I literally don’t know where to start.
It might be the most perfect bad ad ever created. EVER CREATED.
What am I talking about? This.
Yes, I know it’s a social media post, but it’s still an ad.
Something – let us not forget – that is supposedly created to help cultivate or encourage a commercially beneficially change of attitude or behaviour with a specific audience for a specific brand.
Through that lens, let’s look at that ad again.
Seriously, is there a single thing OK with it?
The headline is shit.
The premise of the headline is shit.
The language used in the headline is shit.
The picture is shit.
The ‘call to action’ of NEW PHONE. OWN IT. is shit.
The contrived ‘yoof’ tone when it’s so obviously coming from a uber-corporate company is shit.
Actually, ‘shit’ is the wrong word. It’s stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I absolutely hate every single thing about this piece of communication.
For me, it is pollution … pure and simple.
If anything, it has the absolute opposite effect Telstra would want from it.
It doesn’t make me want to buy a new phone.
It doesn’t make me want to buy a new phone from them.
It makes me not want anything to do with TELSTRA.
Triple whammy!
I know in the 50’s, the approach to marketing was ‘find ways to give your audience new news’ but apart from that being a different time in terms of consumerism, it was also a different time in terms of ability to engage with your audience.
In a World where the ability to connect and engage with an audience is almost constant, brands need to understand the secret to building some sort of audience value is knowing when to use that right as opposed to trying to brainwash them with meaningless shit like this.
For the record, that right should only be executed when you have something to say that directly addresses what people want to know/hear/learn from you … as opposed to what you want them to know/hear/learn from you.
Of course the reason this sort of rubbish happens is because there’s still a ton of brands out there who think social media is brilliant because it lets them ‘push’ all their marketing out to the World for free.
For them, effectiveness is not about ‘return’, it’s about hypothetical value which they will say is calculated by financial outlay, divided by potential audience size … which is handy, because this sort of work is going to achieve them absolute zero return.
Which is why I bet TELSTRA did this themselves.
At least I hope they did … because if an ad agency was behind it, then they need to go kill themselves immediately.