unicornnews: OAA campaign too successful

A fun one from the advertising industry now, that demonstrates the power of one increasingly news-worthy website, as well as the influence of so called outdoor advertising – so billboards and bus advertising etc.

It centres on a recent marketing campaign staged by the outdoor advertising sector’s own trade body, which was designed to prove the power of their ad medium in getting consumers talking. Members of the Outdoor Advertising Association have posted a number of adverts for a website called Britainthinks.com onto the sides of buses and billboard poster sites around the UK. The posters carry deliberately contentious slogans like “educashun isn’t working”, “1966 – it won’t happen this year” and “career women make bad mothers”. The ads encourage people to go to the Britainthinks.com website to vote and comment on the remarks in the ads.

While the Britainthinks.com website claims that it’s been “created to give people a new voice and support the vibrant democracy that the people of Britain already participate in up and down the country – in the pubs, living rooms and street corners of our nation”, in fact the whole thing has been set up by an ad agency called Beta to prove that, despite the growth of digital advertising and viral marketing, traditional posters on a wall (or bus) are capable of attracting consumer attention and generating public debate.

It’s the “career women make bad mothers” remark that has proven that is indeed the case, albeit with the help of the increasingly vocal website-for-mothers Mumsnet. Seemingly unaware that the ads were deliberately contentious, or that the whole thing was set up to demonstrate the power of outdoor marketing, Mumsnet readers have been hitting out at the posters. According to The Guardian, one reader commented on one of the site’s message boards: “The poster I saw on the side of a building today felt like a kick in the stomach”.

As outrage grew a spokeswoman for Beta recently announced its career mum ads would be taken down, partly to appease the outraged, and partly, possibly, because the aim of their campaign has sort of been achieved.

Beta’s Sharon Johnson told reporters: “There has been a misunderstanding with an important mothers’ forum about this campaign which is about sparking a debate. It is not what the campaign thinks. But rather than offend people the decision has been taken to replace the posters saying ‘career women make bad mothers’ with other slogans which work just as effectively”.

Posted Friday January 8 2010 by Chris Cooke

Related categories: Advertising Publicity stunts