hmmm

020 7269 1430

• Communication
• Legal Business
• Real Estate
• Wealth Management

Will live commercials save TV?

May 30, 2008

Predictions of the death of the traditional 30-second advertising slot have been doing the rounds for a couple of years. By common consent, the rise of diverse forms of new media in the Web 2.0 landscape has made TV commercials look tired and stale. How, then, does a brand go about harnessing television’s reach and yet appealing, in a fresh way, to viewers?

For Honda, whose strapline is “If it’s difficult, it’s worth doing”, the answer is in the heavens. Literally. As this Press Association report explains, the car manufacturer staged a live television ad involving a skydiving jump. As PA says:

“The commercial, screened during the channel’s dinner party series Come Dine With Me, saw 14 daredevils jump out of a plane before forming the letters H-O-N-D-A. With only three minutes and 20 seconds to spell out the message the skydivers appeared to struggle over the letter “N”, but it all came together in the end.”

There was even a bit of quasi-ambush marketing, as one of the skydivers delivered his own message. Fortunately for Honda, it was merely “HELLO MUM”.

While Honda’s deployment of a team of parachutists was both high risk and innovative, live commercials are not new. They were a staple of television in the 1950s, and their appeal then was perhaps as now. The spontaneity and danger of the medium – the ‘what if?’ question on every viewer’s lips – may just hold attention long enough to compete with the many and varied allures of the Web 2.0 world. Watch this space – Honda might have made a relatively small step as a corporation, but a giant one for contemporary television advertising.

Police spend £40m a year on PR

May 30, 2008

Check out this snippet from Hold the Front Page – thanks to a request under the freedom on information laws, we now know that police forces spend some £40m a year on PR.

The image below, of Sue Southern of West Midlands Police, is courtesy of West Midlands Police Press and PR Department.

Guardian in online reader scoop

May 30, 2008

Those toiling within The Guardian’s brand new King’s Cross HQ will be pleased with Nielson Online. According to data released by the online researcher, The Guardian remains the most popular online newspaper among Britons, with 3.0 million unique visitors logging on from home and work in April 2008. See this link for more.

« Previous Page — Next Page »