Advertising on Flies

Advertising on flies, courtesy of Adland. Somewhere, a channel planner is smiling. These guys haul mini-banners, but you can also paint your brand directly on them, or laser-etch your USP

Study: Human Avatars Are Better Salesmen

Furries need not apply

In what seems like ages ago, in June 2006,  Harvard Business Review made a huge splash by running a piece on avatar-based marketing (there was even an in-world panel): "The avatar, though, arguably represents a distinctly different “shadow” consumer, one able to influence its creator’s purchase of real-world products and conceivably make its own real-world purchases in the virtual world. At the least, it may offer insights into its creator’s hidden tastes."

Just as I thought everyone's mostly forgotten about Second Life by now, I found this study by two Boston College researchers who recently published a paper on the effectiveness of avatar spokespeople. Their conclusion: "The participants perceive human-like spokes-avatars as more attractive, and players who interact with a human-like spokes-avatar perceive the iPhone advertisement as more informative than those who interact with a non-human spokes-avatar."

The entire Journal of Interactive Advertising is full of cool topics like this; too bad all their stuff is written in that kind of language that takes hours for us layfolk to decipher.

Video Advertising from Armpits

Just as you think there's nothing left to blog about, a friend sends you this. And this is a deodorant company sending out street teams with small TVs sewn into their armpits. The dream of Smell-o-Vision has finally come true.
- via CherryFlava

Update:  R/GA: "I pray the Charmin people don't see this." 

What We Know About Ad Skipping

I've posted a lot about ad skipping in the past here on AdLab, and now we've compiled a lot of different ad avoidance stats on Hill Holliday's blog, plus a bunch of old ads that promote products that help people skip ads (irony alert!). Above: an ad for Mazda that was designed for  people who liked to record their shows on VCRs and fast-forwarded through the commercial breaks.

Billboards That Give

I really like the idea of billboards that let people take something with them, like this Kenzo billboard with poppies. It's a good way to make them bookmarkable, to extend their shelf life. Here are a few more billboards that give blankets, samples, and a life raft.

Business Card Display

This rotating display by a bank that showcases business cards of its small-business customers is something they need to install at the conferences, ideally with a dispenser. Maybe something like adpockets, or these displays, or maybe even a vending machine. Something.

AdLab attended many conferences and came back with suggestions on designing usable conferences, conference badges, and conference websites.

Advertising on School Exams

This beats those report cards sponsored by McD's. A calculus teacher whose school's budget cuts left him short on money for copying expenses started selling ad space on exams. In a few days, he got 75 requests. "His semester final is sold out." Price list: $10 for a quiz; $20 - chapter test. The final goes for $30. That company in the picture -- I think it's these guys.

-- USA Today (2008), via

Send SMS to Complete This Ad

This Axe ad from Uruguay is the best mobile "send SMS and get something" implementation I've seen. Send a text message after dark to a phone number listed on the ad, and you'll get the missing fragment of the picture. Good teaser, meaningful payback. Very smart.

Unlock Wall Street Journal Articles With Google

Among many other things I don't understand about the newspapers', and News Corp's in particular, handwringing over Google is this. Wall Street Journal's managing editor says that Google turns people into content sluts because they expect online stuff for free (no, I don't understand the slut-free connection either). Now, the simple antidote against your pages being indexed by search engines is a robots.txt file, but whatever. What I don't understand is why WSJ's articles that are otherwise behind a paywall are unlocked when you arrive to them through a link on Google.

Take a random article from today, say, this piece about BSkyB's financial results. You click on the link to the article on the Business section's homepage, and predictably hit the subscription jar.




You then copy the headline and paste it into Google's search field:





Click on the link that is likely to come up on the top, and -- magic! -- the entire article is yours to read.




The only difference between the two is that the free one has "?mod=googlenews_wsj" appended to its URL. Now, tacking it onto the URLs of other articles produces mixed results (wouldn't an unlocking bookmarklet be neat?), but searching with Google has worked for all other dozen random articles I tried. Someone else has reported that WSJ tries on occasions to obscure the text with an overlay, but I haven't seen that.

So yes, while I'm not complaining, I can't understand what WSJ is doing either.

VW To Launch New Model with iPhone Advergame

AdLab's intrepid editor driving against traffic towards advertising future.

AdAge today: "Volkswagen of America is launching the newest-generation GTI exclusively on an iPhone app." The entire launch budget for the new model is estimated $500K instead of the customary $60M, since the game is the only thing VW is doing. Fail or win, this is bound to end up in everyone's PowerPoint decks, so I went in to take a few pictures as a matter of public service.

(Read on)