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One Second Ads Hoping To Grab Your Eyes
otis wildflower writes "C|NET reports that GE will be airing a new advertising campaign called 'One Second Theatre'." From the article: "'GE One Second Theater,' as the campaign is being called, presents a humorous peek behind the scenes at recent General Electric commercials produced by BBDO. The campaign is intended specifically for new media like digital video recorders, which can be used to watch expanded versions of the spots, and News Corp.'s MySpace social-networking service, where visitors can read a mock profile of Elli, the elephant star of one of the commercials. The spots will also be accessible on MP3 players, through podcasts presented as if they were recorded by Elli and other characters from the spots, and on a microsite offering an online version of the campaign. The multimillion-dollar campaign, scheduled to begin Friday, is the most recent effort by GE to explore media beyond conventional commercials and print advertisements."
Show me the money and I might pay attention to a one second ad. Unfortunately, my attention span last only a half-second.
Blipverts.
Is anyone else reminded of the 'phallic flash' at the end of Fight Club? Just think... drop a GE logo on there and BAM!
Instant advertising greatness.
For those of you using a text-based browser, here is the ASCII version:
(.)(.)
Just close your browser really fast to get the speed affect.
Table-ized A.I.
The advertisements themselves are one second long, yet the complicated explanation that is necessary to understand what is happening in the commercials takes thirty seconds to read. What the fuck?
Hey, anybody remember back when the point of commercials was to inform you about and convince you to buy a product, and the commercials actually told you what that product was?
see subject.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
A friend of mine told me about something similar to this many years ago where a lawyer was experimenting with the idea of a one-second commercial. Apparently the guy in the ad just yelled "HURT?!?" and flashed his phone number.
If there's any American industry that we'd like to see outsourced....
Boy, it'll be fun listening to a veritable cacophoney of blurps for a thousand products all in the space of one second before I can even comprehend what products they are, what company offers them, and how I can purchase one!
WTF are you doing? How about concentrating on the NBC brand, which is losing ratings (and dump MSNBC for god sakes). Continue to invest in healthcare and insurance which will continue to grow while high oil prices will put a hold on growth in the aircraft and plastics sectors. And pump some more money into congre$$ to get some new nuke plants with your new reactors approved. I'm sick of my shares hovering between 30-38 for the last 2 and a half years. I dont see to many myspace users buying appliances or insurance.
.0000000000001% of company
signed,
pissed off stock holder with
That sounds painful. "My eyes...the goggles do nothing!"
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
They are just a cute and fuzzy corporation that wants to be your pal.
I think I need to puke.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Who's thinkin blipverts?
Max Headroom: We're getting there.
I think part of the reason for this is Tivo et. al, and Web-based shows. Each format allows people some means of skipping over ads, right? If the ads are extremely short, maybe people will be more willing to sit through them. Or at least they'll be unable to get up and grab a beer during the commercial break, unless there are thirty ads in a row... Reminds me of that WarioWare game, except that the theme every time is "Buy!"
Revive the Constitution.
step 1: "Hey everyone: we're releasing a new ad! Come watch it!!"
step 2: get slashdotted...
step 3: profit!
For example take the idea of the 80's yuppie, pixelate a cluster of 1 second ads that incorporate automobiles, IKEA, upscale dinning, wines etc. etc. and you might sell by association.
Just my loose change
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Is it just me or are people's attention spans getting ... where was I?
Philosophy.
What is One Second Theater?
GE is pleased o introduce "One Second Theater" an innovative concept in commercial content designed to capture the imagination of viewers. GE's One Second Theater is available to anyone with a digital video recording device and right here on this website.
Here's how GE's One Second Theater works... blah blah 30 fps blah use your pause button blah...
Gah, sounds like work, pass...
Now if they had REAL one second films... that would be creative... but this is just 30 images in one second... not 1 second theater, but 30 frame slide show...
So what are they advertising again? Jet engines?
What's the adblock string to keep these out?
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
All we need now is for people to swell up and explode, and for TV execs to suppress truth. 3.5 seconds into the future...
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
...society wonders why our children are constantly diagnosed with ADD. No one is given the time to actually sit back and digest information anymore. There's no pleasure in anything. Anything that attempts to circumvent this trend is completely dismissed by the public at large. I guess that's why it's so easy to negotiate the non-existent crowds at Borders: no one wants to read anymore.
