I spend a mainstream amount of time reading magazines and watching TV, and a more-than-mainstream amount reading the Net. Of all the teeming billions of dollars poured into advertising on all these media, essentially none of it speaks to me. This was brought home yesterday when I was impressed by two ads in one day. They were running this TV ad for Subway (the sandwich shop) that was just incredibly simple and linear: “Unlike McDonalds and the others, we make our bread fresh every day in the store”; with a picture of the oven. I haven’t been to a Subway in decades, but the next time I’ve got hungry cranky kids to wrangle, that’s maybe a good argument for giving them a try. The same evening, I was looking through my newsfeeds, and in The Economist’s excellent Free Exchange blog (yeah, dust off your knee-jerk right-silliness filter, but still) feed, one of the entries was an ad; a simple one-paragraph squib saying there was a special offer for new subscribers. I already subscribe, but you couldn’t imagine a better way to pitch a subscription. Two in one day? That’s the first time that’s happened in years.
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Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Rob (Feb 25 2007, at 06:28)
Yeah, Subway has great ads, too bad their products basically taste like sawdust. They kept sucking me back in, but finally I've learnt the lesson that ad quality has no correlation with food quality. Incidentally, has Mickey D's gotten itself a hot new ad company or what? I never thought the golden arches would develop a sense of humor, but lately their ads have been kicking butt.
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From: David Smith (Feb 25 2007, at 07:48)
Hmmm...
That's two out of the last three posts you've felt the need to apologize for your reading habits. Do you really think your readers are that judgemental (or easily pigeonholed)?
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From: sup (Feb 25 2007, at 08:02)
> we make our bread fresh every day in the store
Well, ok. If you call placing frozen bread rods into an oven "making". It's not like the actually mix the ingredients.
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From: Andrew (Feb 26 2007, at 09:56)
The fact that you don't find most advertising appealing is hardly surprising given that in the average household women make something like 80% of all purchasing decisions. Most advertising is therefore skewed towards the 25-55 female demographic.
It's interesting to me that the two adverts that you did find interesting recently were for products that fall within the purchasing sphere of an average male (a lunchtime sandwich and a business magazine).
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