Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Videos celebrating the use of locally sourced food for the creation of burritos, a woman’s first day of retirement after having recently lost her husband and the story of a young man who uses Sharpie markers to draw on disposable coffee cups are among the third group of 10 “Ads Worth Spreading” from TED Initiatives.

An initiative designed to “recognize and reward innovation, ingenuity and intelligence in advertising,” TED’s Ads Worth Spreading looks to showcase ads that married content with technology. “TED began Ads Worth Spreading to provide a platform for conversations about creating not just effective advertising, but great content,” according to the report. “It was an opportunity for the advertising industry to step outside of itself and see how it fits in the zeitgeist.”

For the first time, TED employed ACE Metrix to test each of the 10 advertisements with consumers to see how they performed for a U.S. audience. The point, says Ace Metrix CEO Peter Daboll, was to show the videos were more than just creative exercises....

[Study shows more creativity, marketing ROI with stories in ads ~ Jeff]

You can primp and polish almost anything to make it gleam and glimmer, but making something beautiful doesn’t make it unique and doesn’t make it effective.

The same can be said with advertising and PR. You can devise the most astounding campaign that implements every creative tool in the book and then some, but if your message doesn’t resonate with people, you have lost.

This summer I had the privilege of attending the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where I absorbed the knowledge and advice advertising and PR professionals had to give about the ever-changing field in which they work. In the seminar “Nailing Jelly to a Tree & Other Wild Goose Chases” Dr. Itiel Dror joined Nir Wegrzyn to discuss how to make your advertising messages stick with your audience and have the effect that you desire.

Dr. Dror, a cognitive neuroscientist, stressed three points: making your messages into memories, encode those messages in the appropriate parts of the brain, tell a relevant story and tell it well. All of these components combined make it possible for us as advertisers (or aspiring advertisers) to divulge into human insight and to connect with our audience in a transparent and effective way....