One Second Ads Hoping To Grab Your Eyes

otis wildflower writes "C|NET reports that GE will be airing a new advertising campaign called 'One Second Theatre'." From the article: "'GE One Second Theater,' as the campaign is being called, presents a humorous peek behind the scenes at recent General Electric commercials produced by BBDO. The campaign is intended specifically for new media like digital video recorders, which can be used to watch expanded versions of the spots, and News Corp.'s MySpace social-networking service, where visitors can read a mock profile of Elli, the elephant star of one of the commercials. The spots will also be accessible on MP3 players, through podcasts presented as if they were recorded by Elli and other characters from the spots, and on a microsite offering an online version of the campaign. The multimillion-dollar campaign, scheduled to begin Friday, is the most recent effort by GE to explore media beyond conventional commercials and print advertisements."

If you got the money, I got the time...

Show me the money and I might pay attention to a one second ad. Unfortunately, my attention span last only a half-second.

Ah, here at last.

Blipverts.

Great idea!

Is anyone else reminded of the 'phallic flash' at the end of Fight Club? Just think... drop a GE logo on there and BAM!

Instant advertising greatness.

ASCII Version

For those of you using a text-based browser, here is the ASCII version:

    (.)(.)


Just close your browser really fast to get the speed affect.

This is much too confusing.

The advertisements themselves are one second long, yet the complicated explanation that is necessary to understand what is happening in the commercials takes thirty seconds to read. What the fuck?

Hey, anybody remember back when the point of commercials was to inform you about and convince you to buy a product, and the commercials actually told you what that product was?

Re:This is much too confusing.

If you've been properly indoctrinated, you won't need the 30 second explanation.

No, when you're shown an image of the queen of diamonds for one second, you'll instantly know what to do. . . . either kill the president or go eat a hamburger.

Re:This is much too confusing.

Advertizements have never been about giving you information so you can make an informed buying choice. The sole aim is to get you to buy something. Think Corporate Propaganda.

1 second ads for 10 second abs!

see subject.

Lawyers

A friend of mine told me about something similar to this many years ago where a lawyer was experimenting with the idea of a one-second commercial. Apparently the guy in the ad just yelled "HURT?!?" and flashed his phone number.

If there's any American industry that we'd like to see outsourced....

I for one welcome our new advertising overlords.

Boy, it'll be fun listening to a veritable cacophoney of blurps for a thousand products all in the space of one second before I can even comprehend what products they are, what company offers them, and how I can purchase one!

Waste of $$$

WTF are you doing? How about concentrating on the NBC brand, which is losing ratings (and dump MSNBC for god sakes). Continue to invest in healthcare and insurance which will continue to grow while high oil prices will put a hold on growth in the aircraft and plastics sectors. And pump some more money into congre$$ to get some new nuke plants with your new reactors approved. I'm sick of my shares hovering between 30-38 for the last 2 and a half years. I dont see to many myspace users buying appliances or insurance.

signed,
pissed off stock holder with .0000000000001% of company

Ouch!

One Second Ads Hoping To Grab Your Eyes

That sounds painful. "My eyes...the goggles do nothing!"

Image Repair

Right, GE, the corporation that paved the way for modern management methods like gutting research, "encouraging" suppliers to cut costs by moving production out of the USA, obscene pay for corporate executives, treating employees as liabilities, and institutionalizing layoffs.

They are just a cute and fuzzy corporation that wants to be your pal.

I think I need to puke.

Blipverts?

Who's thinkin blipverts?

Max Headroom: We're getting there.

Re:Blipverts?

I too immediately thought "Max Headroom" when I read the summary... you can still find the original programs on various torrent sites!

For the uninitiated, the pilot episode of Max Headroom [maxheadroom.com] told how new high-speed advertisements were overloading people's brains. Max was, well, kind of a cyborg, when a reporter suffering a terrible accident was recreated in a computer.

For the full spoiler, read TV Museum [museum.tv]

Anti-Anti-Advertising Technique?

I think part of the reason for this is Tivo et. al, and Web-based shows. Each format allows people some means of skipping over ads, right? If the ads are extremely short, maybe people will be more willing to sit through them. Or at least they'll be unable to get up and grab a beer during the commercial break, unless there are thirty ads in a row... Reminds me of that WarioWare game, except that the theme every time is "Buy!"

Imagine a Beowulf Cluster

A 1 second ad in and of itself might be easily missed or easily dismissed. If OTOH a cluster of 1 second ads were shotgunned with the intent of broadly hitting a target audiance that shared an economic niche then the idea might be effective.

For example take the idea of the 80's yuppie, pixelate a cluster of 1 second ads that incorporate automobiles, IKEA, upscale dinning, wines etc. etc. and you might sell by association.

Just my loose change

Attention Spans

Is it just me or are people's attention spans getting ... where was I?

Not what I was expecting...

What is One Second Theater?

GE is pleased o introduce "One Second Theater" an innovative concept in commercial content designed to capture the imagination of viewers. GE's One Second Theater is available to anyone with a digital video recording device and right here on this website.

Here's how GE's One Second Theater works... blah blah 30 fps blah use your pause button blah...

Gah, sounds like work, pass...

Now if they had REAL one second films... that would be creative... but this is just 30 images in one second... not 1 second theater, but 30 frame slide show...

