Month: October 2013

As the wave of midterms pass by in a whirlwind of highlighted notes, last-minute cramming, and caffeinated hours spent in coffee shops and university libraries, students everywhere are a little more than ready to wind down at the bar with friends, classmates, and acquaintances alike, over a drink or two.

What are the kids drinking these days anyway? An excellent question, to which Guinness has provided a heartwarming response. The popular Irish brew, dark and distinct in flavour (one might say it’s an acquired taste), has been commonly associated with the masculine drinker, capable of handling the strong, burnt, and thick profile. This connotation is exemplified by the brand’s recent ad campaign, using the brotherhood of a team as the fuel for its endearing commercial which features a group of friends in wheelchairs playing a game of basketball. Aided by the swells and crescendos of the Cinematic Orchestra’s “To Build a Home, That Home,” the significance of each pass of the ball and shot at the hoop becomes evident at the end, when all but one of the players unstrap themselves from their wheelchairs, and the chair-bound friend rolls out of the gymnasium, together with his able-bodied teammates.

“Dedication. Loyalty. Friendship. The choices we make reveal the true nature of our character.” 

Without explicitly pushing the desirable value of a Guinness into the faces of the audience, the brand conveys dedication, loyalty, and friendship, into the minds of consumers, promoting the aforementioned camaraderie associated with their product. If this is the commercial that “the boys” think of when they meet up after their last economics or organic chemistry midterm, the ad has done its job. Advertising doesn’t need to annoy its audiences with pushy proposals and vies for their pocket money by comparing themselves to other products or by listing out reasons to purchase A over B. Despite the dark, bitter taste of the drink itself, Guinness’ ad leaves the viewer feeling uplifted and refreshed. And we could all use a little inspiration in our day, no?

Watch the ad here.

Recently, Maddi Koop posted “You Are What You ‘Like'” on her blog, a look into data mining using a person’s ‘Likes’ on Facebook, and how consumers can be targeted according to their publicly stated tendencies, interests, and lack of interests. I largely agree with Maddi’s approach to liking or not liking pages on Facebook, and have to commend the engineers behind such data mining businesses on their ability to weed out the extraordinary and uncharacteristic Likes, amongst the vast number that actually do fit with the consumer’s preferences.

That being said, imagine this.

Would it be feasible for a consumer and/or group of consumers to boycott the system? If enough profiles (thus consumers, from the perspective of businesses) like specific pages, related or unrelated to their actual interests, could this not lead to the creation of a new market segment, to which products or services might be tailored toward? A little imaginative, yes, but it is important to note that such data mining should not be a main point of reference for businesses in the development and marketing of their products.

The issue with technology as such a prevalent factor in our day-to-day lives could also be the reason for wasted resources – by relying on technology to sum up and draw conclusions from data, as opposed to live, interactive research, we run the risk of drawing false conclusions, of dismissing intuition or human experience in favour of the ‘facts’ being presented to us.