↓ Tease me please!

Suspense ads (enigmatic or teasers) is a commonly advertising technique which has become overtime a must in many marketing campaigns. They work on the simple premise to create a buzz around a coming product before you actually get to know the entire brand story.

Like Guerrilla it was initially used when you had budget restrictions and couldn’t sustain your brand later; they intended to tease the public by offering only bits of information without revealing either the sponsor of the ad or the product being advertised. This is changing however… nowadays teaser campaigns go along with huge budgets and do release leaked images, even videos.

They usually make part of these perfectly controlled viral strategies letting the consumer get to see the brand and even the product “codename”. Everything else is a mystery, most times because the product is not even finished

An example is VeVo… the new site by Youtube & Universal… we know nothing else apart from the name and that it will very probably become a music-video dedicated site. Speculate about the rest. Vevo has not even needed a proper “suspense” or communication campaign … mixing rumours, exclusive leaked reports, patents…it’s all part of the game, and I can tell it’s very effective (most of their competitors are dying to get to know more).

Obviously some industries (car manufacturers, consumer electronics, software / game developers) tend to use it more than others (imagine a teasing campaign for a product like Pampers).

Teasing campaigns are hard to evaluate and timing is critical: too long = loss of interest, too short = not viral enough. You can get quizzes, mini-websites…

Like Microsoft. They’ve leaked some images of the campaign for their third generation Zune “HD”…

And they are indeed working… hundreds of posts, thousands of comments but given the product is expected to launch this fall… will we have forgotten about it by then?

Surely not, they’ll keep dropping small amounts of info as to keep the fascination & excitement from most of us, stupid consumers who drool with any beautiful image of a product which most times doesn’t fulfil our dreams.

Mean bastards, don’t keep us waiting!

See you @ Rennes

negative value…

I am so _u__i_’ tired of Myspace and its spam mails of people I don’t know willing to invite me to an ALREADY DEAD social place!

I’ve received the “Claire Invites you” message again today… one spam mail per week!

no comment.