Milan, end of August: the summer break has ended, and everyone is returning back to work. Slowly, the city is recovering its normal busy pulse. I don’t know about you, but for me the end of vacations, much more than New Year’s Eve, represents a new start and I’m more inclined to reflect upon what I normally do during the year, and especially about my job as a copywriter. Many words were spent on advertising until the onset of the 90s: in fact, before that decade, words could easily reach the 60% of total weight of an ad.

Nowadays images rule virtuallly unchallenged. A major exception arises when we deal with “digital brand strategy”, though, since interaction is involved. It’s about creating the right environment that nurtures opportunities for interpersonal exchange. Building relations with people online means engaging with reactions, emotions and conversations. In this case, writing becomes more essential than showing. To prove the enduring power of the written word, I’d like to share with you a video which is helping me find a fresh start for this year’s business season. It’s the story of a copywriter who with few strokes of the pen manages to transform the experience of another man. The director won the Cannes 2008 Online Competition.

Italians, as everyone knows, are obsessed by women’s bodies. You can tell just by walking down the street, since huge 6×3 billboards portraying healthy breasts and bottoms invariably block your view.

But weird things happen, when the Italian Institute for Advertising Self-Discipline gets involved. The Institute (a non-profit organization) is part of the system of self-regulation of the advertising industry that was set up in Italy in 1963. It can ban any ad that falls foul of its Code. The Institute must first receive complaints from consumers or any other affected party, in order to activate its considerable powers. The iffy part comes when the following article of the Code must be enforced:

Art. 9 – Violence, Vulgarity, Indecency:
Advertising must not contain statements or representations of physical or moral violence or such which can be considered indecent, vulgar or repugnant according to the sensibility of consumers.

I want to test your capacity to be part of the advertising self-discipline jury. Here are three campaigns that have recently appeared in Italy.

A.

B.

C.

And this is what happened:

1. One was banned
2. One caused many car accidents
3. One advertised an art pavillion and was widely diffused

Match the fact with the relevant pic! We’ll give you the answer tomorrow…

When it comes to decide the strategy of a creative campaign, target research and data are juicy starting points to give creativity the right boost.
Consumer data are especially relevant, after the not so recent alarms on information and advertising overload. In the US, for example, there are about 630,000 TV screens placed in retail stores and their number is poised to grow. The question is: are they really useful?

What’s happening is that given the impossibility to assimilate an excessive array of media options, people tend to go multitasking and this affects how they use traditional media and discriminate among different types of content.
According to the latest report by BIGresearch which conducted a survey on 15,727 American people, the top 3 promotions influencing the purchase of a product are in-store product, samples, shelf coupons and special displays.

New media options tend to increase people’s engagement with other activities, such as reading newspapers, listening to the radio or watching TV. In this respect, key interesting findings are:

• 70% of the people eat while engaging with media, followed by doing housework and laundry, cooking and talking on the phone.
• When reading a newspaper, 30% also watch TV, 17% listen to the radio or go online.
• During a TV commercial, 41.2% of the people surf on other TV channels, 33% talk over the phone or contact people online, 30% think about their own business.

It’s not about being hostile to product information or being overwhelmed by it, though. More likely, it’s about learning to discriminate useful from redundant information. Experienced consumers tend to stick to relevant facts, especially now that budgets are stretched in a slowing economy.

Photo courtesy of jsc*