Creative Frontline Advert

This is an advert by Frontline for an anti-flea treatment for dogs.As the student who originally posted this advertisement explained, creative adverts tend to elicit favourable attitudes to the brand, the buying intent and also better brand recall (Altesch, 1997). Although the advert is persuasive for this reason, I believe that it is also persuasive in other ways.

Firstly, the advert is set up on the floor of a large office building, meaning that as workers walk over it, they represent the fleas on the dog, this is an interesting interactive technique used by Frontline. Goldenberg, Mazurksy & Solomon (1999) highlighted an advertisement template called the interactive experiment template. This advert demonstrates the activation version of this template, showing that the ad only becomes complete and effective when the workers interact with it, by walking over the dog to represent the fleas (even if they had to walk across it to get to work!).  Having the audience interact with the advert has shown to be an effective persuasion technique and here the audience are used to complete the advert by walking over it, effectively interacting with it.

Secondly, this ad is humorous in that it implies that the workers are fleas. Weinberger and Gulas (1992) found that humour attracts more attention to an advert. Furthermore, they state that 55% of advertising executives believe humour to be superior to non-humour in gaining ad attention and, that 94% of advertising practitioners see humour as an effective way to gain attention. Therefore, once you've climbed the stairs or gone up in the lift (lazy) up to the higher floors of the building, the ad will draw your attention more as it is funny, implying that your co-workers are fleas.

Altsech, M. B. (1997). The assessment of creativity in advertising and the effectiveness of creative advertisements. Dissertation Abstracts International Section A: Humanities and Social Sciences, , 3585-3585.

Goldenberg, J., Mazursky, D., Solomon, S. (1999). The fundamental templates of quality ads. Marketing Science, 18, 333-351.

Weinberger, M. G., & Gulas, C. S. (1992). The impact of humor in advertising: a review. Journal of Advertising, 21, 35-60.

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