Monday, March 2, 2009

It's The Little Things That Matter

A couple weeks ago I wrote a post entitled It's The Little Things That Matter. I have found another example of this very idea. Only this time, it’s a negative example.

While reading Branding Only Works On Cattle by Jonathan Salem Baskin for a review I will later post on this blog, I stumbled upon an example he uses.

“Nissan’s launch of its new Altima sedan in 2006 featured a kid living in his car for a week (commercials, website, virals, blog). It was celebrated as novel, new-media thinking, targeted exactly at the attitudes and interests of Generation Whatever…”

He goes on to say that despite being all of the above-mentioned things, the campaign didn’t generate the amount of sales Nissan was hopping. This is a good point brought out by the author, except for one thing. The launch spot he is referring to was for Sentra. It was called 7 Days in a Sentra.



Now I haven’t finished the book yet, so I will hold my thoughts on it until the end. But how can I really believe anything this guy is saying when he can’t even get supporting examples correct?

Believe me when I say that I make more than my fair share of mistakes. If you look through this site I’m sure you can find plenty of grammatical errors or typos. But to credit a campaign, that you are bashing, to the wrong vehicle is a sign of a lack of attention to details. If, as I’m saying, details are what make a campaign or creative great, then this book is off to a rocky start.

What do you think about this type of error? Am I being to nit picky? Is it the bigger idea that matters and not the specific vehicle?

-The Ultimate Account Guy

2 comments:

  1. No, I agree with you. The guy loses all credibility with me in that regard. I had the same issue when I read Buyology (a big pile of steaming crap wrapping in a lame dust jacket- please don't waste your time with it).
    I think that I am especially harsh when someone is tearing something down and they get it wrong. How can you assume that the "bad" they are attributing to the thing is actually the fault of the thing [here the campaign] or the fault of the persons errors?

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  2. Thanks for the comments. Like I said, I'm going to hold my thoughts on the overall book until I've finished it.

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