Oh hi dad, welcome to the disco: memes in ads

Here’s a trend we could all have done without: internet memes plucked from the web and slapped, contextless and out-of-place, on ads.

By far the worst offender here is Virgin Media’s new campaign by 18 Feet & Rising (sorry BBH, someone in the comments corrected me!), using the ‘Success Kid’ photo:

(Image courtesy of Gene Hunt)

Oh and here’s O2 using the very same image on their Facebook page:

Not. Cool.

Another recent offender – Ritz Crackers:

(Apologies for my craptastic smartphone photography – that says
“The wheels on the bus go NOM NOM NOM”)

So how does this happen?

It goes like this. Mr Person works in the creative department of an ad agency, and is a big internet geek. He knows about and likes memes, and rarely sees anything in mainstream culture that reflects them well (articles about planking in the Telegraph six months after it died do not count). So when he’s creating concepts for whatever brand he happens to be working on, he thinks “Wouldn’t it be cool if they used X meme? It fits here” and puts it in his idea.

But what he forgets is this: when someone walks past that ad, they don’t see the cool creative person who came up with it. They see a big, hairy Virgin Media logo and a sales message. And those things together just don’t work.

Plus, with the amount of time it takes to make an ad, it’s been months since that meme was relevant, resulting in even more of a late-to-the-party vibe.

Memes come from of a mindset of having fun and creating things for the sake of it. Ads come from a mindset of needing a vehicle for a sales message. And when the latter uses the former, it pollutes that innocent fun with self-interest, taking something that had group ownership and using it for their own ends.

And what happens when your client says “OK, the Success Kid ad was a huge hit, we want to make him a brand spokesperson”? You can’t, because Success Kid is no longer a toddler but a school-age child, and you only ever had one photo of him. You didn’t even do a shoot that you can take leftover images from.

This sort of thing is fucking lazy, and a big risk. Piggybacking on existing social currency means the idea didn’t originate with the brand/their agency and therefore isn’t controllable or ownable. This is how we ended up with two competing businesses using the exact same image. Where’s the branding? Slapping a logo onto something you found on the internet doesn’t make it yours, especially when it’s been around for years and has its own preconceptions.

Preconceptions like the fact that memes are made to be mixed and re-mixed. Which means thousands of versions of Success Kid  already exist, many of them with captions that Virgin Media probably wouldn’t want associated with their brand:

And brilliantly, that happens even when you stick the meme on a billboard:

Serves them right, to be honest.

The problem with copywriting, exemplified

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.

Blatant thievery at the Chip Shop Awards 2011

I’ve posted before about how I think the Chip Shop Awards are brilliant and a chance to recharge your creative batteries by showcasing ideas that would normally get shot down.

However, no-one takes the awards particularly seriously or considers them as much of an accolade as, say, a Cannes Lion or a D&AD Pencil. So why do agencies risk their reputations by sending in blatantly plagiarised work for the chance to win such a minor award?

This year, there are at least three entries that are blatantly ripped off from elsewhere. In reverse order of heinousness, here are the three I’ve spotted:

3. ‘Great white teeth’ for Colgate by Dinosaur

The ad:

The ‘inspiration’:

The idea from this ad pretty clearly came from a series of sharks photoshopped to have human teeth, posted by c_kick of totalleh.com on B3ta. However, the agency at least seem to have written the line themselves, so that’s kind of OK.

Edit: It’s just been pointed out to me by @adambodfish on twitter that this entry is actually from last year – it’s rather confusing since it’s featured prominently on the Chip Shop homepage! Oh well, the point stands.

2. ‘Every Lidl Helps’ by Walker Agency

A direct rip-off of not only another agency’s work, but work that won a Chip Shop Award in a previous year. Talk about diddling on your own doorstep.

Walker Agency’s ad:

The original, from Saatchi & Saatchi X in 2009:

And a third ad created specifically to take the piss out of this apparent, er, coincidence by Thinking Juice, entered into this year’s awards under the category ‘There’s no such thing as a new idea’ (fairly generous in my opinion, I’d have gone for ‘Copycuntery’ after this great blog):

And the winner:

1. ‘We Sell Fridges’ by C21 Advertising

This one takes the absolute cake. Behold ‘their’ ad:

And then this photo of a real shop in Liverpool, which has been floating around the internet for donkeys’ years:

What an absolute pisstake. It’s even the same photo with the same guy standing in front of the shop. Ironically, this is entered in the ‘best use of plagiarism’ category, because of the use of Selfridges’ branding. Not because they admit they’re thieving gobshites. I’d love to hear their justification for this.

