Ad2 Cincinnati

I realize that most would write about any sticky jingles in a blog called, Fail/Fail Wednesdays, but sometimes corporate-sponsored melodies do a good job. Not only do they help sell a service or product, they help keep the world entertained.

FAIL: BeepBeep.com

Time Warner has an endless stream of crap coming fro their creative department, but one turd is the by far the smelliest: the jingle to promote their website: beepbeep.com. They have somehow managed to turn something exciting (buying a car) into something horrific (listening to the jingle in their commercial).

Lucky, for you, I managed to get a hold of the creative brief that started this monstrosity. Take a look at the details below.

Client: Time Warner - beepbeep.com

Brand Equity: If Time Warner were a person, it would be someone who survived the Great Depression, but never got over the whole stinginess thing. This person LOVES jingles from the 50’s, but is also entertained by moderncelebrities such as “Ken West” and “that one funny guy from Saturday Night live with the curly hair. Yeah, I think his name is Annie Sandberger! He’s a funny guy.”

Target Audience: Young car buyers who are entertained by nails scratching on a chalkboard.

Objective: Just make a commercial for beepbeep.com on TV. Maybe if we play it enough times, people won’t know where else to research car buying.

Ad Requirements:

-MENTION THE ROADRUNNER! DON’T FORGET THE ROADRUNNER!

-Needs to have a jingle

-Video quality needs to resemble a streaming video on a 28.8 kbps modem connection to the internet.

This creative brief made such a horrible ad, I could not even find it in YoutTube. If you really want to see it, though, just watch about 15 minutes of cable TV and you’ll probably run into the ad that features this jerk:

Sellout.

WIN: Freecreditreport.com

What’s more entertaining than checking your credit? Here’s the list I’ve compiled:

-Getting punched in the gut

-Falling down a flight of stairs

-Watching the movie Bruno

The creative team had a very difficult task to get people to check their credit scores, and they were pretty successful with a mini-series musical about checking credit. What was once a painful topic (checking credit) is now more fun with the help of music. Here is my favorite of their ads:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HksXMVhxdxY

Last week’s Ad2 happy hour at Tino Vino brought out most of the board, as well as the end of the seasonal summer wine. We sipped on $4 glasses of wine with names like Exotic Fruits-infandel and Cherry Pinot Grigio and snacked on an array of cheeses as Juno, a cute little dog who’s never missed a table scrap in her life, circled our ankles. As always, there was some no pressure networking. It’s always nice to see new faces. Even convinced a few to wipe the cobwebs from their Twitter accounts.

Plenty remarked that they’d passed by Tino Vino several times but didn’t know what exactly was inside. Heather Stang, Tino Vino’s general manager, gave us a brief talk on starting up the homey winery, which has been in business for a little more than two years. She explained that they (it’s run by a group of friends) were lucky to start off with a friend who had a lot of capital, but since then, location has played a big role in their success. You can make your own wine there too (make sure you have to have space for 30 or so bottles at home!), and though no one from Ad2 did that night, some kicked around the idea of doing it in the future.

We may have classed it up at a wine bar this time around, but be sure to join us October 8th to live it up Bavarian-style. We’ll be at the Strass Haus on Covington’s Main Street from 6-8pm.

In lieu of the massive lighting storms last night, I am paying homage to the brand that iconicized a streak of lighting: Gatorade.

WIN: Is it in you?

To the average bear who only uses the gym to make fun of people working out, the old Is It in You? campaign from Gatorade was probably disgusting. It featured bodily fluids replaced with a tasty drink full of sweet sugary goodness. To an athlete, however, bodily fluids (particularly sweat) are not just something that is excreted. No. It is something that is hard earned.   Sweat is the result of determination and perseverance to conquer pain and achieve athletic glory.

Gatorade’s Is It in You? campaign precisely addressed how athletes value sweat. Then they swapped that endearing fluid with their own product. Disgusting? Maybe. Brilliant? Yes.

Fail: G

Really, Gatorade? Was “atorade” too difficult to pronounce? Or were you inspired by Chevrolet when they shortened their brand to Chevy? Either way, bad idea.  The new name helps people forget the team that brought this brand to to the national stage: The Florida Gators. It also moves the branding away from inspirational athletes to just the pronunciation of a single consonant. Maybe some think that the new name is baller, but not in my house.

Watch an ad here.

We are all über-connected. For most of us, it’s completely expected that our potential bosses are going to look at our Facebook photos before the job interview [note to self: un-tag all those pictures from last month at Final Friday], read our Twitter feeds for potentially alarming overtones, and Google us to find that terrible, terrible editorial we wrote for the newspaper in undergrad. The more savvy of us, of course, have figured out that if we’re active on the Internet - blogging, tweeting, Tumbling, Facebooking, Favring, Flickring, and Digging - we can harness the power of organic search to become a recognized Internet presence, and hopefully garner the attention of a firm that we love and we want to work for.

But it’s a seductive game, one in which you have to pick your battles wisely. Here’s a list of things to consider when

• What is everyone else doing? This can be a double-edged sword, because it’s tempting to make a direct web copy of a web idol’s presence and expect to have the same result. But it’s useful to look at the people who are successful where you’d like to be successful, and look at what’s worked for them. Havi Brooks is a professional coach/yoga instructor/business advisor, but her blog is filled with anything but normal business-speak [just look at her business partner]. Nubby Twiglet, an amazing Portland-based graphic designer, maintains a blog filled with design advice and samples, but also photos of her outfits and her exploits traveling around with a a posse of other fashion bloggers. In both cases, their blogs show that they’re very, very skilled in their fields, but that they’re also not robots - they have personalities and interests outside of work that end up making them better at what they do.
• Consider your input/output ratio. What do you put into it, and what do you get out of it? How is it likely to help you, and how much can you use it to help others? Web 2.0 newbies might want to jump in headfirst, putting a ton of energy into barraging the Internet with how awesome they are via tweet, tumblog, and bookmark, but they’ll soon find that most of the valuable networking contacts they get and maintain come from only one or two channels. Figure out what those channels are, and then capitalize on them. I’ve met some of my clients through Twitter and my own blog. A good friend of mine who does video art and installations meets almost all his collaborators through YouTube and Delicious.com. And an acquaintance back in New York whose Tumblr is utterly fantastic ended up getting a full-time job - as a Tumblr staffer.
• How much of a web presence can you reasonably maintain? Remember, web 2.0 is all about the exchange. So if you’re spending your web time yelling as loudly as you possibly can, people may notice, but they’ll do their best to ignore you. On the flip side, though, if you use the web to maintain an engaging exchange - giving as well as taking - your presence is a lot more likely to benefit everyone, including yourself. So if you don’t have the time or the patience to maintain a dialogue via blog or YouTube or Delicious, consider something more minimal like Twitter or Tumblr.

Do you use web 2.0 to get gigs or promote yourself to employers? How do you do it? What works? What doesn’t?