It didn’t really cross my mind what impact Thursday afternoon’s all-star breakout session would have on my path. In what was a lightning-quick two hour session, Frank Armstrong injected our class with key insight about our prospective futures. Divided up amongst graduates, we were able to hear their story; their journeys through the IMC program. It was invaluable.
We managed to pick the all-stars’ brains, dissecting their individual experiences. I was excited to see how they waded through the work to eventually find success in the real world. For me the sessions presented a sort of “life roadmap” – here is where you are, here is where you can end up if you play your cards right.
For the sake of advertising and IMC, it was interesting to examine how graduates integrated with the advertising/marketing world and how elements from the program were essential. The knowledge imparted on behalf of the grads definitely set me up in terms of knowing what pitfalls to avoid over the course of the next three years.
On my end, the sessions affirmed my faith in the program; that I had made the right choice in rebooting my early adult life. I can look back to the day I accepted my offer of admission with even greater confidence, knowing I wouldn’t change a thing…
It didn’t dawn on me ‘til the car ride home that I LOVES ME SOME GAMES.
This thought process was instigated by the distinct possibility that I was going to playing the new Battlefield installment upon arriving at my house. It LITRALLY was the best part of my day. Speaking of which, I ended up teaming up with a good cross-section of section 1 IMC students in taking on the SA’s video game challenge: play Call of Duty and draw a crowd.
Adver-gaming, in my opinion, falls into the rising trend of “Gamification”. The concept revolves around rewarding people for conducting tasks in a leveling system. Basically the mechanics of a game applied to the real world. Where would find a future application, is in the workplace where corporations would reward loyal workers with incentives. It is clear this concept will take on eventually as it already is being implemented in the advertising world.
As people’s experiences with media become interactive, so tool will their expectations of advertising. It makes sense to take something from the gaming world, which functions as a popular form of escape and implement it as a tool of business. Adver-gaming is the future.
Of all the holidays, Halloween is my favourite. Actually it’s not, but it’s up there in some upper echelon of holidaydom. Actually considering the fact that summer holidays aren’t really marketed, save for pushing the alcohol cottage lifestyle ads, Halloween is the first real marketed holiday of latter half of the year.
Coors Light Summer ad circa 1992
How Summer is marketed towards you.
I look at holidays as a split group, you have the summer holidays which are pretty awesome but inherently don’t represent anything asides from patriotism, blowing part of the country up, and getting drunk. Fall and winter holidays, on the other hand, have some supernatural ascribed meaning which is facilitated through advertising and the pushing of products.
Looking at Thanksgiving, the food industry, in a fairly low-key way, markets the shit out of food products (namely turkey) and the notions of family and homeliness. It’s an emotionally warm holiday.
Fast forwarding a bit, and out of chronological order I might add, Christmas is another warm holiday. We’re bombarded with images of Santa Claus and his reindeer landing on roofs and delivery toys and such. Products are sold under the guise of the big red guy accomplishing this task. It’s coupled, again, with the notion of family togetherness. Rumour has it Coke invented the modern red and white interpretation of Santa; the power of marketing at play…
But enough about these other holidays, we’re here to discuss – actually, I’m here to rant and you’re here to read there’s no two-way street in that department. Random narrative tangents aside, I’m surprised an apt marketer hasn’t fully grasped the potential of Halloween. I feel as though it is inevitably coming, and will emerge as another heavily marketed holiday. Think about it, you target the kids on getting food and random crap by going door-to-door. MORE IMPORTANTLY, you can target the adults getting drunk by offering new, seasonal ways to enjoy their drunkenness.
Anyway as it stands my responsibilities, like a crested wave, have ended for this week – the peak has passed. As such, I plan on enjoying my Halloween weekend and remembering none of it… That is until I get the inevitable call invoking my designated driver responsibilities. I do hope to get out this year, especially after the derailed plans of last year – courtesy of a lass who systematically ended up ruining most things I did.
It arrived in a ceramic bowl, a crude assembly of red paste, flecks of some sort of meat substance, and what I suppose could be described as some type of noodle. With some anxiety and nervousness, my hands moved to the accompanying spoon with this so-called “meal” – hands shaking worse than my poor Parkinsons’ struck Grandfather. The thought of this being good had never crossed my mind. It was completely out of gastro-induced intrigue that I barged into this Tim Hortons and made this purchase.
(Tim Hortons' handout image)
I’d never figured Tim Hortons to be the place taking risks of this magnitude with their, admittedly shotty, hot food selections. When I think Tim Hortons I think coffee, line ups, Donuts, line ups; at certain point the line ups and drive-thru variants resemble a slaughter house cattle line, the creature being slowly processed to be killed or in this case serviced. This is the reason Sydenham road is backed up in the morning. I’ve never actually seen a cattle line or visited a slaughter house, or really know what I am talking about – does that make me a liar?
Regardless of my narrative reliability, I’d stumbled across Timmy Hoes’ new product purely through social networking. A friend managed to post on her status that she was enjoying a Tim Hortons’ Lasagna. At first I thought this was some new slang, or a term she had created (she’s clever, but not that clever). So I immediately defaulted to thinking she’d purchased some form of drugs. I attribute this assumption to watching the Wire too much, which isn’t a bad thing. Moving forward, my interest, while initially discarding her “Tim Hortons’ Lasagna” post, began to peak as I saw other friends talking about it.
“TO GOOGLE!” I yelled. (I actually didn’t).
I looked up Tim Hortons’ Lasagna to see if these outrageous claims had any merit. Five minutes later (I have dial-up) it became evident that this thing did exist. What became more evident were the marketing implications raised by such a stupid story. The blogosphere and actual Canadian news sources were covering this in spades.
