So circumstances* conspired against me recently, which resulted in this blog being cast aside like an old mattress when you've just bought a fancy new memory-foam one. Well fear not old mattress fans, I have returned, sans memory foam.
So I know this is a few days old now but I just wanted to throw my 2 cents into the ring on the ad that's making a few waves in the Irish advertising scene at the moment - the new Club Orange ad.
To be honest I don't find it offensive, obnoxious or rude, although I can see why other people may react that way to it. I just find it a bit stupid. I know, I know, the whole point of it is to be controversial, get people talking about it, generate word-of-mouth, get as many mentions on blogs and social media as possible, yadda yadda yadda. I get that that's how ads like these work I just think it's the easy option.
We all know that sex sells. We all know that controversy generates word-of-mouth and that there's no such thing as bad publicity. But it's easy to put those ingredients together and come up with something like the ad above. What's much more difficult is coming up with a clever and engaging way of selling your product, a way that will grab people's attention because of it's creativity or it's uniqueness. Just throwing a few hot women in bikinis in your ad is talking down to people and treating them like morons, it's not trying to speak to people on their level in a way that's never been done before. I'm sure this ad will be pretty successful but for me successful advertising doesn't necessarily mean good advertising (Let's leave aside the discussion on what is 'successful' and what defines 'good advertising', that's for another day).
So fair play to Club Orange, I'm sure this ad is doing exactly what they had hoped it would but in my opinion they've taken the lazy man's approach to advertising.
I really enjoyed this blog from Una Mullally over on The Anti Room about it and there's a good debate going on in the comments there too, well worth a gander.
Anyway, I've given the suits at Club Orange exactly what they wanted, a few extra views of the ad and a bit more discussion around it. I'm just another cog in the machine.
*In reality I was completely snowed under with college work in the final build up to the industry presentation, which went really well, thanks for asking. After that I was getting stuck into job hunting, which I'm happy to say was successful as I've somehow managed to land myself an internship at Brando, an awesome digital agency in Dublin. Wish me luck
