Enjoyable advertising

[jack]

The internet has made advertising almost synonymous with "bad". I was watching a film trailer, and thinking that's actually an example of advertising that I often like: film trailers vary a lot in quality, but at least they:

(i) are usually shown before a film in a cinema or on a DVD, where it's easy to skip them if you don't want
(ii) tell me somthing about the product that tells me if I want to see it or not
(iii) tell me something _new_, and go away after a few months tops

And it's sort of depressing that most adverts don't do any of that, they just say "BUY COKE!" Well, duh, a business that wants to sell something, what a surprise?

On the one hand, what other examples of good advertising are there?[1]

On the other hand, if the most successful and/or parasitic companies give massive subsidies to broadcast TV, etc, maybe that's a good thing after all?[2]

[1] Should I include things like freee dropbox? To some extent, DropBox presumably just wants to make DropBox, but presumably they also want to make money from it, so to some extent the whole free version of commercial software is a big advertising stunt, but one that is (a) effective and (b) makes my life actively better, so yay :)

[2] Pointless adverts are somewhat zero-sum. Apparently you can make things _better_ for the companies by banning advertising, because they can compete with competitors less to the same effect. Maybe advertising should be legally restricted to short, informative, text-only, and let people bid to display "coke" if they really want to?

Comments

[simont]

On the one hand, what other examples of good advertising are there?

The ones that pop up at the top of Google searches. When I'm googling for something for any reason other than because I intend to buy it, they don't get in the way much – no flashing colours, distracting animation, sound, popups etc – and when I am after something I want to buy, they can actually be useful. I think I've said before that they're the only kind of advert which can inspire in me the entirely positive response of "thank you, that was useful information, I'll take you up on it", although now you mention it I suppose I have to agree that film trailers can count on that score too. (Though text ads have the extra nice property that you can instantly stop looking at them as soon as you can tell you're not interested; if a trailer for a film that Isn't Your Thing comes on, you still have to sit through the rest of it.)

I must quibble ever so slightly with your point (i): I have encountered a DVD (fairly recently, though I can't remember what it was) with unskippable trailers, which was thoroughly irritating.

I suppose the Google text ads don't exactly count as enjoyable advertising as per your post title, but I would certainly say they're good as per the question.

[fluffymormegil]

Were the trailers still unskippable in vlc?

[simont]

I don't know; I didn't try.

(I will generally only watch a DVD on my computer if I absolutely can't watch it on my TV, since only one of them has an appropriately placed sofa.)

[jack]

The ones that pop up at the top of Google searches.

Hm. Those text ads are pretty much state of the art for not being annoying, for all the reasons you state, which is a very good start. But I mostly find them "not really annoying", not normally actually beneficial.

I have encountered a DVD (fairly recently, though I can't remember what it was) with unskippable trailers,

Oh good, can you tell Stark? He took the courageous position that I was wrong to annoyed by unskippable segments on DVDs. (Or possibly some mealy-mouthed similar-sounding but more literally true claim, I forget.)

Yeah, I meant to imply _usually_, I'm still very annoyed by the exceptions.

[forestofglory]

I generally like it when the internet recommends books to me.

[jack]

Good point, I don't usually find automatic book recommendations that useful, but they're generally hitting the sort of things I like, and I wouldn't mind seeing them more.

[ewx]

Some ads are entertaining in their own right (by being funny, beautiful, thought-provoking, etc). I’m not sure how much these achieve their backers’ purposes though - Cleaner Close was amusing to watch but I don’t buy their product (and indeed had to ask the web to check I’d correctly remembered which it was, though as it happened I was right).
I suppose these are somewhat analogous to rich private citizens funding impressive public buildings (does anyone do that any more?) - the creation of a public good in the hope that some kind of indirect benefit.

[jack]

I guess it's almost orthogonal: some artistic/enjoyable adverts are memorable, some aren't.

I always remember that the Guiness Book of Records is called that, but my mind apparently learned that before it knew anything about Guiness, so it thinks it's just a coincidence... :)

[eudoxiafriday.wordpress.com]

There are definitely a few ads on TV that I find enjoyable. I like the moneysupermarket ones ("Geoff saved £200 on his car insurance at moneysupermarket ... and now he feels EPIC") because I love the fact that they are, for once, NOT using an idealised slim/tall/conventionally attractive/rich/'perfect' protagonist.

(conversely, I really, really dislike the current BT ones which I think portray the geeky character as a sleazy/manipulative guy. I know plenty of socially awkward geeks. The vast majority of them are not sleazy.)

I find Google ads creepy; despite not (so far as I know) being logged in to my google accounts when I'm searching for things I've noticed in the last couple of months that they have been flagging up EXACTLY the things I've been searching for (e.g. "Sewing machines from John Lewis"). I also think that this is a bit pointless and a silly advertising strategy: I, myself, searched for sewing machines from John Lewis and then decided that at the moment I don't want to buy one, so I'm not buying one. When you flash up an ad in a sidebar showing them to me, I just think "oh yeah those sewing machines I decided against".