“Browsing the web without ads is actually kind of nice,” wrote Advertising Age June 19, 2006. “No popups stealing your screen. No autoplaying video ads making the page load as slowly as if it were being dialed up through America Online circa 1999.” People who own and use computers agree – by the tens of…
Author: bgoldman
Are you ready for a Pepsi generation of beverage snobs?
In the beginning, there were the wine snobs. Then came the craft beer snobs. Now, Pepsico is out to create a whole new generation of snobs to look down their noses at us common folk – soda snobs. “PepsiCo today [June 4] confirmed that it will soon launch a new line of craft sodas called…
Quick, what's the worst possible brand name in the world?
What’s the absolutely worst, most repulsive brand name you could possibly think of? Well, an ice cream cone manufacturer named M. V. F. Products in India already thought of it. “Indian ice cream lovers are putting their favorite treat in a cone named after Adolf Hitler,” the Times of Israel reported May 29, 2005. “The…
Why this summer's a good time to get sick in Phoenix or Austin
What you have to go through just to see a doctor for the first time can be enough to make you sick. At least that’s what health care consultant firm Merritt Hawkins found when they phoned doctors’ offices throughout 15 metropolitan areas to set up initial, non-emergency appointments. The wait between making an appointment and…
Sophisiticated neuroscience research 'discovers' what good copywriters have known all along
Talk about killing flies with an elephant gun. Nielsen, the audience research company, put together a consumer neuroscience group to help advertisers learn how to “break trough the clutter” of “competing messages constantly fighting for consumers’ attention.” A worthy goal when you consider that in an average day, every man, woman and child in this…
Older and newer media are eating cable television's lunch
Cable television is caught between the jaws of a vise. One jaw, says the Washington Post, is a newer medium – the Internet, with its instantaneous social-media news bulletins and streaming longer-format shows and movies. But the other jaw is an older medium – one which it looked for several decades that cable would replace,…
How to get more consumers to read your emails
This is no April Fool’s joke: According to an emailed March 31 Center for Media Research Brief [no link available], a majority of consumers (60 percent, a Technology Advice survey of more than 1,300 adults found) do read the marketing emails in their inboxes. But only 16 percent read them regularly, 12.8 percent read…
Well-intentioned art director learns the limits of awareness
A big-hearted Chicago art director couldn’t do anything about his city’s homeless people’s mental illness, addiction and substance abuse. But he could address another of their problems – amateur typography. So he’s been working, one-on-one, to redesign their signage, according to a March 26 Adweek report. “Since moving to Chicago in July of 2014,” the…
With much to be unhappy about, Coke is dropping its 'happiness' ad campaign
Even though they’ve spent tens of millions of dollars on it over six years; even though they’ve run it in print, broadcast and digital media in more than 200 markets worldwide; and even though they went so far as to record a single of its theme song (just as they did in 1971 for their…
Budweiser masquerades as craft beer – again
In Budweiser’s love-hate relationship with craft beers, the pendulum has swung again, according to a March 18 Advertising Age report. Three years ago, in late 2012, Budweiser liked craft beers so much that they sincerely flattered them – by going to market with three imitation craft beers formulated to reverse a consecutive quarter-century of…