ICM - Leeds Design Agency

Continuing the theme of advertising on TV and how we tend to analyse the effectiveness of every advert we ever watch, the next occupational hazard has to be knowing obscene amounts about the advertising industry and scaring normal people with your knowledge. When asked over the weekend what the advert with the drumming gorilla is advertising I was the only person who knew it was for Cadburys.

In terms of the effectiveness of the advert this was pretty damning, since only the person in the industry knew the answer. Surely, as a brand awareness ad it has completely failed. However, everyone now remembers the drumming gorilla. I reckon that the problem with the ad is that Cadburys is in no way related to drumming, gorillas or Phil Collins, so the connection between cool advert and brand isn’t made by the audience.
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Last night, whist watching the ad break in Corrie, one of my housemates (who works in PR) and I fell prey to that well known occupational hazard of all marketeers – dissecting the adverts.

Which made me wonder (for the umpteenth time) how far removed we in the marketing industry are from those who aren’t. She and I sat there discussing the merits (or otherwise) of Morrison’s apparent strategy to go head to head with M&S (the Twiggy/Lou Lou stand off is hilarious) then, realising what we were doing (again!) wondered how many ‘normal’ people sit there and dissect ads.

How can we really know how “the general public” will react to a campaign, if our first reaction is to pull it apart and look at it from lots of different angles?

I guess the answer is to know your target market and have a shed load of research on your side… What do you thi…

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Following the gaming Bafta awards earlier this week I was really chuffed that Wii Sports did so well. Winning six awards, I felt that not only did it get the recognition it deserved, but it also proved that, in today’s world of uber violent gameplay, there is still a place for fun, chilled out games. …

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