When a company does a re-brand, most of the time they end up pumping out a new ad campaign to make sure they get a proverbial “bang for their buck”. Mweb made the most mediocre attempt to re-brand themselves by changing their slogan and this has translated well into the resultant adverts that have come out of the effort.
The premise of the advert is that through the power of the Internet you can connect with people you’ve last seen since you went to school with. Long story (30 seconds) short the hero of the advert is sitting looking at a year book and see’s something poking out of his book. He scratches through to see a finger poking out. He pulls out the finger, then pulls on an arm and then eventually his school friend pops out still wearing his old school uniform that he clearly doesn’t fit into. The advert ends with the two awkwardly standing next to each other trying not to make eye contact.
I’ll be the first to admit that this is a clever advert. The Internet and social networking has given us the ability to find people from our past and connect with them. What this has led to is us searching high and low for people from our past, the thrill of the connection and then the awkwardness of trying to explain the past twenty years that have gone by since you last saw that person. The advert captures that reality quite well and despite it taking me a while to actually get the message it does makes sense to me.
Or does it?
You see, I’ve been using social networking since forever and I understand that rush of finding an old friend only to be followed by the awkwardness. You see, I’m not the target market for this advert as I’ve already got the Internet and I know that Mweb is horribly over-priced so I’d avoid them like the plague. This advert is aimed at the first time broadband purchaser and here’s where everything goes off the rails. Quite simply trying to explain social networking by alluding to how it feels is like trying to teach nuclear physics off a pamphlet. All you are going to achieve with this campaign is to make people associate awkwardness with the Internet.
Based on an informal poll I did on people who use the Internet on a daily basis, but not for social networking, thought that this advert was particularly pointless. No one understood its relevance and even less people thought it was particularly funny or smart. Based on this new-age concept of going with the “wisdom of the crowd” I’m going to say that this ad is totally off the mark. Based on my own observation I’m going to have to agree with the crowd (maybe I’m a sheep) by giving it a thumbs down due to being overly obtuse to its intended target market.
So that’s the summary: “Mweb, when you do a re-brand don’t just change your slogan and find a stupider person to come up with your adverts”.
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