Thursday, October 4, 2007
Arnold focus groups "1984"; finds it dreary
Almost everyone in the ad business has spent countless days, hours, weeks bemoaning how focus groups denude commercials of their original creativity. So what would've happened if Apple's classic "1984" was focus grouped? Arnold found out, by asking people who'd apparently never seen the spot how they'd change it—and it involved putting Apple logos on the t-shirts of the huddled masses, and the recommendation that the spot: "Use real people, preferably without gas masks. Make fewer references to Nazism" and so forth. Only one focus group member thinks the spot should be produced at all. Arnold produced this as the intro film to the Boston Ad Club's Hatch Awards, which were held last night, but that's incidental.
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4 comments:
This video is an absolute joke. It's pretty obvious why This is horrible if Arnold is actually conducting research like this. How can you even conduct a study on this ad which is one of the greatest of all time, when it is completely out of context. These focus group people are also completely the opposite of apple's target. It makes me feel like the braniacs at microsoft is behind this video.
After seeing the recent Volvo commercials and now this, Arnold needs a lot of help if they want to survive in this industry.
more than anything, this video demonstrates the people do not have the same kind of patience for TV spots as they did in the past.
here's a thought. what if 1984 was re imagined contemporarily as a ARG (alternate reality game) or utilizing a microsite for delivery...
the campaign would have a much narrower reach, however I believe it would have greater success...
But Catherine, 1984 was focus grouped… I tell the whole story in my next book “The Ubiquitous Persuaders.” Here’s a condensed version. When the Board of Apple was shown the finished spot three weeks before the Super Bowl airing, they hated it and insisted on pulling out of the media buy. Fred Goldberg, who was the CEO of Chiat, SF, decided to prove them wrong. The agency commissioned at their expense, three focus groups. Every single person in every single group hated it. So, Fred burned the research. Apple couldn’t sell the time (This was before Super Bowl mania had afflicted the ad biz) They were forced to run it. The rest is history. One other factoid… Contrary to popular belief, it didn’t run just once. It ran in the middle of the night at the end of December in Twin Falls, Idaho. That way it would qualify for all next year’s award shows. And yes, Chiat paid for that too. All ten dollars of it.
Cheers/George
50% of our advertising dollars are wasted. It’s the 50% we spend in focus groups.
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