I have to say, stuff like this makes me lose a bit of faith in the industry and the awards. For every ad born out of an original idea or insight and slaved over, there seems to be one stolen wholesale from somewhere else and shamelessly entered with an agency’s name plastered over it. Thankfully it never seems to be the good agencies, and lets us all know never to submit our CVs and portfolios to C21 Advertising. Because you just know your first brief on your first day would be ‘The client likes this YouTube video, can you just do another one of those?’.

For shame.

EDIT: In adding the agency links to this post, I discovered that Walker Agency’s website bears a striking resemblance to Rainey Kelly’s, particularly in the colour scheme and lettering style (click for bigger):

(Walker Agency on the left, RKCR/Y&R on the right)

Really classy, guys.

T-Mobile cut fair use limit – and a lot of apostrophes

The indisputable winner of today’s ‘Adding insult to injury’ award is the UK arm of the T-Mobile phone network. From 1 February, they’ll be reducing customers’ monthly data limit from 1GB to 500MB. That’s bad enough, but the page they’ve hastily slapdashed together on their website (or at least I hope it was hastily, otherwise there’s no excuse) really takes the cake. See for yourselves (click for full size):

Here are my main grievances with this exceptionally shoddy piece of copy:

1. First line – “Fixed-price”. No need for the hyphen. Yes, I’m going to be that picky, I’m annoyed with these people!

2. Second line – “we never charge our customer’s more…”. Superfluous apostrophe, unless you’ve only got one customer – which may well be the case after this.

3. “You’ll never need to worry about how many emails you’ve sent, how long you’ve been on-line or the ‘data / GB’s’”. I have multiple problems with this sentence. Firstly, clearly now that they’ve cut the limit, we WILL have to worry about how much we’ve used. Secondly, online isn’t hyphenated – are you from the 90s or something? Do you still write ‘e-mail’ and capitalise the word ‘internet’?

Thirdly – and this annoys me so much I’m not sure I can articulate it properly – “‘data / GB’s'”. No need for the inverted commas, no need for the space before and after the slash, no need for the apostrophe in GBs. But worse than that, the reason we don’t need to worry about the gigabytes anymore is that we no longer have any. Gee, thanks!

4. “So Whats Changing?” and “What Does This Mean?”. Don’t Use Title Case. It’s Annoying, See? Also, this time they’ve omitted an apostrophe where they actually needed one. Sigh.

5. “So remember…” comes out of nowhere and is one of the reasons the whole piece scans terribly.

6. “If you want to download, stream and watch video clips, save that stuff for your home broadband.” Complete tone of voice fail on this line. It comes across as rude and dismissive. Excuse me – I’ve signed myself into an expensive 18-month contract with you jokers, for a smartphone whose main selling features include its large screen for watching videos and its app store for downloading things. Don’t tell me what to use my phone and home broadband for. That’s very much up to me. You pillocks.

7. They’ve halved my bastarding data allowance!

Ahh, I feel better now. Nothing like a good rant to soothe the commercial Copywriter’s harried soul.

FeelUnique.com can’t use mail merge

Beauty website FeelUnique.com are running a promotion on Facebook at the moment whereby you ‘like’ their page and enter your details, and you get emailed a variable percentage discount for the site, or money off (up to £250).

I entered a few days ago and received this email (click for bigger):

 

 

I quote: “You’ve won yourself your next order”. Not the best phrasing, but I and the other people who received it took this to mean our next order was free. However, there was no indication of maximum spend, so some confused fans took to the Facebook wall to ask for clarification:

The next day, I got this. Spot the difference:

 

So the prize has changed from ‘your next order is free’ to ‘here’s the measliest discount ever’. Wow.

 

Is 5% ever worth giving out as a discount? Even if I bought a £100 pair of GHD straighteners, I’d only get a fiver off – and I can’t even do that, because they’re exempted from the discount in the Ts & Cs.

 

So far, FeelUnique haven’t responded to the disappointed fans on their Facebook page – but if they’ve got any sense, they’ll do something to rectify the total shambles this promotion has been. I’ll update if and when they do. Until then, my piddling little discount code will go unused.

 

Coverflow rip-off, round 2

First Volvic ripped off Apple’s coverflow. And now this on the HSBC site:

Same reflections, same movement, everything. Come on, people – everyone’s seen coverflow. And it doesn’t even make sense with your ad concept. Don’t just nick something because it’s cool, it impresses no-one.