What was the last advert you saw (press, TV, internet, whatever) that actually single-handedly made you purchase the product advertised or incorporate the product advertised into your life?

i totally got free texts cos of those breathe.com ads, in the day (2000).

the ad had people breathing in it. their breath moved oceans.

i guess it was ok, artistically.

je ne regret mon free texts.

I got Esure home insurance on the back of the Michael Winner campaign.

haha!

I think this makes me a bad bad bad person, but I didn't want an iPod till I saw the nano on a tv advert. Went out and bought one that weekend.

Mean beans.

I don't even remember the advert, in fact, I think it was bloody silly. But the idea of baked beans + curry = BEST! THING! EVER!!!

Though that was clever product development, not advertising.

Does incorporate the product advertised into your life mean "go and find a copy on bittorrent somewhere and illegally download it? If so, it was the sony PSP media manager software, which I saw advertised in a sidebar banner at pitchfork the other day.

But in general, isn't the point that you don't know that you're being influenced? You're more likely to buy a kit kat than a choc-o-snap when you fancy a bar of chocolate, just because you've heard of it before. So you didn't see the ad and think "Damn, I want one of those, NOW!" but next time you wanted something along those lines, you were more likely to choose that one.

Advertising generally is completely ineffective, but few companies have got the guts to risk not bothering with it, and every so often a campaign does actually appear to work, so every keeps going with it.

There's a great bit in Al Reis' Death Of Advertising where he says there was a study done to see what professions people thought were trustworthy. Advertising came out at the bottom, so the advertising industry decided to try to change public opinion of the industry by... launching an advertising campaign. The campaign failed.

Related thing. Was indifferent to Banksy until the feature on him on The Culture Show which was effectively a plug for his book Wall & Piece. But it did make me appreciate his work more and now I might buy the book, directly because of this 'ad'. I haven't yet though so it may not work after all.

never, i THINK. i considered buying mean beans once but decide to just get normal beans and fry an onion and garlic and some chillies in the pan before sticking the beans in. num. nothing i buy ready made every has enough chillies in.

I can't remember off the top of my head, but I think TV commercials have influenced me to watch shows.

Other than movies it's hard to think of anything.

saw the Banksy book in cheltenham waterstones yesterday and it's a nice thing (£20). it does say that it collects everything from the previous three though so if you already have those then...

Yesterday Sarah and I went to the wonderful and newly-opened Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising in Notting Hill, and afterwards I craved a Pepsi-cola, and had one.

(disappointingly I didn't crave Andrews Liver Salts or Virol bone-marrow food supplement, though the latter at least would have taken some tracking down)