I’ve seen a couple of interesting campaigns over the last few weeks that I felt the need to comment upon. The first is the 3 #makeitright campaign. I really don’t get this, did no planners work on this account? I have nothing wrong with the idea but what a waste. Unless I’m missing something the previous campaign #holidayspam had a really powerful summer message that was backed up with a great product and it was actually entertaining at a variety of levels for different audiences (who of a certain age didn’t raise a smile at the 999 references with Michael Burke), yes I get that it was an evolution of last years campaign but really had it run out of steam? It’s still summer and we’ve just had a run of really hot days in this country which could have led to an interesting tactical message about using 3 at home as well because of the great tariffs.
But No! Out comes a purple muppet and an East17 track. To be fair its a great ad, salient and it creates a platform for 3 to do other stuff as well but the lack of planning between campaigns beggars belief. Surely you should sweat a campaign for as long as possible, monitoring real time metrics so that you know when its effectiveness has begun to dwindle. Research shows that putting messages in the correct context maximises impact, therefore how is a purple muppet more contextually relevant than a well established behaviour over the summer period that 3 had begun to own last year, therefore play it out until August and land the #makeitright platform in September providing a nice bump in the run up to Christmas.
The other campaign that caught my eye recently has been Oasis and their “we have sales targets” messages. It’s an interesting one because transparency is the watch word in marketing at the moment. Anyone who went to Cannes would have heard about this from a variety of talking heads. In reality Oasis just has to be present in a salient way close to point of purchase and this, because of its cheekiness and honesty is likely to cause this merely by the controversial message. I reckon its really nice, fits the brief and is on brand (Oasis has always tried to play in the cheeky arena), its also placed at the most appropriate time of year as the target is students who’ve just broken up from college and university so a big thumbs up from me!
theeqplanner 