Advertising: Tales of Reading in Reintroducing a Color Device

Make that Nook Color, the e-reading tablet that Barnes & Noble is hoping to reintroduce to consumers in an advertising campaign that begins on Monday.

In gently singsong language that evokes Dr. Seuss — sure enough, “The Cat in the Hat” makes a brief appearance later in the ad — a commercial makes a general pitch for reading as it depicts people, old and young, utterly absorbed in their books while the world goes on around them.

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A series of dreamy sequences shows a dark-haired boy in a hoodie sweatshirt, reading in a park and blissfully paying no attention as two other boys and a dog noisily brush past him. A young girl sits cross-legged on a dining-room rug, a Nook in her lap, as she absentmindedly tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear. A couple is stretched out in bed, locked in their own worlds, she with a Nook and he with a book. Four people sit, still as statues, reading, on the stairs of a public building as passers-by rush down the steps.

One print ad bears the tagline “Read Forever,” with a picture of a small boy curled up on a window seat gazing at the screen on his Nook.

The hopeful message? Reading is changing, but it’s not going away.

There are no Barnes & Noble stores in the ads, a nod to the transformation that is under way in the publishing industry. As e-books have taken off, foot traffic in brick-and-mortar stores has decreased, a sure sign that more consumers are doing their book-shopping from home. (Or wherever they and their e-readers happen to be at the moment.)

Barnes & Noble, which operates the nation’s largest chain of bookstores, is hoping many of those purchases will happen on the Nook Color, the $249 tablet that the company introduced last year as an addition to its original Nook, a black-and-white reader whose versions are currently priced at $149 and $199.

There are dozens of e-readers and tablets on the market, and many more are expected to arrive this year. But the most prominent players for devices that focus on reading e-books are Barnes & Noble and Amazon, with its popular Kindle.

Amazon still has a significantly larger share of the e-reading market, but Barnes & Noble has surprised many people in the industry with the gains it has made with its Nook, and the two retailers are locked in a battle for e-reading customers.

Barnes & Noble spent more than $30 million on advertising in 2010 but was seriously outgunned by Amazon, which spent more than $150 million, according to Kantar Media, which tracks advertising spending.

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Last year, an initial campaign to introduce the Nook Color opened on a picture of a Barnes & Noble store, the camera zooming through the entrance and landing on a Nook Color, while Sarah Jessica Parker narrated the voice-over.

This campaign, which was created by Mullen in Boston, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, was an effort to attach some emotional power to reading and to the Barnes & Noble brand. Mullen was hired as Barnes & Noble’s new agency of record in February.

“We really wanted to reach out to all the readers and get the message out about how wonderful reading is,” said Sasha Norkin, the vice president for digital and channel marketing for BN.com. “The world changes, technology changes, but people love to read, and we’re giving them the best way to read.”

The Nook was first introduced in 2009, two years after Amazon began selling its Kindle. Last year, Barnes & Noble added the Nook Color, a device featuring a seven-inch screen with a backlit LCD display, suitable for reading books, magazines and newspapers, as well as browsing the Web, playing games and listening to music.

The first commercial in the campaign will run on Monday, and a longer 60-second spot will run during “American Idol” on Thursday. Print ads will run in The New York Times and USA Today. On the company’s Facebook page, users will be invited to share their feelings about reading.

Barnes & Noble declined to disclose the total spending on the campaign.

To add authenticity, casting agents were dispatched to find people reading in public places like bus stops and cafes. Some people were recruited to do voice-overs and appear in the commercial, which was shot in naturally lighted locations in San Francisco and Los Angeles. They eventually numbered more than half of the people on screen, while the rest were actors.

“It transcended age, race, gender,” said Tim Vaccarino, the group creative director for Mullen. “We wanted to find a collection of people who represented this community of readers.”

 

On Ship of Evacuees From Libya, Harrowing Tales

The rescued workers, ferried to safety in the rebel capital of Benghazi on a tourist vessel, carried with them little beyond harrowing accounts of their weeks in limbo beside a nearly abandoned port, and a collective sense of relief to be out of the war’s path.

