To Stand Out, Campaign for Adobe Gets Blunt

Another blue-chip brand is turning to what was once called blue language to help stand out in a cluttered advertising landscape.

In this instance, the brand is Adobe, which in a campaign getting under way this week seeks to support efforts by marketers to prove to their bosses that spending on advertising is not a waste of money. The campaign portrays products like Adobe Analytics, Adobe Media Optimizer and Adobe Social as valuable tools for marketing executives who want to debunk myths like “Social media is worthless” and “Marketing is baloney.”

Except that Adobe Systems and its agency — Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, part of the Omnicom Group — do not say “baloney” in the ad. Rather, they use an abbreviation for a word that a family newspaper would describe as a barnyard epithet.

The full epithet, with an asterisk replacing a letter, appears on a document that Adobe is circulating internally to explain that the purpose of the campaign is to prove that marketing can no longer be dismissed with the epithet because “today’s campaigns are rooted in hard data and powerful insights.”And the epithet appears unexpurgated in Web video clips that are part of the campaign, visible briefly on a Dymo-style label affixed to a fanciful detector contraption in scenes set in (make-believe) focus group sessions.

Adobe Systems will spend an estimated $10 million to run the campaign in the United States for the next three months. The decision to use the provocative language is indicative of a trend for ads to speak more in the vernacular than in the formal phraseology that was standard for so many decades. The frank language and colloquial expressions follow the loosening of societal standards for discourse, reflecting how marketers seek to mirror changes in consumers.

The campaign is based on the premise that “marketers feel angry about being misunderstood,” Ann Lewnes (chief marketing officer at Adobe Systems) said, and the language in the campaign is meant to reflect that.

The campaign includes, in addition to the Web video, advertisements in newspapers and magazines, and online; sponsored content on mashable.com and theonion.com; sharing the metrics of the campaign, in real time, on adobe.com; and social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. On Twitter, Adobe will use the hashtag “#MetricsNotMyths” to underline the campaign’s theme.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/business/media/adobe-marketing-campaign-works-with-coarse-language.html?_r=1