The advertising game

Recently me and a few friends have been playing 'the advertising game'. Just while watching the TV. Its a funny game, sometimes I tend to think that it's only advertisers or advertising students who get overexcited about adverts, but I am completely wrong. I saw a competitive war brake out before my eyes of dispute as to what advert was what. Below are the rules:

1. You win a point if you guess the name of the ad before anyone else

2. You cannot name an ad if the name appears on the screen or is spoken already, it MUST be before or a point is deducted

3. You can steal a point from another player if you are able to name the song name.

These are rather simple rules, and it is these rules that do allow for a really fun game. I found it interesting seeing how many adverts you do subconsciously take notice of, I even found myself shouting out names of many of those terrible 'cash my gold' ads! While the game is a bit of light hearted fun, it's intriguing to learn what trademark features make up an ad for a certain brand, what names you accidentally call out for some ads that look similar to others and quite basically who remembers which adverts! You can rapidly see which ones work as to how many people try to grab the point. If I ever loose my excuse is always that I only spend my time looking at good ads!

I will be leaving for New York tomorrow for the week with college which I can't wait for, just to see how the city works, and how the agencies operate over there...I shall soon see if I'm able to play the 'advertising game' over an 8hour flight to bide my time!

New Specsavers ad.

This week while watching the TV i came across the new Specsavers Ad. On first glance I thought it was another 'The Lynx Effect' ad, but that was the whole point, it was mimicking a previous ad of women running on a beach to a man spraying himself in Lynx. The Specksavers version used this same set, but then when the women arrived at the man, he put on an awful pair of glasses, to which they all ran away and the strategy line appeared. Specsavers cleverly combined their strategy line 'Should've gone to Specsavers' with Lynx's strategy line to create 'The should've gone to specsavers Effect', with permission from the owner of the Lynx brand, Unilever. The ad was created by Specsavers in-house creative team Simon Bougourd and Neil Brush. I think the ad works really well, it ties in well with their current humorous campaigns so stays on brand, and they have essentially used some of Lynx's popularity but in a polite manor! It's refreshing, light, comedy but still clever.

Check out the ad...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x89xAXHd2l8

Strategy.

Our most recent brief at college has been on strategy. Quite frankly the whole subject seemed impossibly difficult but although I still know i'll never be a copywriter, learning the whole subject gave me more clarity on the meaning. The golden rule I found which helped me most was 'benefit, truth and insight'. When you get a brand or product you filter information under these headings. It just makes things much more clear and more feasible to create a strategy line. I now know what a strong strategy means, and they are generally the most simple.

After this brief we went onto an Art Direction and Copywriting module. During this I complied a research file studying and discovering famous Copywriters and Art Directors, looking at their backgrounds and work. This provided me with the knowledge to understand how they got into the advertising business, and to my surprise the majority had very unrelated backgrounds. For the brief, in teams of two we had to create two campaigns for Philips HD ready TV, one which was copy based and one which was visual communication. I found these very helpful in providing me with a great understanding of the vast difference, and how both ways can be effective in completely different ways. Personally I found the visual communication campaign a much more natural progression into creating ideas or concepts, whereas I found the copy based campaign a much more difficult task to create the idea. All in all, I was very pleased with the outcome, but me and my partner felt our strengths lay in separate areas. Mine in art direction and hers in copywriting.

London.

Between the 8th and 11th of Feb our advertising course visited London. It was a certain highlight of this year. We visited Y&R (http://www.rkcryr.com/), Dave Trott (http://www.cstadvertising.com/blog/) and Fallon (http://www.fallon.co.uk/). Visiting these agencies and learning how they worked and got into advertising gave me drive to work. Particularly I found Dave Trott interesting, he has a whole different outlook on things and although rather blunt at times I admire his honesty. Advertising is a job, course and area which cannot be sugarcoated. In the industry your ideas can be shot down in an instant, so learning to be brutally honest now will definitely help me in the future. Check out their websites.