O2’s latest campaign: Flashy flash and mystery meat return
– posted June 17th, 2007 by Brian Donohue One comment
You gotta hand it to O2 — when they run a big promotional campaign, it’s hard to miss. And with their most recent one, they’ve pressed a sensitive button: the work/life balance. Their TV ads worked — they got me thinking. Apparently the Irish work the longest in Europe, but, the ads ask, do we work the smartest? The sales pitch is surprisingly subtle, you don’t know exactly what they’re selling. But what it comes down to is they say that their mobile office products help restore a healthy work/life balance. And they give a vanity URL to learn more. So how does their web promo match up to their intriguing TV ads?
It was after my third viewing of the ad that I finally remembered to check out the site: http://www.o2.ie/change. (I’d love to know the metrics for how many people bother typing this url. If you just go to o2.ie, there’s nothing about any of this.)
To be honest, I arrived with some serious scepticism. About the last way I’d think to improve my work/live balance is to get a Blackberry phone. When you can check your email anywhere it seems that people end up checking it just about everywhere, even on holidays. OK, having broadband access at home means you can legitimately work from home, but don’t most other technology advances just let work creep into every other part of our lives?
Still, I’m intrigued. Over the last couple of months I had spent some time looking at O2’s regular site, and it’s clear they know what they’re doing on the web. So I arrived at the site genuinely ready to listen to their pitch.
And this is what you get:
Where do I click? What do I do? I’m really not interested in listening to the sounds of cars driving past. It’s a good 5 seconds before I see a little banner appear at the bottom: “Let’s change the way we work.”
Okay, I’ll click that, then maybe you’ll give me the pitch.
Pause. Pause. Painfully slow screen change animation. Now what? Some chirping birds. And at least now I’ve finally got some clear clickable icons at the bottom.
And here’s where the mystery meat navigation comes in. Those little bubbles are rollover-able! I had to hunt around to find anything, but I did. What do they give me? Nicely animated, but totally vacuous quotes. What’s the pitch?? How will you help me restore my balance? Where’s the zen?
Okay, so I click on the iMovie-look-a-like icon “Case studies” at the bottom. And now we get into some good stuff. Three movies of interviews with real customers talking about why they like some O2 products (though the audio quality was quite patchy when I viewed them).
And you know what? They’re pretty compelling. These are really good examples of using multimedia and real people to sell your products. Professionally done, and quite impressive. But none of them made me think how the products are going to help my work life balance. They just explain how they make you more productive.
Next I go into the products info section (still all within this flash movie), I wait for the animated text to finish (why do they want to control the speed at which I read?), and the truth about this work/live promotion shines through: To introduce their Blackberry phone, they say: “We’re sorry we’ve made it easier to do work on the move. Really, we are.”
In other words, we’re sorry because now you’ll be checking your email all the time, whether you’re at work or at home! Sucker!
OK. May as well check out the last section: “Lifestyle tips”. You can guess what you’ll get here. Apart from the bizarre scrolling (the text moves mysteriously at first), this is the PR company’s desperate attempt to be true to whole work/life catch. So they tell us to “Laugh” and “Keep Hydrated”. And “Breath to relax.” And most helpfully, “Be mentally fit”.
This is why I’m coming to a phone company’s website?
So here’s my take on this whole campaign: it’s a great angle, but it’s empty. None of these products really help you restore your balance; if anything, it’s the opposite. It’s PR fluff. And what’s worse, despite offering some really good content (in those case study videos, and even some of the text itself), they had to wrap the whole promotion in a useless, unusable, watch-the-cool-things-we-can-do-with-flash package. And they don’t even mention it on their main site.
Wasn’t this debate won several years ago?
Time to turn off those chirping birds.
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Categories Design
One comment so far
1. Ruairi on Jul 2nd, 2007 - 16:52
Found my way around this site quite difficult also. At one point you get a link to “View Blackberry range of products” which lo and behold brings you to, erm, nowhere. Nice.
It is a visually stimulating site, and the video content is well implemented. I personally think the business users didn’t know what they wanted from this site. Maybe another case of budget without brains?
Good read - I’m with you on many of your points. The site is creatively very pretty - but when I go to view a range of phones from a ‘link’ or ‘call to action’ nothing happens.
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