http://www.abc.net.au/tv/gruenplanet/pages/s3598460.htm
Last week, I missed watching Gruen Planet as I was busy elsewhere. No big deal after all - it's just a bit of comedic spin on the advertising industry.
But imagine my surprise when I got an email from the ALIA Students elist with a link to last weeks segment "The Pitch", where two ad agencies were asked to present an ad that would persuade us to abandon our ebook readers in favour of old fashioned books.
It constantly amazes me that the ad agencies always manage to come up with widely varied "pitches" and this time was no different. One ad aimed to highlight a simple benefit of paper books, and showed a story being played out until the battery ran out at the critical moment, whereas paper books are "powered only by your imagination". The other ad looked at issues of trust and whether or not your ebook had crucial facts changed, because "you can't hack a paperback".
The panel thought both advertisements were "seriously...brilliant" but had to make a decision about which one they liked best. In the end they voted 3 to 1 for "powered only by your imagination" because the ad showed excellent insight into what drives us to read and was selling its products (paper books) against an obvious weakness of ebooks.
I agree with the panel - I would hate being part of the way through reading a story on my e-reader only to have the battery run out where I cannot recharge. We like to interrupt our reading at a natural break in the story, like the end of a chapter, not at some arbitrary place mid-sentence dictated to by a machine!
I so agree, I was reading in bed this morning and my kindle kept telling me the battery was nearly flat so I had to read faster to get to the end of the chapter before I go up and recharged it! Love my kindle though.
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