passive promotion; or, i want hyperdunks.

[This is very much an example of blogging as talking out an idea.  Sorry if it meanders.]

I love creative advertising.  A great idea, something original well executed, ceases to become advertising to me - it becomes content.  Great content is watched, shared, etc.  But such a small portion of advertising reaches this level.

Which brings me to passive promotions.  Product placement, gift lounges, product seeding, etc.  Letting the presence and value of a thing speak for itself.  Product placement is valuable, but most often I find I think of it in terms of 'ways to keep television afloat despite rampant bittorrent downloads'.  This is a failing on my part.

If advertising is about creating awareness and interest, on-the-street visibility is priceless.  my question is why poorly done, low budget traditional advertising isn't almost always replaced by careful seeding.  Gifting lounges have been brought to consumer level in other countries already, letting random people from the street visit and test products, in hopes of creating word of mouth and interest.  While this isn't suitable for everything, it's suitable for something.

While lots of people will attack advertising because it represents a point of view, and offers something to be countered, the only arguments against free product are based on the quality, ethics, and environmental effects of what is offered, other than knee-jerk hate from the Adbusters crowd who sees an enemy behind any commercial offering.

This wouldn't be worth anything to many companies.  But, Nike consistently has the best advertising in the world, from a creativity, ingenuity, and beauty standpoint.  And I didn't want a pair of Hyperdunks until I saw the Chinese and American Olympic basketball teams squaring off in them.

Passive promotion is the simplest response to the army of people who like to pretend they aren't affected by marketing.  All it takes is a product that speaks for it self, and a well planned means of introduction.

nike+ human race.

Nike’s Human Race is probably the best promotion I’ve heard of this year.  This is fairly unsurprising, considering it’s directly tied to Nike+, a joint product of Nike and Apple, the two greatest media machines in the corporate world.

The premise is dead simple.  You’ve got an army of people, running all over the world, using the Nike+ product to track their progress, training against themselves day after day.  You use the product, and the behaviour they’ve integrated into their daily lives, and you make it a marathon, run individually, tracked over the software.  A global event that has no costs tied directly to the physical event.  Just aggregating the data that’s already being tracked and stored, creating a central side for participants to visit, and donating some of the massive advertising budget to publicize the event.

I personally have only heard about it through local radio, but I don’t see why it would need to be a huge media blitz, considering the only participants are those who already use the Nike+ system, and are therefore accessible through that channel.

This is what the internet is for: taking people from different areas, with different experiences, and reminding them that they are indeed connected.  Attaching that feeling of connectedness with your product, which the consumer has already connected to a physical pursuit, and achievements related to that pursuit, furthers the long, impressive history of Nike crafting itself as something people want to be associated with for competitive, social, and quality reasons.

That, and really, a global crowd-sourced marathon called the Human Race is more or less guaranteed to get my attention.