Marketing Confetti by Jasginder Singh

Adobe CS3 raises the BTL campaign quality bar
Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Last few years have seen a huge rise in innovative BTL campaigns; companies have also been engaging advertising marshals as Ogilvy, Saatchi and Saatchi and likes to come up with innovative guerrilla campaigns in developed as well as developing countries. The stress has been on the innovation, going away from the trodden path to engage the intended consumer. With the new age media, this has already taken another giant lead. This July’s first Friday saw Adobe launching its eye catching outdoor advertising campaign for Creative Suite 3 (CS3) at Union Square, New York.

The ad, placed on a 7 feet high and 15 feet wide wall, showcases to the pedestrians the unbounded creative ability of CS3. As pedestrians walk past the wall, infrared sensors locks on to the person closest to the wall; as he/she continues walking and moves the slider along, randomly-generated, colorful animation and music will springs ‘out of the wall’, developing or receding at the pace that the person advances or retreats. When each selected pedestrian reaches the end of the wall, "their" design reaches its full blossom, above the campaign's message: "Creative license: take as much as you want."

The ad is a part of online campaign that was launched last month, with similar sliders coming up in online ads. This ad effort took (rightly) six months of development and was done with Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. The agency, which is part of the Omnicom Group, has been working with Adobe since 2001. The ad is supposedly made by using all of the Adobe CS3 tools.

The campaign had few tough tasks to be taken care of. Major being that the majority of these Adobe products are the amateurs and not professionals, so the campaign had to talk to the normal public. Especially after the rise of social networking websites and platforms wherein anyone can come and express him/herself, the avenues of these products have increased exponentially. Many Adobe users, claims International Herald Tribune, are amateurs who use Photoshop to spruce up their Facebook photos or Premier Express to edit their YouTube videos. So the campaign looks at individual’s unique expression on the wall.

The wall was designed to switch its attention, and the control of the slider, to anyone who gets closest to it - but even the activity and movement of people in the background was designed to affect some of the incidental animation. That’s what the producers of campaign call making the wall "a single and multi-user experience simultaneously".

Also Creative Suite 3 brings together the earlier Adobe CS products along with the acquired Macromedia biggies like Dreamweaver, Flash etc. The success of the suite and the impact on Adobe’s share prices will be a thing to watch this quarter.

Labels: BTL