Here’s an interesting look at one of the new advertising strategies being employed out there. In this case, a gaggle of account folks take several days on a cruiseship. Their task is recording the fun things people are doing on board — its immediate, visceral and, I’m willing to bet, effective. We can tune into Good Morning America or the Royal Carribbean site and see what we think.
The thing is, this is the sort of thing we’re doing at Ipswich River Media. Video can give people a special insight into what it is that sets your organization apart. A good quality video doesnt have to be expensive or a massive undertaking. Sometimes it’s just a view that helps people get a better sense of what you’re all about.
The good news: you dont need to buy TV ad time. That video will attract your web viewers. You can show it in your lobby or give it to your sales guys. Be smart, leverage it in your social networking efforts. A good video can get a lot of mileage and helps you stand out from the crowd. And if it’s fun too, well so much the better.
But a client, Royal Caribbean, looking to add a sense of urgency to its advertising, decided to take a team of six JWT employees on three weeklong cruises this summer. The employees, who call themselves JWT@Sea, are creating a series of quick-turnaround TV commercials that show couch potatoes the fun they are missing as it happens. “Our challenge is to make people feel and understand that it is O.K. to take that weekend vacation,” said Michael Stoopak, business director of JWT N.Y. (or, as he prefers, president of JWT@Sea).
Seeing film of a cruise in progress “makes it feel more than O.K. It makes it feel immediate and urgent and, most importantly, attainable,” he added.
For the ads that began showing last week, a camera crew roamed the ship by day shooting candid film of actual Royal Caribbean guests and bits of scripted material, then edited the film after dark in a makeshift studio on board. They then e-mailed the files to JWT’s New York office after midnight, where another team worked through the night to complete the spots, which were delivered to the TV networks at 4 a.m. to appear that day on “Good Morning America” and “Today,” among other shows.
The real-time approach to advertising, which required doubling the bandwidth of the ship’s Internet connection, is a response to changes in consumer behavior in a time of financial uncertainty. People now are less likely to plan a two-week vacation several months in advance, and are instead waiting until the last minute to take shorter trips, Betsy O’Rourke, senior vice president of marketing for Royal Caribbean, said.
“Booking windows are getting shorter and shorter in this economy,” she said. “What we have found is that people are nervous to make the commitment.”
The first batch of ads, which Royal Caribbean refers to as “postcards,” were shown last week and can be viewed on the company’s Web site. They were shot in the format of a newsreel, with an actual Royal Caribbean guest acting as news anchor, narrating film of other guests boxing, singing karaoke and floating down a river in an inner tube.
“Debbie from Rhode Island laced up the gloves in the fitness center, and late-night explorers climbed mountains under the stars,” said Erica in the ad shot on July 15 that was shown on the 16th. “That’s the news, and I’m Erica cruising with Royal Caribbean. Why aren’t you?”
JWT, which is part of the WPP Group of companies, is planning to repeat the process on at least two more cruises in the next few months. But because the postcard ads have a shelf life of only 24 hours, the agency is also using the cruise film to produce longer, story-driven commercials that will be shown regularly. One such commercial features an 80-year-old woman who rode a zip line, at one of the ship’s private destinations. “This was something on her bucket list,” Ms. O’Rourke said.
The postcard ads are running on national network television — with a heavy concentration in New York and Miami, where much of the cruise industry’s business originates, and on travel-oriented cable networks like the Discovery Channel, the Travel Channel and TLC, the Learning Channel. For an industry with high fixed costs, companies like Royal Caribbean have “done a good job of filling their ships” since the economic downturn began, but need to maintain a sense of urgency if they want to keep them full, said Robin Diedrich, a consumer analyst with Edward Jones.
“Pricing has been the big lever that these companies have been pulling,” she said. But “companies have to be more dynamic with all their offerings, including advertising” to “persuade people to spend money on something they don’t really need.”
(Not surprisingly, the industry has seen no lift from the viral popularity of Mr. Samberg’s “I’m on a Boat” video, which satirizes the clichéd use of yachts in hip-hop culture. The video, which was first broadcast as an “SNL Digital Short” on “Saturday Night Live” in May, has 30 million views and counting on YouTube.)
Ms. O’Rourke said that Royal Caribbean had slashed prices by as much as 50 percent and had even begun offering deals on transportation to and from ports of departure. “As I like to say, it’s now cheaper to go on a cruise than it is to stay home,” she said.
The postcard ads are intended to be about more than good timing. The hope is that by showing guests partaking in more modern, youthful activities — strumming guitars on deck, for example, or working out in a state-of-the-art gym — Royal Caribbean can update the public’s image of what it means to go on a cruise.
“People’s perception of cruising had been a bit sleepy,” Mr. Stoopak said. “But when you go on vacation with Royal Caribbean, you encounter things like the rock wall, or the Flowrider, which is a surf-simulating machine, or ice skating.”
Not that everything about the cruise industry has changed. Shuffleboard is still available on Royal Caribbean cruises, Mr. Stoopak said, though it is not likely to appear in the current crop of commercials.
As a communications consultant I keep a close eye on trends. I organized a summit in NYC last month that included some of the biggest cable operators and TV networks in the world. The line-up included Comcast, Verizon, Virgin Media, MTV, BBC, Turk Telecom, Liberty Global, Vodafone, France Telecom. To keep the discussions lively we had moderators like the Wall Street Journal’s Jessica Vascellero and David Lieberman of USA Today (now with Deadline.com).
has a handle on it all. Yet, at the core it’s still about the content. How do you create a compelling story? How do you reach your audience amidst a sea of alternatives? Granted most businesses don’t enjoy the same access as Jersey Shore or American Idol. But the good news is that the barriers to entry have been lowered. You have more compelling ways to reach your audience than ever before. You just need to figure out how to take advantage of it. 
