Thursday, March 11, 2010

The Future of Advertising 2

here's the first part, btw.

"People have arrived at a certain degree of development, they are more sensitive and have more spiritual force, and so their problems are more acute.."


The way I see it the future of advertising will be determined by the future products, which in turn will be determined by the the people's needs and moods... and we can clearly see a growing interest for products of more experiential nature. There will be a lesser demand for physical things (i.e. no more new pencil holders, pls!), but a higher demand for new experiences that would last much longer then a few seconds of a print ad or 45 sec. of a TV commercial. In fact future TV commercials will look more like movie trailers with product placement... offering consumers chances of participation in freshly created stories, scripted or unscripted, role playing or reality games, funny or unnerving contests, educational as well as entertaining programs, etc..

Last year I posted an idea for a car brand (or a car rental company) ... a road adventure reality show "Lost in a city"... where participants are transported (blindfolded!) and dropped in an unknown to them place (new country or city) with only a credit card, a map of the place and car keys ( brand of their choice). After a couple of days of exploring the place they would arrive to a special pickup place to be transported back to their original homes. Their road adventures would be recorded and published online. No selling propositions, no logos.... think of it as bmwfilms.com a few years back... but instead of actors real people. (NB: events could be scripted or not)

Anyway, today I came across this article "High end thrill-seekers pay to be kidnapped" from springwise.com that tells us about a new business startup Ultime Réalité that offers experience seekers a menu of realistic custom made high end experiences ranging from being woken up in a morgue surrounded by corpses to being hunted down by a serial maniac. What's also interesting is that the requests, according to Reuters primarily come from top-level executives seeking an extreme-sports alternative. Prices for basic kidnapping start from 900 €.

The way I see it, brands should embrace this new experiential medium and instead of crafting persuasive selling messages start offering persuasive (as well as relevant to the brand) life experiences.
For example, Fallon has launched a campaign to introduce the new name for Charmin toilet tissue, 'Cushelle'. TV spot shows a koala hugging a Cushelle pack of tissues. Experiential approach to current Cushelle campaign would be, for instance, to let the consumer to hug the koala and experience the softness ... instead of imagining it from the picture. If this is not appealing enough (as I suspect), lets drop the koala and create a more rewarding experience of family friendly softness - i.e. to offer real homeless people a chance to spend a soft-n-cozy luxurious weekend with a real hospitable family in their own home! (with Cushelle tissues in their private toilets of course!)



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