Time for another look at award winning radio commercials — spotlighting the good and the bad from the 2007 Radio Mercury Awards
This one was a finalist in the “PSA” category.
As I listened to this spot, my reactions were as follows.
1) “Good grief. A computer voice from the 1980s?? How relatable is that?”
2) “Oh, wait. These are supposed to be old computers. Okay.”
3) “They’re getting me to picture those old computers.” (I have half a dozen that I keep around, “just in case.”) The humor is a bit lame, but they are getting me to listen to the voices, which in turn trigger visual images of the computer-like devices.
4) “Oh, now they’re giving me a good reason to act on the sales message: I can get rid of those old computers and help the environment. Not bad.”
5) “Wow, they’re raising one of the biggest objections targeted listeners have to acting on this sales message: fear of their old computer files being perused by strangers.
‘All of the data on your hard drive will be cleaned out or destroyed.’
“The spot sounds a bit lame, but all that matters is whether it causes the targeted listener to act. These guys know what they’re doing.”
6) “Oh, my God! Now they’re scaring the listener with the very objection they just overcame!
‘I still know your personal information and all the sites you used to go to.’
“Are they nuts??”
They came so close. But in a misguided effort to be funny — a goal they never achieved, by the way — they brought the targeted listeners to the brink of taking action…and scared them away.
Sad.
Comments on this entry are closed.
I like the Mac picture! Shame on those who took mine away!
Tom: My very first computer: the Mac Plus.
Yeah, I love the photo of the beige toaster, too. But mine’s still in the garage. For posterity. Or, maybe I’ll turn it into a fish tank.
Yeah, uh, that little joke is not only a landmine, it’s in the wrong place. If they really wanted to make the joke work, they had to put it BEFORE the promise to erase the hard drive, along with some kind of assurance that the people involved don’t care where you’ve been. And even then, it’s risky.
I find too many creatives try to work their darlings in where they don’t belong, getting in the way of the real message–and possibly even killing it. Darlings are not just comic. They’re often an attempt to be profound. I once heard a mortgage message where the broker was talking about how much work she does to help people. She was describing a specific case where the woman whom she was helping save her home was recently widowed because “her husband died if cancer.” BAM! Commercial over, right there. Nothing in a message selling mortgages upstages husband dying of cancer.
Murder your darlings, not your sales message.
The mac picture makes me happy.
The only way to completely erase all your data from an old computer is to use an old device that many radio stations used to have… the magnetic bulk eraser. Just place it on your computer’s hard drive and turn it on for a couple minutes. Wipes it clean. Unfortunately no one will ever be able to make that computer work again, either, but that’s the only way to make your old data impossible to retrieve. Nothing else works.