What Makes An Ad Worth Spreading
"What makes an ad worth spreading?"
TED curator Chris Anderson answers that question with:
"It’s a film, made by a corporation, where the community that it’s targeted at actually wants to watch it. In fact, they want to watch it so much that they’ll tell other people in the community about. It might be something that’s hysterically funny; It might be something that’s gorgeously beautiful; It might just be ingeniously clever; It might be a big multi-media production or just a single employee talking to a camera, sharing her values and her dreams. We picture them as short as thirty seconds, as long as five or six minutes, and we’re inviting you—the whole advertising community—to dream about these things, to dream what they might be and to submit to us films over the next few months.”
People who know me well know that I love TED Talks. This is one of the reasons.
TED, together with YouTube, has launched Ads Worth Spreading, a challenge designed to inspire advertisers to create authentic and intelligent ads that people actually want to watch, and more importantly, share.
The idea behind the challenge is to eventually have the ads that run after the Ted Talks to be "every bit as compelling as the talks themselves." That is a tall challenge but one that I think can be done.
Creative advertising is spreading. I've written previously about creative advertising in the age of social, with Old Spice and Weiden+Kennedy setting the bar high. As an aside, First Round Capital's play on the Old Spice campaign for their annual holiday card was genius too.
Creative advertising is spreading because marketers are realizing that it takes more than just a print or banner ad to make an impact on a user these days. Marketers now have to go above and beyond in order to resonate with consumers. Anderson does a great job of explaining why that is:
"Simply put, the relationship between consumers and companies is changing. Consumers are more than a mouth and a wallet. We've grown savvier and have access to more information channels to choose from.
We're moving toward a future where advertisers and consumers are part of the same community, sharing ideas and engaging in a learning cycle, together."
Anderson's video is here and worth checking out:
