Success of Advertising Campaigns

We have talked about some ways to make social media campaigns and advertisements memorable: making it short, designing for remixing, not making it feel like an outright ad, making it shocking, using fake headlines and appealing to sex (Lecture 2). During a recent visit to Milan (Italy), I ran into a display tent in a square by the Duomo that invited passersby to interact with the display and find out more about a particular building:

This reminded me of a French commercial that was making rounds on Facebook a few months ago, and it seemed like the display tent was modeled after the commercial. One of the reasons this commercial stuck in my mind was indeed because it was not made to feel like an outright ad, had somewhat of a "shocking" content, definitely appealed to sex and kept you guessing till the end. The commercial ends with a pointer to their Facebook site which I visited and would have stayed longer on if it didn't involve me google-translating everything from French to English to get a better understanding of the kind of interactive elements it had.

What got me thinking was the reversal of roles: real life imitating social media. This booth clearly seemed to be modeled after the success of the commercial, wanting to attract more people into the booth and to the hall by audience participation. The more pervasive social media gets, the more blurred the lines get between real and virtual presence!