Taking a step back from the whole thing, and gazing on it with marketing in mind, one could see the genius behind it. What Tim Hortons did was just a smaller scale version of KFC’s Double Down campaign. Create a product so outrageous and give an initial push in marketing. The outrageousness will spiral out as interest spikes. People will talk about the product. The media will cover the product. And what you get is a form of self-sustaining free advertising. As Kip and Kathy covered in their respective classes, launching a new product is often a very daunting and expensive task that can often fail if the wrong advertising means are implemented. In the case of Tim’s Lasagna, they managed to garner mass amounts of free advertising courtesy of people’s social media updates, and the CBC.
(image from: Palsys.net)
With this understanding, I now realize this blog just spoke of this product. In talking of it, and describing it from an anecdote, I just redirected Tim Hortons’ message of “NEW PRODUCT. NEED ATTENTION. LOOK HERE”. Now the main question is how did it taste?
To be honest, I never entered Tim Hortons; I never purchased Lasagna there; my hands never shook with anticipation about the product. This is all because I never fell into the marketing trap Tim Hortons had presented before me. Now if they served some form of alcohol, it would be an entirely different story…
Steve Jobs is dead. Long live the King. And any other sort of respects I can pay to the man who basically shaped modern computing into a more personalized form.
In the past few days and weeks the media has been lit ablaze by this man’s passing. Describing him as an innovator, painting him as some godlike entity who came down from on high to change the world according to his vision. And while there is some truth to that, the rose-coloured lenses were definitely in need of checking when remembering him.
A key facet in examining Apple computer’s rise to success in their early days, was the creation of the GUI (graphical user interface) – think how you click icons to activate functions vs. the old system of entering code. GUI basically revolutionized everything from the ground up. To compliment this was the user’s electronic extension, the mouse. The mouse is another key aspect to modern computing. Generally these things are attributed to Apple.
While they did create them, they did not invent them. Casting a shadow of a doubt on Jobs’ image as an innovator, there is the well known PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) a Xerox outpost that designed these concepts first. They went one step further and created working/final versions of the GUI and mouse. When these things didn’t fly with the Xerox top brass, Jobs managed to get in touch with them and send a team of Apple employees and himself to PARC. They uncovered PARC’s discoveries and used them for their own gain.
"Good artists copy, great artists steal"
While this incident doesn’t fully discredit Jobs’ contributions to the technological world, it certainly paints a different image of the man. Innovator – he very well could be. Marketing guru, he was.
You’re losing your hair. This harsh reality hit home about a year ago when I noticed I’d managed to reach a dramatic threshold of how my hair had thinned; a point of no return. I was then presented with two options, buy into the hair loss replacement schemes in some desperate effort to cling to scraps; or take control of the situation with a razor. I opted for the latter.
It hadn’t occurred to me until half way through the week that this was going to somehow connect to marketing. In an effort to familiarize us with marketing case-study formats, Kip ran us through a case study of modern day shaving blades, Gillette v Schick (I went all legal on you there). In the tl;dr version of the case(too long; didn’t read) it was evident Gillette had lost major ground on the market thanks to Schick and their marketing prowess. Gillette was seen as the overpriced and overrated brand.
Fast forward past the case analysis and we dove into solutions to turn around Gillette’s floundering position.
“Make ladies razors,” some girl said…
Or maybe she didn’t.It was in the pre-noon hours, which for me exist only as a haze of “almost awake, not quite there”. REGARDLESS, the point is someone made that point as a viable option for Gillette.
A typical Gillette ad features men using the blade for facial shaving. Looking at Shick’s commercials, they appealed to guys with male pattern baldness by featuring Andre Agassi shaving head.
Shick's commercials appealing to balding men.
Furthermore it would encourage more guys in various stages of hair loss to take the plunge and shave it off which. It seems the hair loss remedy market is one that plays on appealing to male self-esteem. Gillette could radically shatter this notion. In the end, it is more liberating to purge what’s left than cling on to something that doesn’t want to be there.
There was something pure about up-and-leaving a place. A renegade action if there ever was one. Taking the wheel and driving off to some new location and life. It seemed like the ultimate plan B should anything go awry – break glass in case of emergency. I’d ditched Ottawa and the last 3.5 years of my life as a university student in an instant. No hesitation. I was Kingston bound.
Entering college, a 23 year-old first year, with a few years of university under my belt, was going to be an interesting experience. The immediate anticipation and fear was that I’d be the oldest person in the room. A glance around the room during orientation day only added fuel to the fire. There was an “oh god…” moment that crossed my mind as I saw the young faces.
As orientation day pressed on, fancy terminology for “an hour later…”, my fears were immediately quenched as I met fellow students in section 101. We were all in the same 18-25 demographic as Kip, and actually every instructor, would explain. The numbers 18-25 were hammered on us on a seemingly daily basis that still continues to this day.
It was a good thing. I think.
Blogging was something I’d never fully considered in the grand scheme of advertising. To be honest, I’d grouped it with the Twitter-addicted cell phone tweakers, people who come to look like meth addicts from the constant refreshing of their twitter feeds and speed-freak button mashing of their mobile devices. It seemed like a superfluous engagement.
I was wrong. I think. As classes rolled on it became increasingly apparent that blogging, Twitter, and mobile technology all served important parts in the machinery of advertising. As such I’ll push one of my videos in this blog post – nothing like shameless self advertising, right? Whatever, I still hate Twitter.
College itself was a brand new experience. Kingston, on the other hand, was not. It was, however, my homeland. I always enjoyed Kingston living. I recall an awkward realization in the car ride home with my brother from St. Larry’s, it hadn’t fully dawned on me that Kingston was once again my home until we passed by the Cineplex, a common site of congregation amongst my peers in the summer. I was back baby! Kingston is my home again.
