Miss Helga and Wolfgang - Creativity in Marketing by Alex Osborn

Sometimes it is difficult to recognise an add when you see one.

One of the most succesfull examples is the Miss Helga and Wolfgang - Unpimp Your Auto.

Well, the link above leads to a fancy MySpace Area. So what?

[Check the link before you continue to read more!!! A spoiler is coming!]

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This MySpace area is actually a Volkswagen Golf GTI commercial! I find it an interesting mixture of reality and fiction. Even though I do not exactly belong to the target group (18-30 years old male, single, no family to transport, sport cars enthusiast), this site got me hooked. Okey, (virtual) Miss Helga is s-o-o-o attractive and demanding at the same time ;-) Those Rice-Rocket-Smashing videos are great entertainment :-) Not to mention the test drive sessions :-) In German I would say... reizend :-) Just lately, the commercial won an award in Cannes. This Add-Like-A-Myspace-Area is a typical example of viral marketing = how to facilitate and encourage people to pass along a marketing message. Just check at those enthusiastic MySpace member comments and tags!

Remember Alex Osborn? He was the father of the CPS (Creative Problem-Solving) Techniques and Applied Imagination. At the same time, he owned one of the biggest advertisement agencies ( Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn) in the United States. The Miss Helga commercial was done by an agency called Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, there is a funny story about them in the BusinessWeek called "The Crazies Add Guys in America". I am almost sure that Crispin, Porter & Bogusky have done their homework and utilised the ideas and techniques of Alex Osborn. Alex Osborn left an interesting heritage for creativity research: 1) each year there is the The Creative Problem-Solving Institute - a large creativity conference, 2) there is the creativity research database at the University of Buffalo and in Hong Kong and 3) there is even an organisation supporting educational topics, the Creative Education Foundation.

I am getting more and more interested in the connections of marketing and creativity. The Web 2.0 and virtual reality brings another dimension to it, let see what kind of adds will show up in the Second Life by Linden Lab !

Comments

[W Micheals]

Thanks for the read, I only just stumbled across your blog, and this post made my day.

[W Micheals]

Thanks for the read, I only just stumbled across your blog, and this post made my day.