Online+Advertising+Critique

Maybelline's Ad for Long Stiletto Extreme Mascara on Xiaxue's blog targets a demographic of females aged 12-25 in Singapore and Malaysia who read Wendy Cheng's blog on xiaxue.blogspot.com. They have approached her and Nuffnang, her affiliate network for advertising, and paid her to create an advertorial on her personal blog using their product.The advertorial was posted on January 24th, 2011, and is available for viewing here: []

Wendy Cheng (know by her screen name Xiaxue) is a Singaporean celebrity blogger who blogs full time about her everyday personal life experiences and observations. A lot of the content she produces is highly personal, including filmed clips of her plastic surgery procedures and coverage of her recent completely sponsored wedding. She is frequently sponsored to blog about new products and services, including travel, food, beauty products, and others that are relevant to her lifestyle. She has gained popularity through her personality and style of writing in the blogosphere and engaged in internet drama against other popular bloggers (such as Dawn Yang of ClapBangKiss.xanga.com) to increase her fame. Much of the content she produces appeals to a female viewership.

By using Cheng to promote their product, Maybelline is reaching an existing audience of engaged readers who fit into the demographic of people that they are trying to reach without having to seek them out individually. Cheng's website reaches an average of almost 40000 clicks per day from readers who frequently visit her blog for updates. Using Xiaxue as a personality whom readers trust is much more effective than traditional celebrity endorsements.

She is a Singaporean resident who can relate to the people that Maybelline is trying to reach in the asia pacific. Viewers can give Maybelline feedback about their product in an unofficial capacity in the blog posts comments section. As a real person who would be compromising her own integrity and trustworthiness to endorse a product, viewers implicitly trust her as an ambassador to the brand. There is a sense of immediacy to the advertisement since Xiaxue is a blogger who frequently updates and she is available to answer questions about the product after her first hand use of it. All of the images she posts is self-generated content. Cheng shot and created all the images on this particular blog post and photoshops them, so there is no professional alteration of the results. Viewers can regard her endorsement of the mascara as a review with real photos. They can witness the product being applied in the manner it would be used by the typical consumer, rather than a professionally styled shoot with expert makeup artists and techniques. In addition to the written review on Xiaxue's website, an accompanying episode of a reality internet show called Chick vs. Dick (re-named Chick vs. Chick for this particular episode because of the replacement of the male host with Wendy) features the Long Extreme Mascara as the focus of their challenge. Here we see the two hosts on the street approaching normal people (mostly girls who would most likely buy the product and some boys too) on the street to test the mascara and document the results. By having the product filmed on the go in a quick manner with regular people it shows actual results from usage there is no possibility of the results being photo-shopped or altered. The awkward and uncomfortable behavior from the people being filmed also contributes to the advertisement's authenticity. the awkward and uncomfortable behavior from the people being filmed also contributes to the advertisement's authenticity.

What Maybelline does in teaming up with Xiaxue is release control over their product by placing it in a real life persona's hands. Wendy Cheng is the personification of their desired end user and target audience.By giving her the responsibility of doing the market for them, Maybelline is allowing their target customer base to do their marketing for them. They effectively marketed this new line of mascara to young women by creating word of mouth advertising through an online media personality, and allowing her to fit the product into the context of her life.

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Diane Von Furstenberg has teamed up with PopSugar in the facebook application game PopSugar's Retail Therapy. The game is based on building a retail clothing store and running it. The clothing items are based on real-life designs from different brands which are available for purchase in online stores. Diane Von Furstenberg, along with other major brand names have provided in-game versions of their clothes and accessories for the game. Users can choose which items to stock their stores, and pick from their closet inventory of items to dress their avatar shopkeepers. This advertising campaign is disguised as entertainment through a network of affiliates upon affiliates. At the first layer there is the brand association with PopSugar (from Sugar Inc.), which is an entertainment media website and blog network for women interested in fashion and beauty. PopSugar is also integrated with ShopSense to advertise their affiliates within their blog networks and now migrating to Facebook. The second layer of affiliate branding is between PopSugar and Facebook. The intertextuality of the advertising campaign filters the brand value of the merchant and through two publishers, which increases the brand value as a major quality label that is viable enough to penetrate through two major contemporary social media outlets. The DVF brand has an in-game store within the neighbourhood of boutique shops that the user can visit. the store is stocked with Diane Von Furstenberg items on the shelves and racks, and the user is informed of the name of the item when the cursor hovers over the rack or shelf it has been placed on. Every piece of virtual merchadise in the game coincides with an item in real life, and every one of those pieces are labeled with the name of the designer or brand. The store is decorated to look like a DVF store with specifically designed carpeting in the pattern of an iconic Von Furstenberg print. What this game allows the player to do is dress up their avatars with the branded merchandise available and create 'looks' for them. This dressup aspect can be applied to the customers who visit your shop, which have the names of the user's facebook friends over them. Looks and outfits can be created for facebook friends. Friends are sent notices when looks are created for them in an attempt to draw the user's personal network into the game to increase exposure to the game and the merchandise sold. Users can click on the virtual merchandise which will lead them to the page of the actual merchandise on the designer's website, or to a page where similar items are shown if the item is sold out. This form of click tracking is highly useful in measuring the clickthrough rate of the users interaction with the website.

DVF is trying to target a new generation of women who are using social media to communicate who are most likely to purchase items online. I think that DVF is only experimenting with trying to sell their merchandise this way, and they are mostly focused on collecting information on the demographic and interests of the people who are interested in their brand through facebook. They are also attempting to increase brand awareness amongst the facebook crowd and to attract a new generation of future consumers by displaying the different styles of clothing they produce in the digital store space. The look and feel of this game is somewhat adolescent because of the use of cartoony cute mascot avatars and hot pink palette and highly stylized fonts. The dressing up aspect of the game also seems slightly juvenile, although it does draw in influences from contemporary culture such as being able to dress up your avatar with Christina Hendrick's hair and Reese Witherspoon's 2010 Oscar dress, etc. Because of the aesthetic of the game and the format I don't think that this game will appeal to a generation of tech savvy young women because of the price range of the DVF clothing, and because this game does not offer anything new or exciting in terms of gameplay, aside from having content that is tied to real-world items. For these two reasons I don't think it is a successful campaign for producing immediate sales in the short term. However, for long term goals of building brand awareness and a modern up to date image for this older brand I think it is very successful. If the players are too young to be making purchases or cannot afford to buy from this brand, knowing that DVF is willing to experiment with social media and internet games signifies its innovative spirit in participating in new systems of marketing and advertising. - Both these advertisements are highly successful in their goal of reaching their female audiences. Both offer a form of entertainment to retain the viewers attention and uses the notion of storytelling to encapsulate the product in a larger context to see how it would be used in real life and how it would fit into the consumers existing lifestyle. Retail therapy uses taking pictures and has other characters wandering in and out of the store who are wearing diffferent combinations of clothing items on sale. It lets you see how you would look in comparison to other "fashionable" people and making it an activity of establishing individual ensembles out of identical parts (just like in real life!). The usage of affiliates helps to reach a narrowed audience who are more receptive and likely to purchase the products. Using familar environments and other well-established and popular websites to generate authenticity in grassroots marketing is the key to success for Maybelline's advertisement with Xiaxue. What both of these forms of advertisements do is rely on a form of entertainment and storytelling to capture the viewers attention.