The Rodeo

Or Why traditional advertising is wasted on me

While seeing Serenity yesterday, we were assualted with a barrage of advertisements for movies I care nothing about, and products I don’t care for. The only one I really remember involved Richard Gere wasting a large amount of money paying for some (assumedly) Indian man to release a large amount of birds (which I assume would return to him so he could charge another poor sucker and release them again ad infinitum) to surprise a small girl who could only afford to purchase the ‘release’ of a single trained bird by the money-grabbing shopkeeper (who reminds me of every person who runs a mobile-phone ringtone download business), in order to secure good fortune for her brother who was going on a trip.

It was an ad for some credit card or other. Visa I think. But it had no effect on me, except to make my image of Richard Gere seem slightly rosier. What a nice man.

But what did it have to do with convincing me to obtain one of their credit cards? Nothing at all.

I hate most advertising. I don’t watch ads on TV, I record programs so I can watch them without ads. I ignore 99% of ads that I see on billboards while commuting to work every day. I read the newspaper online, and whilst online I use a firefox plugin called Ad-block which allows me to remove ads from my screen. I never see them.

All this ads up* to a big problem for traditional advertisers: I’m not getting their message at all.

Here’s a hint for you all (should you want to advertise something to me): Make it relevant or make it funny. I have a whole directory on my laptop where I save cool ads. I show them to people around me. All of those ads have two things in common – they are very funny/cool, or they are extremely relevant to me.

That’s the only way you’ll convince me to even look at your advertising. Even then I probably won’t buy your product if the ad is just funny. It needs to be relevant, and I need to have loads of people back it up. Go look at bloggers – give them free stuff and they’ll probably give it a plug (but don’t expect it or you’ll make them unhappy).

RodeoClown: thinks Richard Gere got more advertsing than Visa.

*pun intended

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