EOC Week 3

•Interpret the problem – Getting the market share of smokers to smoke Newport cigarettes and relate smoking them to a positive and pleasurable experience.
•Understand the creative brief – The creativity in the Newport ads is usually always about doing something other than smoking, doing something that people find joyous such as: skiing, being at the beach, being with friends, playing cards, etc. Even when the ads do include a person with a cigarette they are always doing something fun.
•Say it outright – The ads are consistently creating a connection between not the cigarettes themselves, but the brand of Newport to pleasure.
•Know your audience – Newport wants to attract younger people in their 20’s and early 30’s, people that are successful and know how to have fun.
•Write your objective – Newport’s objective is to create a conscious connection in the consumers mind between the brand and pleasure.
As I looked at all the Newport ads I noticed two things that stood out to me most. The first was that in hardly any of the ads did you see anyone actually smoking a cigarette. Secondly, in all of the scenes Newport creates you always see the people doing something that normal American people would enjoy doing. This one caught my eye the most, the ad reads “After all, if smoking isn’t a pleasure, why bother?” and “Alive with pleasure!” When I saw this I looked back to all the ads and noticed a third thing, all the ads have the word pleasure in them. Newport is trying to disconnect the fact that smoking cigarettes can kill a person by creating a scene of young healthy people having fun and with putting alive in their ad and not just that you’re alive but you’re doing it with pleasure. To me, it seems that Newport isn’t worried about people thinking of the act of smoking as pleasurable yet just the brand Newport represents pleasure.

EOC Week 2: Ethics in Commercials

A few months back in April, General Motors put out an advertisement on television that stated the loan bailout they received in the amount of $50 billion from the American government had been paid back in full and also in advance. After this commercial was put out the Obama Administration would come out to back the ad in press releases and speeches. But, little by little, truth started coming to light by people that were working closely with the whole loan and also by people that worked in the American and Canadian government. "It appears to be nothing more than an elaborate TARP money shuffle," Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, said in a letter Thursday to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.”

After some investigation of what the “payback” really was it turned out that not only had GM lied when they said they paid back the government in full. But, that they had also tried to lead the public to believe that the money they used to pay the government back was money that they made by selling cars and making profit which was also not true. The money was taken from an escrow account that the government gave the company when they were in bankruptcy. “As it turns out, the Obama administration put $13.4 billion of the aid money as "working capital" in an escrow account when the company was in bankruptcy. The company is using this escrow money—government money—to pay back the government loan.”

EOC Week 1: VW Lemon

“The take-away was obvious. If this was Volkswagen's idea of a lemon, the Beetle must be a well-built car.” Volkswagen proclaimed that since the chrome piece on the inside of car was blemished that it was a lemon, meaning the car was useless. The Doyle Dane Bernbach ad agency was the first to use some kind of tact in order to persuade the public to purchase the product. The Volkswagen was the exact opposite of what Americans were out to buy; the war had just ended so thousands of men were back and were ready to make families. These families were looking for big automobiles which is the exactly what the Volkswagen is not. To make things worse the car is manufactured in Germany and was brought into existence by Adolf Hitler. But the way that they went about doing the ad would win them brand loyalty with the people of that time and ultimately won over the hearts of Americans for decades and decades to come.
“Before the advertising campaign for Volkswagen Beetle, ads were either information-based and lacking in persuasiveness, more fantasy than reality, or relied on the medium's ability to deliver a repeated exposure. Being breathtakingly simple, Beetle ads, connected with consumers on an emotional level, also conveyed a product benefit in a way consumers could relate to.”
The relay of this message was so impactful on American society that it revolutionized the way we as consumers were relayed messages by advertising companies. This was known as the creative revolution in the advertising industry. Companies began to create stories around their products and brands, causing the public to have an emotional connection with the company.