When the economic sentiment is gloomy, marketing efforts to package the iPod as an ideal corporate gift will not be music to one’s ears. This year too, Apple India has attempted to push the iPod as a corporate gift. Aside from print ads, there is even a dedicated website. Curiously, a search for ‘ipod corporate gift India’ on Google does not bring up this site on top but all the online shopping sites come through.…
AdAge reports that New York City is experimenting with 12-foot wide LED screens on the sides of buses. The ads served on these buses will be networked into a central computer, allowing for customization of messages. The messages can be tweaked to target consumers in different ways: the morning route can have messages from say a coffee brand and the evening route can switch to a beer brand. When the bus travels along say a…
The ad blogs’ favourite whipping boy Enfatico used to get panned for every reason under the sun, especially for not releasing any major creative work for Dell since their inception (Enfatico’s inception, that is). Now that they have finally released a campaign for India, they continue to get panned. Read more about it in AdAge, Business Standard and Adrants. The ad is a departure from Dell’s usual Direct Response ads – they feature humans (wow!) and…
The new TVC for Airtel’s Voice SMS is likely to be a popular one. Judging by the comments over at YouTube, everyone seems to lap it up. While the idea of ‘faking’ an emotion to win over a girl is interesting, I thought the idea could have been pushed further. Did they need celebrities at all? The product feature in itself a powerful one. The presence of celebrities gives it a talking point and adds…
From a product strategy point of view I liked the move from Tata Sky to launch their premium DTH service: Tata Sky Plus. Essentially it converts your DTH set top box into a personal video recorder, allowing you to pause, record and rewind live TV. It immediately sets them apart from the competitive DTH space in India. The launch TVC featuring Aamir Khan and Gul Panag (inspired casting, I must say) is quite endearing. While…
Talk about catching them young. A campaign for The Economist (doing the rounds of almost all the ad blogs) caught my eye. Aimed at students of the Greater Philadelphia area, it involved supplying pizzerias with Economist-branded pizza boxes. The cover of the box reinforces the ‘Get a world view’ platform with a pie chart that connects pizza consumption and offers interesting data from around the world. As an aside, for me this is the classic…
Came across a cute little guerilla marketing idea, implemented by Sixt Rent-a-Car at the Hamburg Airport. The problem: several leading car rental brands and others were already present in every nook & corner of the airport through signage and billboards. Sixt literally used the airwaves to break the clutter. Here’s how: they set up powerful Wi-fi networks. Macs and Airport Express were in action (I had to bring Apple in there somehow!) as seen here:…
Sometimes, us agency types get caught up in following the category codes that we end up creating cliched stuff. Refreshing to see work that totally breaks away from that mode. I loved the expression on the ’employee mosquito’ and the way he hides the can. Brings out the idea of ‘sure to eliminate mosquitoes’ with simple humour. After all, if mosquitoes don’t know how to get rid of other mosquitoes, who will? Via Ads of the…
When I first heard about Twine, my reaction was ‘Ho-Hum, another social web service’. Twine was in private Beta for a year with a claim of “the first mainstream Semantic Web application”. Ever since I have discovered it, that feeling has been replaced with ‘Hey, there could be something big here’. ‘Could’ being the operative word. What is Twine? It is an online, social web service for information storage, authoring and discovery. Simply put it…
PC users have over time become familiar with some of the Mac Apps like QuickTime, iTunes. While those are both on the Mac & PC platforms some of the Mac-only apps are quite unfamiliar to PC users. And that’s a pity. Take the case of Pages – for me, it beats the pants of Microsoft Word any day for sheer elegance, user friendliness and design quality of output. Ditto with Keynote as compared to PowerPoint.…