What’s the deal with that ShamWow guy?

The season premiere of Rick Mercer’s The Mercer Report aired last night along with what I think is one of his best commercial parodies:

I remember our Whipple book warning future advertisers not to “make your ad look like an ad” because people’s ad-detecting radar will pick it up, and they’ll automatically tune out. Yet Vince and the ShamWow, Slap Chop have done an impressive job of making viewers pay attention (Am I the only one whose friends can actually recite lines from ShamWow? It’s scary.)

If any of you have had a class at the U of W in the past 2 years, you’ve probably sat through one of those speals from Australian students promoting adventurous summer jobs in places like South America. Some of them use the same technique as Vince – they talk super fast and act out their speech with hilarious imitations of white water rafting and scuba diving. In other words, they take the animated, larger-than-life approach so you find you can’t look away - you even want to watch - despite the fact that you’ve already seen the ad 4 times that day.

Another great tactic is using a cheeky personality with some great tongue-in-cheek lines (“cause you know we can’t do this all day”) behind what appears to be a cheesy infomercial. It’s a bit like watching all those animated movies (like Shrek) that are supposedly “for kids” or “the family” but realising they contain a lot of adult-content jokes (“you’re gonna love my nuts”).

What do you think contributes to the ShamWow success? Or maybe you can't stand the commerical - why?

Also? I can kill you with my brain microwave popcorn.

This past summer, a cherished and dear member of my family - our hot air popcorn popper - passed away at the advanced age of 15 years.

For weeks, we looked for a replacement, only to find that every darn air popper we bought left at least 1/4 cup of kernels unpopped, as well as spewed the popped stuff all over the kitchen. After trying about 10 different brands, we finally admitted defeat – we would have to try microwave popcorn.

While searching the internet to see if there were any healthier methods to making popcorn in the microwave, we came across news stories from the States which claim that packaged popcorn like Orville Redenbacher and Act II can, potentially, kill you.

According to the New York Times, (*ding!* that’s one for me, Kenton ;) a doctor in the United States has been able to positively link the consuming of microwave popcorn as cause of severe lung inflammation found in one of her patients.

Buttered microwave popcorn contains a chemical called diacetyl which is used to create that artifical buttery flavour. When it’s heated, it forms a vapour that can cause the lungs to swell, making breathing difficult for anyone who is exposed to it over a long period of time.

But there is a better way. All you need is a paper bag and some popping corn. Seriously.

Take about 1/4 cup of kernels, put them into the bag, fold the bag over, and microwave for about 2 1/2 minutes. Add some of your own real butter, and voila - popcorn perfecto!

Surprised? I was too, but who can blame us? We’ve been bombarded for so many years with images of prepackaged popcorn being popped in microwaves that many of us can’t imagine it being done any other way. But it can, and (hello starving students!) it’s cheaper.

It’s the Recession, Didiot! has done the math, and your freshly popped, do-it-yourself popcorn will have cost you a grand total of 9 cents, compared to the average $1.29 for a store bought package.

Where I think this all relates to communications is in the combination of advertising and PR which has successfully promoted microwave popcorn’s convenience and taste while smoothing over any concerns over public health.

In spite of diacetyl being linked to the lung disease found in workers of microwave popcorn plants in 4 American states, USA Food and Drug Administration insists (in classic crisis communication style) that they “haven’t seen anything that would give us any reason to suspect this is something we should make a high priority” (USA Today report).

Right.

I think I’ll stick to my 9 cent popcorn, just in case (“or my name isn’t Orville Redenbacher”).

New job for CreCommers!

Heads up my fellow CreCommers - Terry Ortynsky Nissan may be looking for a new ad editor soon.

In today’s FreeP:

Looks like somebody didn’t remember that old elementary school rule: “’i’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’!”.
In fact, even a simple run through spell check would have caught that one, which is something you would think is standard procedure in an ad agency...

Four more for good measure?:

Let’s see... that would’ve been an automatic fail in journalism, and another 50% deduction in advertising or PR. Too bad our strict standards at RRC don’t reflect those seen in the real workplace.

