Hasta La Creative!

Tiffany & Co. made headlines this weekend with a preview of its new campaign, featuring seven real life couples who’ve all popped the question—including a same-sex couple.

The real-life gay couple, a handsome New York City pair, are part of a push from the brand to show diverse love stories, a spokeswoman for the company explained to Elle. 

“Nowadays, the road to marriage is no longer linear, and true love can happen more than once with love stories coming in a variety of forms,” said the spokeswoman. “The Tiffany engagement ring is the first sentence of the story that a couple will write together as they create a life that is deeply intimate and exceptional, which is the message we hope to convey through this campaign.” 

While it’s certainly exciting to see such an iconic brand make a progressive statement with its “Will You?” campaign, it’s also obvious that it makes sense economically. The growing market of same-sex couples searching for engagement rings has many brands courting gay and lesbian couples directly. 

See the full ad below, and click to enlarge.

Your company’s brand(s) are not as important to your customer as they are to you. It’s cold and hard, that truth. But it is honest, and unmericless. I could lie to you…tell you that your dress fits nicely and you look fantastic. It doesn’t. And you don’t.

But, the rule is that the closer we get to something or someone, the less likely we are to notice flaws. This is the power behind the word Engagement.

Enter AdWalker, a company that uses human billboards that look like androids, complete with interactive digital displays on their chests and equipment packs wrapped around them. My first thought was; “This is stupid.” So, being a curious type, I went to their site.

The human billboard is not a fresh concept. The AdWalkers are like any other pain-in-the ass bothering you while struggling to go somewhere, except they have the added ability to inolve you with digital games, contests, gift giveaways, coupons, etc. The payoff for you, the consumer, is discounted or free stuff in exchange for your time and information. And that’s a score for AdWalkers–gaining information is the name of the game. To lend some weight to this, their client list is pretty impressive.

So, maybe it’s not a stupid idea, but it does need work. The site lists several case studies, but they’re weak. They speak in impressions, but never define what constitutes an impression: Is it the number of people that filled out information, or the number of people that were approached? Plus, there is absolutely no meat in any of the case studies. No percentage of coupons redeemed. No dollars earned. No number of new members signed up. No measurement. No ROI. To recommend AdWalkers as anything but a publicity stunt, I would need to seem some data.