I won’t even try to describe how wonderful this is. Just click this, and play with it. No, seriously, play with it.
Simply brilliant advertising.
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
Support Dean’s World
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
I won’t even try to describe how wonderful this is. Just click this, and play with it. No, seriously, play with it.
Simply brilliant advertising.
{ 17 comments }
Words I’ve tried:
Seduces, hugs, punches, tickles, f**ks, eats, farts at.
I followed your advice, clicked on just click this, watched a few seconds of what looked like an idiot with earflaps notice a bear coming up behind his pup tent. Then the choice came up on the screen:
Shoot the bear (button one)
Don’t shoot the bear (button two)
I tried clicking on first one variant then the other. Nothing at all happened on screen.
I’m not much into computer graphics crap, in that I use my machines mainly for data processing. But if this truly were such a great advertisement, the geniuses who put it online ought to have known enough to make it campatible with just about any combination of operating system, web browser and whatever so that a message would come across in some understandable format.
Sorry to prict you balloon this fine Labor Day weekend, but I report things exactly as I see and understand them.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Works for me, that’s all I know.
Arnold, I have a suspicion that you maybe just need a flash player update to latest version.
Sandi,
I have a suspicion that your suspicion is correct. But if you don’t typically play much of anything on your computers that require the latest flash player software, then why would you take the time and frequently the trouble to download such stuff to begin with?
Much of a lifetime ago, I was the assistant director of marketing for a NYSE-listed company with headquarters on Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago. One of the dicta I quickly learned, in order to keep that job and pay the rent on my high-rise apartment right across the Chicago River was that advertising, in order to be effective, had to be available to its targeted audience without necessitating that audience to go to any trouble at all to be exposed to the advertising message. Truly it was a simpler world back in the 1960s. But principles of advertising communications within a given media almost never change at all.
For the first time, I am starting to embark on a mass email campaign to B2B (“business to business”) markets for my specialized list services and products. It is hard enough to get other business just to open and read your advertising messages before hitting the Del key. I hope I have more common sense than to couch that message in some oh-so-cute format that requires they download someone else’s software just to read a couple of short paragraphs of what we can do for them, at what cost, and how fast.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Can someone who’s actually also seen and enjoyed the ad talk about that, rather than arguing over whether Arnold should make sure to keep his web browser software up to date?
Thank you Dean,
All marketing common sense begins with acknowledgement of the need both to pay attention to the obvious and to avoid trivializing the message for the sale of the media.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
It will be, and is, a constant battle in the new media of the internet, as it evolves with new technology, to figure out what to market and who to market to, and how. If the internet marketing crowd were to take your advice too literally, they would not use photos because some people still use web browsers that don’t support those. They would not use animation because some people do not have web browsers that support that. And so on and so forth.
Marketing in the internet era involves all sorts of challenges that did not exist for the world of print, or for the world of radio, or for the world of television.
Anyway the ad in question is remarkable. Using Flash technology (if you update to the latest Flash) it presents you with a choice, and then, stunningly, the hunter in the flash animation reaches outside of the YouTube video window, pulls out an object from an advertisement on the side of the video window, and uses it to erase other parts of the screen, then invites you to type in what you would like the hunter to do instead of shooting the bear. Whatever you type, it then attempts to have the hunter do.
It is highly amusing. Whether it is effective or not will depend on whether their consumers generally have up-to-date web software (you apparently do not) and whether they find it funny, and whether, on top of all that, it actually gets them to buy the product.
It certainly, and inarguably, does one thing: grabs consumers’ attention by startling them. But clearly, they are marketing toward consumers who keep their web browsing software up to date.
LOVE IT!!!!
Thanks Dean.
A hunter FEEDS a bear is hilarious. GREETS a bear is cute.
Folks – please share the good ones.
Maybe we are trying to compare apples to crayfish, Dean. I will admit I know nothing about marketing much of anything to individuals or their households. All my marketing experience — the corporate assignments in the 1960s and early 1970s, then my running my own business for a living since 1982 — has been focused on selling products and services to businesses large and small.
With business folks, the stuff you are describing on this blowyourmind youtube ad either doesn’t get through the Bayesian spam filters or the recipient email address just clicks the Del key to make it go away. It isn’t that they don’t have sensate imaginations, or active senses of humor. But it you have to go through a couple hundred emails per day, plus get your regular assigned work done, every email gets no more than about one second to determine the vital question — kill it or glance at it. The latter earns a couple more seconds. But that’s about it.
I don’t even let my customers send me crapmail to my business email address, but instruct them instead to send it to the personal email accounts that Stefi and I maintain on different computers. That category includes humorous crap that people circulate, pleas to support this or that presumably worthy cause, preachments by politicos looking for money or votes, and these days, dozens of groups working to get me more and more pissed off at Obama. (For which I don’t hardly need any incoming emails.)
Needless to say, I have neither time or patience for or interest in facebooks or other put em together online contrivances. When its time to play, as in these hours on Dean’s World, I say let it roar. But when I’m doing business, I have no provision for bullshit of any kind.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Maggie: Okay, so far we have greets, seduces, hugs, punches, tickles, f**ks, eats, feeds, and farts.
Anyone come up with anything else?
paints, fishes with, eats
plays baseball with, plays golf with
LOL
kisses, smokes with
“Smokes with” really made me laugh!
Try also “dances with”!
I wish it were SFW, and mainly safe for my kids, who have scruples. Why doesn’t computer hosted content have some sliders going from G to X on sex and G to X on violence, etc?
Yours,
Wince
P.S. I want this because it is funny and I like it and I would like to share it with my kids, but I can’t, because it would violate their consciences.
Some words seem to be more effective followed by ‘with.’
works with
sleeps with
plays with
dances with
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