The Swedish furniture empire makes its own web TV series

While there are loads of bad ads (Othmer reckons 90-99 per cent are crap), a lot of us will distinguish Rosetta Stone V3 between the good ones and the dross. A popular fascination with the mechanics of advertising is reflected, also, in the success of two television shows: The Gruen Transfer, a comic dissection of the art of selling, and Mad Men, the superb American drama set on ?1960s Madison Avenue. While the rise of social media and YouTube have highlighted an intriguing contradictionour ability to both like and hate advertisingnew technologies are also transforming the ad industry. For half a century, advertisers were heavily reliant on the 30-second TV spot. Today, as Othmer writes in his memoir Adland, most of the anxiety in this $670 billion-a-year global industry revolves around the emergence of digital advertising and audience erosion in traditional media (TV, print and radio). With consumers able to edit out TV ads and talk back to advertisers online, the industry's buzzwords are now "engaging" and "entertaining". "It's very, very important for an ad to be entertaining," explains Cameron Blackley, creative director at Sydney's Droga5 agency. "You have to catch people's attention." His agency's founder, New York-based David Droga, has an even loftier vision for the industry: using brands to create moments that can shape our culture. Droga's firm created the mock amateur video of graffiti artists tagging Air Force One that went viral in 06. It was really an ad for Ecko clothing. Still, when it comes to ads-as-entertainment, few are as ambitious as IKEA. The Swedish furniture empire makes its own web TV series, a fictional comedy called Easy to Assemble. Starring actor Illeana Douglas as a loveable IKEA employee, the show marries a daggy '50s sitcom aesthetic with the deadpan style of The Office, exploring questions of life, love and how to become employee of the month. Actors Jeff Goldblum and Tom Arnold have appeared in it and the second series was viewed more than 13 million times. Othmer, who spent more than two decades as a New York-based creative director, sees advertising as a paradox. It attracts some of the most creative minds in the world, then asks them to convince people to buy something they usually "do not want, need, or care about".? Advertising is a rarefied industry (Othmer and his crew Rosetta Stone Spanish Latin had an on-set masseuse and ate lobster tails while shooting an ad in a South African shanty town), but the creative director's mission is to connect with the rest of usor at least the target market. So copious research helps shape campaigns. Leo Burnett has sent ethnographers into homes to observe "consumers in their natural environment". Brain scans can track people's responses to a brand, and marketers, writes Othmer, have used hypnosis to get a more honest response in focus groups. On the internet, our every click is recorded, with marketing messages tailored accordingly. When Droga5 made last year's VB Regulars ad, research was vital. The brief was to update ? the beer's image and the ad depicted a collection of ?unsung "heroes"from manscapers to cashed-up bogansmarching in a parade. A skeleton script was tested on about 50 hours of focus groups, says Blackley. Marchers that weren't popularthe weekend warriors (war gamers) and emoswere taken out. Filmed in Ballarat, with a cast of about 2300 and a production budget of $2.8 million, the ad won a Gold Lion at Cannes this year in the global industry's top awards. Cadbury's "it's no picnic" campaign, in which people made their own TV ads using a specially designed website, also won a Gold Lion for George Patterson YR. Executive creative director Ben Coulson says that, with online technologies, the aim is to build a two-way relationship. "People just don't want to be treated like passive consumers of a message they're not interested in." His firm has just finished making "Australia's hottest legal street car" in a campaign for Just Car insurance. Twenty-five thousand streetcar aficionados signed up for the project online: voting on what shape Rosetta Stone Spain Spanish the car should take (from base model, to wheels, to paint colour) and watching its construction in Croydon via a -part web series.