Despite absolutely no credible evidence that subliminal advertising is effective or exists, it’s a popular belief that it does exist and is effective. (Please note – This doesn’t mean that sex doesn’t sell. It’s just not subliminal.) Here’s link with examples of claims of subliminal advertising:
The most famous claim of subliminal messaging was the James Vicary popcorn message study that was a complete fabrication.
And finally, Saturday Night Live’s Mr. Subliminal:
Many people consider this commercial that introduced the Apple Macintosh during the 1984 Super Bowl to be the greatest commercial ever made. Maybe. But it’s certainly the ad that created that the Super Bowl was as much about great ads as it was about great football.
The Coke jingle “I’d Like To Teach The World To Sing” actually became a hit song back in the 1970s.
Bonus Video
Coke attracted both praise and controversy when they ran a Super Bowl ad in 2014 featuring the song “America the Beautiful” sung in multiple languages.
McDonald’s had a lot of luck reaching out to the African American community back in 2008 with it’s McNugget Love ad, even though some consumers found it offensive or annoying. (Hey, it’s a McDonald’s commercial!) Are ads like this the right way to reach the urban market?
Here’s a more recent urban marketing ad featuring Teyonah Paris from AMC’s Mad Men. (And how meta is that? An actress from a show about advertising in a McDonald’s ad…)
(Sorry about the poor quality on the video for this one.)
UPDATE: And here’s a link to a McDonald’s urban ad from 1976!
Billboards and other forms of outdoor advertising don’t always get a lot of respect, but they can be incredibly creative. Here’s a few examples of cool outdoor ads:
David Ogilvy is one of the most recognizable names in American advertising, founding one of the leading agencies in America, and having been involved in some of the great advertising campaigns. Find out a bit more about him here:
I would argue that for me, Wendy’s “Where’s the beef?” campaign generated the best advertising catch phrase of my lifetime. In fact, it’s good enough that Wendy’s revived it 30 years later! Here’s a couple of examples:
Reintroducing “Where’s the beef?”
A multi-lingual “Where’s the beef?”
Here’s a list of more than 400 popular advertising catch phrases. Which of them do you (or your parents!) remember?
Parker Loghry is a sophomore organizational communication major at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He grew up in St. Libory, Nebraska, a town he describes as having “a hundred people, two bars, and one gas station.” So of course he starts an ambient/post-rock one-man-band called PlainFire. He’s now distributing his music using long-tail tools on a “pay as you please” basis. In this guest blog post, he tells how he’s gone about chasing the musical long tail. Thanks, Parker.
PlainFire was an experiment. I had always loved metal, the in your face, complex, and loud style of music, but after hearing the Explosions In the Sky album, “The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place,” I began to appreciate simplicity, emotion, and mood in music. I had heard this during the summer of 2010 and listened to this style of post-rock/ambient non-stop up until December of that year, when I took a stab at making my own ambient music.
With a little push from my scholarship community to complete some type of a research/creative project to fill requirements, I jumped on GarageBand on my MacBook Pro, a production program which I had been pretty familiar with due to lots of tinkering on my family’s Mac mini, recording rough mixes growing up. Using an M-Audio interface for my guitar recording, I went to work. The first song ever recorded was “No Matter, Time Will Always Elapse.” I started from nothing. I just went. Not knowing how to read music, and writing whatever I could think of that sounded good and would be something I would want to listen to. I programmed all the drums by dragging and dropping samples, changing note velocity to make them sound more human. I used my keyboard to write any part that wasn’t guitar. I never used a preloaded GarageBand loop. All tracks were original using sampled sounds. So it went, writing on the fly, experimenting the whole way. 7 days and 14 tracks later, I was done. My first album had been written.
Afterwards, I wanted to share my music, but had no idea how. My first move was burning a spool of a hundred CD’s that I could hand out on campus. I chose a picture I had previously taken of a landscape and used the photo-editing site, Picnik, to make my album art and logo. My father, a professional photographer, happened to have a printer capable of printing on CD’s, which were then placed in a paper envelope along with a printed insert with track listings and website information.
I didn’t want money for it, and I never asked for it. I just wanted people to listen. Surprisingly, I had trouble getting people to take my free copies of the album. I knew I had to put it on the Internet somehow, with a huge “FREE” sign beside it. I searched around and found a website called Bandcamp, which allows artists to create a page and release their music however they prefer. I spread the link around on Facebook and blog-spots everywhere across the web. Using Bandcamp, I received sixty downloads of my first album, “The Farther We Stride.” A dream come true, sixty random people from the Internet were listening to my music.
The following summer of 2011, it was the same routine: A week in front of my computer tinkering away on a new album. This time I had more experience and had learned tricks to make the project easier and more professional in quality. I had dove in to Logic, another audio production program, which amped my sound entirely. Another seven days, and I came out with a new 10-track album, “The Stronger We Have Grown,” a continuation of the first album’s title.
On April 9th of 2012 I had finally finished my project and released it onto Bandcamp under the same page as my first album. I spread the link around Facebook a second time, but once again, got little response. I set up an account through the online distributor, CD Baby, which put my album up on sites and stores including iTunes, Spotify, Amazon
Through all of this I have been donated around $30, which to me is $30 too much. The satisfaction of having people I don’t know listen to my music and connect with it brought overwhelming satisfaction and joy that money couldn’t buy, making every hour I spent on making it more than worth it.
