What the ad industry needs

For a quick picture, I’ve analysed 75 randomly selected ads from Campaign’s website for the skills and experience that the ad industry wants. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the most in demand skill involves communication in some way. Other than that, it seems as if the industry needs highly organized people with good commercial awareness, an understanding of marketing strategy and an ability to analyse data or code in someway. I’ve analysed enough of the adverts to run some simple statistics clustering the skills. Here we see that these skills are not demanded individually but are clustered such that the adverts demand analytic skill and communications skills. I’m going to use this as I design my teaching next year. Get in touch if the data would be useful.

We all smiled together and we’d never be the same

The last few posts I’ve enjoyed tying together some links between ads and other cultural texts.  The Kia Woman of Now spot seems one of the most misguided attempts to borrow from pop culture to me.  But then I remember this spot for O2 which uses a rewritten version of Little Boxes by Malvina Reynolds.  Let me preface this by saying that Little Boxes must be one of the most covered songs ever – the TV show Weeds invited a different group to cover it at he start of every episode.  So it’s pretty well known.  It was written as a critique of the disposable individuality provided through consumption.  In a way the best example of what the song was talking about is the O2 ad.

In denial

Perhaps I’m being unfair but these seem remarkably similar to me. You can’t help but feel that Kia’s Woman/Man is “IN DENIAL”:

Getting your ideas from youtube

I was just flicking through Newsjacking by Hunter and Burkhart and I was reminded of this TMobile viral, watching it again reminded me of (what I think is) the original version. I wonder if TMobile paid them for their idea?