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| Bryant Park. Southside. |
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| iPad stations & lovely, friendly promotional staff. |
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| Well designed. Flawless presentation. |
As I was strolling through the streets of Manhattan on this wonderful August summer day - the first one with California weather: 72 and sunny - my always wandering eyes were captivated by a very well executed promotional event, this one done by AOL.
In an earlier blog criticizing the makers of the reality TV show 'Swam People' for trying to score with a cheap publicity stunt (link see below), I wrote about the challenge of getting people's attention in New York City, where everyone and their brother are trying to get you to listen.
AOL did manage to do just that. And they almost got me to order an iPad online, because this editions app is actually quite cool. As I sat down on one of these chairs and played around with one of the iPads, a friendly, young lady came over and guided me through the program. She was well trained and very knowledgeable, although her eyes, at every question I asked, seemed to be trying to locate an invisible teleprompter hidden behind my left shoulder.
Editions, in a nutshell, is an app that pulls news content from various sources from the web and hence puts together your very own customized newspaper, similar to the social networking news aggregation app flipboard. It is pretty sweet. The only shortcoming is that you cannot print an article. Saving, archiving, and later printing are still quite somewhat essential for a writer. But perhaps I'm already part of a dying species.
In any case. AOL stopped me on a busy Manhattan work day, and got ten minutes of my attention. And hey, their promotional tour bus even inspired me to write about it. That is quite an accomplishment.
MAD SCORE: +5
Message: +1, because the iPad sells like hot cakes, and this app is pretty cool
Creative: +1, that is one impressive truck, and it's very well put together
Context: +1, because they understood that content is king, the medium (paper) only, well, the medium
Impact: +1, I predict this to be a success
Intangibles: +1, add the pretty ladies, and the 360-impeccably presented promotional stations, and AOL has got itself a winner
Related links:
For more about AOL's 'Editions' click here
Blog post 3/31: 'Cheap public stunt - Swamp people's fake gator'
More about 'Mad Ad Scores'
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