Still fuming from yesterday evening’s TV
You see I’m struggling to deal with the present norms of traditional advertising.
This rather obvious insight came to me after being force fed my third same TV advertisement from a global fast food giant that told me why I should be interested in knowing that they now use 100% vegetable oil in their cooking.
Every time it came to a break there was the ad – repeating the same message – trying to drum the message home into my rather tired subconscious mind.
While it became a pain, the program it interrupted was worth watching so the pain was worth suffering just one more time. Even though it was probably just 45 seconds long, on the third take the ad felt like an eternity.
So let me just hit out with four points that show how this message would fail when turned “as is” to email, and then I’ll wrap up with how it could have worked so much better when re-crafted and dropped into a willing Inbox: -
• Firstly the obvious one. It was broadcasted to many luckless souls that had no chance to filter it out – in email land we know the four letter word that this is now thought of, SP__
• Secondly it repeated the same point. It repeated the same point. It repeated th___. See how there is no room for repetition in email communications? Yes you should make your point clearly but don’t continue to make it again and again. Subscribers get bored and bored subscribers turn off.
• There was no WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) message in the content. 100% vegetable oil. So what!! Such a lacking of WIIFM would normally produce an email message that bombs.
• And finally there is no compelling “program” to sandwich these types of messages between.
If you were a marketer with a list of those wanting to hear of news from Global Giant fast food then a tweaked email message could have hit the mark so much better.
Then you have the space to really expose the lacking WIIFM and tell the real story on why 100% vegetable oil is such a good thing. (The TV ad failed to point this out – making the unknowing like me wonder what all the news was about.)
All the work done in making the TV ad mildly amusing ( so that it could be consumed repeatedly without driving you insane) would have been ditched and in its place some good hard facts and research could have been uncovered on why vegetable oil is such a good thing to have around your fast food.
The message would have replaced humour with reasoning and logic.
And by doing so subscribers would have thought that Global Giant fast food was a business that cared about their health instead of one that just plain annoyed them again and again with their TV ads (now there’s a bit of advertising brand affect worth thinking about).
Nuff said.