Sent to current customers, this direct mail piece is a retention tactic aimed at increasing customer loyalty in BMW customers. Specifically, it’s promoting BMW’s cold weather tires.

In order to cut the mail open, the recipient can have some fun as they tear out the winding road — which by no coincidence aligns with their idea of offering a sporty and fun car. When the ad’s medium aligns and is used to further promote a message this way, it’s an idea we refer to in my advertising classes as fusion. Fusion, when it makes a connection between medium and message, can actually serve to reinforce the message being delivered.

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Target Audience: Anyone who is thirsty and isn’t offended by a fake Spanish accent.

Communication Objective: Use TV actor Jonathan Goldsmith to turn Dos Equis into a household name and into the brand consideration set of people across America.

Obstacles: Having a gray-haired, Don Draper lookalike convince people he chooses beer over scotch.

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When you have someone in your family who has to eat gluten-free, you realize how many products contain gluten and you start looking for products that have the label of gluten-free. While these kind of products used to make up a tiny sector of the food and beverage industry, the category has officially gone mainstream, with tens of millions of Americans reducing or altogether eliminating wheat/barley/rye/oat products from their plates.

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This is an ad for a Belgian TV Channel called Prime Sports which people must pay extra to receive.

The ad is funny to me — from the story of the “Ronaldo” to the part about David Beckham.

The tag-line captures their positioning perfectly: “cut out for top-class football,” alluding to the fact if you’re a big soccer fan and want the best/most soccer coverage, then you’ll pay more.

How do you make a commercial for the Super Bowl when you are by far the most recognized brand and the market leader in the hot sauce category?

The answer is not to just emphasize brand name; after all, consumers are well aware of your brand. Instead, the strategy should be to emphasize the category benefit (hotness), as this ad by Tabasco from a past Super Bowl successfully accomplishes.

The marketing strategy is to stimulate demand. The ad articulates this strategy by showing the product used in a new way. The ad is aimed at broadening the category definition in order to grow the brand, since any growth to the category means an automatic proportionate growth relative to market share for Tabasco. Here, it appears that Tabasco is actually changing the definition of who their competition is to include condiments/sauces in general.

Said another way, as market leader in the hot sauce category, by stimulating demand in order to expand the category definition, this meant Tabasco was able to expand the entire size of their pie.

Monster.com ad from the 2009 Super Bowl.

Possibly the one problem: what makes Monster.com different from CareerBuilder?

What’s a Super Bowl party without pizza? No really, it’s hard to imagine. In a country that consumes more than 75 football fields of pizza per day, it’s not that surprising how well pizza franchises such as Papa John’s are doing. Appropriately, they will be using this pizza box leading up to the Super Bowl this year.

Says Andrew Varga, Papa John’s chief marketing officer: “As the company that has always believed that better ingredients make a better pizza, our intent as an official sponsor of the NFL is to make the football experience even ‘better’ for fans.”

Last year, Papa John’s was also the Official Pizza Sponsor of the Super Bowl, and the company had its largest single sales day in its history, selling more than 900,000 pizzas nationwide.

Vlasic might just be the most recognizable name when it comes to pickles.

They also serve as a lesson in price reduction. Said another way, they show the riskiness that comes with price reduction that relies on an asymmetrically large increase in sales volume.

For years Vlasic was the market leader and had charged a price premium over others in their category.

But then along came WalMart, which decided to offer gallon jars, weighing in at 12 pounds, of Vlasic pickles at less than $3 per jar. For a comparison, most grocers charged more than that price for just a quart of pickles.

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Piers Morgan has officially taken over for Larry King with his Piers Morgan Tonight show on CNN.

Morgan replaces the long-time broadcast interviewer who was perceived as an honest and mostly down-to-earth personality. King was never too harsh as he interviewed people. In fact, his critics said King was often completely ignorant when it came to his interview subjects, but perhaps that’s exactly what gave him his ability to ask his infamous open-ended questions.

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Finding a trebuchet can be hard work. (I would know.)

From Strata-G.

Paul McCartney and John Lennon are seen as one of the best and most creative songwriting duos in history.

Believe it or not, according to Paul, the two usually utilized a template when it came to the songwriting process. He said:

“As usual, for these co-written things, [John] often just had the first verse, which was always enough: it was the direction, it was the signpost and it was the inspiration for the whole song. I hate the word but it was a template.”

Other artists who have admitted to using some kind of formula when it came to their work include Agatha Christie (more than 4 billion books sold), Danielle Steel (more than 570 million books sold), and Robert Frost to name a few.

Does this mean that if we were given these templates we would be able to create anything close to what they did? Not at all.

The point, which I learned this weekend in my Innovation Methods course, is that there are common patterns in how people come to arrive at creative solutions.

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