Confusion by design

It’s Christmas time so the body of disappointing advertising on London Underground is firmly on the rise!  This week it’s the unfortunate turn of Acer to feature in our spotlight.

This bit of kit is a ‘convertible laptop’, i.e. a device that provides the computing power of traditional laptop but the ‘hands-on’ experience of a tablet. The first question I therefore have as a potential user is “OK, how might I use this, in what situations?”

The first questions are categorically not “does it have a 360° dual-torque hinge design?” or “does it have a Corning Gorilla glass panel?” because I don’t even know what they are. But that’s what you’ve taken up your ad copy telling me Acer. Sigh…

Another pointless mobile operator ad!

It’s Friday so it’s Bad Ads time. This week sees the return of one of my ‘favourite’ sectors for yawn-inducing technology advertising, mobile network operators.

The guilty party this week is Vodafone. Can we just make it clear Vodafone, that if you REALLY were in the business of helping people to get closer to the ones they love at Christmas, you would have invented something like Facebook. Neither does the phrase that you no doubt paid someone far too much money for, “power to you”, mean anything at all. Whatsoever.

Yes, your turkey ad is mildly diverting (and it does seem to be very popular with vegans) – but was there any need to spend your money on this stuff – hands up anyone who says yes. Yawn…

 

 

And I do what with this thing?

One of the most popular places for manufacturers and retailers of technology products to place their very worst advertising seems to be the London Underground. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been staring at ads as I stride the tunnels and climb the escalators, only to shake my head and wonder who on earth authorised the spend.

The two ads featured here, snapped yesterday on my iPhone, are for the new Microsoft Surface Pro 4. It’s actually quite a nifty bit of kit and if any ‘tablet’ is going to replace your laptop, this would be a prime candidate. But oh, the advertising…

Guess what you can do with it people? In the first ad you can ‘power up’…ooooohhhhhh!  In the second ad below you can ‘Go anywhere, do anything’.  What??!!

I’m not a Microsoft hater by any means. But these are vacuous, pointless words, leaving you none the wiser as to what the benefit of the thing might actually be.  Sigh…

And the point of Twitter is?

In my experience, Twitter is a service that many people fail to see the value in.  They say things like, “why do I want to hear what somebody had for breakfast?”.

Maybe that’s valid if you really want to follow some z-list celeb but I think Twitter is the ultimate broadcaster. It enables me to follow all my favourite news services and I have complete control over what I see. I think if more people understood that, then the service would gain far broader appeal – for instance we gain inspiration for much of the content here on Better by easily being able to see what people and companies are doing that’s better for others all around the world.

Which makes it the sadder that Twitter’s first TV ad left so many of its target audience – people who aren’t currently using Twitter – confused as to what the hell is the point of Twitter. And looking at the ad, you can easily see why. #Fail

Check out the story and view the ad here

 

And the reason for choosing your Internet Service Provider is ???

Oh Virgin. What is this? I mean seriously, what is this?

There are so many useful, valuable reasons to carefully choose your Internet Service Provider. High speed connection, high-quality customer service, competitive pricing, competitive data allowance…

But what did you do? Just like every other communications/connectivity provider, you think we will all believe that is you, the ISP, that somehow provides us with all the great stuff on the web. And what’s worse, you think that there might be people out there who actually enter ‘women who rock’ into a search engine (and I doubt very much there are many mothers who would want their daugther to live Billie Holliday’s life either).

Stop it. Stop it now.