I read that as, ergo I didn't watch it. And as you dig your heels in further and further you continue to gripe about advertising while never clearly answering my question: Do you ever consider the entertainment value separately from the taint of the advertising? Why not just say, "No, I don't," if that's the answer? Why all this tap dancing around the question and complaining I'm not following the dance steps properly?
That's ludicrous, @Chinspinner. Why would I care that it didn't appeal to someone? No one thing appeals to everyone. I have yet to get an answer to my question, which is all I've been trying to do: Do you ever consider the entertainment value separately from the taint of the advertising? If you are reading more into that question such as, my caring if you do or do not like this video, it boggles my mind. That's why I keep posting. I can't understand for the life of me why you have read so many strange things into my posts that weren't there.
Your question keeps changing. You seem to be trying to lawyer your way around some argument you have created, and now you are getting yourself in a tizzy because I am not playing along.
My question keeps changing? WTF? Maybe to clarify it when you didn't seem to understand it. Honestly, I don't get your reaction or your anger. And what argument? This is about opinions and preferences. There is no argument to be made about someone's preferences, they are what they are.
Because if you would just read up you have all the answers you need. Now I won't reply to the next post so you can feel content that you have had the last word. Use it as you wish.
OK, I read each and every one of your posts. You never answered my very simple question and instead became angry over some imaginary slight. There.
arguments over semantics are much less enlightening on issues, when compared to sharing your honest and full opinion, whether it's developed or not. I thought I would answer this questions for chinspinner since I'm already used to speaking on his behalf The entertainment quality of an ad shouldn't have any bearing on the product itself. What I hate personally, and I have a feeling chinspinner feels about the same on this, is less an issue with marketing and more of a critique on marketing. If chinspinner where to reflect, do some soul searching, he might consider the following: Why are you broken marketing? I have to always try to avoid your numbing presence. Small animals dancing and talking, musical scores fit to catchy rhymes, laughs jerked from the essence of our being. But where is the product? Hidden behind a brand and name where our ideas of it are left to our imagination. Where is the substance? Why does my sale depend on how hard I laughed during your commercial? Why doesn’t it depend on an actual pitch… O, why is this, this how you sell? Why? Why leave me to digest the never-ending mass of flashing lights and misleading anecdotes, simply hoping to have left some sort of an impression, regardless of what that was. Just so that, when I go to pick between a line of products, I’ll end up picking one that left an impression rather than making an informed decision? Aren’t you doing your product a disservice by relying on entertainment rather than information? Even the more honest ones are nothing but contrived reasons, twisting their perspective pitch into prospect. Not a single one has the decen… “luminosity.com! Train your brain in a way that just feels like video games. See what you can do to improve your neuroplasticity!” Woah… Are they telling me I can play games to get smarter… HOLY SH*T, oh wait. I have no idea what neuroplasticity is, maybe I’m giving this commercial too much credit… nah… I’m going to go play some games and get smarter. No wait chinspinner! you were so close… come back! Alas, he never came back. But basically if he continued he would have probably concluded that the entertainment factor behind marketing isn’t substantial to the essence of the ad, which is nothing more than a brand name. That’s essentially wrong, because it sells, but the point is it shouldn’t. They try to be on point, but with entertainment as the first and foremost, nothing really comes through in truth. I’d say trailers on entertainment are the small exception to this. You can sell an album on its music. you can sell a movie on its action scenes. And there is no such thing as exception so I should also mention that it isn’t impossible for commercials to be informative and entertaining. But the information has to be a sale, a pitch, not just random information delivered cleverly, because that puts entertainment over the message. This has been happening since the 60’s when they added 3 legged woman, impossible hats to the top of people’s heads, and hidden sexual curves inside bottles of coke. they thought that type of subliminal message was too much like brainwashing and thought they did something about it, but they didn’t take the definition far enough IMO, because it’s devolved into the same thing either way.
No one needs to do any soul searching to figure out what you just said. Pretty much everyone knows and agrees with your statements. What Ginger is discussing is the quality of the entertainment used to trick people not to care about the product, not the product or the honesty of the advertisement itself.
That was a joke. I know it doesn’t take any soul searching, but sometimes you guys need to say every part of your point because otherwise it turns into this less than nothing of back and forth. The answer however, doesn’t change. It is essentially entertainment without substance. I can say the same thing about porn, to give you an example. The quality of entertainment in ads is fundamentally equivalent to porn.
For the record, what semantics? This is about reading imaginary demons between the lines.... But I digress. That may very well be. So let's have a discussion about the unethical writer who would attempt to promote their book with a viral video. I love your prose. I look at marketing from a different perspective. Yes, I'm not impressed at the saturation, the constant assault, the banality of some of it. But If I have to gripe about marketing, my gripe is with the lack of critical thinking that makes commercials you can't stand sell a product as well as commercials that are entertaining. I have a gripe with people so foolish as to think others are judging you by how white your whites are, or that vitamin C actually does anything for a cold. I think media literacy should be taught in grade school and infomercials should have burned out as not profitable before the first one was on a week. So from my perspective, if you want to avoid the bombardment, don't get mad at the bomb droppers, get made that their crap is effective. I didn't post the thread to sell anyone Virgin America. I posted it to discuss the dual purpose the marketers were clearly going for. Except if that was true, entertaining commercials wouldn't sell the product. The success of Apple begs to differ. While The Selling of the President 1968 was an eye opener, I think Subliminal Seduction was never corroborated with legitimate evidence. Though I must admit I have been looking for the ejaculate in the ice cube images ever since. I have been saying for a long time that the science of marketing is the one science the anti-science crowd does better than the science crowd. I fail to see that promoting one's book is a bad thing. I want people to read my book. If enough people like it, it will market itself. But those 'enough people' have to know about it before anyone can read it. As such, I plan to put a great effort into marketing my book when it is finished. There's no shame in that.
