Most marketing conventions will tell you that it’s important to establish your brand and to get people familiar with your products and services. A different marketing technique is also available at your disposal and it certainly has both its strengths and its weaknesses. I’m talking about the teaser.

On television, you may have noticed some commercials that don’t seem to feature the target product at all. In fact, there may not be any explicit mention of the company behind the ad. It may be comprised of some random event or a story that begins but stops part way through. Typically, at the end of these “teaser” ads, you are either presented with a teaser statement of some kind or with a nondescript URL to a website.

With the former, the goal is to create a viral marketing campaign. They want to get people talking about that ad so that they can discuss what the ad could be all about. More people will talk about it, more interest will be generated, and people will be anxious to find out what is the true nature of that ad. It’s hard to get people interested in an ad campaign, and a “teaser” strategy just might work.

If the teaser ad ends with the prominently displaying of a URL, people may feel more inclined to visit the website compared to a conventional ad that ends with a URL. People will be motivated to go to the website to find out more about what the teaser was really trying to show. Naturally, the biggest downside to this strategy is that if the person does not go to the website, they may never be motivated enough to find out the nature of the ad and, thus, your marketing dollars may go to waste.

What’s your take on “teaser” advertising campaigns? Do they frustrate you or do they intrigue you?