Snowsquare has a post about a cryptic ad campaign apparently setting up a rebranding by mobile telephony provider MTS.
There is something strangely appealing about the crazy drama of these "secret" ad campaigns. I can remember several from my time in Moscow. The silliest was one that involved a bunch of posters with nothing more than the letters "AB" (if memory serves) and eventually turned out to be advertising a new (and ultimately unsuccessful) line of potato chips being promoted by Alla Borisovna Pugachova, an aging, overweight pop star. Happily, I think the Russian marketers have become more sophisticated in the past couple of years, although some of snowsquare's photos suggest there are still companies taking a low-budget approach to advertising.
Another, more recent - and more captivating - campaign of this type involved a man with his hand on a curvaceous figure that looked like the silhouette of a woman, with the caption, "So that she doesn't leave [you] for someone else." ("Chtoby ona ne ushla k drugomu") Turned out the ad was for car alarms, and the man was resting his hand on what emerged (in the second version of the ad) to be a luxury automobile.
Strangely, I don't think I've ever seen anything similar in the US, except maybe once in a long while promoting movies. I think this is a function of Russia's money being concentrated in Moscow, a city which has more than enough outdoor advertising space to create a huge impression on any of its 10+ million residents. There is no such single concentration of wealth/influence in once US city, although maybe there are ad campaigns like this in New York and I've just never heard about them. Maybe it also has something to do with people who are only 15 years into the daily visual assault of advertising and are thus more willing to look at the billboards and think about them. On the other hand, I guess there are sometimes some pretty cryptic ads on US TV (our nation's equivalent of the common city-space), but I have been living TV-less and therefore have been deprived of them for the past 6 months or so.
If I may rave briefly, I'm a huge fan of snowsquare - the best English-language slice-of-Moscow blog around.
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Rebranding
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4 comments:
Thanks for the encouragement - I'll try to keep snowsquare.comit interesting - any ideas welcomed!
I agree with your assessment of Snowsquare. It is a superb blog.
That is interesting to see. I always liked a creative approach to advertising, this way they are at least of some use to general public. Also it proves to be an efficient way to advertise, creating "secrecy" and "mystery" around the product. This way people will actively look for what the product is and even if they don't need it, they will try it at least once to see what the whole mystery is about.
On the other hand I would have to disagree with u on the lack of such ads in US. There are many that appear in NYC subway and on TV. Take for instance a large billboard poster, one in existence, that was shown along Highway 101 near Silicon Valley. It read “{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com” and nothing else. People who actually bothered to solve the riddle and go to the website (and than solve some more riddles) got a job interview with Google.
http://www.google.com/search?hs=C5e&hl=en&lr=&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=first+10-digit+prime+found+in+consecutive+digits+of+e.com&btnG=Search
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