There are two things I know very little about, politics and women. However, this add seems to have the same level of knowledge as I do. Every semester I ask my students to send me any advertisement they think is worth showing to the class. Usually students send me excellent advertisements that garner a lot of attention or do a really good job communicating their message. In this case though, a student thought this ad did the opposite of what it was intended to do. Give it a look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOppsQJtL2M
Mini Darth Vader and Volkswagen, the “go mom” ads for Proctor and Gamble, the “Uncle Drew” advertisements…everybody has their own favorite advertisement but what if you were going to create your own ad? You’ve probably seen advertisements and thought, I could do so much better. This fall students in BUAD 310 section 1 and 2 (Principles of Marketing) will be tasked with creating their own advertisements for the graduate programs at UMW. The new convergence center on campus will allow students to use the latest technology to direct and produce their own advertisements which promote our outstanding graduate programs. When these students graduate they can not only show people their resumes but they can show people their commercial, wouldn’t it be cool to have someone who can produce commercials on your staff? Once the advertisements are created I’ll post them on my webpage and if they’re really outstanding you’ll be able to see them in UMW marketing efforts. If you have any ideas or suggestions for what you would like to see please email me and I’ll pass them along.
I recently gave a presentation to the Fredericksburg Chamber of Commerce and one of the questions that came up was who should you target in the network? First, picture a very wide spider web, each line in the web is a connection to another user and each point that connects two lines is a user. For example, suppose that I am connected to Fred then Fred and I will have a line between us. If Fred is also connected to Barney then Fred and Barney will have a line between them, and so on. In this network Fred is very central because he is connected to both Barney and I. He brings together unique users and thus should be the focus of your targeting (we presented a paper on this, AMA 2014 Poster v2). To illustrate the importance of centrality let me give you another example that I use in class. Last semester I had an international student from India and I compared that student to one of the more popular domestic students in the class. I asked, who should you target? Most of the class said the more popular student because they have more connections. But wait, that’s probably not the best way to go if we think about this issue of centrality. The more popular student knows many people, yes, but most of those people know each other too. By reaching this person you’re reaching the same crowd and if they retweet or repost something the same people will see it. However, the international student is connected to all of these different groups. They’re connected to their friends back home, their classmates back home, their friends here, their classmates here. By reaching the international student the chance that message will be viewed by different people increases and that’s who you should focus on.
I recently spoke with an executive at a major motion picture company. He was telling me about how their advertisements are regulated by multiple agencies (the Motion Picture Association of America) and the FTC, because of this their creative freedom is significantly restricted. If they were producing a horror movie they would want to scare people into seeing the movie or if the movie was R rated they would like their advertisements to be the same, but the advertisements must be toned down. To get around this though the film industry is taking an indirect route by placing advertisements on video sharing websites (such as Youtube). They create the ad for another market (where the ad would be legal) and then the ad is placed on youtube and if it happens to be viewed by people in the United States, well……
Click below to see one such ad produced in Brazil for a movie that made most of its money in the United States.
There are two things I know very little about, politics and women. However, this add seems to have the same level of knowledge as I do. Every semester I ask my students to send me any advertisement they think is worth showing to the class. Usually students send me excellent advertisements that garner a lot of attention or do a really good job communicating their message. In this case though, a student thought this ad did the opposite of what it was intended to do. Give it a look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOppsQJtL2M
Mini Darth Vader and Volkswagen
