Never mind the beef, where's the "Magic"?

Here's a new social media (Facebook) post by a crowd calling themselves CameraMagicsa. Now, I don't know about you, but I've been looking for some magic in this post and it eludes me.

The copy is bland and boring. I mean, "great prices"? Or how about "we specialise in..." and then list just about every camera type available today. C'mon dudes, you can't "specialise" in everything.

Instead of the boilerplate cliches, why don't you spend some time thinking about what makes your business different to every other camera outlet out there? And then telling us about it. Why should I do business with you rather than the jokers down the road?  "Great prices!?" I think you'll have to do a lot better than that.

Do you really believe the copy you have in this yawn-fest is going to entice me into your shop? Do me a favour, answer two questions John Caples would ask of every ad he ever wrote:

• Would this headline make me read the ad?
• Would this ad make me buy the product?

Now, some nitpickers will say "this is a modern-day online promotion, the old advertising rules no longer apply. This post doesn't have a headline per se, it's not even an ad in the classic sense of the word. It's just a Facebook post and it's not trying to sell anything directly."

To which I say "Rubbish!"

They are hoping, that upon seeing this post, I will "Like" their shiny new page. In that sense this is a classic direct response ad. But...if they want me to "like" their page, they'd better give a compelling reason to do so. Which, of course, they don't.

And because they haven't done enough to entice me over, I'll never discover if CameraMagicsa really is magic, or just another badly advertised camera shop.

Is this good advertising...or does it just resemble it?

Creative people in South Africa are currently fawning over the latest effort for Santam featuring noted actor Sir Ben Kingsley, or at least someone who resembles him. The celebrated star of the movie Ghandi only makes an appearance at the end of the commercial, although we are led to believe otherwise.

I, of course, take a contrarian view. I ask "what's the point?" First off, the commercial opens on the actor's look-alike but we are not supposed to know he is a look-alike at this point. He is extolling the virtues of real things as apposed to imitations. He waffles on in this pretentious vein for the first half of the 60-second epic set on a magnificent stretch of what I think is the Western Cape coastline. And then reaches the point..."like your insurance."

So, now we know what we are dealing with - a commercial for an insurance company. Time to leave the TV and go and make some tea. Because, let's face it, whether it's Ben Kingsley, a look-alike or Ghandi himself, why should we believe an actor (no matter how well known), or a look-alike, or the Mahatma himself when it comes to insurance? No reason.

Finally, at the end of the commercial the "creative bit" appears. A group of Ben Kingsley look-alikes gather on the beach and our lead actor asks "So, is your insurance the real thing...?" Now the real Ben Kingsley steps out of the group, looks at his doppelganger, turns to us and asks "or does it merely resemble it?"

What a load of pretentious rubbish. The commercial gives us no reason to consider the advertiser apart from vague generalities about being the real McCoy as opposed to the opposition who presumably are not. But why should we believe Ben Kingsley about this? No reason. Is he an insurance expert? No. Does he know more about insurance than the rest of us? No. Does Santam "do" insurance better than anyone else. Not presumably. Is this good advertising? No. Or does it merely resemble it? No.

Pepole who advertise parity products would do well to study the famous Clause Hopkins Schlitz beer advertising from the early 20th century...they might learn something.

KFC New Slogan...Not So Good

Just read a Yahoo News article about KFC changing their "Finger licking good" line to "So good". Huh? "So Good"??? What lunacy inspired this latest departure from commonsense.

In "Finger licking good" KFC truly have a brilliant property that has stood the test of time - not an easy feat in this throw-away, disposable era. "Finger licking good" is memorable, alludes to great flavour, arouses curiosity in people who are unfamiliar with the taste and taps into a common action we can all identify with. Best of all, it's associated with one brand, and one brand only.

"So Good", on the other hand, is about as bland as bland can be. Imagine this scenario: a bunch of peckish people are discussing which fast food to get. Someone suggests KFC. "Why?" "Because it's so good". Yeah, right. Can you think of even one restaurant in any category that would not claim its food is "so good"?

The article quotes KFC's head of UK and Ireland operations, Martin Shuker, who says "It's about becoming better at everything we do, including our great-tasting food, the work we do with our people, and the way we operate in the local community," Huh?

