Once No Great Shakes, Print Ads Create Flurry

When ad man Richard Lewis walked into his 4-year-old daughter’s room last Christmas, he absent-mindedly picked up one of her favorite toys--and shook it.

That familiar toy--known as a snow globe--is a hand-sized glass ball filled with what looks like water and tiny snowflakes. As Lewis shook it, the snow went flying around.

This half-baked shake seems to be shaking some new life into the print advertising industry.

“I suddenly pictured an Absolut vodka bottle inside one of these globes,” he said. “Maybe it’s a sign that I’ve been in the business too long,” said the Absolut vodka account manager at the New York firm TBWA Advertising, “but the first thing I asked myself was, ‘Gee, I wonder if we can somehow turn this into a print ad.’ ”

Absolut-ly.

Inside the December issues of L.A. Style and New York magazines--and a trade magazine called Market Watch--is a sort of two-dimensional snow globe ad, produced at a cost of about 75 cents each. There, wrapped inside a plastic covering, is a bottle of Absolut--shaped like a snowman.

But this is no ordinary plastic coating. Between the snowman and the wrapping, they have pumped in a thin layer of clear, oily liquid along with bits of white plastic. When the page is jiggled, tiny plastic snowflakes begin to swirl around the 80-proof snowman.

This, however, may be the snowflakes before the storm. Not too many years ago, print advertisers began including more than perfume-scent strips to promote their products. Cardboard ads began popping out of magazines like veritable jack-in-the-boxes, and Toyota even folded a pair of 3-D glasses into a printed ad.

Now, new technologies--like those used in the snow globe ad--may put even more pizazz into print advertising in 1989. “People will be shaking, rattling and rolling their magazines more than ever next year,” said Fred Danzig, editor of the trade publication Advertising Age. And those in the magazine publishing business refer to these flashy ads as “printaculars.”

Bear in mind, these printaculars aren’t happening by accident. Print advertisers know they must be increasingly creative to snatch business away from television and radio. Indeed, the amount of money that advertisers are spending in the United States on specially inserted ads has nearly doubled in just three years. Upward of $324 million will be spent on magazine-inserted ads in 1988, reports Leading National Advertisers. And while that is but a small piece of the $5.4 billion that will likely be spent on magazine advertising this year, the numbers are on the rise.

Fast-food companies--which often see their business decline around Christmas--are relying increasingly on this kind of breakthrough advertising. Earlier this month, McDonald’s spent more than $1 million to become the first major advertiser to use a hologram in a magazine print advertisement. The hologram--which produces a three-dimensional image of a new and old McDonald’s hamburger stand--appears on the back cover of the December issue of National Geographic. “I can guarantee you,” said McDonald’s spokesman John Onoda, “there’s more of this innovative stuff on the horizon.”

Perhaps the biggest fans of flashy print ads are makers of distilled spirits. After all, they are not allowed to advertise on TV or radio, so they have little option but to rely heavily on eye-catching print advertising.

And liquor companies know that glitzy print ads are especially crucial during the Christmas season when some post up to 50% of their annual sales. Chivas Regal, for example, ran a sort of spin-the-dial print ad in Time Inc. magazines last week. The ad asks readers to spin a cardboard dial to select various Chivas Regal gifts for friends and co-workers. For example, the wheel suggests that the family plumber should get three cases of the Scotch for Christmas--but the IRS should get none.

But the season’s biggest attention-getter is the Absolut vodka ad. And in a rather shrewd attempt to garner even more attention--and to get its name on television--Absolut recently mailed 1,500 copies of its snow globe ads to TV stations nationwide. And many of these stations have, indeed, aired short news stories on the unusual ads.

What Absolut didn’t tell the TV stations was all the headaches it had with its snow globe ads--at least in the trial stages. It seems--in a test at the bindery--the liquid stored in its ads leaked out when the sharp-edged plastic flakes cut through the container.

“We were faced with a crisis a week,” recalled Lewis. “It wasn’t just a matter of finding the right packaging, but also the right substance to put in it.”

For one thing, the liquid had to keep from freezing in very cold temperatures--so the company used a substance that remains liquid in temperatures down to 78 degrees below zero. Also, the liquid had to be nontoxic in case young children opened the plastic and drank it.

Isn’t all this a bit much for the sake of a print advertisement? “I think people are picking up magazines to be entertained, and these ads fall right in line with that,” said Karen Fund, publisher of L.A. Style, which is running the current Absolut vodka ad. But she warns that these kinds of attention-getting ads could quickly become old hat if more than a few of them appear in a single issue.

