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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.

‘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.

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.

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.

Here’s an excerpt:

London Olympic Stadium holds 80,000 people. This blog was viewed about 330,000 times in 2011. If it were competing at London Olympic Stadium, it would take about 4 sold-out events for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

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Firstly, I like the subject line: ‘Did you think we’d forgotten?’. It works well with the content and headline of the email, but it also creates a lot of intrigue. I’d be too curious not to open it.

Secondly, ‘we’re sure you don’t remember but…’. This is good because it’s true. It implies that while grocery shopping is pretty inconsequential to you, they value their customers so much that they remember when each one joined. Even though obviously it’s automated.

I also like the tiny preheader at the top (not pictured): ‘We’d like to share a bottle of wine with you’. Preheaders are getting more popular, it seems – they’re lines of text right at the very top, even above the ‘view this email online’ bit, that sum up what the email is about. They’re there because of all the email clients which automatically disable images, thus rendering you unable to see the headline, which risks you closing the email without finding out about your freebie (or whatever). If you see the preheader, though, you’re more likely to enable images to see the full message.

The one thing I’m less keen on is their choice of gift. I mean yes, a lot of people appreciate wine, but it’s a bit of an assumption. I wonder if they consult the buying history before choosing a gift, or just give everyone wine. If you were a teetotaller, forbidden from drinking by religion, or just really hated wine, you might be quite annoyed by their choosing it for you.

That’s fairly minor, though. I appreciate the thought and the email, and will continue to shop at Ocado (though I would have anyway).

Note: ‘Ocado’ is pronounced ‘oh-ka-dough’, not ‘oh-kay-dough’. It’s from the word ‘avocado’, which a lot of people don’t seem to have realised.

Hat tip to Andrew for forwarding me the email.

But this takes the cake. A website, called Etsio (any copyright claim there, Etsy?) which exists purely to advertise internships that you have to pay for. Oh yes. Take a look at some of the ‘great opportunities’ they’re offering (click to enlarge):

Why would you pay £65 a day to groom dogs? Seriously.

Offer to groom your neighbour’s dog for 50 pence and you’re ahead by £65.50!

Shame on you, ‘a fish in sea‘ (shit name, by the way).

A design agency charging for an internship? Literally every designer ever has had to do work experience, which means the gits who founded this company should bloody well behave better.

I will be berating them on twitter, and so should you.

This one wins the prize. Why yes, I’d LOVE to pay £266 a day to learn how to book a flight!

That works out to minus £13,000 a year. Negative salaries! What a concept.

You might wonder, as I did, how Etsio justify their horribly exploitative business model. Well, here’s how (from their FAQs):

Why should I pay for a job?

You aren’t paying for a job. You’re buying experience and paying for training. It helps you improve your CV, makes you more attractive to an employer, and even helps you decide if you want to start your own business.

We provide a link between you and small businesses, so you can see at first hand whether that profession is right for you. These businesses are difficult to reach, because they don’t have big HR departments organising internship programmes, nor do they normally offer work experience.

Most applicants we come across don’t have any experience that would make them useful to our employers. And remember that our work experience clients are putting themselves at risk by exposing their trade secrets, customers and inside information to you. That isn’t the kind of experience that you can get elsewhere

And:

Shouldn’t employers pay interns?

Major corporations take interns, because they can afford to, and mostly they pay them. But small companies simply don’t take interns. If you want work experience with the kind of small, exciting professions we deal with, we have to incentivise them to give you work experience. And that means paying them.

What utterly shameless bastards.  ’Small, exciting professions’ like dog grooming! ‘Companies that are difficult to reach’ like design agencies! What the hell.

I sincerely hope no-one ever uses Etsio, and they go bust within the year. Whereupon they’ll hopefully have to pay someone to let them clean toilets and lick boots.

They also make terrible, PR-disaster-level mistakes on their website. Behold.

Here is their ‘Pacific run long sleeve top‘ in grey (click for bigger):

Now let’s change the colour to black:

Note that the colour of the top itself is still grey, so no excuses there. Oh dear.

I expect this won’t be around for long, and neither will the person who did it. But I laughed, and so did you.

It’s called ‘How the buggery did I get into Copywriting?’ by me, Holly Brockwell. It’s in issue 2 of Shellsuit Zombie magazine, which you can buy here for two pounds fifty.