Great new commercial focusing on Awareness

I often find myself telling people that running a commercial JUST to generate awareness is a waste of time - the commercial needs to alter behaviour as well. I'll make an exception for the great new commercial from Transport for London. This is the first commercial I remember seeing which was designed for the time-shifting generation. Viewing it on a broadcast system without the ability to rewind the broadcast just wouldn't have been the same.

Enjoy

Honda vs. Ford via Scamp

Nod to Scamp - (see http://scampblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/battle-of-epic-car-ads.html)

This post vividly shows the difference between a great commercial and a reasonable one. My guess is that Ford are a little too "safe" when defining a brief whereas Honda have built and been true to a brand philiosophy.

Wieden & Kennedy must be the best around at the moment!

Will the new Vodafone campaign ad do more than win awards?

Sometimes you see a commercial which makes you stop what you are doing, watch the TV (or online video for the 2.0 community out there) and literally stare at the TV to work our what's going on. I had this experience the other day when i saw the first airing of the new Vodafone commercial which I believe is called Mobile Internet (time rain):

I think that this is a beautiful commercial - it's well shot, interesting and it's going to get noticed. However I wonder what the ROI is going to look like on this? Whenever i see this ad, I wonder whether it wasn't a case of a great creative idea waiting for a client to buy into it rather than the other way around. Will this advert really sell incremental internet usage across the Vodafone network? I'm struggling to understand how.

There is no call to action in this advert - you don't get an offer to trial or any way in which users can sign up for services. What is commercial appears designed to do is raise awareness about online services. That bothers me because although I'm sure there was some kind of ROI framework put in place before the campaign aired, I'm amazed nobody made sure people knew how to get online or even view what content was already out there. Voda are spending a lot of money telling consumers across all networks that mobile internet services will give them back time. Nowhere does this specify that Voda is better; nowhere does it imply that customers on Voda get better services.

Payback on this campaign is going to be tough but if they can persuade millions to try a few online services, maybe those 3G network licences will look a better investment than they do at present. Before that though, they have to make this commercial pay off and we all know that 90 second ads are expensive. By my rough calculations, Voda are going to have to get each customer to increase their ARPU by more than £1 over the year to make this pay off and that's a tough ask as most people in telcos will attain to. At least the execs can look forward to a trip to Cannes next year!

More great advertising from ...Microsoft?

In recent months, I've noticed that Microsoft have been coming up with some great commercials - Office 2007 was one example.

Now there's a new one aimed at people like me - online advertisers. I thought you'd enjoy this one.

However - one question - does anyone have any ideas how Microsoft is going to solve the gap between consumers and advertisers through technology? My concern is that the commercial highlights the natural gap between any database marketer and real consumers. There's no substiute for actually listening and seeing how consumers actually interact with a product.