Sometimes, of course, they get attention for the wrong reason. Last year, an Absolut vodka ad included a computer chip that played “Jingle Bells.” But some of the ads failed to so much as toot while others wouldn’t stop wailing.

And when TransAmerica and Dodge division placed so-called pop-up ads in magazines in the past few years at great expense, an estimated 8% failed to work right, executives said.

“The problem with all this tends to be that the creativity often races ahead of the technology,” said John Schenck, vice president at New York-based Magazine Publishers of America. “The ads don’t always work the way they’re supposed to.”

Technical problems have so far kept magazine advertisers from introducing ads that are supposed to light up like neon signs. Nevertheless, flashing lights are still expected to be seen in magazine ads before the end of 1989.

Right now, several advertisers are looking at computers chips that will actually “talk” to magazine readers. Other advertisers that use celebrity spokesman are toying with computer chips that will mimic the celebrity voices. At least one dog food maker is considering an ad that will “bark” at readers. And a sort of “keyboard” advertisement--where readers could hit specified notes and actually play a company’s jingle--are also on the drawing boards.

Don’t like what you’re hearing? Well there is an option. “If you don’t like the sound that an ad makes,” said Kyle Grabarek, marketing coordinator at Signature Marketing International, a New Rochelle, N.Y.-based sales and marketing company that is designing many of these chattering print ads, “all you have to do is turn the page to shut it off.”

Mazda Puts Brakes On Porsche Comparison

When can a Mazda beat a Porsche?

Probably not on a race track. But it certainly did last year in a TV commercial devised by the Santa Ana office of Mazda’s advertising agency, Foote, Cone & Belding.

The ad for Mazda’s RX7 model even showed a race track setting and claimed: “From 0 to 60, it will beat the Porsche 944.”

How did Mazda figure that? Well, not on the race track, as the ad might suggest. In any case, the commercial has run its last lap.

A complaint was filed with the National Advertising division of the New York-based Council of Better Business Bureaus. By the time the BBB expressed its concerns about the commercial, it was informed by Mazda that the ad had stopped running.

Janet Thompson, Mazda’s vice president of advertising, said the firm’s agency gathered the Porsche statistics from a Porsche brochure and never did actually race the two cars side by side. “The intention was certainly not to mislead anyone,” she said. “We just based the commercial on published information from Porsche. And who wouldn’t want to compare themselves to Porsche?”

Tiger 5 Agency Bags Some Pacific Bell Ads

Pacific Bell may be a phone company, but it recently discovered that its advertising wasn’t being heard very well by Asian-American customers.

The phone company had been mostly advertising in English to its Asian-American clients. But a demographic study revealed that 11% of all its customers are Asian--and almost half of its Asian-American customers speak little or no English.

As a result, Pacific Bell has decided to advertise in the native tongues of these clients--particularly in Korean, Chinese and Vietnamese. And several weeks ago, a tiny Los Angeles firm that specializes in creating Asian advertising--Tiger 5--was handed a big chunk of Pacific Bell’s $1-million Asian ad business.

It marks the largest piece of business the agency has picked up since it was founded here four years ago, said Kathy Kim, the agency’s marketing director.

Now, the 14-person ad shop--whose employees are all of Asian descent--has plenty of work ahead. It already handles some clients trying to reach the Asian-American market, including the Los Angeles Times and Hyundai.

All this is some change from 1974, when the agency’s founder, Tae Heung Kang, immigrated to the United States. Now, the agency’s annual billings exceed $2.5 million. But what about the odd name, Tiger 5? Well, Tiger is Kang’s nickname. As for the numeral 5--that’s the number of people who were originally employed at the agency.

L.A. Agency Lands Koala Blue Account

The Aussie fad may be fading somewhat, but singer Olivia Newton-John’s clothing chain, Koala Blue, certainly isn’t being bearish on Australia.

Instead, last week Koala Blue named a new agency to handle its $600,000 advertising business. That agency, Los Angeles-based Saatchi & Saatchi DFS, also handles U.S. advertising for Toyota. And Koala Blue’s new ads will have a “distinctly Australian flavor,” said Nelson (Skip) Riddle, president of the ad firm.

Although the 40-year-old entertainer attends store openings and helps promote the chain, there are no plans to feature her in the advertising, said David Sidell, chief operating officer and partner in Koala Blue. “Koala Blue has to stand on its own as a brand name,” said Sidell, whose company has grown to some 23 outlets today from two stores in 1984.