Have you ever heard such rubbish? If someone wants a quick bite of finger-licking good food do they really care about the outlet "becoming better at everything we do", or "the work we do with our people", or "the way we operate in the local community"? If you want us to know about all these things, KFC's PR company should be doing its job a lot better.

What I'd like to know is how many advertising agency man-hours (person hours?) went into the "creation" of this piece of rubbish. And how many dollars has it cost. I could have come up with (and rejected) this line in less than 7 seconds flat...and you can bet it would have cost KFC a whole lot less. However, I laud the skill it must have taken to sell this nonsense to KFC, who's marketing idiots, in buying it, show themselves just as stupid as the the fools who proposed it in the first place.

And does KFC really, honestly, truly believe the the non-slogan "So good" is likely to change anyone's perception of the brand one iota? Purleese.

The article goes on: "The company plans to put calorie information on its menu boards from September and launch its first ever non-fried griddled product called Brazer, as a lighter option." Fine. But is that any reason to drop a brilliant slogan?

And then this: "As consumers become increasingly concerned about health and environmental issues, many high-street food outlets have amended their menus and practices." Still no reason to change slogans and, possibly, even a reason to make more use of the "Finger licking good" property..."It's lighter, but it's every bit as finger licking good as always" (Time taken to think of this line...2.7 seconds, but I'm having slow day.)

Also, people don't appear to be so "concerned about health and environmental issues" that they are turning away from the brand in droves because, as the article concludes, "KFC has experienced 19 consecutive quarters of growth."

Read the full article here.

Loeries 2010...not much style, hardly any substance and the food was awful.

A bit late with this. Sorry. 

Once again SA advertising's annual wankfest, the Loerie Awards, fails to impress. I'm not going ramble on about the whiners, winners or losers. By now you probably know as much as anyone else about these things.

I believe it's a mistake to hold the event in Cape Town. My reason for this is simple. Cape Town is just too big a place, and too spread out to make it an attractive option. What's more, about half the people who attend are right there on home soil. When the ceremonies are over they head off to their own venues and mix with the same people they always do.

But when the event is held "out of town" (Sun City and Margate being the other two venues to date), everyone is out of town. Mixing and meeting is much easier and the there's a much more festive atmosphere to the whole gig. I've attended Loeries in all three locations and Margate really stands out as the best of the lot. Let's hope the Loerie committee comes to it's senses once the Cape Town contract expires and returns to this fun seaside venue.

As to the event itself, well, what can one say about that? Appalling is what one can say. This year, Saturday night was far, far better than Sunday's proceedings. An absolute highlight was Pitch Black Afro. What a pity he wasn't asked to do a few more numbers. He was far more entertaining and enjoyable than Arno Carstens and Springbok Nude Girls who assailed our eardrums for what seemed like far too long. Earlier, their first song, which opened the show, was much better...but then, that was a cover of a Brenda Fassie song.

The food at the reception was, sad to say, abysmal. About the same standard as last year. You must know that if I turn down food from the trays being carried around among the people, then it's really bad. You would think, after the 2009 fiasco, that steps would have been taken to rectify matters. Whoever approved the food ought be force fed a diet of it for 11 months and then sent out to find a better caterer. It shouldn't be difficult.

Saturday's MC was David Kau who was quite good, but not brilliant. On Sunday we had Nkwenke Nkomo, who ain't no comedian. But my heart went out to him as he was forced to share the stage with a prancing queen in hot pants who had absolutely nothing funny to say. I cannot for the life of me remember his name but he is, apparently the same guy who did the "Ayoba"ads for MTN. He was not very ayoba on the night.

The awards themselves were pretty predictable with the gongs going mostly to the usual people. One thing that always amuses me at these awards shows is the grave announcement, in a suitably stentorian tone, that "This year no golds were awarded in this category." 

Puurleeease...what bunch of wankers decides these things, anyway? I guess the poor dears feel that if they don't award a gold in any particular category they are helping to "improve standards". Bollocks. I've been attending awards shows for about three decades, so I can reliably inform you that in all that time the standard has remained exactly the same. The winning work today is no better or worse than it was 20 or 30 years ago, or than it is every year, year in and year out.

