Posts Tagged ‘The X Factor’
Rebecca – I Told You So! – WRONG—WRONG!
I had this all ready to go!
I think the result is very strange. Rebecca should have won.
She is the one who will go on to achieve great success.
It’s wonderful to be able to say I told you so nearly ten weeks ago!
She is the one with the X Factor.
She deserves it.
Rebecca
Someone, I can’t remember who, taunted me to write about The X Factor, so here I am.
I wish I’d done it before because we’re all in the “I told you so” business and it’s true, I promise, I’m hardly an ITV dot com type but I was looking up Rebecca last week. She has a rare authenticity that moves me and I believe in.
I think she’ll go far.
Vauxhall’s Ad With The X Factor
As an adman, I have to say I love the new Vauxhall commercial, the one for the lifetime warranty. I can see how it’s spot on brief, catching the zeitgeist, truly the first of a new generation of advertising with a different type of offer. It’s designed for these just coming out of recession, hovering on the edge of double dip times. It’s great.
It achieves excellence by obeying the good, old fashioned rules of good old fashioned writing. It attracts your attention, inspires your interest, builds desire for the payoff and creates action at the end. Old fashioned principles with leading edge delivery. That’s advertising at its very best.
I’ll give you an example of the opposite. The X Factor is becoming like Fox News, utterly carried away on its own hype and insensitive to its audience. It knows how to pull my heartstrings and invoke my tear ducts almost at will but as it goes into its own advertising and promotion between the commercial breaks, it loses me. I wander. I write or I go into the other room. When I come back it’s telling me what’s coming up “after the break”. This is insane. I feel cheated, used and abused. I feel that I’m being toyed with and exploited.
In another echo of so many over-inflated advertising egos of the past, I laughed out loud when I saw the double page spread in The Times for Christine and Adrian’s new breakfast show “Daybreak”. This is an utter waste of money. Double page spreads are the creative team’s favourites because there are their words and pictures up in lights, like a poster, unsullied by editorial or other content. They’re the account man’s favourite too because they make for an excellent presentation and impress the client easily. Watch how readers behave. The page gets turned in double quick time. And in The Times? What objective is being achieved for ITV’s marketing strategy? Are readers of The Times part of Daybreak’s target audience? If this is aimed at potential advertisers it is an extraordinarily expensive way of reaching them.
Countless millions are wasted based on the petty pretensions of marketing directors or their advertising agencies. Similar egotistical spendthrifts inhabit TV production. Occasionally though, particularly in Britain, you see beautifully crafted and intelligently written masterpieces of communication. The new Vauxhall ad is one of these.
Dermot’s X Factor Interviews
He's Got It!
Dermot O’Leary’s interviews with David Cameron and Nick Clegg, tonight on BBC3, were incisive and inspiring in a way that none of the other debates or interviews have been.
Perhaps precisely because they were aimed at a 16-24 year old audience, these were forward looking, exciting programmes. Look to your laurels, Paxman, Dimbleby, et al.
I think Dermot will tear Gordon Brown to pieces next week.
Rage Against My DRM Resolution
I have always sworn that I would never buy any DRM music. It’s a fundamentally flawed and immoral idea that if I pay for music I shouldn’t have the right to play it where, when and on what I want. It’s an idea that is doomed to failure. Even Steve Jobs, the gamekeeper turned poacher turned lord of the manor turned poacher has recognised that it has exactly the opposite effect to that intended and alienates customers too.
So what has caused me to break my resolution? The X Factor. It has to be bad that every Christmas the charts are hijacked by manufactured pop. I don’t count “Rage Against The Machine” as my favourite band but I spent 67p at Tesco’s online music store and got my DRM track.
You should join in too! See the Facebook campaign page and rage against The X Factor!
Peter Reynolds 
