Wednesday, December 30, 2009

I’ll Take What’s Behind Door #3 (Who Wouldn’t?)

Monty Hall was a visionary.

He twisted the world of marketing and turned fun into a business.

He understood product placement and advertainment and rolled it into one wonderful TV show called Let’s Make a Deal, decades before Hollywood met Madison Avenue.

How much would an advertiser pay for this today:

Advertisers’ products are dramatically revealed by a giant curtain, which prompts large audiences to ooh and aah in delight, as an announcer lovingly describes every benefit of the product. Then the audience at home gets to stare at the product for far longer than a 30 or 60 second commercial.

Realizing the value of such a marketing opportunity, some smart folks have brought back Let’s Make A Deal, 2009-style, with Wayne Brady in Monty Hall’s old role. Yesterday, Wayne tried to give away a VW Routan.

After a woman dressed like a cowboy didn’t win the car, Wayne offered her $900 to spell “Routan;” before she revealed her spelling, he offered her $700 in case she misspelled it. She may not have been real smart, but she was smart enough to know she didn’t know how to spell Routan. She took the seven bills, and when the correct spelling was revealed, America got a look at the car’s name once more, in big black letters, straight to camera.

Who woulda thunk that a show from 1963 would be such a perfect fit for the wild wild marketing environment in which we find ourselves?

Don't discount the Past when it comes to the Future of brilliant marketing solutions.

Monday, December 28, 2009

Never turn left (and other crazy wonderful examples of twisted thinking)

Being better comes from having Better Ideas.
Better Ideas come from Twisting Your Thinking.

Just ask UPS, who figured out that avoiding left turns at intersections reduces idling, which in turn lowers fuel consumption. According to eccomodder, the right turn policy is saving UPS twenty nine million miles a year or three million gallons of gas in the US each year. Not to mention, it’s helping save the environment.

Twisting Your Thinking can be about literally going left when others go right. Asking better questions. Changing things when things are going well. And just plain doing things differently.

When you Twist Your Thinking, wondrous things can happen.

Read all about those wondrous things on this page. Sometimes frivolously fun, sometimes unapologetically productive. Please join me and tell all your friends.