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This is the first day of my daily 60-minute ad challenge, and the product/service/company/etc. is…

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The Amazon Kindle

I started today’s challenge at 6:00 p.m. and finished at 6:59. I didn’t know a lot about the Kindle, so I spent about 10 minutes researching and watching user videos. I wrote down key words and phrases and the qualities I found most beneficial and unique about the Kindle, then spent about 10 minutes concepting.

Kindle: Sketchbook page

To the left you can see the sketchbook page I used today. I’m limiting myself to one page per challenge in the interest of conserving paper and not allowing myself enough space to get distracted or waste time with superfluous ideas.

After researching, I decided to highlight one of two benefits: (1) the ability to store and access hundreds of thousands of books–it’s literally a library at your fingertips, or (2) the ability to purchase and access an entire book within less than a minute. Those seemed like the most interesting aspects of the product to me, and what most users highlighted in their reviews.

After sketching out a few thumbnails and hashing through some possible executions in my head, I decided to go with the latter benefit for my ad. It seemed less obvious and expected, and I thought it would also be easier to execute within my remaining 40 minutes. My visual changed slightly as I looked through my options for stock photography (as it always does) and I think it was for the better. Without further ado, here is my final execution:

(c) Amy E. Rumbarger 2009

The Aftermath

How do you feel about this ad? I actually like it a lot. I think the visual I ended up with works much better than any of my initial concepts–and that’s why I like quick-fire challenges. I’m forced to solve problems in a split-second. I don’t have hours to sit around looking for the perfect stock photo. That can be a horrible thing or a wonderful thing, but in most cases, I think it’s great and it can produce stronger, more unique visuals than I would have initially conceived.

Given more time, what would you have done differently? Well first of all, I noticed as I was posting this that I forgot a call to action. Now, it’s pretty self explanatory that you’d go to amazon.com for the Amazon Kindle, but still, I would’ve put the website (amazon.com/kindle) in there under the logo to make it explicit. Also, with more time I would’ve played with the type some more and thought about the background more. I actually do like the background here, as it really says “Kindle” to me with the grayscale, but at the same time, there might have been a better solution that I would have stumbled across if I had time to experiment. I’m fine with the type as it is, but I obviously couldn’t go through my thousands of fonts and endless placement possibilities in the last 3 minutes of the challenge, so again, there may have been a better choice I just didn’t have the time to discover.

How would you extend this into a campaign? I’d continue to play off the idea of delivery–pizza boxes, styrofoam boxes, etc. but I would probably change up the headline for each one to make it visual-specific, or I’d use my current headline as a tagline and deal with the headlines differently. I think this could also be a really great start for some non-traditional and guerilla pieces; possibly partnering with a pizza delivery chain or a Chinese delivery chain to have food delivered in receptacles designed to look like book pages. There are a lot of possibilities there.

That’s it for today! Come back tomorrow for more, and for now, feel free to comment, e-mail me, or follow me on Twitter.

All content in this post (c) Amy E. Rumbarger, 2009