Innovation in Practice Blog

Marketing Innovation: The Unification Technique in Outdoor Advertising

The Unification Tool is a tricky but effective tool for outdoor advertising. Unification recruits an existing resource and forces it to carry the advertising message. That resource can come from within the medium itself or within the environment of the medium. In other words, the tool uses an existing component of the medium or of its environment in a way that demonstrates the problem or the promise to be delivered.

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Teaching Children the S.I.T. Method

My seventh-grade son asked me to volunteer at his school to teach something nonacademic and fun, like how to rollerblade, bake cookies, and so on. I called the school and asked if I could teach a course called “How to Be an Inventor.” I had taught Systematic Inventive Thinking in many innovation workshops for about four years at that point, so I was confident I could deliver a fun and useful program for kids.
To my surprise, the school administrators said no.

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Why Super Bowl Commercials Are So Effective

Super Bowl commercials capture our attention because they tend to be highly creative and well-produced. At around $4 million dollars for a thirty second spot, Super Bowl advertisers need to create the best, most innovative commercials possible. To do that, they use patterns. Professor Jacob Goldenberg and his colleagues discovered that 89% of 200 award winning ads fall into a few simple, well-defined design structures. Their book, “Cracking the Ad Code,” defines eight of these structures and provides a step-by-step approach to use them.

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