DISQUS

Rex Hammock · 1 year ago

So tell us, Scott. What did your friend say when he discovered it was a practical joke?

paullmf · 1 year ago

Tech Blogs as entertainment, whatever next!
Seriously..loved the story, but would love to know how succesful the campaign was

Beth Robinson · 1 year ago

This is a neat example, but why would a company only use one strategy? Entertainment goes after future buyers in likely demographics. Information goes after those ready to buy in the near future. As long as there's room on the web, I don't see the point in only doing one.

Book Calendar · 1 year ago

It is called infotainment, entertaining soundbites that inform you about a product or event. It is not enough to inform, one must be entertained while you are being informed. This is what Fox News is about and a lot of modern commercials. There is no conflict.

Someone · 1 year ago

When you buy a car, you don't think "lemme have a look at ALL the cars out there".

So the entertainment builds knowledge OF the product.

The information builds knowledge ABOUT the procuct.

I think.

John Gillett · 1 year ago

If viewers have trouble hanging around for a :30 second spot, how are they expected to read through a ten-ton pile of legalese?

Like a previous commenter, it would be interesting to see if Toyota considered the campaign a success, or the experiment interesting...

Elias Bizannes · 1 year ago

Text ads are just the beginning. Google's adsense is as much about relevance as it is about push-advertising.

Next steps? VRM...

Elias Bizannes · 1 year ago

*Pull, not push sorry

Noah Brier · 1 year ago

I agree with Beth. While I see your point Scott (and love your Clio/text link line), Google ads work best for people who know what they want. The car industry (and many others), however, are built on convincing people to buy things they don't yet know they want. This is where the more entertaining variety comes in (not that I'm saying the Toyota ads, or just about any other online display advertising, are any good).

What's more, Google et al. are fundamentally different media properties than anything advertisers have used in the past. Never has their been such a good opportunity to get inside the head of a consumer and understand exactly where they are in the purchase process (even point of sale needs to do more selling).

Nathan Ketsdever · 1 year ago

I was a bit freaked out by this ad. I wasn't going to send it to a friend--because I have no idea what it did.

ps. the City Paper in Nashville is **massively** switching to web--only 2 print publications a week. (sorry if you've already read or covered the story)

Hillel · 1 year ago

Scott... you're definitely onto something, but you haven't followed the evolution of the ad far enough.

You're right the text ads are fantastic. They are fantastic for direct response.

The pub-fighting app you reviewed is more of a brand advertisement. The advertiser thinks that their demographic will respond to this kind of "fun". Whether you think it's fun or not, likely there is an audience for it.

But you stopped short on your journey... just because many brand marketers are creating these "distractions" and "infotainment" sites doesn't mean they won't evolve beyond that.

The real holy grail is creating an online experience that users come back to organically and that is positively associated with your brand. IMHO the best example of this today is Nike. They have created the Nike+ suite of online services that are both useful for their target audience (runners in this case) and an effective brand "advertisement". Nike is dedicating a huge chunk of their consumer marketing going forward to developing these types of services.

What does this mean? It means that eventually, the big brand marketers (who represent even more money than the direct response business that google dominates) are going to become web software developers/publishers (or at least financiers).

This is the true destination of advertising on the web. Right now these folks are sponsoring (sometimes) useful widgets. Eventually they'll all graduate to full blown branded apps.

(Full disclosure: this is what our company does. we try to create cool online experiences that are useful, beautiful, possibly entertaining, and eminently brandable. Our first three are already out there and we're working on more.)