Skiilight Blog
Archive for April, 2009
Two American Companies: Lost and Found
My favorite advertising of recent weeks has been the rebirth of Sprint as a company selling “now.” Formerly known as the cell provider your dad has through work, Sprint appears to be appealing to a graphically-motivated purchaser with its upcoming iPhone competitor, the Palm Pre.
With this new look, comes a new tagline: “The Now Network.”
In addition to the great new commercials concentrating on “nowness,” Sprint has rolled out banner ads that receive (or appear to receive) data in real time, showing things occurring “now.”
The Sprint microsite also “receives now”- which is just a branded way to say gathers aggregated content.
The Sprint commercials remind me of one of my favorite commercials of all time, this Areva spot (shown here in its french version)
In actuality it appears Sprint has been moving in this direction for awhile now, as evidenced by this internal video showing their response to Hurricane Katrina:
While Sprint appears to be moving in the right direction, we have another company dropping like a hot potato no one wants to touch. With consumer confidence in all things GM at an all-time low, reassurances from Saturn simply don’t hold water. All major news outlets report that GM is trying to sell Saturn and if there are no buyers, look for closure of the brand and a GM bankruptcy. “We’re still here” just isn’t going to cut it.
Meanwhile, a very plain-speaking video explaining what GM plans to do to save itself is buried on its corporate page.
So, the question is, which GM do you believe? The one who still thinks Saturn will be around in a few years or the one that says they’re closing nameplates? Honesty is always the best policy, especially when no one will believe that the “still here” Saturn will be that way for much longer.
March Madness: Yahoo vs. ESPN
Adweek posted an interesting article (with an entirely misleading headline) about Yahoo Sports vs. ESPN in March visitor metrics.
Headline: “Yahoo Sports Slams Foes”
The story: “Yahoo Sports reeled in 14.4 million and 12.7 million weekly uniques during the tournament’s first two weeks (per Nielsen), versus ESPN.com’s 12.8 million and 9.8 million uniques.” (Uniques in this sense are visitors)
The Reality: “John Kosner, ESPN’s senior vp, general manager of digital media, said ESPN.com draws a more passionate fan base, one that visits more regularly and stays longer than Yahoo’s does. Kosner argued that because Yahoo can funnel casual sports fans from its home page and e-mail pages, its audience is less valuable. He points to ESPN’s huge edge in total minutes (216 million versus 144 million in the second week in March) as a truer indicator of engagement. “ESPN.com’s users are consistently more valuable than Yahoo’s,” said Kosner.”
This is a great example of how quality metics and knowing how to interpret them helps you identify your place in the world. Taken at face value it looks as if Yahoo really took ESPN behind the woodshed. However, as John Kosner eloquently explains, the unique visitor metric does not hold as much value as time spent, especially when the total visitors number is as close as theirs are.
Heineken vs. Bavaria Beer Commercial
I love direct spoof ads. Shooting one across the bow of your competitor. The originally smart and funny Heineken ad is made even better in this ad by a European competitor.
Heineken’s Original Commercial