Early bird gets the (book)worm

I woke up early today and raced to the School of Visual Arts Library.

They're having a book sale and I wanted to be the first through the door. As I type this, I hear certain voices, some clearer than others, saying Wow Joe, you are seriously a loser.

Maybe so and maybe not so, I say.

I was one of the first to walk through the door and my punctuality was handsomely rewarded in the form of first dibs on all the Advertising Award Annuals. I've mentioned these before but, for anyone who doesn't know, they are books showcasing the very best advertising for the year.

All of the advertising books that I've read, all of the professors that I've had say that you should spend as much time as possible looking through these books. Well I just doubled my collection.

In other news, three of my MICHELIN Guide ads (one campaign) stayed on the wall this past Monday!

The benefit (as I see it) is that the MICHELIN Guide Star ratings are based on anonymous inspectors who are highly trained food experts whereas Zagat, Yelp, Citysearch ratings are based on the user reviews of people just like you and me (or worse!).

Very quickly I would just like to point out that although I wrote what "The benefit" is in the paragraph above, I really didn't actually get to the point (I'm hearing those voices again).

What I mean is, I stated a fact about the MICHELIN rating process but didn't tell you what the associated benefit is. This seems to happen often in advertising. You get so caught up in the research that you develop ads based on facts and features. The problem with this is that all we really care about is the pay off. What does this product do for me? What can I get out of it? That is the benefit.

Of course, it's implied and I'm sure you figured it out, but to be sure here it is. Since

(FACT) the MICHELIN Guide is based on the expert critiques of anonymous inspectors,

(BENEFIT) you can trust that the rating they give will be the experience you can expect.

The tagline I chose to capture this benefit was: Ratings you can trust lead to meals worth having.

I showed actual User Reviews from websites like Yelp and Citysearch that gave a restaurant 5 Star ratings but did so for the stupidest reasons. The User reviews that I included served as the visuals in my ads and they were pretty damn funny. Some people mentioned that they got drunk before the entrees came out and others mentioned that they never ate there but saw a celebrity leave or found money in front of the restaurant.

I think that the campaign is based on the right stuff and that's because I put the time in last week to do my research. Speaking of which, I have to get back to work on the assignment for next class, Budget Rent-a-Car (Luxury Edition), an offer by the company to let you "ride your dream."

Enjoy the rain everyone. I hope I survive the journey home with all of these books :o(

joeyz101

http://twitter.com/joeyz101