Truly awesome advertising

As a long time subscriber to Maxim, Stuff, Blender, and FHM magazines, I have witnessed a dramatic shift in the capabilities of magazine advertising. Ads have left the 2 dimensional space of paper, and reached a 4th dimension that was for a long time simply unreachable; and found only in the dreams of idealist ad executives. These changes are based on new found creativity, a greater understanding of New Media, and a truly revolutionary increase in advertising budgets. I'm not talking about pop-up books, but about interactivity, and how it has reached unbelievable levels. A couple of recent examples (that I can remember) are listed below:

1) The Stickers Advertisement, from Mini-Cooper USA. This advert -which ran in several magazines- contained a full page of of decals. The stickers were for mini-cooper enthusiasts to place on their Mini's, for everytime they raced another sports-car and won (kind of like when the Red-Barron would mark his airplane each time he shot down an enemy). In addition it had several lettering decals for car-owners to use in detailing their cars with their names, or some other message. That was a tremendously successfull campaign, as I remember it today. I even used the lettering on my own car. Though I wasnt a Mini owner, I still appreciated the gesture.

This ad campaign was a stroke of genius for Mini. On the budget side, the stickers would have been only slightly more to print (compared to other possible textiles), yet produced a whole new level of interactivity for the reader.

2) The Jeep Sponge: "Grows right before your eyes". Remember those "incredible growing dinosaurs" that used to come in little plastic pills for you to drop in a bucket of water. Anyway, it used to be a popular and cheap kids toy in the early 90's. Jeep harnessed the power of those toys in order to emphasize the new length of the 2005 Jeep Wrangler (usually described as too small for extra passengers). In the recent magazine ad campaign, Jeep stamped the same sponge material into little Jeep Wranglers, and sealed them up on the page of the advert. Readers were greeted with a quick blurb about the newly lengthened Jeep Wrangler, and told to play with their new toy. Like an 8 year old I ripped that wrangler right out of my magazine and ran to the bathroom sink. And what do you know, it did get bigger!

So there you have it folks, another effective advertisement that worked, and emphasized its message pretty darn clearly. Though, as I said before, it was probably much more expensive than a color ad would have cost. After all, its the same kind of toy people used to pay for just a few years ago.