Why Eventful Advertising is Unlikely
I’m about to hop on a plane for ad:tech Chicago, but I wanted to address, if briefly, Adam Broitman’s challenge to the blogosphere as we continue our back-and-forth about “Eventness or Sobytiinost’.”
Adam asks, “How can the context of an event be leveraged (for marketers) in the interactive space in such a way that takes full advantage of the medium?”
Some quick responses:
- Most things in life aren’t eventful, let along advertising that tends to ride alongside an event
- Famous or good and eventful aren’t the same. Ridley Scott’s 1984 Macintosh ad is famous and deservedly so, but only its Superbowl debut makes it even hint at eventfulness
- What MECA’s Bob Kimball calls “presence based communications” — and what in the media pyramid is either the red middle band or the precious yellow capstone — is a prerequisite for anything eventful.
So, one trick is to look for things that people don’t want to defer. This is why Anheuser Busch does so much sports marketing, because they think it’s TiVo proof. IM, LiveChat and, of course, Adam’s fascinating virtual worlds are presence based and therefore have a chance at being eventful. Things like what CBS did with online March Madness for the last two years have a chance at being eventful.
But just because something is live and presence-based doesn’t make it eventful, and how a brand can partake of eventfulness when it DOES happen without making a mess of things is something currently beyond any formula.
Perhaps the most successful example of the sympathetic brand magic that we’re talking about is the long-standing on-camera Disneyland response for sports figures. “Fred! You just won the NBA championship. What’s the first thing you’re going to do?” “I’m going to Disneyland!”
Let’s just hope the game was unforgettable, because that’s what it takes.
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