October 2008 - Posts
With the presidential election just one week away, nothing seems to be getting Americans’ hearts racing like a new opinion poll. Perhaps wanting to get in on the action, Dunkin’ Donuts decided to commission a poll about its own high-stakes race: Dunkin’ Donuts coffee versus Starbucks coffee.
According to a commercial the donut chain made to go with its poll, the results show that: "In a national taste test, more hard-working Americans preferred the taste of Dunkin' Donuts over Starbucks."
The first question that springs to mind, of course, is: what criteria did they use, exactly, to find out whether these people were "hard-working"? And why do they have to be "hard-working" in order to judge coffee?
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| Dunkin' Donuts |
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The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down something like 8 million points, the economy is in the tank and the federal government is spending billions to bail out the financial system. So you’d think those in the financial services industry would be bending over backward to reassure jittery customers that their money is in better hands with a brokerage firm than, say, under a mattress.
Well, that would be wrong. Several weeks into one of the worst financial crises in modern history, few companies that help ordinary Americans invest their money appear to be doing something -- from a straight advertising perspective -- to try to convince us that we should do business with them.
Take, for example, the last few issues of The New Yorker, a magazine that is always rife with financial services ads. Flipping through the pages, we did find a number of witty cartoons on the subject -- "A banker, eh? Can you make a living at that?" one opined -- but we were sorely disappointed that almost none of the advertisers had updated their campaigns to address the current financial crisis.
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| Fidelity |
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For years, many people regarded environmentalists as earnest and well-intentioned, but more likely to plant a few trees than force Americans to make substantial changes.
That all changed with former vice president Al Gore’s documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," which mixed tough talk with just enough hope to leave people emboldened rather than defeated.
The most recent "we can solve it" ads, sponsored by Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, take the same tack, with the same results. Watching them, we couldn’t help but feel a little manipulated, a little scared and a little hopeful. But, they got us thinking every time.
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| wecansolveit.org |
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In this era of instant electronic communication, do you really ever actually need to talk with, much less actually see, your friends? Isn’t it much easier just to text them, trade voice mails or check their status updates on Facebook?
Dentyne takes that attitude to task in a new series of print and television ads that poke fun at technology terms by showing their real-person equivalent.
Two friends whispering to each other? That’s "voicemail."
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| Dentyne |
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