Quote:
Originally Posted by etienne66
At least the more recent Kindle commercials show the screen and give you some idea of what you are getting. The previous set of commercials seemed to be making more of an artistic statement. Plus they should be making a big deal about the batter life, the ability to read anywhere you have light and how much it does look like the page of a book while being lighter than a lot of hardback books.
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Not necessarily.
There are different (successful) approaches to advertising *campaigns*.
It all depends on who the target audience is and the intended effect. The Kindle ads until now have taken a soft-sell approach, nonintrussive and non-threatening; kinda like a butler waiting for your attention...
...to tell you the house is on fire.
The idea was to let people know there was such a thing as a Kindle and that it was used for reading. And that Amazon makes it. They were not intended to sell Kindle on the spot but rather to draw people to the website to investigate. And *there* you find out the techie details.
The new ad is in the same vein; it tells you you can use it to read outdoors when LCD screens are washed out and that it costs less than a pair of quality sunnglasses. How much less? What else does it do? Well, it says Amazon... Time to hit the web...
Same approach: these are not ginzu knife ads trying to sell you the product in 30 seconds--they're attention grabbers designed to steer traffic to the Kindle website. Which is, after all, the Kindle storefront.
Before people can buy into something, they have to know it exists. And ebook readers are new enough that many have heard of Kindle but have only vague notions of what it is, what it does, what it costs. Instead of a hard sell: "Pick up that phone right now!" they've been going soft and cuddly. And now a bit less soft with a bit more humor. They got *us* talking about the ad; if they get non-techies to even notice it, they're ahead of the game.
In a stream of loud, in-your-face ads about cars, tight-fitting jeans, and clueless beer guzzling jerks that all get tuned out instantly, a quiet poolside scene might actually draw more attention than a three ring circus. Think of it as counterprogramming.
I'm thinking those folks know what they're up to. How well it works, we'll know soon enough. (If you start hearing the catch-phrase all over, for example...)