Anti-piracy ads target digital-savvy youth over illegal downloads

Everybody remembers the ‘piracy it’s  a crime’ advertisement that was played previous to lots of movies from 2004 to 2007. This ad made us clear that illegal downloading of movies is equal to stealing a car or a handbag. A few months ago, some new anti-piracy advertisements have been launched. The advertisements show us a parody on classic films such as Reservoir dogs and The sixth sense. The target audience of this ad is the so called digital-savvy youth. After all, these young people find it so obvious that they can find everything on the internet and they don’t even think about the consequences of this illegal downloading for the movie industry. And the consequences are quite big. Declining incomes  more and more prevent good films being made. The UK film and television hopes that these advertisements will urge the young generation to buy more legal DVD’s and downloads and to go to the movies.guardian

Ann-Sophie Parmentier

Food manufacturers target children on internet after regulator's TV advertising clampdown

Since the media regulator Ofcom has made it difficult to advertise during children’s television brands such as McDonald’s, Haribo and Skittles are using social networking sites and internet chat programs to target children.

Adverts for brands classed as being high in fat, salt or sugar are banned in programs for children.

Turning down the advertising on children’s television isn’t very effective because the advertisers simply use the money to advertise online.

Skittles set up a profile on the social networking site Bebo and now has more than 3500 friends. McDonald’s developed an Internet game where children have to shoot down McDonald’s logos. Some brands use MSN messenger and add friends who they give information about the latest activities of the company.  That kind of advertising in an unregulated area so that Ofcom can’t really do something about it. Many people want the government to change the legislation and forbid advertising for children.(guardian)

Sharon Persyn

bringing your brand back from the brink

The internet and social network sites in particular have changed the way of handling with products having branding problems. Dealing with such a branding crisis is all about keeping control, but social network sites have made it very difficult to keep the product from breaking down. Why is this so much harder? As an example we take Toyota. This company was forced to recall 8 million cars. Because of the social network sites, the need to respond is now a real-time issue. Toyota failed to respond quickly to the customers questions and got therefore a lot of criticism. The problem is that brands have a fear to communicate through the online world because they think it will lead to more negativity. But in fact the opposite is true. The social media can help a brand to recover after a blunder. If Toyota had done this communication earlier, many problems could have been avoided.  marketingweek

Anthony Pieters

Social network sites help revitalising the online ad sector

In the first half of his year, social media sites have helping online display advertising in the UK making a growth of 6.4% or about £381m (450 million euro), so says the Internet Advertising Bureau.  

More and more companies like Unilever, Virgin and O2 advertise on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkIn etc , by spending huge budgets to pick up potential consumers.  

Online video ads are the most popular, however they only make part for 5.5% of total digital spend. Although, paid-search advertising (like Google and others) have still an increase of 8.9% to £1.18 bn (1.39 milliard euro) , the paid-for search’s share of UK internet advertising shrunk  from 61.7% to 59.5%. The main reason is that marketers switch to areas such as social media and online video advertising, who have a high margin growth.

Overall media and entertainment spend the most on display advertising, followed by the financial sector and consumer goods companies.

But why advertising at social network sites ? First of all, they can attract the people you want to advertise. Secondly, the number of target people is huge (a half milliard people all over the world has already Facebook for instances) .

Julie Scheipers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/oct/05/facebook-display-ad-increase

Cultural differences in ads

Tastes of consumers are different all over the world, so aren’t advertisements in Asia the same in Europe, neither are they in North-America. Successful, but provocative ads in one part of the world, for instances Europe , might be provocative in prudish America.

These disagreements are also at publicity concourse, for example when the jury of the 2002 Grand Prix for print advertising (Cannes) got split after a discussion. The notorious commercial for travel company 18-30 (by Saatchi & Saatchi), who won finally the competition, was hated by the Canadian juror. Reaction of the Swiss judge Mr. Fabrikant : ‘Do not sell “politically correctness” to us’.

It isn’t only hard in times in terms of financial aspects, it is even for global marketers dealing with different cultures. Globalization is a fact, but commercials can’t be aired all over the world without adaptations. Changing standards in a country or a continent is not commended, you have to know what the different acceptable attitudes are.

Violence in humorous advertising is tolerable in the USA, in addition to what it is in Europe. Generally in North America, there are more violent-typing ads than elsewhere, but nudity and sexuality are a no-go-zone.

Julie Scheipers

http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2003-06-19-xtreme_x.htm

The marketing answer to online shopping

Online shopping is becoming more and more popular, nobody will doubt that. Marketers couldn’t let pass this new trend either, so it was up to them to create new strategies that would go along with this new virtual way of shopping. The answer was behavioural targeted advertising. This marketing strategy is based on user interests and their recent online activity. Based on this information, online shoppers will be confronted with specific adverts which were found more relevant to their online behaviour. Of course, this could become dangerous because behavioural targeted advertising might narrow the possibility for brands to grow their customer base. Therefore it stays very important to actively search for new customers. Some customers might not be searching actively for the product you offer (and by consequence won’t be listed as ‘possible buyer’) but nevertheless, might become interested  when they get confronted with advertising about it. marketingweek

Ann-Sophie Parmentier

How Marketers Target Kids

Kids are very important to marketers because they can influence their parent’s buying, they have their own purchasing power and they are the consumers of the future. This text describes some strategies marketers employ to target children.

Marketers use psychologists to analyze children’s behavior, fantasy, art and dreams and use these results in their advertisements.  They make the kids aware of their brand because children can already recognize brands from the age of two and by the time they go to school children can recognize hundreds of brand logos. Further marketers want the coolest kid to use or wear their product and so give it a cool status, so that the other kids would also want to use or wear what “the coolest kid” uses. On top of that they pay to advertise in schools. By giving free drinks and snacks, putting their logo on the school bus, computers, sponsoring school events and supplying technology they hoop to reach the kids.

I don’t think you can blame parents for not protecting their child.  When other kids talk about the product or they get it for free in schools, parents can’t do anything about it. (media-awareness)

Sharon Persyn