But don’t get me wrong - seeing these mistakes, which are certain credibility crushers, only makes me understand not only the value of having these rules in place in CreComm but also the need for more grade 6 English teachers.

PR and comedy together?

I heard about this particular comedy sketch on CBC a while ago. Not being all that familiar with the field of PR at the time, I watched it, laughed at it, and moved on. Recently taking another look at it, however, makes me wonder how many comedians are in PR because I think they would be perfect for the job.

There seems to be something about the psyche of comedians which allows them to notice the quirks, take advantage of an audience, and in general, twist around words to create the effect they want. Or in this case, master the art of filling up a journalist's interview time without actually giving away any solid information (which, I can imagine, is probably a hard thing to accomplish without looking simply repeating "I'm not talking about this. It's a non-issue." (Take note, Bomber coach Mike Kelly)).

Here, comedians John Clarke and Bryan Dawe act out an interview between an Australian senator and a journalist about a real life oil spill which occurred off the country's western coast in the 90s.

Censor... anything but the creative muse

Last week, my advertising class was given our “Good Ad/Bad Ad” assignment (self-explanatory), and in the midst of my ad searching, I came across three ads that stood out from the rest. In fact, I had remembered seeing this one particular campaign floating around on the internet a while ago, and I deliberately went googling to try and find it, only to discover it didn’t fit the assignment criteria (had to be from a magazine... but more on that aspect later).

Our text Hey Whipple, Squeeze This addresses an advertising paradigm called “positioning” where the idea is that there’s only a certain amount of room in a consumer’s head for products. If your product isn’t in their head already, the only way you’ll get access is if you de-position one of your competitors, or try to plan an ad campaign that will fill any available head space.

This is a definition that seems to summarize the typical Western (read: North American/European) market: highly saturated, and with numerous brands touting similar products. But what about more difficult markets, such as the Middle East, where the competitors aren’t other products in the market place, but the market place itself? So far our text and classroom discussions have been focused on how Western advertising companies selling Western products are fighting for the top spot in Western markets. But what happens when a Western company wants to market in a country that has strong censorship against the very products they want to sell? Advertisers have to get a little creative, and things get a lot more interesting.

Enter the international brand Change and their campaign to promote lingerie and swim wear in Saudi Arabia. The country’s censorship laws which aim to uphold the morality of its people inevitably result in products showing Western models with exposed skin being scribbled over with marker before hitting the shelves (see this edited package or this amusing doctoring of Katy Perry’s CD).

But Change wasn’t about to back down to the challenge; instead, they did probably the smartest thing they could have ever done, which was to turn the idea of censorship into an advertising tactic (“When life gives you lemons, make lemonade”). I'll let the ads speak for themselves:

Images courtesy of AdBlogArabia.

This is a great campaign in that Change understood the type of market they were trying to access and altered their campaign accordingly. This did this not only visually, but also by way of distribution: instead of trying to get ad space in magazines, Change decided to keep their campaign under the wire and get at their female market by submitting their ads to local and international blogs, which proved highly successful.

The Change campaign is a prime example of the changing face of advertising. Whereas advertisers in North America go to great lengths to attract customers by making their ads stand out from the rest, those aiming for a more conservative market must figure out how to get past the marker-wielding middle man first before reaching their actual customers.

Greetings blog-o-sphere!

Hello!

I'm yet another college student studying Communications who is setting up a professional blog. It'll act as an archieve of the work I'll be doing over the next few years as I complete my program and head out into that not-so-distant other dimension: The Real World.

Outside of the occasional PR, advertising, journalism, and broadcasting assignments, I'll be posting other entries covering a variety of other topics with the hope of eventually finding a "niche" to latch onto (because "random stuff" can only be interesting for so long, right?)

And since this is a professional blog, how about a little bit of shameless self-promotion! Here's a link to my flickr account (which I update, infrequently, when I remember to clear out my memory card ;).