Yup, a nation of functionally illiterate, oversexed, undereducated, greedy, contemptuous assholes...founding fathers never saw that coming.
Oh shit... I'm already out of time.
# man tar
Image
Mint Mentos+2-liter of Diet Pepsi/Coke = Minor hillarity during a work break. Warm cola tends to work better than cold, 5-10 mentos seems to more than do the trick.
There - that might just sell some otherwise undrinkable/inedible snacks!
Ryan Fenton
demo and applications:
7 748873531
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-14536843
Isnt SUBLIMINAL advertisement illegal? 1 second is very close to that subliminal line.
It didn't hold my attention long enough since I've trained myself to ignore anything related to ads.
The only thing in here which has caught my attention is the post somewhere up above containing this:
Hallo, My name is Inigo Montoya. You kill -9 my parent process. Prepare to die!
[Smoke (art)]
/s/ Gregory Thomas
[Eat At Moe's (9.99 Hamburger)]
Subject: Competent Authentication
As this post shall evince, M. Gregory Thomas(tm) does declare this first post on behalf of the Special Trust confided to me from the royalty in His bench; to acknowledge and reserve and assert claim on subject matter for participants in any event of conversation, where information submitted is audit by a presentable graphic for advertised goods and servies as to discern or regulate the acceptance of automated transponse to encumber a politic in its daily discourse and business; where that advertised goods or services shall be adapted to satisfy a query of verifiable information from an image, to satisfy the cause of authentication as a postal vessel to move evidence into the forum as does from a competent and sound Record.
Done on this sixth Day of the fifth Month, in the Year of Our Lord 2006, to be held in trust by him at the town of Westminster, California republic.
To proceed to Slashdot and satisfy a metric of competancy, adapt the following image to text;
Linux Support, USD 10!
[Mundt Network Redundancy Adminsitration]
[Gregory Thomas]
[Anyone trying to implement the above as claimed, will be Slashdotted. So rests duplicate of the original letter patent from His mind.]
without prejudice
Imagine if this caught on! If every company was doing this you would have roughly 180 ads in your normal 3 minute ad break. The sesures would suck a bit though.
Now the average three minute ad break will have room for 200 ads!
epileptics around the world are turning off their televisions
being vague is almost as cool as doing that other thing...
Do you want to see it again ?
"Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."
- Alfred Hitchcock
I promise to be different...
Advertising was dying slowly... Well.. every company was advertising its pants off, but with the average audience that has a concentration with very short timespan (anyone noticed that series on tv don't last an hour or an hour and a half anymore but when you take away the commercials they are about 35-40 minutes), and a total overload of commericials, nobody is paying attention anymore. Well.. there's always tellsell that weak minds fall for.. but anyway...
So what do you do when a product/service is about to kick the bucket? You re-invent it. And to be honoust.. this could be brilliant. Not only do you revive the interest of the advertisers... you can charge them a huge amount more !! Or do you really think they pay 1/30 of the amount they were paying for a 30 second commercial ? No way !!
So you make maybe 5 times as much money per second and you have maybe a couple of years to come up with a real solution for the declining interest with consumers, before advertisers get a clue they were suckered. 1 second is just to short for being called subliminal messaging.. but not by much. So maybe it will 'hang around' in people's brain... but that's just the brand... not how good it is.. you can't get a real message across.
But I have a good advise... LESS advertising... maybe people will notice it again.
Gabbo!
Gabbo!!
Gabbo!!!
Theese ought to be popular with hippies & vietnam vets.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
And once you've done that, you can take the bottle and do this.
www.clarke.ca
Seriously I would rather see companies trying crap like this, you have to want to watch the full version. I like this idea much better than trying to find ways to MAKE you watch the commercials. This plan only subjects you to 1 second unless you opt in.
Algerath
Make them psychedelic, please! Even more fun for stoned people watching TV!
"I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me."
www.fastforwardtv.com.au interesting to see how/where etc this was originally patented. Cheers, Dean
First of all, this is a sign of desperation from a major consumer-facing company. It could be GE or Sony or anyone else. The only difference here is that GE is advertising their advertising plans, rather than trying to be surreptitious like many other companies. This just means that they're smart enough to attempt publicity around their publicity--metapublicity, really. At any rate, it's a sign that advertising as we know it is dying. This is no surprise--advertising evolves fast, and things that were normal in the late 1970s are now unheard of. (Does anyone else remember the Kraft recipes during Love Boat?)