Of course advertisement can be entertaining and create the sense of not watching an ad, but still project the product. Companies like Old Spice and Virgin are really good at that kind of thing, but that's because they hire professionals. I want to peg that commercial at about 300-400K (at least). I imagine you've got something more cost-effective in mind, @GingerCoffee, which means it has to be even more clever/enticing. That's only if you're strictly planning to virally entertain to help get the message across, though. A lot of writers these days keep blogs that at their core simply advertise their books. They're doing the same thing you want to do, except using content to pre-satisfy the consumer instead of entertainment, and the smart ones keep their content very entertaining too. A mix of content and entertainment might be more practical for you to provide, if it's an opportunity for you. I'm not speaking strictly in the sense of blogging, but my mind's being too stupid to come up with good alternatives right now. P.S. does this mean you've decided to self-pub? Last time I checked you were planning to query, or am I wrong and this was always your plan?
That is what the side-track with @Chinspinner was about. The thread itself was about the cleverness of making a passenger safety video that had the dual purpose of being a marketing tool and the entertainment aspect that had people unrelated to the product telling others about the video.
Definitely planning traditional publishing first. I just don't think I can rely on that anymore than I can rely on winning the lottery. I do plan on making a trailer for the book, with the help of my son who knows how to make them. I would also consider hiring a professional. What the Virgin America video made me think of was to try to make a video that someone would share with someone else. A lot of research has been done in marketing. Some videos go viral by chance, some are purposefully planned to go viral, such as hiding a product ad in one of those videos of something unbelievable, some marketers do focus groups, the research is out there. I plan to take advantage of it. I haven't starting planning the trailer yet. I'm still writing the last few chapters of the book and it will need one more serious top to bottom edit after that before I hire the professional editor. But I am starting to think about the next step, marketing the book.
Maybe you are right here, imaginary demons are less than the same. Oh! Wonderful idea! I plan on doing something similar and offer my hope for the best. And I think this is where the lines become blurry and everyone realizes that there was never even anything to argue about The dual combo of entertainment and info is a balancing act. Marketing is too lazy to find that balance and relies on the entertainment instead. I just hope that when you go to create your viral video you keep this in mind. Or rather maybe it's better if you don't and just add a circus of performing animals in sync with a catchy tune, repeating the name of your book over and over again. and that is the saddest part. Marketing is simply a machine trying to figure out what is effective, and thinks we are telling it what that is. Interesting idea, I would vote on that. And those last few sentences remind me of something interesting. This could spawn a whole other topic. That is just my own personal opinion on the matter, not actually something objective. An observation of valuing entertainment over the sales pitch. They should be indistinguishable equal in message and entertainment. Yeah, it is more like they got fake subliminal messaging banned but then never mentioned/forgot that subliminal messaging is indeed a marketing tactic.(just look at all the animals! 'Weeeeeeeeeeee" Are you kidding me? That's a squealing pig trying to sell me car insurance.)
I've been saying that all along. This would be a definition of "marketing" as a single entity, and one we can blame. That's not the definition of marketing I use. Marketing is the science of manipulating people's actions resulting in them buying one's product. The consumption of the product is the outcome measure marketing scientists are looking at. Again, marketing science has nothing to do with the entertainment value of a commercial. The question is, does said entertainment result in an uptick in product sales? And yet I'd bet that is a successful commercial. My point wasn't as much about how entertaining the Virgin America video was. My point was, someone was telling me how cool that video was on an unrelated CSPAN program.
I see, so marketing by definition is subliminal. Great. Yeah and that's not good enough. Like I said, they are looking to us(the consumer) for the answer, but they really only get a small part of the answer and have to end up using trial and error to figure out how to use the insights. It should, because it definitely is part of the calculation; which you exemplified here. And if you are strictly talking about my opinion of what a 'good' commercial is then yes, that has no relation to marketing science. To make clear, I no way believe that balancing entertainment with information is a perfect formula for marketing a product to the masses. I think it does, and I think it goes to show that our definition and understanding of these matters is still... insufficient.
I didn't find it entertaining - I found it immensely annoying. Seriously, it's fun for the first 30 seconds, but after the 2min mark it just gets irritating. And it reminded me of this advert here: It was originally highly successful, actually, and many people enjoyed it. But then the advert kept popping up - every new advert by that company had the same fat guy singing "Go compare!!!" really loudly. Until by the end, people hated it so much they switched channels the moment the advert came on, to the point where the company used the same fat guy in their commercials, but this time he gets beaten up the moment he starts singing, in an attempt to basically get back on the viewer's good side. Just found this Go Compare advert - it's pretty dull but shows you how they're trying to change their image:
Sorry if this point has already been made among the canyons of text, but it seems that the more entertaining an advertisement is, the less likely I am to remember which product was being promoted. Also, ad repetition is definitely a double-edged sword. There are several excellent ads I've only seen once and would like to see again (Apple, among others). On the other hand, if I thought for a minute that I could get away with it, I would happily kill the young couple in the AT&T TV commercial (the one which ends with the guy saying "that was her"). I guess I remembered the product, though.
While there may be some subliminal effects of a marketing scheme, that is not the correct definition of marketing. Some ads come right out and say, "buy this," and, "our product is better." If you take their word for it, how is that subliminal? And is dishonesty the same as subliminal? Video News Releases are commercials disguised as news, for example, because advertisers have found that people are more likely to believe the ad when they think it is on the news. While 'trial' may be the last step in marketing research, the research is a tad more advanced than simple trial and error. You are missing the point. It's not about the song and dance, it's about making a book trailer that people want to share with someone else. I'm not following you here.
