When I was a small child, I am told, I used to run out of the room when a TV show was on, but race back in, to watch the commercials with rapt attention. My parents found this behavior a bit odd, to say the least. Little did they know that I would grow up to be a marketing and advertising guy, where I would not only write about commercials, but write and direct them for a living. When I was young, it was difficult to defend this behavior. As an adult, I know realize that a 30 second commercial (at least the good ones) have average budgets similar to a 30-second sitcom, with better acting, tighter scripts, far better special effects and production values, and more compelling content. 

To be a really great commercial, though, takes some work. Most great spots are part of a series, simply because it’s easier to be memorable if you can inject some continuity into your campaign…that way you can make the same point, with similar stuff, without boring your audiences. A current example of this would be the GEICO commercials with the animated lizard. Classics-to-be. In fact, GEICO has an embarrassment of riches on the “series” bandwagon…the cavemen series, the lizard series, the new money with eyes series, and the customer paired with a celebrity series. By comparison, Progressive’s series with stand-up comedienne Stephanie Courtney makes it seem as they just aren’t trying as hard as GEICO.

Another take on making great spots is where you create something that is not-quite-a-series, yet bears some family resemblances. “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” and “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz” did it for Alka-Seltzer.

But it seems that the ones we immortalize in our minds somehow end up being the stand-alone, one-offs, for some reason. Two spots that come to mind for most people (and ranked #2 and #1 respectively in just about every poll of memorable ads) are the Alka Selter “Speecy-spicy Meet-a-ball” spot from Alka-Seltzer and the “Brave New World” spot that introduced the Apple Macintosh. The wild thing about the Brave New World spot was it only aired once – during the Super Bowl – and recently saw a revival, as it was parodied by the Obama campaign, substituting Hillary Clinton for the large screen broadcast from “Big Brother.” (My personal favorite is the 2001/HAL spot that Apple created to skewer PCs for their milenium date problems.)

Recently, I’d say my favorite of the long-running series spots has to be the “Hello, I’m a PC…and I’m a Mac” spots from Apple. For Apple users, these spots are funny and reinforce their buying decision. As I type this on a PC, the spots are funny – and painful, at the same time.

So what does this have to do with your marketing? Well, consider this…when you create spots that resonate – spots that people remember long after they’ve stopped airing – spots that people talk about around the water cooler at work – those spots just increased the reach, effectiveness, and duration of your advertising, all without costing you one dime in additional advertising dollars.

Food for thought.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 12:51 am and is filed under marketing, media.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.