Progress is Beautiful

Created by San Francisco-based Venables Bell & Partners

I know how this Audi Ad is dangerous if imitated, breaks all traffic rules and generally makes no sense. But I am not here to judge or over analyze till all the fun is gone. Now and then, I simply love the thrill of a car chase and nobody does it better than the transporter himself. Aired during this year's Superbowl, this commercial shows Jason Statham behind the wheel of an Audi A6.

Last year's Superbowl had Audi do a parody of the famous "horse head in bed" scene from The Godfather. According to the NewYork Post, "Audi says the ad scored well with dealers and helped traffic to its Web site jump almost 200 percent. It reported a 7 percent decrease in sales in 2008, although that was far better than most of its competitors. At the same time, Audi saw its US market share rise slightly, from 0.7 percent to 0.6 percent."

After a gap of two decades, returning to the Superbowl circuit in 2008 seems to have turned out well for the car company. So this year, Audi has increased its marketing budget by almost 20 percent and again targeted the big daddy of media spends. Post Superbowl 2009, American audiences are being shown shorter versions of the 60 seconder.

With most car companies talking directly to the consumer about savings and assurance programs, Audi's tone and style is like a breath of fresh air.

Sometimes it pays to be different. The recession will not last forever. Meanwhile, let's just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Relevance is the Soul of an Advertisement

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Source: http://www.adoholik.com/ Via [adsoftheworld]
Agency: JWT London, UK
Creative Directors: Nick Bell, Russell Ramsey, Howard Wilmott
Art Director: Mark Norcutt
Copywriter: Laurence Quinn
Photographer: Mike Russell
Account: John Mitchell, Nick Jackson

Lengthy is out. Brevity is in. Email is out, IM is in. Expressing yourself within 140 characters via Tweeter is in. Attention span of the average consumer is fast decreasing. Time is the new currency - proclaimed JWT, as part of their revamping efforts in 2005. They also started "one-line brief" where the account managers compress a three page-long brief into a line and presents the same to the creative group. This practice led to hilarious situations and plenty of confusion. Glad we came out of that one. Sometimes information helps. And then there is too much information. How do we strike the balance?

Keep it relevant. If "Brevity is the soul of wit", as the Bard would like us to believe, then "Relevance is the soul of an advertisement". And of course, credibility is every bit as important. As I have said earlier, nothing speeds up the failure of a bad product like a piece of good advertisement. Simply put, you don't want people to know how bad your product is. Anyway, let's go back to relevance.

Being relevant should not be confused with typical idea-killers like "making the logo bigger" or "mentioning the brand name thrice" or "listing benefits". Relevance do not stifle creativity. Take the above Kit Kat ad as an example. They have even showed the product for crying out loud!

As we move towards digital advertising, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) becomes one of our most important tools and relevance the key factor. If the right words and the right tags are not used, wouldn't we find ourselves lost in a sea of digital information? CDA, a digital communications consultancy carried out a study that revealed the importance of both keywords and carewords in SEO. Keywords being the short precise words used to search for a particular information and then carewords being the more descriptive words on the webpage itself which invoke action.

Traditional media may have been kinder towards lack of relevance but there is no place for irrelevant ads in the future. Consumer profiling is becoming more specific and advertisers are choosing their images and words with care. True, mindless ads will still exist but it will get that much harder for them to sell the goods.