Tag Archives | Advertising
Oh No, Not Ads Within Captchas
If you’ve ever stared helplessly into the hazy, jumbled letters of a Captcha, the Wall Street Journal relays some disturbing news: a start up called Solve Media plans to turn these Internet nuisances into advertisements.
Instead of the usual nonsense in the Captcha box, companies will pay to show a message that the user must re-type. For instance, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 ad requires users to type a slogan, “Browse Safer.” Toyota’s ad will will require typing the amount of money the company spends on safety, “a million dollars an hour.” The idea is that if you repeat the message, you’re more likely to remember it — more so than banner ads, which are easily ignored.
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How IBM Sold Tech in the Eisenhower Era
Back in May, we told you about some industrial films that IBM commissioned from the Muppets in the 1960s. The decade before that, the office-equipment giant was a major advertiser in glossy mass-circulation magazines such as LIFE. Today, those ads are a fascinating, evocative trip back to a world in which technology, work, and workplaces were radically different. Yes, there was a time when the typical piece of business correspondence was a snail-mail letter typed by a secretary on a typewriter which might or might not have been electric–and which had no provision for correcting errors.
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The Golden Age of IBM Advertising
Back in the 1950s, IBM was just getting into the computer business, many companies still needed to be convinced that electric typewriters weren’t a technological boondoggle, and slide rules were still essential equipment. And the American workplace–at least as depicted in magazine ads–had what we’d now consider a distinct Mad Men edge to it.
Mix yourself the cocktail of your choice, settle into your Eames chair, and return with us now to the era of mainframes and secretarial pools to rediscover these vintage IBM ads from LIFE and other publications.
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They're Watching You
Good, creepy reporting at the Wall Street Journal by Julia Angwin on how marketers use cookies to create detailed profiles of who you are based on your surfing habits. (I don’t think the standard defense–“none of the information is personally identifiable”–settles the matter. Unless you think it would be acceptable in the real world to spy on someone as long as you didn’t know his or her name.)
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FaceTime Takes Center Stage in New iPhone 4 Ads
Perhaps the amount of negative publicity surrounding the iPhone 4 has forced Apple to go for the sentimental in its latest crop of ads for the device, or perhaps it’s just coincidence. Either way, FaceTime is given top billing and it seems as if the company is serious about video calling.
Four ads have been released: “Smile,” a father reassuring his teenage daughter that the braces she just got aren’t that bad; “Meet Her,” a grandfather seeing his new grandchild for the first time; “Big News,” a wife telling her husband that she’s finally pregnant; and “Haircut,” a boyfriend telling her girlfriend that even though her hair is really short its still “cute.”
There’s no announcer voice, just the interaction. It lets the feature speak for itself, which I think probably does a lot more to convince the viewer that this is something you want rather than some voice telling you this is what you need.
Some have said these ads are a little too personal; I would have to disagree. In a time where advertisers seem to rely too much on humor, having somebody market something on a level like this seems refreshing to me.
We have all four ads here for you to view after the break. I’d like to hear what you think.
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Meet a Web Publisher Who's Okay With Safari's New Ad Removal Feature (Me!)
Back in August, I blogged about an article that predicted that all Web browsers would eventually block all ads by default. I ended with a poll in which a plurality of respondents said that sounded like a swell idea.
Ten months later, no browser has introduced sweeping ad-blocking. But on Monday, Apple introduced Safari 5, a new version of its browser with a feature called Reader. It’s not an ad blocker per se, but it does remove ads as part of what it does. And it’s the first significant development in built-in ad, um, discouragers since pop-up blockers became standard equipment years ago.
Like Readability and Instapaper, it examines a Web page with an article on it, strips out navigational elements, Flash modules, and other items other than the story itself, then displays the text and images in a streamlined view that looks a bit like a word-processing document. When an article is broken into multiple pages, it’s also smart enough to stitch all the pages together without making you click on anything.
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The IBM Muppet Show
IBM. The Muppets. Two venerable institutions-but not ones we tend to associate with each other. Yet in the late 1960s, before most people had ever seen a computer in person or could identify a Muppet on sight, the two teamed up when IBM contracted with Jim Henson for a series of short films designed to help its sales staff. Little known today, these remain fresh, funny, and surprisingly irreverent. Henson would return to their gags and situations in his famous later works–and he plucked the Cookie Monster from one of them when assembling the Muppet cast for Sesame Street in 1969.
Whose idea was this unique collaboration? Well, Henson had already established himself in the advertising field. He was best known at the time for the Muppets’ guest skits on variety shows and Rowlf the Dog’s appearances on The Jimmy Dean Show. But he was busier making a wide array of commercials and longer sales films for regional and national products from Esskay Meats to Marathon Gasoline.
For its own part, IBM was keenly aware that its products–including computers, electric typewriters, and very early word processors–had to be explained to both the public and IBM’s own employees. So it formed its own advertising group, including a film and television division. An executive named David Lazer headed this division, overseeing the production of training and sales films.
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Twitter Tiptoes Into Advertising
For what seems like eons, people have been asking Twitter how and when it’s going to start making money, and the company’s executives have always said that they’ll move to monetize the site only when they can do it right. Today, Twitter is announcing its first big money-making idea. It’s a form of advertising called Promoted Tweets, and it’s no big whoop–basically, brands with presences on Twitter will be able to pay to put (clearly-labeled) tweets about their products at the top of search results. I can’t imagine anyone but the most adphobic among us hating the idea, but it also seems unlikely that Promoted Tweets alone will pay to keep Twitter free forever. They’re clearly a first step rather than the final answer.
Twitter will talk more about Promoted Tweets–and the future of Twitter in general–tomorrow at Chirp, the first official Twitter conference. I’ll be there, and will let you know what we learn…
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The Gates/Seinfeld Mystery Explained–Sort of
Remember the Microsoft ads from 2008 which starred Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld? They attracted lots of bemused attention at the time, since they were full of absurdist humor and had so very little to do with Microsoft products. Now TechFlash’s Todd Bishop has unexpectedly revived the discussion by asking Microsoft honcho David Webster to explain what was going on. Webster basically says that the company was planning a lot of new advertising but was worried that nobody would pay attention, so it decided to kick things off with some ads that were impossible to ignore. And he says that the rumors that the campaign was cut short were false.