However, it's also a sign of desperation from GE specifically. They are a sick company, with almost a decade of short-term thinking infecting them like a disease. They don't make decisions to improve the company, they make decisions to claim profitability in a quarter, regardless of whether or not they actually made any money!
Take a look at GE's stock vs. the NYSE. They can't keep up to the conservative market indicators, which is a sign that they're adrift and lost. Having worked there for several years, I can confirm it--this is a company that needs to be gutted and rebuilt.
Of course they're large enough that they're not going to go away any time soon, but at the same time, they're not going...anywhere. They're just grasping at straws to become relevant again.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
If you have a nice easy to remember number then it's completely possible to remember it in one second. Plus if you are the first ad in the slot then it's likely that tivo users will not only see your whole ad but rewind it to find out what the hell you are doing.
Of course it only works for the first couple of people to try it, then it becomes old and will be ignored.
Anyone remember the episode with Zipping that caused a person's head to explode due to the large amount of data being presented?
in the form of advertising is regulated by law. GE advertising approaches subliminal advertising through unconscious messaging as its medium encroaches upon the limits of human awareness inability to detect changes within broadcast frame rates.
Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message" taught us the connection between presentation and content back in the 50's. Subliminal messaging circumvents Reason? What does bypassing Reason accomplish?
Studies have proven that subliminal is ineffective without the reinforcement device of repetition.
Actually, 1 seconds is not subliminal at all. Everyone watching will be very aware of what they see. The threshold for subliminal for vision is on the order of 1/20th of a second.
I saw United 93 several days ago and saw series of red dots flash on the screen twice during two separate plane scenes.
I know they are anticopy measures used to stop bootleg 'camrips' but couldn't Universial give the cap codes a rest for a film as momentous as this?
If the cap codes were only on a single frame, that is 1/24 of a second and should be in the 'subliminal range' of vision yet I saw them 'clear as day'.
Before the film, the same 'trick' was tried to get me to buy Coke to drink during the movie--during a Coke ad?!?
I guess cap codes are a 'necessary evil' to stop piracy^W illegal distribution in the 'digital distribution age' (we have horror film 28 Days Later to thank for starting this 'tradition') but 'the masses' are paying 'real money' to watch a 'defective' film on the big screen. Must we wait for the DVD release of a movie to be made available in order to enjoy it to the fullest without cap codes?
At first, I thought it said they were going to put these 1-second ads in DV cameras, not DVRs. I was about to flip out for a second there...
Now, if only all commercials became 1-second blips and they cut down the commercial space accordingly (instead of putting in more to fill up the gap). Longer shows and less fast forwarding!
If you can't convince them, convict them.
I read the topic as "One second abs" and I thought, oh man, I'm there :).
We have enough youth, how about a fountain of SMART?
Lets hope they lose this round.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The Late Show (Letterman) does this type of thing when they do skits like, 'Will It Float?'
Dave will ask what we are playing for and for a second they will flash a picture of the item. The announcer gets really into saying the name, like "Black and Decker can opener", but they only show the item for a second. I've actually been wondering for a while if they were being paid for some of their spots.
Get your Unix fortune now!
Longer shows are exactly what the networks do NOT want. Their profit model is based on selling you, the viewer, to advertisers who PAY the TV networks to run ads for them.
The networks use THE SHOW as advertising to the advertisers - "We have this show which we can guarantee will have ten million eyeballs watching this week (or near enough thanks to Nielsen et al), so for $X million you will have lots of exposure for your ad."
This is why your TV shows get shorter in actual running time, they have ads before, after and DURING the show itself (those banners below the picture), and why the show's credits usually get squashed into a small corner so they can fit in EVEN MORE ads (I'm surprised the show's creators don't stomp on this aspect actually).
Pay TV is the ultimate form of TV network double dipping - all of the above is true, then the consumer (in the genuine sense of the word) PAYS THEM AGAIN!!! Something about a sucker born every minute...
HTH
Visceral Psyche Films
Maybe they should start subliminial "DO NOT PIRATE THIS MOVIE" adverts :)
OK, now I am 100% positive that time really is speeding up.