The conditions they left behind were dire. Misurata, Libya’s third largest city, continued to be the scene of intensive, close-quarters fighting between forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and the city’s anti-Qaddafi rebels. It also faced barrages of mortar and rocket fire from Colonel Qaddafi’s troops.

As the fighting raged, as many as 5,000 migrant workers remained trapped within the city, according to Jeremy R. A. Haslam, the team leader for the International Organization for Migration, which chartered the vessel that entered the port for a second time to collect foreigners trying to flee.

The city also was at risk of losing more of its already limited medical support. Misurata, like much of Libya, has relied for years on foreign medical workers to help staff its hospitals. Much of that staff has already left. And foreign nurses aboard the vessel said that many more planned to go soon.

Prospects for further evacuations were unclear. Mr. Haslam said the crew of the Ionian Spirit, worried that Misurata was too dangerous, was threatening not to return for another evacuation. “They think they are pushing their luck with a third trip,” he said.

Compounding the unease was an evident sense of distrust between crew members and the cruise line operating the ship. “I am sure I do not want to go back,” said a crew member on the vessel. The crew member, who asked not to be identified because he feared retaliation, said that the crew had not been told they would travel to a war zone, and that many of the ship’s company remained on the vessel only because they were owed back pay.

“They told us we were going to Greece,” the crew member said. “Not here. They lied to us.”

All around the Ionian Spirit, the scenes of the evacuation were evident, as more than 650 young Ghanaian men slept on the decks of the vessels or slumped over the tables where tourists would ordinarily be enjoying their meals. Also on board were more than 100 Nigerians, 72 Libyans and smaller numbers of other nationalities.

They were an exhausted lot. Many had been sleeping in the open for weeks, and had waited, anxiety rising, for a berth on any of the few relief ships that have risked docking in Misurata.

Isaac Owuso, 33, a construction laborer, offered a mixture of gratitude that he had at last left the city with his deep disappointment at his recent fate. He had traveled from Ghana to Libya, he said, to work on the Qaddafi government’s construction projects and earn money for his wife and child.

When the war erupted, he had managed to save $2,000 euros and 100 Libyan dinars, which he kept hidden in his clothes. He tried to flee Misurata overland, he said, but robbed at a checkpoint. He said he did not know whether rebels or pro-Qaddafi gunmen manned the checkpoint. But he knew the result.

“Look at me,” he said, pulling a lone dinar note from his pocket. “This is my life. See me? I have only this money and nothing more. How will I take care of my family?”

The ship’s cabins, meanwhile, held many wounded Libyans evacuated from the siege, including four recent amputees. Some were anti-Qaddafi fighters suffering grievous wounds.

“Thank God for this ship,” said Mustafa Youssif, whose leg was amputated on Sunday after he was hit by shrapnel while riding in a pickup truck near Tripoli Street, one of Misurata’s fronts.

In other cabins were more victims: a 9-year-old boy struck in the teeth by shrapnel, and an anti-Qaddafi sniper shot through his mouth, a man peppered with shrapnel holes.

One deck also held several Filipino evacuees, including a group of teachers from Misurata University.

The teachers said they had come from the Philippines in December, and had not yet been paid their salary by the government when the war started. The university had closed, and since the bombardments of the city by the pro-Qaddafi forces, they had been surviving with help from Libyan neighbors.

“They gave us food,” said Zoe Contreras, 37, an English teacher. “Our neighbors were giving us water. They sometimes were knocking on our door and then just giving us food.”

Not all of the foreign workers in Misurata had been so fortunate, they said. A group of evacuating nurses said more than a dozen of their friends and colleagues in Misurata had been missing since mid-March, when the pro-Qaddafi forces occupied the neighborhood near their apartment building.

The missing, they said, included five Filipino and four Bangladeshi nurses, as well as an Egyptian nurse and her husband and three children. The account underscored that the toll of the fighting in Misurata, which rebels say has killed more than 1,000 people, is far from tallied, and that there are potentially many classes of victims whose fates remain unknown.