Stand-Out Advertising

I’m reading Seth Godin’s Purple Cow right now. I’m about 20 pages in, and it’s making my brain ping off in all directions. It’s brilliant.

Seth talks about what he calls the TV-Industrial Complex. Basically, TV advertising was king. If you had enough dough to be able to afford to buy an ad on TV, then almost no matter what your product was, people would buy it. He gives the example of Cap’n Crunch (a mainstay in my household growing up). Quaker literally created the ad campaign, then they created the cereal.

Those days are over. In order for folks to buy your stuff these days, they have to buy in to who you are. People no longer trust every single thing they see on on TV.

We’re looking for things that stand out: things that are, as Seth terms them, remarkable.

You’ve heard all the hullabaloo about the new Old Spice marketing campagin. What’s brilliant about these ads (and they certainly are very funny and tongue-in-cheek) is that Old Spice spent not one red cent on purchasing TV advertising. They released the ads on the net, an they spread virally. And then they got picked up by TV news stations all over the country. To date, Old Spice reports sales are up 107%.

I recently visited the Rollingdale Winery in Kelowna. Here’s how they’re advertising. Pretty clever.

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