services to help both develop and implement the campaign.

I’d take this seriously. Evergreen has an impressive portfolio.

Only a handful of days are left, so click the Enter Here button and fill out the form.

A few TV spots.

CMOs/Ad Agencies are sort of getting the message. Not that they quite know what to do with it after getting it, but efforts are being made. What a shock not to be portrayed as sick, daft, vapid, immature or stupid in any of these ads.

Oscar Mayer:

Cute, sassy. Not sure why this fellow would make fun of a male teenager with long hair.  This ignorance creates a queasy cognizant dissonance for folks fifty to seventy and thereabouts.

Tide Washing Pods:

Not sure why these two have to be retired.  They could simply have busy lives, appreciate the convenience.  It’s as if the advertisers are embarrassed using older folks in a commercial and feel the need to apologize and explain why.  You see, they’re retired.  Now it makes sense.

T-Mobile:

Age-neutral targeting starring Boomers (unlike another one).  A simple, clever campaign making everybody aware of T-Mobile’s global coverage plans.  I laughed out loud at this one:

Overall, pretty good spots.  A few tweaks from some or more older creatives would have helped.

Carmakers should be marketing their hybrids to…

Big surprise:

Carmakers should be marketing their hybrids to … baby boomers
Car companies have long pitched their rides to the young, but the biggest buyers of hybrid cars in the US are the 60-plus set…

The study found that these buyers most valued the pride and prestige of driving an environmentally responsible car…

As usual, I wonder why this is news:

21 December 2007
Green Boomers
Green boomers are more attuned to advertising, both positively and negatively. They pay attention to ads for products they plan to buy, but are more critical and therefore are more likely to believe there is not much truth in advertising. They also wish that advertising included more real product information to help make decisions.

How long have I been saying that? I wrote articles about it four years ago, must have posted about it here twenty times over the last 2½ years…

17 February 2011
Green Boomers Redux
… A few of these Green toy companies might get the smarts – and market their products directly to Baby Boomer grandparents.

16 May 2008
Coming Boom in Boomer-Friendly Transport
My point three years ago was that Baby Boomers were buying up those mid-priced boxy cars (even though they were being marketed to college kids and twenty-somethings) because they were easy to get in and out of, easy to see out of, and some had large dashboards that were easy to read. So why not build cars with these and more features for older drivers?

Along with ‘green’ – the auto industry had better retool with an eye on the 50+ market.

12 March 2009
Who’s gonna buy this car?

__

Two excellent biz/marketing bonus reads by Jonathan Salem Baskin in Forbes:

Boeing Marketing Reorg Illustrates Hazards Of Innovation

Google, Facebook And The Rise Of Zombie Marketing

Facebook And Twitter Do Almost Nothing To Drive Sales

The same day the previous post was tossed up, I read this:

Facebook And Twitter Do Almost Nothing To Drive Sales
by Ashley Lutz
… "While the hype around social networks as a driver of influence in eCommerce continues to capture the attention of online executives, the truth is that social continues to struggle and registers as a barely negligible source of sales for either new or repeat buyers. In fact, fewer than 1% of transactions for both new and repeat shoppers could be traced back to trackable social links."

A surprise? 

02 May 2011
Click this ad. 0.051% do.

25 September 2012
Twitter & Advertising

27 November 2012
Black Friday, Cyber Monday Surpass One Billion Press Releases

07 December 2012
What is Digital Advertising?

So WOMM is a washout. So are banner ads. 

What the hell are these consumers people doing?  Reading stuff? Looking at pictures and silly videos?  Listening to music? Communicating with each other?  Sharing stuff? Being virtually sociable? 

Where are their priorities?  They are supposed to be viewing and clicking ads, then buying stuff. 

Back to that piece in Business Insider:

Mulpuru didn't study small businesses, which she said do disproportionately well in social commerce.

What’s disproportionately well mean?  If fewer than 1% of transactions are influenced by social media for large businesses and their products/services, does this mean that 1% of social media advertising is influential when considering small business products?  Or would it be fewer than 2%? 

Hardly anybody pays attention to social media marketing blather or banner ads. Most product reviews are useless.

That leaves paid search, email, direct marketing, and something we now refer to as traditional advertising… 

15 December 2006
The Brouhaha Over WOMM

Pretty soon, consumers won't believe anybody - even their best friends. They'll realize that they receive the most honest and straightforward information about a product or service from a TV commercial, print ad, or product web site. At least we don't lie about who we are and why we're saying what we're saying.