After reading Piper’s post about AT&T’s commercial, I was struck by the simplicity of this marketing tactic. This tied in with what I read on Forbes, that a marketing trend going forward in 2013 is that advertising campaigns are going to be decidedly alot more simple. I agree with what she said about the ad, that the message came across as funny, genuine, and most importantly, clear.
When it boils down to getting the right message to the consumer, our sensory channels are often bombarded with information about different brands everyday.
This can create alot of noise variables, and impede the communication channels. Therefore, despite how brilliant your marketing strategy is, it never gets registered in the consumers mind. By effectively differentiating yourself from the competition by creating a simple, easily understandable ad campaign, it reduces all the noise variables and gets the message to your consumer much more effectively. It’s nice to have a creative concept, like the Target ads during the oscars, but ultimately, if consumers aren’t able to grasp the purpose of the ad within a couple seconds, the advertisement is ultimately rendered useless. By focusing on one message and using integrated marketing communications to coordinated a unified message, I think it will be alot more effective.
I think in the study of marketing, we sometimes get caught up in super creative ideas and try so hard to differentiate our ad from the crowd that the message gets lost in the delivery. By looking at things from the consumers perspective, who often only has a couple seconds to spare to pay attention to your ad, I think one will be able to craft ad campaigns more effectively.
An ad campaign that is one of my personal favourites is the got milk? campaign. I consider its simplicity and humour to be charming, and this just goes to show that an advertisement does not need whistles and bells to be successful.
