Kizmo

Apple products

Sometimes I can be a little late to the party, just the other day it dawned on me, Apple’s marketing campaign is ingenious. Let’s start with Apple.com. A clean, easy to read and navigate. Very open, lots of white space but still a lot of content. The color palette is white and gray which allow pictures and icons to take focus. Apple’s products are similar, cleanly designed, simple and effective user interface understated color. Now lets look at the ad campaign they started a few years back Mac vs. PC. All white, simple and clear statements. There is no clutter to their ads. Everything Apple does follows the same rules, whether it’s an ad, a product or their website. Cohesion, consistent and constant. That has helped shape Apple into a brand that consumers will pay for, respect and continue to follow even when they make mistakes.

Sure, it’s appealing, the label is kind of pretty, and it has pretty clever marketing. Is there anything more healthy sounding than “Vitamin” and “Water?”  Probably not.   How many people do you know that have reached for this bottle instead of soda, thinking they were making a better choice?

However, looking at the label I’ve discovered it should be renamed to “Sugar Water with Some Corn Syrup.” This bottle packs about 33 grams of Sugar (that’s 7.8 teaspoons!) and 125 calories!  You might as well get the soda.

When blogs started making noise about Microsoft’s new children’s book, “Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?“, I confess I rolled my eyes and didn’t pay much attention.  After getting my hands on a copy yesterday, though (thanks, Microsoft!), I realized something that the bloggers either didn’t get, or didn’t make clear.  It’s not really a children’s book.  I mean, it is in the sense that you could read it to kids and they might like it, but my nephew is currently very entertained if you give him a spoon, so that’s not necessarily a testament to the value of the book.  The book is just a funny joke.  It’s clearly meant for adults, and doesn’t actually say much about the server, but it made us laugh out loud, and sparked a conversation about the product in the office. The nice thing about being Microsoft, and having a presumable legion of agencies at your beck and call (Steve, if you’re reading, our lines are open), is that every once in a while, they do a great piece of marketing.  Which is what this is.

Engadget posted pics of every page if you don’t have your own copy.

AdAge’s Small Agency Diary has a good article up on how ad agencies have been dealing with widespread expansion into the interactive advertising world.  We’ve worked with several agencies over the last year or so, who ranged from shops for whom interactive content is a new service, to agencies who’d started strictly as interactive shops.  Guess who’s easier to work with?

The best interactive shops, in my opinion, are those who understand that, unlike print design, producing great interactive ad work is a combination of the traditional model and the process of software development.  And understanding the technology is key for any company that will be producing. Johnson’s three qualities of good interactive companies is a great list. We’re all about #2, of course.  And #3 is about improving process, which is basically my point about understanding, at least to some extent, software development.

With all the dogmatism of brevity, here are 38 things Ogilvy & Mather have learned about advertising.

Peter Merholz has a good post up about how advertising should give some idea of the experience of using the product, and cites Polaroid and the recent iPhone campaign as good examples.

The other side of this approach is brand-centric advertising that’s all about capturing how a product will make you “feel” or how you should identify it (and by extension, yourself?). Soft drink commercials typically go this way, for example. However, in the case of some products, introducing potential customers to your experience via an ad is an amazing opportunity. Besides the examples Merholz mentions, one of my favourites is the campaign that introduced the Wii. A little over the top, but you understood right away what makes the Wii different by watching people playing it (not watching what they were playing).