Completely unbeknown to me, this blog made it into Campaign Magazine’s ‘Best of the blogs’ feature this week:
(Click for bigger)
Hooray!
Sadly I don’t get paid for this, but I might make a few pennies out of extra ad clicks.
It’s actually very sweet of Campaign to feature me after I slated their Facebook page on this very blog. Thanks, folks.
Ughhh Jesus Christ.
In revenge for this brain-melting abomination of a headline-subhead partnership, I’m not even going to name the advertiser. No free publicity for you, sir.
Look what just popped up on my Facebook news feed:
‘What else do I know?’ ‘If I know this, who else does?’
Oh GOD NO! Someone might find out that I like makeup! The HORROR! They might… they might… comment on my eyeshadow! Or buy me mascara! Noooooo…!
I can picture this sounding so reasonable at the concept phase:
“People give out loooooads of information on Facebook, I’ve read about it in the Daily Mail! So we’ll, like, pull stuff off their profile and be like YOU LIKE THIS, OMG PSYCHE and they’ll be scared and change their privacy settings!”
There are several problems with this approach.
Firstly, anything they pull out from people’s profiles is likely to be as weak and un-scary as the example above.
Secondly, it’s within Facebook. Maybe if they’d put this ad somewhere else on the internet, it might have been effective, but they’re displaying Facebook data on Facebook. It feels like a kid holding up your exercise book and saying “HA, YOU’VE WRITTEN YOUR NAME ON THIS! NOW I KNOW YOUR NAME!”.
Thirdly, I really doubt many people are going to be scared by an obviously-automated ad, even if it had something personal like your phone number in it. If it were a pretend person’s profile, or they’d posted it on a group page, THAT would get your attention. But this is basically screen-scraping – you know there isn’t a real person behind it, so who cares?
Crimestoppers, stick to catching bad guys. Your ad ideas are poor.
This post on beauty blog Temptalia caught my eye, because it perfectly demonstrates a problem I’ve had many times since I’ve been a Copywriter.
The post is a review of a Chanel lip gloss, which looks like this:
And is described by Chanel like this:
This brilliant pink lipgloss delivers the ultimate pop of colour, along with subtle shimmer and a high-shine glow. Part of the limited-edition Knightsbridge Collection, its striking hue is named for a thriving artistic and cultural area of London.
And now the problem. The gloss actually looks like this:
Are you seeing ‘brilliant pink’? A ‘striking hue’? ‘The ultimate pop of colour’? No, me neither.
Christine, who writes Temptalia, wonders how Chanel could see something in this gloss that clearly isn’t there. And I can tell you exactly how.
The poor copywriter was given a photo of the tube, just like the one above, and if they were lucky, a few notes about the product. These probably said something along the lines of ‘shimmer, high shine, pink’. Not much to go on. I bet you a fiver they’d never even seen the product in real life, let alone tried it out. Which is how they understandably missed the fact that outside the tube, this gloss is weaker than Anthony Worrall Thompson’s resolve in the Tesco cheese aisle.
I can sympathise because it’s happened to me many, many times. I’ve written gushy descriptions of mobile phones I’ve never touched, drinks I’ve never tasted, and cars I’ve never driven (I can’t even drive). In fact, I once spent a whole week writing a massive manual for a fairly important piece of technical equipment that I’d never even seen a photo of. I had to describe how to operate the thing, including what buttons to press when – despite not knowing what the buttons said or even what colour they were.
How does this happen, you might rightly wonder? Well, no one’s under the illusion that it’s an ideal situation, and there have been plenty of times when I have seen the relevant product and even tried it out. But in the current workplace culture, where deadlines are constantly squeezed and everyone’s overworked, there often just isn’t time to do things properly. You can try to insist on seeing and trying the product, but all you’re going to do is massively delay the project, getting innocent account managers into trouble with their bosses and expectant clients, whose deadlines have also been squeezed.
I don’t know how useful anyone found the manual I wrote blindly, but I know I did everything I could under the circumstances to make it accurate, and hopefully it was a great deal more useful than no manual. So yes, it’s a big pain in the bum for all of us when you buy a hot pink lipgloss and it turns out virtually transparent, but if you’re going to blame anyone, don’t make it the copywriter. They were probably disappointed too.
It’s New Year’s Day. Literally the very first day of 2012, and as if to agree with all the plankton claiming that this year will be the end of the world, I’m already compelled to write about one of the worst ads ever to exist.
I’ll set the scene for you, because it won’t seem as bad without the context.
I was sitting on the sofa in my pyjamas. It had just gone 7pm on New Year’s Day, and I was quietly enjoying the second-to-last day of my Christmas holiday, watching trash TV (Come Dine With Me).
Then, without warning, an ad started that never seemed to end. It was a dire, dire song which I eventually realised was being sung by Mis-Teeq refugee Alesha Dixon. It featured middle-aged women dancing and lip-syncing embarrassingly. It had cringe-making lyrics about ‘checking me out’ and ‘do-do-doing it our way’. And dear god did it ever go on.
Through our grimaces, Andrew and I tried to guess what brand it might be for. My first guess was Weight Watchers because of all the saccharine female positivity (unless I’m mistaken, there is precisely ONE man in the whole ad), but it also brought Coca-Cola to mind because of the excessive repetition of the word ‘always’.
As it turns out, it IS for Weight Watchers. And worse, it’s by the former advertising glitterati at Saatchi and Saatchi London.
This is probably a good time to let you watch the ad. You don’t have to watch all of it (unlike those of us it was forced upon):
And it really was forced: this monstrosity was played on all commercial channels between 6.45 and 7pm today. But why?
Andrew makes the excellent point that you don’t NEED to advertise weight-loss strategies on the first of January. Early January is the one time no-one needs to be reminded that they’re a bit podgy – it’s on all of our minds after the excesses of Christmas. Are Saatchi’s really going to show their client the inevitable enormous upswing in registrations and try to put it down to their ad?
You can make an argument that while people don’t need to be told to look for a weight-loss strategy, they might need to be reminded of Weight Watchers. Fine, I get that. And I get the ‘real women’ angle, borrowed from Dove, which staffed the video with actual Weight Watchers dieters. But why the godawful song? Didn’t Saatchi’s staff see the lampooning meted out to SapientNitro after their similarly toe-curling YouTube ditty?
Apparently not. And moreover, why Alesha Dixon? She’s never been fat. She’s never used Weight Watchers, or needed to. And she represents both Fitness First and Strictly Come Dancing – strongly suggesting that any desirability in her figure comes from exercise and movement, not carefully totting up how many ‘ProPoints’ her lunch is worth or chugging down low-calorie milkshakes.
Overall, this is a diabolical start to UK advertising in 2012. I hope it gets better – surely it can’t get much worse.
Edit: Does the tune remind anyone else of Miley Cyrus’s ‘Party in the USA’? There’s a definite similarity.
