With Easter having just passed, with all its bunnies, eggs, and sugar-fueled rampaging children running amok, I have to decided to give a marketing shout-out to the Catholic Church - probably the best advertising agency ever to have existed.

Bunnies laying colored eggs…deemed “too believable” to make it into the Scriptures.

It is hard to build solid marketshare, even around products of value. Let’s take renters’ insurance as an example; generally runs around $25/month. Protects all your stuff. Great idea. But do I have renters’ insurance? Nope. So imagine how difficult it must be to sell a religion! To take a big ball of fiction - and I’m not talking “It wasn’t Oswald!”, plausible fiction. Not even “We never went to the moon!”, unlikely-but-not-out-of-the-realm-of-possibility fiction. No, we’re talking insane-ramblings-of-the-local-crackhead fiction! To sell that product to massive swaths of people. I am just amazed every time I think of it.

So, being a site that looks at advertising, let’s look to the best ad agency on Earth for some pointers. I’ve tried to condense Christianity’s dominance down to a few major factors:

The Must-Have factor: your product must be marketed as the coolest thing since TickleMe Elmo (or in Christianity’s case, the coolest thing until TickleMe Elmo. Christianity offers you eternity with wings and music. Think Victoria’s Secret Angels fashion show, except with less thumping techno and more “good, Christian women” (which are at the other end of the hotness scale from Victoria’s Secret models). So, major upside there. And when you have absolutely no Consumer Reports, video footage, satisfied-user testimonials… when you have absolutely nothing tangible to prove your product even exists. you better have a major upside! Oh and one other thing…

The “Joe Rogan”: that’s right, fear factor! “If you don’t use our toothpaste, you could get gingivitis!” Not good enough. “If you don’t buy our life insurance, you’re wife and children could end up in the poor house!” Still not good enough. No, how ’bout an eternity of a large, red guy with horns poking you with hot things! Eternity! Holy f$#@king shit! That would scare the hell out of me, except that I am a rational person. Oh, that brings us to the next point…

Suspend rational thought: make dissenters feel stupid for being logical (or strap them to a rack and pull out their entrails.. check with your local regulations on this one). Q: “If God is all-powerful and all-loving, how can he let children be murdered?” A: “God works in mysterious ways. If only you had God in your heart, you would know this. tsk tsk {sympathetic shaking of head}”. Q: “If everything comes from God, including Lucifer, does it not logically follow that your God is the source of evil?” A: “Buuurrnn the heretic!!!!!”

Street marketing. Hit the dumb people first: approximately 75% of Americans are Christian. Compare that with 38% of scientists and 24% of doctors who don’t even believe in God, let alone being part of an organized religion. Smart people generally have a hard time buying what religion’s selling. So, to maximize their advertising resources, early Christians did not disseminate their message to the scholars of their time. No, they hit up the dumb people first. By the time they went to Justinian, they had their numbers. The Emperor had little choice.

“F’ world peace, what’s in it for me?”: We have been aware of the effects of our car emissions on the environment for quite awhile now. Reducing gas consumption is the just the “right thing to do”. And yet people kept forging along, buying their Hummers and SUVs, furry animals be damned. No, not until now, when people have been feeling the squeeze on their wallets from high gas prices have they decided to look for smaller vehicles.

Same goes for religion - Buddhism is a peaceful religion, concerned less about what awaits you in Heaven, and more about how to conduct your life well and live in harmony with your fellow man. Big mistake! Christianity realized that people don’t want world peace; they want to be able to commit unspeakable heinous acts against their fellow man and still get through those pearly gates. Mafioso types are Catholic for a reason! Buddhism warns you of Karma. Christianity gives you unending Forgiveness. No contest.

Make it easy to switch: finally, we bring our discussion back to Easter. Why the bunnies and eggs? To convert the Saxons! Yes, Easter comes from worship rituals of the Saxon Goddess Eastre. Christmas trees? Yep, also German. Christmas was invented and set to December 25th to replace the Winter Solstice celebrations of those pesky pagans. In fact, pretty much all of Christianity - from the holy trinity to “the messiah” to resurrection - it’s all an amalgam of pre-existing Egyptian and Persian myths. Christianity is very much like Microsoft. They’re hardly ever the first to market with anything, but manage to swipe up marketshare through marketing power and pre-established dominance.

So for any ad exec looking to see the Perfect Storm of marketing effort, look no further than your local church. Happy Easter!

According to a recent article I read, MySpace will be entering the News market.  MySpacers read the news???  Look for “Suppress news from my home page!” MySpace skins to be a big marketing opportunity.

Interesting move by Dove here – they go on the attack against their own industry.

Kind of dangerous really – “ok, you’ve convinced me that I don’t need to follow our shallow cultural beauty standards! You’ve convinced me that I’m beautiful just for being me! You’ve convinced me… that I don’t f’ing need to pay extra for Dove!”

Advertising isn’t about truth, Dove! What’s next, “Look Amish, use Dove”?

I’m being a bit facetious of course. I think it’s quite an engaging clip, just not sure how it sells more Dove soap. I think if they can tie the power of the message into their product a bit better, they have something to run with for awhile.

TV commercials bother me. Taking a quick self-inventory, I find that about 94.47% of tv advertising evokes in me one or more of the following responses:
1. mild displeasure
2. malaise
3. feeling of having my intelligence insulted
4. making oath to self to never, ever buy that product/service being advertised, “just to show ‘em” how much I hated the ad
5. a desperate wish for the sweet, sweet release of Armageddon
6. outrage and disgust (this especially when computer graphics are used to make babies/animals talk/dance)
7. alarm and fear that these ads are being beamed to alien races and revealing us to be a petty, weak, and easily-vanquished civilization.
8. confusion (specifically, asking questions such as “do they expect us to buy their product based on that ad?” or “did the ad genius who came up with that actually get to keep his job?” or “the ad agency showed that ad and the client approved it? wha-wha-whaaa?”