If a piece of work get's more votes than all the others in the category, give the luvvies who slaved their guts out to produce it their little gold gongs. What harm can it do? Because, when all is said and done, deciding to give gold or not is surely nothing more than a matter of opinion, and everyone's opinion is just as valid as everyone else's. To deprive someone of gold for producing the best work of the bunch seems somewhat churlish and a little too opinionated from where I sit. 

Not to mention the fact that these are only creative awards, anyway. It's not like the work being awarded makes a damn jot or tittle of difference in the world, especially to a client's bottom line.

Sorry to rain (fish) on your parade

Sometimes it rains. Sometimes it rains fish. What does this have to do with investment banking?

Nothing.

But don't tell that to the folks responsible a new radio ad for Nedbank Investment Banking. Somewhere along the line someone has not only managed to stretch a tenuous analogy too far, but they have managed to sell it to a gullible client, too.

Once again we see (hear?) an attempt at creativity-at-all-costs that completely misses the point and ends up confusing people. There are plenty of "rain" idioms in the English language suitable for bank clients..."saving for a rainy day" comes immediately to mind. But maybe that's not creative enough..."too obvious" I can hear you say. Perhaps. So, instead of coming up with yet another tortuous and inappropriate analogy, why not offer up a few convincing facts instead?

Hey! That would be original.

But what is it with these analogies? Someone else - a legal firm this time  - has been telling us how there are many similarities between itself a flamingo. They then go on to list precisely ... none. Haha. That ought to keep us guessing, eh? Except that nobody cares.

So, to save yourself a lot of trouble in trying to invent the next "analogy no-one has thought of yet" here are the three simple steps to creating powerful radio ads. Following these steps probably won't lead to creative awards, but as you're not going to win any with the kind of puerile drivel described above, you may, at least, attempt to make your next foray into radio a bit more profitable for your big-spending client.

Here are the guidelines for powerful radio advertising:

1. Identify your Prime Prospect early in the ad 
2. Make your Prime Prospect an offer only a complete idiot would refuse 
3. Make it easy to accept the offer.

And that, my dear friends, is that.

You "Do Broadband"...we "Do Nothing"

For the past several weeks Telkom has been running ads on TV and radio extolling their heroic efforts in taking the FIFA World Cup into millions of homes around the world. Fine. But...in one of these ads they claim a capability of 40 gigs a second! So the question is, where is Telkom's uncapped bandwidth option? So far it's failed to materialize.

We are not stoopid. We know full well that FIFA made damn sure the WC was going to run as smoothly as possible, hence the massive bandwidth capability put in place for the event. Does this capability still exist? No-one is saying.

In one of the radio ads we hear the stentorious voice intone "...and if we can do that for FIFA, imagine what we can do for your business". Well...I'm still waiting...just what can you do for my business, Telkom?

Hey, it's NOT funny, guys.

A couple of posts ago I bemoaned a radio commercial where the patronizing protagonist laughed at his own inane humour.

Now there's another in the same vein polluting the airwaves, this time from Speed Services Courier and extolling the virtues of their Counter-to-Counter service. In this one a group of guys is, presumably, sitting around and discussing the "C-to-C" service..."Oh, you mean Atlantic to Indian?" asks one dumbo. "No" replies someone else, "that would be ocean-to-ocean." This continues for a few seconds, wasting valuable "benefit time", until a quick announcer-type character gets a few miserable seconds to squeeze in a benefit or two. Not too much of that though, we don't want to spoil the flow of the "idea" now, do we? To which I would ask, "what idea?" Well, wait for it...here it comes (drum roll, please, maestro).

The "funny man" of the group now chirps up: "C-to-C. I wonder if they do china-to-china!!!?" I don't usually make use of exclamation marks to this extent, but I've used them here to illustrate the point. The "joker", and, by extension, the copywriter, thinks this is the funniest joke he's ever cracked - and maybe it is, poor fellow - and makes sure we all think so by laughing hysterically at his own "joke". Hey dude, IT'S JUST NOT FUNNY!

Point is, if you want someone to change their behaviour, in this case switch to another courier company, you'd better give them a pretty darn good reason for doing so, not try and win them with stupid, inane attempts at humour. Very few copywriters can write good humour. If you can't, your best solution is just to stick to the facts. You may think the facts are boring, but to someone looking to switch couriers, for instance, the facts may be diabolically interesting. Oh sorry, I forgot, you never researched the facts beyond what the bare-bones brief said. Shame on you.