It appears I knew an answer that no one else knew about today. Some of us on the Ad 2 Orlando board were doing a post-meeting lunch and, of course, we were talking about advertising – we’re tireless about the topic.
Anyway, we started talking about a teaser ad campaign that’s happening in Orlando. All it says is a statement with a simple graphic below it. It’s on both digital billboards and perms, and the TV campaign has people doing weird things and then just the tag. Because I get to see every digital board spot that goes up with my new job, I knew who it was. Little did I know that no one else at the table had known it but me, because even when you Google and You Tube it, nothing comes up! In Yahoo Answers, someone put the wrong answer.
This fact led us into a conversation about teaser strategy and what can happen when it is too boring or too vague. I started looking around other people’s advertising/marketing blogs and found that opinions vary on whether a teaser ad is useful, a waste of money, or if it is even traceable for measuring success.
With this campaign, for instance, if you even took the effort to find out what the heck it is, you can’t. I looked on Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Google Plus. I even looked up the hashtag on Twitter and there are only people saying “what is this?” “what does it mean?” and “this is weird.”
Let’s see how they play this out, shall we?
Here’s a teaser ad that I’m excited to see more about… I know what the product is and when the payoff will be. But what exactly will the message entail?
Patti is still learning 
I think that this campaign will either fail or fizzle out without measurable results. Without an integrated strategy that includes digital, even a landing page with nothing but the logo, social media buttons (FB like, Twitter Follow, ect), or even the date of the revel, i think that consumers are just going to get frustrated and give up caring about the campaign. I think that [censored client] was expecting the average consumer to have heated discussions like the one we had, but at the end of the day, we’re advertisers, and as you said, we’ere tireless about the topic, so of course we’re going to beat it to death.
with the VW teaser, you know who it’s for and you can set expectations of what you’re going to get at the reveal (another cute superbowl commercial involving VW, Star Wars, and Cute Dogs. possibly another top ad with loads of free press after the event involving ‘top superbowl ads’). It’s something to look forward to.
Where (censored campaign) Fails is that It’s has an identity crisis. It wants to remain mysterious and keep consumers guessing, but it has no way of a) managing the expectations of consumers and b) showing results that proves it was a success.
Whatever the campaign may be, the presentation to [censored client] must have been amazing for them to willingly jump in without digital backup.
then again, i’m biased on two accounts. 🙂