As many of my readers know I am a sports fan. I am also a decent athlete. I played numerous sports in high school and played intramural sports in college and to this day. I watch just about anything on t.v. that is sports related.
I say this because hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars are spent on advertising during sporting events throughout the year. Between sponsoring events, taking corporate sponsorships of sports stadiums, the seemingly endless repetition of television commercials, and banner and pop up ads on sports news sites, it's really hard to not notice this marketing effort.
Let's focus on television commercials today. As with any competitive market, marketing ads must distinguish themselves in order to be effective. With commercials the typical options are comedy, cuteness, wierdness, occasionally the 'Oh my god, I have to go out and by that right now' commercial or 'cool factor', or finally the so insanely annoying you can't get the commercial out of your head approach. All of these options, along with others not mentioned, can be effective when done right. Of course this all depends on the viewers point of view.
However, sometimes you really have to question why a certain commercial was deemed to be 'the one', or rather the final cut. For many people, the Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld commercials left you scratching your head. But at least you could kinda figure out that they had something to do with Microsoft. Budweiser does a great job of making fun and/or funny commercials that are easily recognizable during the Superbowl. GoDaddy.com, a website domain name hoster/provider, had very effective Superbowl commercials two years ago in that there were lots of scantily clad women running around and the commercials were fun. The problem was, while there was a web address at the end of the commercial, when you went to this address you could not find the commercials but instead found the boring domain name website. The CareerBuilder Superbowl commercials from last year's Superbowl were very strange but were also attention drawing... you really wanted to know what this commercial was about and in the end you were easily able to figure it out.
Sometimes you see great commercials that do everything but tell you what you really want to know, "What/who is this about?" Such an example is in the link below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4dm-OnmLXY&feature=channel_page
This commercial does a lot of very good things. While watching you are drawn in by the popular figures; it's got good background music that sometimes gives you goosebumps; it's a very tame commercial and not really annoying, even after watching it several times in a short amount of time. The one BIG thing it doesn't have is, what is this commercial really about?
Is it a sports commercial? Is it another randomwebservice.com ad? Is it an ad for some new clothing line? Anti-drug commercial? Ok you get the picture. On one hand, this commercial has drawn lots of attention from personal blogs such as mine; on the other hand, there is no direct links to this actual company's website found in Google/Yahoo/etc when you search on "What is G" or "G commercial" (at least not as of Tuesday 1/5/09). Fortunately for this company the internet has evolved to the point where any random person can find an answer to just about anything. Somehow this has been termed 'viral marketing'. I liken it to crapshooting.
I'd wager that if you put numbers against numbers, traffic and more importantly sales are much higher when there is a clear message of who/what the commercial is about and when you have directed listing in Google/Yahoo for visitors to click on and visit your website. I get viral marketing when it's cheap... but when you spend millions on a commercial and hope for a viral marketing reward... something's wrong with your marketing department.
In case you are wondering this commercial is for Gatorade, who has decided that they needed a complete re-brand of their entire product line. I'll save my thoughts on this for my next blog.
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Monday, October 6, 2008
LOL
I find the use of the term LOL to be quite overused. Typically I use this term abundantly in my text messages and in email, though I am trying not to use it as much these days. I generally don't use it in my blogs.
When you think about it, how often do you 'laugh out loud' in your normal conversations? Probably not as often as you use LOL in your texts or emails. I guarantee that most of the time, when you use the term LOL you use it because what you just read was slightly funny or silly, but was not enough to really make you laugh (out loud). Or possibly you are trying to convey that something you are saying is funny or silly and not meant to be mean or serious. It's almost as if we're apologizing before we speak so as not to offend our audience. Ironically, most of the people that we text or email with, and specifically that we would use the term LOL with are our friends and family, so we shouldn't have to apologize up front for what we say. The should typically know whether you are making a sarcastic remark or whether what you are saying is a serious statement or not. If they do not they most certainly should not take anything you say so seriously that they would be offended by it.
The term LOL was specifically developed for text and email and led to an entire genre of "new" words. The genre has many websites dedicated to it such as lolcats, etc. It's led to a generation of web users and texters who have become lazy in their english and grammar. But this is not my main point, I want to focus solely on LOL usage.
I cringe at what a conversation would sound like if people talked using LOL in their verbal language. Can you imagine? (Keep in mind that the proper pronounciation of LOL is lawl on most websites)
John: "Hey Pete, how are ya?"
Pete: "Lawl, I'm a little hungover from going out last night."
John: "Lawl, yeah last night was a blast, though I'm never singing karaoke again, lawl."
Pete: "Have you hear from Joan today, lawl, last I heard from her, she was in the bathroom praying to the porcelain god. I was LAUGHING MY A$$ OFF at that!"
You get the idea, though this would probably be much more funny to actually listen to a conversation like this.
In the above conversation, three of the four "lawls" would be a chuckle in real life and would not have been voiced. I get the fact that it's hard to express laughter any other way via text or email, but we created terms for when something is really funny, ROTFL, or LMAO. Why haven't we created a term for when something is just slightly funny, something that we would really just chuckle at but not really laugh at?
Maybe we could just go with ll (laughs a little), or ckl (chuckle) when something is just a little funny and not worthy of an LOL. I don't have the solution, as usual, I just have a complaint about something that I think is stupid, yet still use more than I'd like to. I do appreciate those people who use "ha ha ha" and "hee hee" in their text and email still, while it's still not necessary at least it's not LOL.
When you think about it, how often do you 'laugh out loud' in your normal conversations? Probably not as often as you use LOL in your texts or emails. I guarantee that most of the time, when you use the term LOL you use it because what you just read was slightly funny or silly, but was not enough to really make you laugh (out loud). Or possibly you are trying to convey that something you are saying is funny or silly and not meant to be mean or serious. It's almost as if we're apologizing before we speak so as not to offend our audience. Ironically, most of the people that we text or email with, and specifically that we would use the term LOL with are our friends and family, so we shouldn't have to apologize up front for what we say. The should typically know whether you are making a sarcastic remark or whether what you are saying is a serious statement or not. If they do not they most certainly should not take anything you say so seriously that they would be offended by it.
The term LOL was specifically developed for text and email and led to an entire genre of "new" words. The genre has many websites dedicated to it such as lolcats, etc. It's led to a generation of web users and texters who have become lazy in their english and grammar. But this is not my main point, I want to focus solely on LOL usage.
I cringe at what a conversation would sound like if people talked using LOL in their verbal language. Can you imagine? (Keep in mind that the proper pronounciation of LOL is lawl on most websites)
John: "Hey Pete, how are ya?"
Pete: "Lawl, I'm a little hungover from going out last night."
John: "Lawl, yeah last night was a blast, though I'm never singing karaoke again, lawl."
Pete: "Have you hear from Joan today, lawl, last I heard from her, she was in the bathroom praying to the porcelain god. I was LAUGHING MY A$$ OFF at that!"
You get the idea, though this would probably be much more funny to actually listen to a conversation like this.
In the above conversation, three of the four "lawls" would be a chuckle in real life and would not have been voiced. I get the fact that it's hard to express laughter any other way via text or email, but we created terms for when something is really funny, ROTFL, or LMAO. Why haven't we created a term for when something is just slightly funny, something that we would really just chuckle at but not really laugh at?
Maybe we could just go with ll (laughs a little), or ckl (chuckle) when something is just a little funny and not worthy of an LOL. I don't have the solution, as usual, I just have a complaint about something that I think is stupid, yet still use more than I'd like to. I do appreciate those people who use "ha ha ha" and "hee hee" in their text and email still, while it's still not necessary at least it's not LOL.
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