Friends Help Friends Make Tweets, Right?

International Friendship Day was started in the United States by none other than Hallmark when their intelligence team got together and realized that their biggest holiday lull came exactly on August 2nd. How could they possibly sell greeting cards when the next biggest holiday was Halloween, which was more than 2 months away? Alas, they came up with Friendship Day: a day where people could celebrate the friends in their lives. Awww! This holiday would be surely loved and universal. Don't we all have friends? Wouldn't we love it if Hallmark helped us write them friendship poems and delighted us with friendship quotes? The answer was a resounding yes. Except not how'd you expect. The holiday has failed to capture Americans but has become huge and vastly celebrated in South America and Asia. Some countries celebrate the holiday with the same enthusiasm we reserve for Valentines Day and Mother's Day. It has  inspired advertisers in these countries to come up with unique ideas to sell more product. +Castro, an advertising agency in Argentina, decided to capitalize on the holiday for their client Todomoda. Using twitter, they drove troves of teenage girls to their stores by proclaiming that "real friends share everything." And they meant everything. The company designed a new kind of tweet where one user composed the first half and then invited one of their friends to write the second half. When the tweet was completed, it was simultaneously broadcast onto both user's feeds. Girls received instant discounts and prizes when they shared a tweet with a friend. They also used the platform to play games and answer trivia questions. The idea worked magic for the store. Shared tweets were seen by more than 500,000 users!  Even celebrities became involved when Todomoda encouraged girls to ask the likes of Nicki Minaj and other huge names to share a tweet with them. International Friendship Day has definitely helped international stores improve their numbers for the slow month of August. So why hasn't the holiday made it big in the U.S.? Do South Americans love their friends more than we do? Are Americans just turned off by obvious marketing ploys?  Even if the holiday hasn't officially taken off, Americans have been increasingly searching Google for "Friendship Day" every year, with 2012 seeing a very notable increase. Maybe we will come to love and celebrate this holiday eventually and Hallmark can finally breathe easy when August rolls around.

I leave you with a friendship quote:

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

-Anais Nin

Is There a Method to the Madness?

Every time I see a Manhattan Mini Storage ad, I cringe. Not only are their ads controversial, but they also don't really say much about their service. Their ads are usually very simple and feature yellow letters against a blue background proclaiming things such as "If you don't like gay marriage, don't get married" or "Mitt Romney? That guy couldn't even beat Obama." Is the company wasting their ad space in order to inculcate their beliefs into our heads? While I love seeing examples of gay pride plastered across the city, isn't conveying a clear message about the benefits of your product one of the fundamental rules of advertising? An advertisement that features a sexy model in a barely-there bikini might get people's attention, but will people merely look at the model and enjoy the view, or will your brand name stick into people's heads? Many brands have come across this dilemma when they buy too much into an idea that does not have a clear advertising goal. When I first saw the Manhattan Mini Storage ads, I was sure that they had fallen into this trap. I see these ads everywhere I go: on the subway, on billboards, on buildings, in phone booths... Every time I see one I try to find a point to the words written. Do they somehow relate to storage? Do the lines "Michelle Bachman says God told her to run for president. Why doesn't God talk to smart people anymore?" somehow convey a message about Manhattan Mini Storage and why we should store our extra stuff with them? After further research I discovered that they also feature ads like "Remember, if you leave the city you'll live in America", "We have more wiggle room than Herman Cain's morals", and my favorite, "If you watch Hoarders and wonder what the Big Deal is." Why haven't I seen these? These ads clearly encourage people to stay in New York and store their extra stuff. But why would they also run ads that are not as effective? Couldn't they just write the bad ones and throw them out as great ideas that almost work, but ultimately don't? According to their company page, Manhattan Mini Storage tries to run ads that "speak to the people of New York city." While I am all for speaking to the people of New York city, I don't think they should waste their ad space on ineffective ads, but instead, try to stick to their great ideas.