After four years of studying communication strategy, I often fancy myself immune to advertising. As I take in billboards, email promotions or commercials during the occasional TV shows that I watch, I quickly label what methods they seem to be employing and then ignore them. A testimonial? I think. How obvious. Or- could their keyword advertising be more transparent? Com professionals, don't you roll your eyes at 90% of commercials that you see? It's easy to undercut the ads when you feel you could have done something better yourself.
I wasn't really paying attention to the commercials in between watching a rerun of one of my favorite shows, How I Met Your Mother. But some phrase, some manner of speaking caught my attention, and I looked up in time to see this across the screen:
I thought absolutely nothing of it and went back to working on the "Happy Birthday" banner I was constructing. But, during the next commercial break, a similar commercial caught my attention right away:
It amused me.I mean, the writers of the commercial perfectly captured information-highway-overload and managed to portray it verbally. I mentally gave them props, but thought nothing more of it.
Near the end of my show, my boyfriend pointed at the screen.
"Who is that girl?" he asked. "We've seen her in something. Recently."
"Umm," it was on the tip of my tongue. I snapped my fingers. She was so familiar. "I don't know. That's going to drive me crazy."
My boyfriend quickly opened up his laptop and went to IMDB.com. He plugged in How I Met Your Mother, but it wasn't the random actress's name that got my attention. It was the sidebar on the page. You guessed it:
Alright, that's it, I thought. I typed into my search bar: bing.com They got me.
I'm not sure exactly how IMDB sells their advertising space, but how brilliant is that? Buying up IMDB ads for the shows that you air commercials in between? You can get two impressions from your audience in an instinctive way. Since then, I've seen bing.com several other places and each time, I have mentally congratulated them on expansive and thorough campaigning.
