Not so perfect pitch
November 7, 2008

Kudos to DEG and its studio supporters for pulling together to fund a $25 million ad effort for Blu-ray at exactly the right moment.

The holidays are upon us, player prices are falling and the most compelling titles in the format’s short history -- Iron Man, The Dark Knight, WALL-E, Kung Fu Panda, Hellboy II, among others--are on store shelves or headed there straight away.

The “Tru Blu” campaign as it’s called, combined with title-specific ads tagging Blu-ray Disc, hardware marketing and retailer promotions ought to create quite a mass of consumer impressions for Blu-ray during the holiday shopping season.

Since I started my career at Advertising Age and spent almost a decade there before joining VB, however, I can’t resist playing ad critic.

With 3 million or so set-top Blu-ray players and many more PlayStation3 consoles in homes, and about 10% of big titles’ sales now coming from Blu-ray, it’s time to move this format beyond early adopters.

And I fear that Tru Blu’s “Perfect Picture. Perfect Sound”--while a great motivator for technophiles and film buffs--is not going to be compelling enough reason for families who are currently seeing their long term savings melt away to invest in new home theater equipment and software that costs twice as much as their good old DVDs. DVDs that offer pretty dang good picture, pretty dang good sound.

Consumers do not understand the richness and interactive potential of the Blu-ray format, and this campaign does nothing to change that.

It is a nice, simple message about Blu-ray benefits. And it’ s probably the best that can be done by committee, when all the studios are at different stages of creative development for Blu-ray.

I didn’t count, but I assume the campaign’s quick cut visuals of the many films coming soon to Blu-ray are doled out in fair measure to all the studios involved, And they look good, in the way that any sizzle reel does. It’s going to play wonderfully on movie theater screens.

For TV and the Internet, however, it would have been nice to see a little more detailed information about the potential of Blu-ray.

For now, that information will be conveyed by retailers and by individual studio ads.

Posted by Marcy Magiera on November 7, 2008 | Comments (0)