Read Forever

Barnes & Noble launched their new Read Forever ad campaign at the end of April, with TV spots and print ads emphasizing the notion of reading forever. According to a New York Times article on the campaign, the ads feature a hopeful message: "Reading is changing, but it’s not going away."

The article also posits that the lack of images of any Barnes & Noble stores in the ads is an accurate reflection of the current transition in the publishing marketplace: brick-and-mortar foot traffic is down, online purchases are up.

And Barnes & Noble wants the Nook (specifically, the Nook Color) to take a cut of those online purchases. Hence, the campaign. Duh.

To this marketer's mind, Barnes & Noble had two main challenges to overcome in the marketplace. First, the resistance to e-books and e-readers that has been displayed by many tried-and-true bookworms (like yours truly). Second, the simple fact that the Kindle beat them to it, and "Kindle" has, to many, become synonymous with "e-reader," just as we've abandoned "self-adhesive bandage" (too many words) in favor of "Band-Aid" (the first of its kind, you kn0w).

And to this bookworm's mind, the campaign hits it out of the park on both accounts. It hits the emotional nail on its proverbial head. By focusing on books instead of readers, the ads succeed in not driving e-book hesistants away at first glance; by scattering the Nook among images of people reading real, old-fashioned p-books, the ads successfully (I think) position the Nook as just one among many ways to read.

In short, it celebrates the act of reading rather than the way in which we choose to do it. What better way to celebrate a new way to read the books we already cherish?

Great Idea Friday: Books on Lamp Posts

There's something iconic in literature about the lamp post. Think Narnia. Or Shadow of the Wind. Or any number of mystery novels with detectives (or bad guys) cloaked in fog and silhouetted by a single lamp post on a dark night.

Some clever author out there is capitalizing on this reputation, posting pages of a new mystery novel across the East Village on lamp posts. Though interviewees in a recent New York Post article on the lamp post book argue that this is an inefficient way to read a book, the marketer in me sees a kind of genius here: get them hooked with randomly placed pages, and then draw them into the book as a whole. It's guerrilla marketing to the core. It's kind of fun.

It's a small-scale effort, but I'm curious if anyone else has seen or heard about this. Things like this do make me miss the "only-in-NYC" nature of that city.

Jay-Z's Memoir Gets the Big Creative Ad Campaign

Did you all hear about Jay-Z's upcoming memoir? As a bookish-type working in the ad industry, the Big Creative campaign behind the book has hit all my radars and appeared on at least 50% of the blogs I currently follow. It seems that Droga5, an independent ad agency out of New York, has devised a clever, interactive campaign for fans, involving large reproductions of the book's pages appearing in various locales discussed throughout the book. The enlarged places will loom on standard advertising mediums - like billboards, bus stops, and building sides - as well as less conventional spots, like the bottom of a hotel pool or the felt of pool tables in a local pool hall.

The best part is that these pages are all unannounced, and form a kind of scavenger hunt for those eager-beaver readers looking to participate (and the winner gets tickets to see Jay-Z and Coldplay in concert).

There's something wonderfully refreshing about a new kind of ad campaign for the publishing industry - for all our talks about the need to change and to breathe new life into the world of printed pages, most publishing ads (for those publishers that still take the time and money to even run print ads) look the same, featuring the cover of the book, maybe an author head shot, and a series of blurbs from recognized authors and critics praising the book as "the best of its genre" or "my favorite book of the year." The ads amount to little more than a re-organization of the elements on a book's jacket and (in this humble book-loving advertiser's opinion) do precious little to make a book stand out from the dozens of other titles offered for sale each month.

But this? This is different. This is new. This is refreshing, and this turns heads. Decoded stands out from the crowd... even if it is yet another celebrity biography/behind-the-scenes (or in this case, lyrics) kind of book.