Pepsi: Two Celebs

Using celebrities to endorse products is very common in advertising. Often times a product only has one celebrity endorsing it, or if multiple celebs are in on an ad campaign they only show one at a time. This new Pepsi commercial I found very interesting because not only does it include two different celebrities but the stars in question are so different from each other. One is a boy band from Europe while the other is a football star here in America. I thought the diversity this commercial had made it great and effective because it reaches such a wide audience.

This is one of two commercials they made, the other one places Drew Brees out of his element and has him singing with One Direction. I think this commercial and ad campaign is funny and effective because of brilliant work combining two very different celebrities.

Whole Foods Ads

I have been reviewing Whole Foods ad campaigns in an attempt to better understand their business. This ad is a perfect example of what they try and show off to the public.

As is the case with most Whole Foods ads this highlights the healthiness and wholeness of their products. It has the traditional color scheme that makes you associate the ad with the brand. The colors also make a connection to healthy and ripe with the green background. One aspect that I feel makes this ad so successful is that it makes the connection that other grocery stores and food is not healthy and that there is no alternative to Whole Foods. By creating and highlighting their niche they have separated themselves from other brands. I feel that Whole Foods through their advertising has created a positive feeling around the brand that has allowed them to be successful.

Seasonal Ads

Holidays offer a great time to advertise your product. While running seasonal ads can be tricky because you spend the same amount of money but can only run it in a small window of time they are still quite useful. This high risk high reward time is when some of the most famous ad campaigns are launched. Coca-Cola in the past has done a tremendous job of this. These seasonal ads around holidays can occasionally produce some of the best ads.

This is a recent Halloween ad released by Snickers. The ad sticks with the usual grab a snickers theme but ads a holiday twist. I think this is one of the good seasonal ad campaigns because it doesn’t drift to far from the usual theme but still encompasses the holiday spirit. I really enjoyed this ad and think it does a great job of capturing my attention.   

LandShark

This fall break my friends and I went on a road trip to Ann Arbor. On the way we saw many billboards. Billboards are a great way to advertise because of the large amount of people who see them. When you are driving the natural instinct is to look and see what is on the sign. This is even more the case when you are in rural areas with nothing entertaining to look at, as was the case with our road trip. The vast majority of the billboards I saw during the drive were not very entertaining and only stayed in my mind for a second. One of the billboards I did like was for a beer called LandShark.

I thought this billboard was extremely effective because of the way they kept the beer’s name as a theme throughout the entire sign. Adding a fin to the bottle was a great idea and tilting the bottle to the side was genius. I thought the slogan “Let The Fin Begin” was clever as it kept with the shark theme. The color pattern added to the feel of the billboard and made it seem very desirable. Overall I thought this was a very good use of a billboard and was one of the most effective forms of advertising I saw on my trip.  

 

Sunday Night Football Intro

Primetime sporting events always have tons of people viewing them so advertising during them is very popular. You can guarantee that people are tuning in so TV ads during the game are at a premium. Just before the game though is a great time to advertise. Something I hadn’t notice or thought much about are the advertising opportunities during the intro. This video is of the opening for Sunday Night Football on NBC.

 

This intro does a great job of getting a catchy unique song that sticks in your head. This is important because unlike most ads this one is only shown once during the week and doesn’t get remembered brain though constant play. They also do a terrific job of attaching faces of NFL players and other celebrities to help make a deeper connection between the audience and the programming. There is also a lot of advertising done for other products during this intro. NBC uses this as an opportunity to pitch one of its other shows. They also have advertising from completely other products such as Verizon and NFL Red Zone.

I think this Sunday Night Football intro is great and uses a lot of different strategies to advertise for a lot of different products. This is a very successful use of TV time before a large audience.   

Chubbies Shorts

I came across a company last year that I found to be very interesting. It is a shorts company based in San Francisco called Chubbies. The brand was started by Stanford grads who wanted to bring back the look of short shorts for men. The shorts themselves are pretty nice, lots of cool designs and great colors. The thing that really got me was the way they advertise and represent the brand. Chubbies really tries to dominate the college to young professional field with an emphasis on men in fraternities. Everything the company releases plays right into that demographic.

It starts with the name of the shorts. Every short they release has a different name and story behind it. For example these pretty normal green shorts take on a whole new life when given this name and bio.

 

THE PREGAMES-Yup - the weekend has finally arrived and these shorts are ready to kick that mother off in a monstrous way. Get outta those terrible work pants. Throw them into your furnace. What? Don't have a furnace? Find one. Destroy those damned things.

Now that we've taken care of that, time to get into these party-startin, lady-attractin, beer-slangin mamma jammas and get the night started right.

Weekend activated and you're already winning.

 

 

At first I wasn’t positive if this in your face style of advertising and promoting would be successful but these shorts were sold out within a matter of hours.

The company is currently doing very well and is expanding very fast and I think their style of advertising has a lot to do with it. They really stand out and make you take notice of them, something that has caused me to remember them and actually buy the shorts. I think they did a great job of finding their demographic. I beleive more than half the battle is finding exactly who would buy your product and Chubbies did a great job of that.

Below is a link to Chubbies’ website so you can explore and see more of their unique brand.

 

http://www.chubbiesshorts.com/

 

 

 

EPL Jersey

This Saturday, as I often do, I woke up early to watch the English Premier League. For those that do not follow soccer the EPL is the English soccer league, considered by most to be the best league in the world. During the game between by beloved Tottenham and Manchester United something caught my eye in a way that it has never before. In soccer unlike traditional US sports such as baseball and football, the front of the jersey is reserved for sponsors. While this is something I have known about for virtually my entire life I never have thought deeply about the sponsorship on the uniforms. I made the immediate connection between this form of advertising and celebrity endorsements. A company that decides to promote themselves on a uniform not only takes on the risk of the players misbehaving but also the team as a whole. Celebrity endorsements/partnerships can be very risky for companies because once the two form a bond a celebrity’s bad judgment can seriously hurt a business. To me having your company on a jersey is a huge risk. Not only are you as a company now bond to a whole team of players but you are also a part of that organization. I wonder if fans of rival teams would be against products that sponsor their most hated opponents.

I also did some research into just how much teams earn from jersey sponsorships and found some very interesting information. Manchester United and Liverpool both earn the most with an annual 20million pound payday. London’s Fulham club makes the least bringing in 120,000 pounds yearly. The range in which companies advertise on teams is almost as wide the discrepancy between the costs to sponsor. With companies ranging from beer to air travel.

The NBA is one US league that as discussed moving toward this style of advertising and revenue and I think it will be interesting to see how it is received here in the states.

Below are some jerseys to show examples of this form of advertising.