So what are they advertising again? Jet engines?

Adblock string

What's the adblock string to keep these out?

And now for the one second post...

Oh shit... I'm already out of time.

Here's my 1-second ad for Diet Pepsi and Mentos...

Image [imageshack.us]

Mint Mentos+2-liter of Diet Pepsi/Coke = Minor hillarity during a work break. Warm cola tends to work better than cold, 5-10 mentos seems to more than do the trick.

There - that might just sell some otherwise undrinkable/inedible snacks!

Ryan Fenton

Isnt this ILLEGAL?

Isnt SUBLIMINAL advertisement illegal? 1 second is very close to that subliminal line.

I've evolved beyond even this...

I didn't RTFA.
It didn't hold my attention long enough since I've trained myself to ignore anything related to ads.

The only thing in here which has caught my attention is the post somewhere up above containing this:

(.)(.)

I hope this catches on

Imagine if this caught on! If every company was doing this you would have roughly 180 ads in your normal 3 minute ad break. The sesures would suck a bit though.

too many ads already

Now the average three minute ad break will have room for 200 ads!

epileptics around the world are turning off their televisions

Here's my version ....

Do you want to see it again ?

Like the quote at the bottom of the page:

Life is too short to be taken seriously.

Like these adverts.

Antagonisms and commericals: Hitchcock

"Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some."
- Alfred Hitchcock

yep... was to be expected

Advertising was dying slowly... Well.. every company was advertising its pants off, but with the average audience that has a concentration with very short timespan (anyone noticed that series on tv don't last an hour or an hour and a half anymore but when you take away the commercials they are about 35-40 minutes), and a total overload of commericials, nobody is paying attention anymore. Well.. there's always tellsell that weak minds fall for.. but anyway...

So what do you do when a product/service is about to kick the bucket? You re-invent it. And to be honoust.. this could be brilliant. Not only do you revive the interest of the advertisers... you can charge them a huge amount more !! Or do you really think they pay 1/30 of the amount they were paying for a 30 second commercial ? No way !!

So you make maybe 5 times as much money per second and you have maybe a couple of years to come up with a real solution for the declining interest with consumers, before advertisers get a clue they were suckered. 1 second is just to short for being called subliminal messaging.. but not by much. So maybe it will 'hang around' in people's brain... but that's just the brand... not how good it is.. you can't get a real message across.

But I have a good advise... LESS advertising... maybe people will notice it again.

Season 4 predicted it.

Gabbo!
Gabbo!!
Gabbo!!!

Flashbacks

Theese ought to be popular with hippies & vietnam vets.

This could be great

Now I can fast forward through 200 commercials on the Tivo insted of 3 or 4.

Seriously I would rather see companies trying crap like this, you have to want to watch the full version. I like this idea much better than trying to find ways to MAKE you watch the commercials. This plan only subjects you to 1 second unless you opt in.

Algerath

Ah . . .

Make them psychedelic, please! Even more fun for stoned people watching TV!

Sign of desperation

First of all, this is a sign of desperation from a major consumer-facing company. It could be GE or Sony or anyone else. The only difference here is that GE is advertising their advertising plans, rather than trying to be surreptitious like many other companies. This just means that they're smart enough to attempt publicity around their publicity--metapublicity, really. At any rate, it's a sign that advertising as we know it is dying. This is no surprise--advertising evolves fast, and things that were normal in the late 1970s are now unheard of. (Does anyone else remember the Kraft recipes during Love Boat?)

However, it's also a sign of desperation from GE specifically. They are a sick company, with almost a decade of short-term thinking infecting them like a disease. They don't make decisions to improve the company, they make decisions to claim profitability in a quarter, regardless of whether or not they actually made any money!

Take a look at GE's stock vs. the NYSE. They can't keep up to the conservative market indicators, which is a sign that they're adrift and lost. Having worked there for several years, I can confirm it--this is a company that needs to be gutted and rebuilt.

Of course they're large enough that they're not going to go away any time soon, but at the same time, they're not going...anywhere. They're just grasping at straws to become relevant again.

Max Headroom anyone?

Anyone remember the episode with Zipping that caused a person's head to explode due to the large amount of data being presented?

SUBLIMINAL communications

in the form of advertising is regulated by law. GE advertising approaches subliminal advertising through unconscious messaging as its medium encroaches upon the limits of human awareness inability to detect changes within broadcast frame rates.

Marshall McLuhan's "the medium is the message" taught us the connection between presentation and content back in the 50's. Subliminal messaging circumvents Reason? What does bypassing Reason accomplish?

Studies have proven that subliminal is ineffective without the reinforcement device of repetition.

At first, I thought it said...

At first, I thought it said they were going to put these 1-second ads in DV cameras, not DVRs. I was about to flip out for a second there...

Now, if only all commercials became 1-second blips and they cut down the commercial space accordingly (instead of putting in more to fill up the gap). Longer shows and less fast forwarding!

My eyes decieve me

I read the topic as "One second abs" and I thought, oh man, I'm there :).

Eternal Battle

Lets hope they lose this round.

Not just me

OK, now I am 100% positive that time really is speeding up.

Re:Snore...

You make the assumption that slashdotters RTFA.