Emergic: September 4, 2004 Archives

Saturday, September 4, 2004

New Honda Accord Ad

This ad is one of the most remarkable ones I have seen. 606 retakes. $6 million to create. No Animation. It is all real.

General | PermaLink | Comments (4)

AFAIK, it (the ad) never hit the screens because the total duration of the advertisement and cost of advertisement slot during primetime was too expensive for Honda to afford.
:)

Posted by Anurag

The Honda ad was distributed by a method known as viral marketing. Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like Rajesh, posting that ad url on his blog, and naturally some of the blog readers would check out the ad and then send it across to their contacts. This is a simple peer-2-peer model in the marketing world.

Also, recently there have been a lot of ads that are created just for this type of distribution. Sometimes the content of those kind of ads (not necessarily Honda's ad in this case) border on things that might not be appropriate for prime time television.

Posted by Anand Jain

I stay in USA and have seen the ad a number of times in network TV. This was on the air about a year ago. Do you really think a big company like Honda will depend on an ad-strategy called 'viral' marketing?

Posted by Raj

Read for yourself: http://www.leith.co.uk/casestudies/hondahrv_viral.html

Also giants like Budweiser and Gmail (yepp, Google plush with $2+ billion in cash uses that strategy) use viral marketing. Gmail accounts are only availble via invitiation... and that in essence is peer to peer aka viral marketing.

Posted by Anand Jain

Dell: Going from Good to Great

How Dell Got Soul is the story in Strategy+Business about the growing up of Dell. "When growth slowed in Y2K, the computer maker’s leaders realized they needed to redesign their win-at-all-costs culture."

How Mr. Rollins, together with company founder Michael S. Dell and other leaders, put Dell back on track makes a powerful case for the role corporate culture plays in enduring business performance. Their story also strongly suggests that, over the long run, the healthiest and wealthiest companies are those that define their strategies and management systems with a purpose beyond merely increasing returns to shareholders.

“What great companies have always done is to find ways to appeal to another side of human nature, wanting to be associated with something that’s great,” says John P. Kotter, an expert in leadership and culture and a retired Harvard Business School professor. “You want to find the nature of what you’re making exciting and believe that this product or service does something useful for humanity. Great companies institutionalize that, and you can’t fake it.

“It’s not just in your business model,” Professor Kotter says. “It’s in people’s hearts.”

Management | PermaLink | Comments (0)

Portable Video

After music, it is now the turn of video. The New York Times writes:

What if you could take along not only music but movies, television programs, home video and still pictures in a high-tech box svelte enough to slip into a briefcase, backpack or purse, or perhaps a pocket?

An answer is beginning to emerge, however tentatively.

Microsoft's response takes the form of a system called the Portable Media Center, being incorporated first by Creative, an early maker of MP3 audio players, into a sort of oversized audio player with a color video screen. Samsung and iRiver will follow with sleeker versions this fall; all three will cost about $500 each and be capable of 80 hours of video play.

The Windows-powered machines enter a nascent marketplace that includes devices by Archos, a French maker, and RCA. Each camp makes the case for its own pioneer status on a new frontier of hand-held devices. And all say the devices will appeal to commuters and travelers, including those looking to occupy small children on long trips.

General | PermaLink | Comments (2)

Adding my 2 cents on this issue: I dont think so that portable video players are going to acquire the same cult status as of the portable music players. While a lot of people listen to music while driving to work or jogging, that cannot be the case with video players. Also, most of the music that we listen is averages around 5-6 minutes in length (unless ofcourse you are listening to mozart et al) while the video (movies or tv shows) content is longer than that. Its much easier to switch contexts between music player and doing something else than with the video players.

Why would I buy a portable music player for my road trip with children, when I can get a DVD player installed in my car for much cheap ?

Posted by Anand Jain

Typo error. Please read the above as "Why would I buy a portable *video* player for my road trip with children, when I can get a DVD player installed in my car for much cheap?

Posted by Anand Jain