Behind the Buzz - digital and interactive advertising and marketing

Framing

by Rachel on June 17th, 2007

Following my piece on Court TV and Save My Husband, I was asked in another forum what I thought about some of the reactions to the game itself, the premise of the game, not the results and conduct of it. As far as I can see there seems to be the following three types:

• OMG! it’s all a marketing scam to get our names and addresses or find out something else about us.
• OMG! how dare they fictionalise kidnapping when it’s going on all around us.
• OMG! i thought it was all real and now I hate them for making me believe it

The first one I dealt with in my original post - yes, it’s all a scam to get information from you. That’s what a lot of marketing is; relationship marketing is all about getting permission to send things directly to you. It’s far more effective than mass advertising, speaks to you directly about things you want to here and can deepen the relationship between you and the brand. It’s always optional and you should be able to remove yourself at any time from the list.

The second one is strange in that anyone who has the slightest nodding acquaintance with any entertainment, books, TV, films, plays etc know that dramatic situations like this are often used for entertainment. Looking at the top TV shows in the US, such as CSI or Law and Order, they use murder, kidnapping and worse as the premise for their entertainment. This is a mindset I can’t get my head around at all - so I’ll leave it by just saying I think it is strange.

The last reaction I also think is strange but is easier to understand. At my Mesh panel, Michael raised the question about advertising, marketing and framing, following up with a blog post. Here he looks at the way advertising usually has a format that we are used to, that have a structure that sets us up to know it is an ad and not a piece of content. In the UK, commercial TV has a ‘title’ plate at the beginning and end of a break, to close out the programme and start it up again; this frames the commercials. Most stations do not use the same device in the US and that fools me sometimes, you’re sometimes not sure - which results in me missing parts of programmes as I have no cue to turn my attention back ;-) In print and online, the ads usually have borders or some way of marking them. If you look at Adsense ToS, the ads have to be delineated in such a way as to mark them as ads. One of the reason PayPerPost has such a reaction is that they posts are not framed in a way to mark then out.

Not having seen the initial round of advertising for Save My Husband, before they plastered disclaimers all over it, I’m not sure how they appeared. But from placements on sites and in commercial breaks there was a first level of framing around it. I think the disconnect came at the link through. What you got on the game site was not a typical marketing website; it did not carry the same clues as going to a brand website would have given you. So even if the the initial trigger was framed as an ad, the site gave an illusion that this was something more. And for first timers in the illusionary world of ARGS, the expectations were not there, the game cues were missed somehow. In a parallel to this, I’ve occasionally clicked on ads that were designed to lead the user into thinking there was a game or an experience behind them and then got really annoyed when I found that it was a straightforward marketing site. I’m looking for the make-believe, not the reality.

So on the last one, with my own perceptions and world-view I can’t see how anyone could be mistaken, it all looks pretty obvious to me. But from a different world-view, when the expected cues and framing were not in place, I can understand how someone may be taken in at the start.

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POSTED IN: Advertisments, Alternate Reality Experience, Fun and Games