I was walking through the Waterfront Canada Line station and spotted this big ad for Steamworks on the wall.
I don’t want to pick on arts majors (for I am one of them), but I fear the copywriter and graphic designer could have spent more time in science class:
It’s either 119 seconds, or just “1:59″. “1:59 seconds” is sort of redundant, and sort of just wrong.
A friend sent this unfortunate combination of a pop-over (is that the right term for this sort of thing) flash ad and an article involving a tragedy. The Province couldn’t really anticipate this particular convergence, but the result is a kind of macabre illustration.
I used a screencasting program to capture this, because the ad that gets served rotates:
I spotted this ad on the SkyTrain today. I’m not trying to pick on BC Mental Health & Addiction Services–they do good work. However, I thought there was a simple marketing lesson here:
That’s a pretty long web address. Experience teaches us that anything–poor layout, a difficult-to-read font or a forgettable URL–can present a barrier to ‘customers’ taking action. This is probably more true for people who might be reluctant to admit that they might need treatment for a gambling problem. If you’re such a person, then you may not want to stand under the ad, jotting down the URL, surrounded by other SkyTrain riders. When I snapped the above photo, my travel companion joked “great, now everybody thinks you’re a gambling addict”.
The lesson: if you’ve gone to the trouble of organizing the program, creating the page, writing the ad copy, designing the ad and buying the space on public transit, then it’s worth spending the extra $100 (the cost of a new domain plus an hour of some IT guy’s time to redirect the URL) to register a short, memorable URL. DoYouGamble.ca, for example, is available.
This sort of oversight is very common, particularly inside large organizations. It stems, I suspect, from viewing the ad as a problem to solve instead of a communications opportunity. Instead of asking “how can I produce an ad?”, the creator should have asked “how can I most effectively recruit people for this program?”
On an unrelated note: surely TransLink must offer government agencies, charities and non-profits a deep discount for advertising on public transit, because their ads seem disproportionally prevalent there.
This morning I had breakfast with some American friends who have been up in Vancouver for the Olympics. We discussed this Tim Horton’s ad that tells the story of the reunion of an African family in a snowy Canadian airport:
It’s pretty touching, in a corporate coffee commercial kind of way. In a minute, the ad explores those two pillars of Canadian culture: the immigrant experience and Tim Horton’s.
Tim Horton’s is, of course, a much-loved Canadian brand. It’s also an incredibly mainstream brand–there’s nothing edgy about the Timmy. So this ad isn’t meant to provocatively appeal to the coasts–it’s a commercial for every Canadian watching the Olympics. And I think it’s probably appealing. We are, of course, nearly all immigrants to this land.
My American friends explained that this commercial would never, ever air in the United States. They said that there’s simply too much ill will and anger around immigration. It would mean corporate suicide for a big company to run this piece in the States.
I can’t say that I was surprised by their observation, but it’s a little sad. It’s also a reminder of how, in certain respects, we’re so different from our neighbours–spelled with the ‘u’–to the south.
Today I saw this ad on TV. It’s for Jack in the Box smoothies:
It seems pretty offensive to me, particularly given that it describes menopausal women as ‘street rat crazy’. When I compare it to the Motrin ad that caused all the furor back in November (I wrote about it here) it seems much worse. Sure, criticisms of the Motrin piece focused on insidious details, but the sexism of this Jack in the Box seems both overt and, well, nasty.
I found a few blogposts criticizing this ad, and some complaints (as well as some support) on Twitter. There’s nothing, though, that matches the uproar that the Motrin ad earned.
So what gives? Why isn’t this ad causing the same fuss? I have a variety of theories, but I don’t want to bias anybody’s responses.
We use Gmail for our personal and professional email. As Gmail users know, Google often runs a content-specific text ad in the space above the main buttons in the interface. Tonight, while looking at my Inbox view (as opposed to viewing or writing a message) I noticed the ad:
It is, indeed, an ad for KLM. The ad’s link is here. If you click that, you’ll notice that it actually redirects three times (once from Googlesyndication.com, and then three times around the KLM site). That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?
Is there some secret code that I’m supposed to crack, or is that just gibberish? The irony, of course, is that the nonsense words actually made me click the link.
Today I read on Mathew’s site about how mommy bloggers are up in arms over a (beautifully designed, incidentally) Motrin commercial. Here it is:
The righteous indignation is pretty thick. Amy Gates characterized it as an attack on ‘babywearing’ (a term I hadn’t heard before). Jennifer says the ad “is offensive and extremely disrespectful to moms”. And, as you’d expect, there’s plenty of chatter on Twitter.
After watching the ad twice, I can’t understand what all the fuss is about. Is the problem that Motrin suggests that carrying a child in some kind of wearable attachment might result in pain? That seems like a legitimate possibility. If a backpack or shoulder bag hurts your back, then why wouldn’t carrying a kid?
Is there some massive anti-baby-wearing conspiracy that I don’t know about? Are the nation’s pram-makers secretly funding anti-sling propaganda?
I’ve also read a lot of criticism of the ad’s thesis that “wearing your baby seems to be in fashion”. That sounds accurate to me. Every celebrity magazine I see at the grocery store features famous women and their babies. Frequently the celebs are ‘wearing’ their baby. If these magazines reflect current trend, then it’s fair to say that “wearing your baby seems to be in fashion”. Let me put this question to my older readers: is baby-wearing more popular today than it was twenty or thirty years ago?
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The whole thing strikes me as a heated over-reaction to a totally ordinary advertisement. The rage from the mommy blogosphere implies that no mother ever suffered any pain from wearing her baby, and that the very notion is somehow abhorrent. When I compare this with the recent breast-feeding plus H&M issue, it pales in comparison along any axis.
Importantly, the ad doesn’t advocate a particular approach to child-rearing. It just says “hey, if your back hurts from wearing your kid, try our painkiller.” What am I missing?
In any case, it could make a nice fresh case study for the book we’re writing. We have a pending chapter tentatively entitled “Damage Control”.
UPDATE: Motrin posted an apology (direct link to the image) and promised to pull the ad. I’d excerpt it here, but it was posted as an image, not text. On the other hand, the image file is called ‘marketing_message.jpg’. If they had gone with text, that message might reach more people.
