Or in AT&T’s case…drowning in the collective unconscious. I’m a big believer in using symbols and images that people are familiar with. The VW Darth Vader ad was successful because everyone born after 1970 has the mythology of Star Wars seared into their memory. The Little Thor television ad works because everybody knows about the VW Darth Vader ad (which was shown during the 2011 Superbowl).
The folks who developed this AT&T television ad attempted to do the same thing by making a parody of the T-mobile dance video:
The problem with AT&T’s approach is that the original T-Mobile Liverpool Street Station Dance video made its mark as a viral video. The roughly 2 and half minute video was never intended to be used as a television advertisement. The audience for viral videos skews younger and the audience for prime time television skews much older. An 80-year old grandmother who watches Jeopardy every night and only occasionally uses the internet to e-mail her family is not going to understand the flash mob reference. And how many people over the age of 40 even know what a flash mob is? The people who “get” the reference to the T-Mobile dance video aren’t even watching television. They’re on the internet playing World of Warcraft and periodically looking at other viral videos.
Another problem I have with AT&T’s ad is that it’s not very timely. The T-Mobile dance video was released in January of 2009. It’s now 2011. Who besides advertising junkies like myself even remember the T-Mobile dance video? This ad would have been much more effective had it been released sometime in 2009. The Thor ad is effective because it comes only months after the original ad it is referencing.
An advertiser is most successful when speaking the same language as the target audience. AT&T, in this case, is speaking a totally different language than the vast majority of its audience and that’s why this ad fails.
This is a spoof on the VW Darth Vader advertisement. Some would claim that the promoters of the Thor movie are ripping off VW, but in my view cliches are an advertiser’s plaything. In order to communincate effectively and with the greatest brevity it’s essential to use ideas and themes that are already in a consumer’s head. This is a perfectly valid way to sell a product. An advertiser must strike a chord with their target audience to get their attention, and you can only do this by reminding the audience of what they already know, think, or feel.
Most economic theories are based on the premise that people are rational decision-makers. In recent years, behavioral economics has emerged as a discipline, bringing together economics and psychology to understand how social, cognitive, and emotional factors influence how people make decisions, both as individuals and at the market level. Many of the findings of behavioral economics have a direct influence on how users interact with a product. In a worst‑case scenario, a product’s design may encourage user behaviors that are detrimental to users’ best interests.
Here is one great example:
In unfamiliar situations, people make value judgments based on the information available, but they do not treat information equally. Dan Ariely, his book Predictably Irrational, provided a great example from The Economist, which offered three types of one year subscriptions, as follows:
a Web subscription to Economist.com, for $59
a print subscription, for $125
a print and Web subscription, for $125
Why offer a print subscription on its own at all? People can be very bad at judging the value of things, particularly things they buy infrequently. They rely on contextual information to understand when they are getting a good deal. Ariely conducted an experiment in which he presented these three options to a group of 100 MBAs, and 84% chose the print and Web subscription, with all others choosing the Web‑only option.
He then conducted a second study with a different group of 100 MBAs, presenting only two options:
a Web subscription to Economist.com, for $59
a print and Web subscription, for $125
Only 32% chose the print and Web subscription. With three options available, people anchored on the print subscription, which made the print and Web subscription look much, much better by comparison. They didn’t know whether $59 for a subscription to Economist.com was a good deal, but choosing between just two options was easy.
I love this ad. At a minute and a half long, and during a general election flooded with third party political ads, VoteVets.org could only afford to air this during the morning on the local news channels. This is storytelling and mythmaking at its finest. When you forget you’re watching a political ad and just listen to the message….that’s when you know you’ve succeeded in creating a great piece of political propaganda. Doing something like this is often a great risk because of the expense, but it’s extremely difficult to tell a good story in 30 seconds.
One of the reasons why this ad is so powerful is that many of the myths included in the piece have been told and retold over the entirety of Harry Reid’s career. It’s not really telling you anything new. People already accept those myths as reality. This ad just reminds them of those myths and pulls those thoughts about Reid back out of the viewer’s subconscious. Within the first few moments most voters know exactly who the narrator is talking about. Harry Reid’s name isn’t even mentioned in the narration, but included for a few brief seconds in text form at the end of the piece.
