There has been lot of buzz about ZooZoo advertisements by Vodafone during recently concluded IPL 2009. Now I have no experience what so ever in advertising and branding. But something like this made me think that which advertisements/campaigns produce great branding and sales push?

So I started thinking about all advertisements that I liked, which made me at least remember the company when I was looking to buy something they sell. 

Common thread among these all?

They don’t leverage the medium, they add value to it. 

Now I may be completely wrong, or very accurate. But this is just a personal observation. I don’t have tonnes of data to prove it.

But here is what I observed -

TV - Most of the advertisements on TV will entertain you. Be it Zoozoo, or some dental care gum with people’s teeth used for lighting tennis court, or some guy using a adhesive stick to catch fish. They will entertain you, make you laugh. Almost each time. My mom, who is cooking in the kitchen, would come out to see the zoozoo ad and not when Gilchrist was going berserk hitting everything over the fence. TV is mainly entertainment focused and hence if you can entertain people through your ads then you can win them over. Throwing lot of information about your product in their face for 20secs is money not so well spent. This is why I think, ads which are shown on news channels (their hardly news channels any more, but gross entertainment channels) don’t make that big a impact on me. Because I take it as roadblock in consuming information. May be its just me though. But if it was me I will roll out different campaigns for news, sports and entertainment channels.

Newspaper - Well most of the newspapers are meant to provide information, news, analysis. So if you can add value to this then that will be great way to utilize your marketing budget. For example, if you are a training institute which is geared towards providing IT related training. Instead of providing information about you and your products, provide information about your domain. Like jobs created in industry for last couple of years in technologies that you train in. This may add more confidence about your brand to your consumers.

Online - Online is very different in this aspect. Because for online media, there is no categorization at high level. So roll out ads based on the properties that you are buying here. I was engaged in a good discussion with Mahesh other day on twitter. And point he mentioned about performance based branding is, finding out right set of properties to target and rolling out your campaign for it. I would like to add that, choose right set of properties, based on USP of these properties, roll out campaigns geared to add value to their USP.

Whats your take on this?