One Foot out the Door

In Chicago there is a company called Lettuce Entertain You (even before the age where I understood witty humor I thought that was clever) that owns several chains of restaurants throughout the Chicagoland area. Rosebud of Highland Park is one of these restaurant. Rosebud has been a family favorite of mine since it opened several years ago. Much to my dismay, they have finally shut their doors to open another restaurant in Deerfield (a hop skip and jump away from Highland Park), what's funny is that I was expecting to be in dismay a couple of years ago. They had said on numerous counts that they were going to shutdown their Highland Park location yet the set date would come and go and no closing of doors would happen. I now conclude that this was a skeezy advertising ploy to rush in the dinner crowds each weekend before it actually shut down.

Let me tell you if my conspiracy theory is right than they have a brilliant brain trust of marketers over at Lettuce Entertain You because each time I went there before it was set to close I could hardly believe how crowded it was!

So do I like that they said goodbye and then stayed time and time again? Yes and no, I love the food but hate the deceit. Regardless of how I feel though, that was some damn good advertising.

Svedka

I feel that an effective advertisement is memorable, informative, persuasive, and progressive (or original if that term is preferred). Memorability is necessary for obvious reasons: you can't buy something that you don't remember. Informative is needed to accurately and efficiently portray what the product is. Lastly is the persuasive aspect, which is inherently needed to attract consumers to the product in the first place.

Originally I was going to bash Svedka for their seemingly unoriginal, random, and dumb robot girl campaign. But, while attempting to be an objective individual, I read an article that made note of how nobody cares if a female robot is treated as an object, because it is just that. The advertisements used by Svedka are memorable because of how random they are, they are a little weak in the information category, but the excel in the persuasive and progressive categories.

In this day and age people are always looking for the newest and sleekest products. The robot girl is just that, and the bottle itself in the advertisements are pretty sleek looking too. Sex, money, alcohol, and fancy futuristic things are all very persuasive ideas that will draw in a wide demographic of men and possibly women too.

It is progressive because of how they use the robot girl to sell sex. They are making an interesting statement with her because they know that they are making her seductive but in a very atypical way by using a robot. That causes heads to turn and the advertisement to pop out from all the clutter.

Dishes and Battleship, Fun for the Whole Family!

What fun! Father and son playing a quality game of Battleship, enjoying their night, most likely just finished dinner. But what's this? They aren't the only ones who look like they're having a great time! The mother and daughter in the background are loving doing the dishes.

I'm starting to like these 50's and 60's advertisements more and more because of their absurdity. Why was it even necessary to include the women at all if the only point was to offend and degrade the female gender? They could have easily left the women out of the ad and not lost anything in terms of advertising power.

Folgers returns

After doing some research for those advertisements I mentioned in my last post, I stumbled upon this Folgers gem. I've never seen a comic strip used as an advertisement before. It seems kind of like a transitional concept used between the age of print and the age of television to use bright colors and a storyline in print to draw in and entertain the audience.

My question is, was this advertisement ever taken seriously? Or were these always kind of laughable. The dialogue is painfully unnatural and everybody seems just a bit too happy about how great Folgers is... I mean, how can you confidently make a statement like "nothing adds so much to a meal" when it's so arbitrary and unprovable? I feel like it only subtracts from the advertisement.

Sexism and a Cup of Coffee

I was watching a movie the other day, for the life of me I can't remember the name of it. The movie had tidbits about advertising along with a lot on Alfred Hitchcock (who is, unrelated to advertising, a very fascinating man). What caught my attention the most were the Folger's coffee commercials from the 60's that they injected into the movie to break it up and give a sense of what advertising was like back then.

It was astounding for me to see how differently women were treated back then even through advertising. One man asked his wife in one of the commercials "how could such a pretty wife make such bad coffee?"

the following advertisement is actually one of the ones used in the movie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VprIbx4QkPc
...Really?

What's more is that the wife not only takes the verbal abuse but in other advertisements she finds herself in the kitchen with her mother or friend crying because all she wants to be is a good wife and she can't even make a decent cup of coffee for her man.

I'm not by any means a feminist, but wow to Folgers.

Hoo-Ah!

Al Pacino's words from the movie Scent of a Woman carry a lot of tradition and intensity behind them. The Marine Corps advertises better than any other organization I know of. Every single time I'm at the movie theater and one of those five minute Marine Corps commercials comes on I can't help but get goose-bumps all over.

The idea of being part of something bigger, to be an individual but to function as a singular unit, is a very profound concept and by no means easy to portray in five minutes. But the Marines make it possible by using images of Marines working together through training courses, combat, and doing their famous rifle motions in unison. It seems like they're almost using parade tactics to appeal to Americans, lots of color and discipline to put on a show to flaunt all their hard work and skills.

The Element of Surprise

This weeks assignment reminded me of all of my favorite advertisements that I've seen while driving thousands and thousands of miles for my high school rowing team. Over the past few years billboards have been getting more and more creative by using all available real estate going beyond the board itself and sometimes even inventing space that wasn't even really there to start with. A billboard advertisement for the Museum of Flight in Seattle has a 3D plane crashed into the billboard and the only other words on the billboard are the name of the Museum. Simplicity strikes again, this image is hilarious and fresh. The message "see the history of flight from the first kite to the latest jets" (not actually the Museum of Flight's words) will not attract nearly as wide of a demographic as a real plane crashed into a sign.

Chick-Fil-A not only has the best chicken in the country but they, and the San Francisco Zoo, provide great examples of using all available real estate on a billboard. They provide comic relief from the thousands of other monotone advertisements on the road. There are only so many colors in the palate and so many fonts to choose from. It's difficult to attract attention on the road because unless it's something out of the ordinary most people have taught themselves to selectively view things. Chick-Fil-A and the San Francisco zoo provide that much needed relief by going beyond simple colors and fonts. San Francisco Streetlight Giraffe Advertisement