Hey, I’m not blind to the harsh reality that it is hard to make a clever ad for mouthwash. But that doesn’t mean I should tolerate some foppish prick in a turtleneck droppin’ dental wisdom as he stands in front of these 15 foot tall white blocks representing my teeth as a deluge of blue-green liquid pours out from between them. And when a problem comes along, I CAN not, and WILL not “swiff it”.. and god damn the ad guys that took my fond childhood memory of associating the “Whip It” song with a bunch of cool geeks doing the robot with red ziggurats on their heads, and replacing it with some cracked out suburban housewife skittering about her dusty home with a fucking mop/broom hybrid.

Give me pencil, paper, and 10 minutes and I know for a fact that I could come up with better material than this, but NOT better than this. I realize this ad has been out there awhile, but it’s worth seeing again. It’s kind of sad – I went to YouTube looking for other TurnPike work, and all the ones I found said “never aired” next to them. In fact, it looks like the Turnpike Films site isn’t even up anymore. What the hell is wrong with these clients! More Turnpike:

Magic Beer
Save the Pinata
Raisin Bran

This commercial actually makes me a bit uncomfortable, but I suppose it’s about as cool as you can make Alka Seltzer. The effervescent glow sticks are a nice effect. Sadly, this song is as good as half the shit I hear on the radio.

Here’s an idea for the R&D department at Alka Seltzer. We know there are certain light effects that can induce seizures. Certainly there’s some light or sound pattern that will induce an upset stomach (for me, that pattern is called “country music”). Put it in your commercial and watch your sales go through the roof.

Why settle for just swiping music from the 80s for your ad? Hell, swipe a whole ad!

Here’s an obviously effective (3 million views as this writing) ad mashup using the famous Apple 1984 ad. Ouch, Hillary. Ouch.

Interesting nexus of modern social networking and games from our childhood – it’s the YouTube Scavenger Hunt. I think there’s a lot of potential in this idea. “Item 1: film yourself eating a BK Whopper!”

I’m almost afraid to talk about this, since I generally don’t like my favorite music ending up in commercials. But I’m wondering why more “techno” (we’ll lump all the manifold subgenres of electronic music together as “techno”, since that’s what most people call it all anyway) music doesn’t end up in commercials. I will fully admit bias – I think it’s the best new music around. But I’m going to try to make an objective case for it.

The first Google image that pops up for “techno”. Yes, that’s how much cooler it is than your music.

I’m going to assume that when music is used in a commercial, it is being used (in most cases) to a. be in the background, accessorizing the product, b. evoke powerful emotions. I can’t think of any music that does that better than classical music and techno. And I think techno is the obvious 21st century heir of the classical music legacy, but that’s a topic for another post.

There are few if any words in techno, and a steady beat. What better music to spotlight your product? The narrator doesn’t have to compete with the singer. And the viewer won’t be ignoring your product as they sing along to a song they know.

More importantly, you can’t find a much better music to evoke emotion. There’s no story-telling in techno music. It is melodies and beats designed entirely to put you in a mood. Even the occasional lyrics are just there to reinforce the mood that the music is trying to evoke. With the exception of a few rock songs (Blur’s Song #2 comes to mind..a-WOO-HOO!), there is no better music to get someone excited about your product.

Many of you have probably never even heard of “As the Rush Comes” by Motorcycle. Here’s an example of what I think is a great song to put behind a product.

The sparse lyrics are already primed for a particular product:
“Embrace me… Surround me…When the rush comes.. So bring it on! … Tampax.”

And here’s a company already doing it well – I just wish it wasn’t a company that markets vehicles to men with small penises.

Now that I’ve hopefully made my case, ignore everything I said – I don’t want my music pushing product!

What I find interesting here is the crossing over of music/songs into commercials and looking at what might have inspired the usage.

This post over on DHADM shows a pretty good example of how one bit of a movie could have made its way into a national commercial.

In recent memory, Total Eclipse of the Heart was mostly popular in the movie Old School. It was a hit with many and almost certainly the 20-30 something’s that work at advertising agencies.

The popularity of the song in that movie, sung by The Dan Band had a cult-like following. I think it’s very possible that this inspired the usage of the song in this Garmin commercial. Indirectly maybe.

I just recently saw a commercial for “Hair U Wear”, a new product line of hair extensions by Ken Paves.

Ken’s dad often returns to this pic and thinks “My son and his girlfriend”…living the fantasy if only just for a moment.

Who the hell is Ken Paves?, you ask. Well, he’s the hair stylist for none other than Jessica Simpson. Ken Paves is a “celebrity extension” – not a real celebrity, but instead someone who gets his moment in the sun by being attached to a real celebrity. And if done right, you can’t even tell them from the real thing!

I’m not sure if he and Jessica are business partners in this, if she’s just promoting for him, or what. But it’ll be interesting to watch how well this gambit works. I’ll tell you this much – I first saw a commercial for this just a week or so ago. A few days later I went to get a haircut and this queen had his own centrally-located, free-standing kiosk full of hair extensions at the salon. (Yeah, I go to a salon. What of it?)

Anyway, this could prove a great marketing ploy for new products trying to come to market on the cheap. Can’t afford a celebrity? Use a celebrity extension! Then beg your extension to leverage his or her friendship with the real deal.

As a side-note: the site has Jessica’s new song “Public Affair” playing. I could have sworn I was listening to an 80s Madonna song. I did a little looking around; I’m not the only one that thinks so