by Pasi Hiedanpää

Advertising might be one of the best ways to affect people´s preferences; I doubt that only one’s personal recommendations are more affective.

In order to make even better and more appealing ads than before, one of the Finnish commercial TV companies arranged an TV advertising contest in cooperation with the Finnish Association of Marketing Communication Agencies (MTL). In the contest the jury chooses every month an advert under the title of “The Best Seconds of the Month”. The four members of the jury are replaced every month, and they all are advertising professionals representing MTL.

I chose to watch all available awarded ads, from November 2004 to 2006. While watching them, I wrote down something I found characteristic concerning they way they influence us. I found that all these had at least one of these attributes: emotion, nostalgia, humour and speed.

By speed, they keep you awake and interested in all the action in sight. Emotions are aroused for example by children and animals. Nostalgia is brought up in faded pictures, by using elderly characters or bringing childhood memories to spectators; times by the sandpit and those little clever sentences which might have confused grown-ups. Humour might be one of the hardest skills in advertising. It is too much culture bonded and if you fail in it – you really can go wrong.

These were used jointly within the same commercial as well; almost none of the ads included only one way to appeal to people. The idea behind it seems to be: “If you hate chilren, you must like humour.”

A creative advertising is the way to stand out from others and to better be kept in mind by the audience. Humour or other ways to affect people’s minds are the way to do it. This is the most reasonable trend in Finland, and I think that it is quite a universal as well. Usually all these trends derive from the US due their open TV advertising culture. Globalisation has also led to TV advertising campaigns, in which the same commercial is used in different countries. Of course the same campaign cannot be directly adopted from one country to another.

In my youth, in the 1990´s, there was only two commercial TV channels in Finland. From those years on, there has been a massive change in the amount of channels and in TV advertising. In 1950´s, when everything started in Finland – there were only some dozens of televisions in Helsinki. Both the advertisers and producers started to adopt the new way of advertising. In the beginning, advertisers did the manuscripts themselves and sent these to the producers. There were not specific companies for TV advertising – ads were made by the Finnish film industry. The new phase began, when first advertising campaigns were launched – advertising agencies were involved.

One can see that massive changes have been happening since the 1950´s, business and cultural-wise. Internet also started as an amateurs’ hobby and it has changed into a multibillion business – the same thing happened with TV. What is the next media to overcome?

A link to the archive of the best advertisements; unfortunately the web site is in Finnish:

www.spotti.mtv3.fi/kuukauden_parhaat_sekunnit.shtml/1598?a07

An English spoken advert, named “The Vaclav story”:

www.spotti.mtv3.fi/kuukauden_parhaat_sekunnit.shtml/1802?a07