Standing out from a crowded market is getting harder and harder to do.
Right now, the team at Marketing Eye are in brainstorming mode for the year ahead and we are trying to come up with creative for an advertisement in the Gold Coast Bulletin.
'Have you been hit lately?' is the headline for the advertisement for launching a new website or refreshing an old one.
Websites are all about hits after all.
Now, there is a part of me that thinks that a headline like this is sending the wrong message. Yes, it is clever. Yes, it relates directly to the product we are trying to sell BUT can it be taken the wrong way?
When the LOSER campaign came out, did anyone take offense to this? I suppose some may have.
A long time ago, when I was young and trying to be really creative, I came up with a concept "we're not a fat company" eluding to the fact that in the technology boom days, agencies had large overheads and therefore had to charge their clients more - yet as a boutique agency, we had little overheads and kept our prices low.
An image I had in mind was an obese, nude lady, with layers of fat and our logo at the bottom of the page.
My creative department was scared! They were worried that everyone would take offense to an ad like this. I found it to be creative, yet others found that it would offend people and so in the end, we didn't do it. The risk was too high.
I still like the creative and personally, wouldn't care whether someone is fat or thin... as long as they are happy and healthy - who cares. Right?
Given the context, 'have you been hit lately' relates well to the topic at hand and certainly would make someone look twice.
It will be interesting to see what happens from here. Will our phones be ringing hot with sales or will someone take offense?
Let's wait and see.
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3 comments:
Well, the general consensus was not to place an advertisement with this headline, so we have withdrawn it and replaced it with a more conservative advertisement that ties in with our overall branding guidelines.
There is a fine line between being creative and causing controversy.
Its usually a pretty fine line... The old saying 'any news is good news' probably holds true. if you offend some people enough, they will in effect become champions of your campaign by raising awareness to more people than you could have hoped for in the first place. Advertisers have been using sexually explicit images to get this result for years, this is just using a different angle.
This is an interesting tag line and one that I believe makes people look twice at as well. I think that inorder to figure out the exact meaning, they are going to have to dig a little deeper and read in to the article and ad.
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