Des Temps -- of the times -- a blog by Desedo.

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Simple Stroke of Disruption

09

Mar/2008

appleretroad.jpgDuring the 2002/3 NFC Championship game, Nike premiered a :60 called Soccer Streaker. It was effectively a Super Bowl commercial, but airing it 2 weeks early was a simple yet adroit example of disruption planning.

Given the media glut in which we now muck about daily, simplicity can sometimes be a point of great strength. Since the clean design of Apple/Google/Craigslist stays winning, I often wonder why so many Power 150 bloggers, who are ace in this market+brand space, have visually chaotic sites. If everyone is screaming, I’ll seek the lone, silent man.

One such lone man that oft moseys about my planosphere asks: Could a Brand re-broadcast spots that have been in the vault for 30 years? If they come out of left field, seemingly random and at off-hours, would the content feel like a whisper? A secret, ergo valuable, discovery for the viewer that could then build WTF buzz value? I’m not suggesting that this be the entire campaign, but if it’s a small % of your media buy, the ROI could be surprising.

The type of Brands may be limited, tech/cars/drugs no, but Kool-Aid? Ima guess the recipe hasn’t changed much.
Same goes for Alka Seltzer.

Deodorant? Though it’s not from the vaults, W+K tapped into this zeitgeist for Old Spice; putting us in a simple world focused on frenching, not twittering.

It’s these quiet yet novel disruptions, like Banksy in a Museum, that may soon gain greater traction in the advert game as the din of ‘new media’ increases.
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Comments:

  1. Gavin Heaton
    Mar 13, 2008 at 4:18 pm

    Some of those old ads capture the brand spirit perfectly. And nostalgia is a great way to re-establish that connection with former customers (and while I have never actually owned a Mac, I remember the Apple II fondly).

  2. [...] Brilliant article about brands as tradable commodities in the NYT mag on Sunday. Of course once a brand is relaunched, with it comes with a wholly new ad campaign, or at least a remix of old codes. Within this space, I’ve been wondering if there is also room to run historic ad campaigns. [...]


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