AntiSocial Media
Connecting with an audience is the most important goal an advertiser needs to accomplish. Beyond pushing your agenda, your message and your product… you need to connect with your consumer on their level in order to make your brand or product relevant to their daily lives.
This desire to make a connection inevitably and quite naturally found itself taking over the internet. It makes sense… Go where the people are. You cannot get through a single work day without logging on, so why not focus advertising energy to those sites which are visited most. But, how can you make your efforts social and interactive? Many have found their answer to be: By incentivizing! How many businesses have you liked simply because you liked them? Or did they have to ask you to, boasting some sort of promise? Do you still visit those websites or has the social media realm captivated your attention?
This brings me to my title for this piece, AntiSocial Media. I believe, as I said before, that social media is a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless. And while its title implies a form of communicating which promotes social behavior, it, in fact, diminishes our abilities to be social, connect and interact on a personal level. What’s the need for calling your college buddies to catch up when you can view their lives on the internet, look at pictures of their wedding and see their kids grow up in the posted family photo albums…? No need to call your friends about buying that new house, just post it and they can take the tour themselves!
This reminds me of the car commercial where the daughter says her parents aren't really living because they don’t have any friends on Facebook, all the while, they are out enjoying their lives while she is sitting at home socializing on her computer, alone.
Through all this quick and easy connection comes a very real disconnect far greater than I think we would like to admit. What’s more important, living your life for you, or so it fills your wall nicely? Do you take pictures for yourself anymore, or has personal photography reduced itself to the sole purpose of showing off? I hope we can get back to a healthy balance of communication where we can supplement our lives with technology but not replace it entirely. Unfortunately, it has become so common, that to not have a presence means you don’t exist.
We continue this trend because “everybody else is doing it”, and I certainly have nothing against the platforms themselves, just what human nature has done with them. So, we do what we have to, to prove that we exist and that our clients do as well – but I look forward to a time where advancements improve our abilities, instead of hindering them.
Get On The Bus, Or Get Left Behind!
It's as though he had some kind of perception that increasing the visibility of his law firm were somehow detrimental to his business plan. When reading what he wrote over and over, his words had the connotation that Morgan and Morgan and the rest of the big law firms that thrive via advertising, were somehow less than honorable for incorporating methods that exceeded word of mouth.
I read those words again. This time they seemed envious…like someone who feigned distaste for something simply because it was out of their comfort zone, their little bubble of what was familiar. The last time I read that lawyer's words made me think he was a child who wanted a toy that another boy had, and acted like he didn't want it just on the off chance that the other boy would stop playing with it long enough so that he could have a turn.
The world of legal representation is like any other. You're selling something you want people to buy, but in this case, you're selling your legal expertise. How will people ever like you….ever build a rapport with you, if they don't even KNOW you? I'm here to tell you that advertising in the legal industry WORKS. I've never needed an attorney in my life, but if I did, I would surely call one that advertises because those names immediately pop into my head, and my personal opinion is that one is just as good as another for any service I may ever need.
While I'm on this legal kick today, have you ever listened to a Morgan and Morgan commercial and noticed the emphasis on “FOR the people?” For them…..not against them. Why not “for the PEOPLE”? Farrah and Farrah really “gets it” in my humble opinion, because he portrays himself as a very affable “every man”. “Call me Eddie.”….and if I were ever in Mr. Farrah's office, I might feel comfortable doing just that, and I feel that he would make me feel welcome and not overwhelmed. I salute these two law firms for doing it the right way. Some of you may tire of the Morgan and Morgan, Farrah and Farrah, and Harrell and Harrell commercials, BUT I BET YOU REMEMBER THEM.
Mad Men Marketing to Participate in Park(ing) Day!
We plan to convert one of the metered parking space in front of our 111 E. Bay Street location in Downtown Jacksonville into a living room area in order to play a DVD series marathon of the AMC Drama Mad Men, and invite the passing public to take a seat and enjoy. We are excited to take part in this national movement to transform regular parking spots, even if only for one day, into public spaces, so that anyone can come by and relax in a formerly hectic environment, for free.
Park(ing) Day will be held in Downtown Jacksonville on Friday, September 21st from 10am – 5pm.
For those of you who don't know much about Park(ing) Day, here's a brief description taken directly from the website parkingday.org:
Providing temporary public open space . . . one parking spot at time.
PARK(ing) Day is a annual open-source global event where citizens, artists and activists collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spaces into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public places. The project began in 2005 when Rebar, a San Francisco art and design studio, converted a single metered parking space into a temporary public park in downtown San Francisco. Since 2005, PARK(ing) Day has evolved into a global movement, with organizations and individuals (operating independently of Rebar but following an established set of guidelines) creating new forms of temporary public space in urban contexts around the world.
The mission of PARK(ing) Day is to call attention to the need for more open urban space, to generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated, and to improve the quality of urban human habitat … at least until the meter runs out!
So, come join us, take the load off and spend your lunch hour, break time, or walk about… watching a great TV program in the privacy of your very own public parking space living room!
Where’s The Toy In My Cereal?!
McDonald's sees a spike in their sales go up every time they employ their strategy of affixing Monopoly pieces to their soft drinks and fries and a few other choice products. They reward those who super size their meals with double the Monopoly pieces. The game is so popular that if you wanted to increase the sale of a less popular item, such as the filet of fish, you could simply apply more game pieces to its wrapper.
The same phenomena exists with a proof of purchase system. Everyone remembers Kool-Aid points from their childhood. You could purchase a number of Kool-Aid branded memorabilia with a large enough number of points. Pepsi and Coke used a similar method. Pepsi even made the mistake of advertising that with 35 million Pepsi points, you could purchase a harrier jet. Taking this literally, one man with a corporate backer attempted to take advantage, only to be told that this was impossible and the company became embroiled in litigation surrounding this promotion. People were more prone to purchasing Pepsi instead of Coke during the period when Coke did not employ a similar system.
The reason I'm posting this is that gimmicks don't always work, but the concept of scarcity suggests that people's wants are infinite and are prone to consumerism. If you tell some people they want it, it just may work. It's like a Jedi mind trick. You can reward people who purchase your product with items that do nothing more than advertise your product either in the home or in the form of apparel. It doesn't work all the time. It takes the right product, but with enough creativity, this concept of “incentive to purchase” can be a home run.
Where Did The Ads Go?
In the past, Dell was unique because you could go online and customize a computer to your specifications. As a matter of fact, you can STILL do that…BUT did you KNOW that? NO, because they don't remind you that they can do that. You probably also didn't know that Dell enhanced their presence on QVC and that they added Alienware's high end gaming PC's to their arsenal. The U.S. military has a contract with Dell as well and updates all their PC's every 2 years on the average, perhaps as a direct result of their market saturation at the height of Dell's popularity They don't remind you that it was their company and founder Michael Dell that revolutionized the home computer industry by simply catering to consumer needs and streamlining the production process. The point is that once you have a successful marketing campaign, you don't stop. You alter your approach, but YOU DO NOT STOP ADVERTISING.
As a lovely freebie to those of you who read this blog, let me just add that you no longer need to spend a lot of money on a computer. You can purchase a bare-bones PC at Best Buy or another convenient retail chain for around $300 brand new, and it will do everything that 80% of you need it to do. The only thing it will lack is high end processing and graphics capabilities that gamers require and it won't have the software or maybe even the hardware to support a media software intensive job. Aside from those two things, if all you use your computer for is to type the occasional document and surf the web, a cheap one will do just fine. You're welcome. 🙂