And the Magic-8 ball says….

Ad Age pulls out the magic-8 ball with their 2019 predictions for the advertising industry. I won’t go into all of them because they made a lot of them, but I found some interesting enough to write about.

Firstly, Ad Age predicts that brands will begin investing more in voice-overs, such as the house brand Alexa. In voice marketing strategies will increase. J.P. states that, “More than half of U.S. households will have a smart speaker by 2022.” The only thing that I am worried about is the ability to keep consumers’ privacy secured. I know people are worried about these type of machines being able to collect data. So further down the line when more of these type of brands are built, companies will have to build a way and promise a way not to collect data that disrupts consumer privacy.

Secondly, they predict that the term “attribution” in TV advertising will be a very overused phrase. Jeanine Poggi, senior editor, media and technology, makes an argument that “TV sellers will aggressively try to prove that commercials drive specific business results, like test-driving a car, or the ultimate holy grail—making a purchase.”

Read more 2019 predictions from Ad Age here: https://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/ad-age-s-2019-industry-predictions/316142/

I am curious to see if everything that Ad Age predicts will come true or not.

Subaru Capturing the Feelings of its Audience

This week, my current event focuses on Subaru’s technique in their recent ad campaigns: three ads that highlight three different emotions of owning a Forester. Each emotion builds a special co Screen Shot 2019-02-23 at 10.03.39 PM.png nnection with the ads. These three are sparked by: joy, anxiety, and the value of lifelong memories.

The first ad shows the worst fear of parents- their child not coming home because Screen Shot 2019-02-23 at 10.03.52 PM.png something has happened to them. In this case, it is featuring the distracted teens in car accidents. The teens (while somehow unharmed) are so distracted, that they go about their business, wether it’s texting, eating, etc, completely unaware that they were in an accident. Subaru uses this ad to tug at parents’ hearts and to get them to connect about teen driving safety. By the end of the commercial, Subaru shows a seen of their new 2019 Subaru alerting a distracted teen who is about to get in an accident herself, thus saving the girl. The mood changes from depressing the whole way through to relief as the mom of the teen gets to watch her teen pull into the driveway, unharmed.

The second technique that Subaru takes is capturing the value of lifelong memories that their brand is able to make and be timely with. The second ad follows the movement of the family’s dog as it hops out of the Subaru and walks through a line of different objects that have been in the car be Screen Shot 2019-02-23 at 10.12.31 PM.png fore. As he walks through, he grows younger, showing the memories and moments are moving back in time. Subaru uses this to show that their brand not only lasts a long time, but is reliable and durable. The dog pulled at my heart (but admittedly all dogs pull at my heart so no surprise there) as I watched, and I can assume it does for some others as well. While not much is happening through the commercial, Adweek makes a great point that Subaru is “unleashing a new approach” to the car advertising world. They are using a “reverse-chronology concept” to get their story across to their audience.

Lastly, the third technique is something of a little bit more traditional approach, but nevertheless, my favorite one of the three. Subaru captures a couple enjoying a road trip together in their Subaru. The ad uses humor and adventure to capture the audience. They wanted the ad to be as realistic as possible, so as Cavallucci states, ‘” the whole production [team] took the trip, stopping for beats (memorable interactions with people and places) along the way.”‘

Screen Shot 2019-02-23 at 10.31.56 PM.png Subaru takes a final approach in this commercial by capturing the joy that people get from owning a Subaru. I really like this one because the humor and storytelling of the couple as they set off for adventure. Maybe it’s because I’m not a parent yet and can’t relate to the first one as much, but this one just seems to resonate more with me than even the dog one. Sure, the dog was cute, but it didn’t scream “get this car” to be as the third possibly could do if I were searching for a car right now.

https://www.adweek.com/creativity/subaru-highlights-the-joys-anxieties-and-lifelong-memories-of-owning-a-forester/

Spotify Wants to Block the Blockers

This week in advertising, Spotify has a new conflict they are trying to fix among their app’s use. Users are trying to get rid of ads that briefly interrupt their music time. This attempt to block ads has caused Spotify to create a new policy, in which they have put a “ban on ad blocking technology” (Sloane).

Spotify is working hard to improve their advertising business and is being set back by all of the blocking that is happening. Ad blockers, like uBlock Origin and uMatrix, are contributors to this ad blocking. Ad blockers allow people to block and protect their privacy by protecting their surfing history and behavior.

Spotify gives users the option to subscribe to their subscription that offers ad-free music time, in which 96 million people are subscribed to already. However, if you don’t want to pay the $10 a month, than you have to be willing to listen to the advertisements. Ads help bring in about “$198 million in ad revenue” (Sloane) for Spotify. Therefore, Spotify is making it clearly known to its subscribers that it has the right to terminate or suspend users from their accounts if they continue to use ad blockers to rid of ads. All of this is set to happen come March 1, 2019. Georgina Torbet states that the “company assume[s] that users had accepted the new terms” after they sent out emails warning their subscribers about the future consequences.

Spotify has had similar problems in the past, including apps that allow users to have Premium features such as unlimited skipping and access to non-shuffled song lists.

To see if this has created backlash comments, I went to their social media accounts to find out. Surprisingly for me, users have not made comments regarding the usage warnings via email. Maybe down the line when accounts will supposedly be deleted, we will then have to revisit this to see if Spotify has any backlash.

Sloane, Garette. “Spotify Tells Users with Ad Blockers to Get Lost.” AdAge, 8 Feb. 2019, http://www.adageindia.in/digital/spotify-tells-users-with-ad-blockers-to-get-lost/articleshow/67908560.cms

Torbet, Georgina. “Spotify Could Terminate Accounts of Listeners Using Ad Blockers.” Digital Trends, 10 Feb. 2019. https://www.digitaltrends.com/music/spotify-ad-blockers-termination/