A very creative site

Stuart Elliott, who writes on advertising for the New York Times, describes an innovative website and marketing campaign for a brand of gin. The website, full of whimsy, nostalgia for a bygone era, and a clever pastiche of images is worth a gander.

Mr. Elliott writes: The Web site, billed as the Curiositorium, is a digital curio cabinet, stuffed with all manner of offbeat, oddball sights and sounds that are intended to bring to life the brand’s promises that it is “a most unusual gin” and “it’s not for everyone.”

Best yet, the product it touts actually came on the scene just a few years old, but then, who's counting? The creative team designed their product and site to look like something alive and well in Edwardian England. Full of fanciful images, perusing their site is fun and inviting. They even invite you to become part of their exclusive little club. And of course you'll want to try their product.

But for me, the site is a great case study for how creative minds can transform something as mundane as a bottle of gin into a nostalgic celebration full of romance and feats of derring do.

Decoding the Messages Behind the Message

The NY Times reports that the Feds are launching a new campaign to help educate kids about advertising. A sample ad is at the left, for eco-friendly jeans made by an imaginary company. This ad and others are similar to those used to target kids, and I guess all of us.

As noted in the Times article, the government enlisted the aid of Scholastic, the educational publishing company and Fleishman-Hillard to create the ads, a website and game to help kids decode ad messages and "become critical thinkers."

Over the years I've spent a lot of time crafting messages for persuasive media, political campaigns and issue ads. So I've learned first hand how powerful a medium video can be to deliver those messages. And while kids are certainly a lot more media savvy in some ways, they and all of us are susceptible to the subtle messages so often embedded in advertising. We're so used to them, they don't even register in our consciousness.

As the lines have become blurred between fact and fiction, news and advertisements, political rhetoric and reality, etc. the ability to think critically is more important than ever. Nobody likes to be manipulated. So I'm glad that we're making an effort to help kids understand the motives and messages behind the message.