The Nerd Signal

Short-term Virtual Memory – Marketing Crossovers

Advertisers are trying more and more to get their products in front of people in ways that will grab their attention and keep them memorable. They’re charged with dreaming up tricks and techniques to make their product ads entertaining, fresh, & in the back of your minds when you’re on a shopping trip in the hopes that the product’s jingle or funny commercial will be a catalyst to your purchase.

For Pilot’s new Extrafine ballpoint pen, they’ve enlisted some very experimental Lego people to demonstrate the amount of detail one can create with these pens. The amount of detail, whether legitimately drawn with these pens or not, is incredible. Old Spice went a little crazy with their commercials, spawning an Old Spice guy Twitter account, and a YouTube channel that would record small personalized clips for people who responded to the call to ask questions of the Old Spice guy. Last year, Blizzard teamed with Pepsi’s Mountain Dew to promote two flavors of World of Warcraft themed Dew Game Fuel flavors – Horde and Alliance. They did something similar for Halo as well.

The goal of advertising remains the same no matter what year it is – create campaigns that will draw an audience and make them remember your product, in the hopes that they’ll purchase the product on their next trip to the store. It takes a daring team to delve into the marketing techniques that Old Spice and other companies took to create their advertisements. They’ve done a fantastic job so far, and I’m interested to see what they’ll do next.