ThinkNoLimit Marketing Coaching

Sharing with friends has long been a category motivator Coke trying to own. If you review the TVCs of Coke, you can easily find the element of sharing in many of them. This ad is also about sharing with friends in the festive season of CNY. Obviously the thinking behind it comes from the observation that young people today are heavy users of instant messengers and web video conferencing and hence the idea. Yet there is a very fundamental issue with this TVC. That is, why TVC in the first place ? If we believe they spend most of their time on the computer ... Another problem is that kids hate to be told what to do. The adults (who do the ad) sometimes fail to realize that.

Photo hunt ad is commonly used to grab readers' attention, increase involvement and make them remember the message. This Fedex tries to play with photo hunt to talk about the difference between two of its services, one cheaper and one more expensive. The ad seems to work to get people read the ad yet it can be done better to connect the play of the two photos with the message.

Is it a good move to come up with a new version of a popular ad of the past ? The song, the romance and the directorship, unquestionably the old 陽光檸檬茶 TVC is a classic. Some people may tend to compare the old and the new and argue which one is better. There is no point arguing about that. It is a good ad so long as it works to appeal to the target audience. The old one managed to do so as it was new and fresh in the advertising scene at that time. Over the year, there have been many emotional appeal ads with similar blends of song + romance. Since the target audience were born in the 90's and hadn't seen the old version before, it may just be another ad similar to what they have seen many times. It is actually their parents resonating with this ad. Note young people are rebellious. They hate what their parents like. This ad may just remind the young people 陽光檸檬茶 belongs to their parents' generation and provokes the "not-for-me" thought.

Other than confectionery products, pre-Chinese New Year is the season for promoting household cleaning products. How about having someone to do the clean-up for you ? Clorox is having a promotion to give away 2-hour cleaning service by HK Employment Development Service. It's not a bad promotion idea at all but 2 hours is definitely not long enough if one wants to have the whole flat thoroughly cleaned for the new year. We all have budget constraint understandably and it's a trade-off between number of prizes and the size of the prize (length of the cleaning service in this case). In fact, it can be potentially turned into a societal promotion initiative, more for brand building than sales generation. The mechanics can be the same but the saying in the ad can be twisted a bit to do that.