The late Bill Bernbach once remarked that nothing kills a bad product faster than good advertising.
Absolutely true: the better a product is advertised, the faster people will try it and discover it is rubbish, thus hastening its demise. But here is Bird’s corollary** to Bernbach’s axiom: few things will damage a good product more than bad advertising.
I’m not saying it will kill it but I guess if you waste enough money on the wrong messages you could go broke before the product had a chance to succeed.
All of which brings me to the picture here, which promotes BE broadband.
Now, this may well surprise many creative people but research shows that when they see a picture of a sumo wrestler near the word sumo, normal people, amazingly, think the message is about sumo.
Having got that far, if the sumo wrestler is having a tug of war with a number of people, only the most imaginative will conclude that the advertisement is about broadband.
This is a shame, because what BE offer is, as far as I can make out, very fast broadband speeds, and a service so good that it has won an ISPA award.
I believe there are millions in this country who are deeply frustrated by the rotten service they get from broadband providers. BT’s speeds at my flat are so slow they are almost in reverse. When we switched to Virgin we lost caller ID and TV subtitles. A colleague would happily shoot everyone at TalkTalk, who are all words and no action.
If I am right, BE have what the late Gary Halbert called the ultimate marketing advantage: a starving crowd. But what they hunger for is better broadband, not sumo wrestlers.
When I ran a large creative department people would show me their ideas and – if I seemed puzzled – often say, “Let me explain”.
I would then reply, “Sadly, logistic and budgetary constraints prevent us from sending you round to every prospect to explain what the f*** you had in mind when you thought this up.”
I think that if BE said something dull and uncreative like, “Faster broadband speeds or your money back” they might do a little better.
If they wanted to be a little imaginative (they have a good story, carefully concealed) they could explain how the big providers actually slow down their speeds. That would turn customers’ justified resentment into sales.
** My partner, who has a Phd in philosophy, says this is not a corollary, but I don’t care. It deserves to be.
You think that's annoying. A designer put a photo of an arse into a presentation on subtlety the other day. Someone else won the pitch.
Spot on…
But I've also noticed this campaign on the Tube where I think it works a little better. For a start, they've actually got some copy which explains what the hell they're on about and actually enumerates the benefits of the service. And of course, when you're stuck there staring at it for 30 minutes in rush hour, you've got the time to think about what the hell it all means.
It's certainly a striking image – I saw the thumbnail you posted and immediately knew what campaign you were talking about. But it's the copy that did the legwork.
Drayton
i was in the Big Smoke yesterday on a day out from Yokel-by-the-Sea to see a client and the train stopped next to a billboard advertising Barclays Corporate. I know that is the sort of company that can usually be relied upon to provide high grade marcomms w@nk but i was struck by the creative leap this campaign had made. Essentially, the 'big idea' is … that there is no headline; nothing, zilch. Just a moody landscape and some turgid body copy about JCB tractors or something that manages to bury anything resembling a benefit. Even trapped directly opposite it for two whole minutes I couldn't summon the energy to read it through properly. I wish I'd seen that creative presentation; “we couldn't think of an engaging way to express in one line the benefit of using you, so we've not bothered ok?” Brilliant!