For the recent Australian free to air premiere of Mad Men agency Razor and creative offshoot US released some far from subtle banner which featured, off all things a strobing “CLICK ON A VICE” message. Had this creative just taken up residence across large broad-reaching site (ninemsn, yahoo, fairfax etc etc) it may have gone relatively unnoticed. However Razor opted for a buyout across Mumbrella (a great placement for Mad Men) which puts this banner immediately in front of the most aware audience on earth. Ad folk.
A brief look through the comments of various articles on the mumbrella site will lead one to find a variety of posts taking a stab at the creative and making various references to epileptic fits. A glance at Twitter brings up much further discussion regarding the banners in question. In addition to this Tim from Mumbrella has been passing back the reader feedback (according to a comment he left on mumbrella).
If the only feedback noticed by the agency is the direct email(s) from Tim(I don’t know what level of detail he has passed back to them), then it is potentially feasible they believed it was a few sensitive ad folk having a dig. However had they been present on Twitter, or active users/browsers of the comments section they would have surely seen the level of negativity these ads have generated.
This ad has been running for 2 weeks 5 days* and the conversations surrounding it have all been negative. One would think that an agency, knowing the power of the social web would amend the creative to meet the demands of viewers, or at the very least post some type of response to this criticism explaining their stance.
The fact that this creative got made and approved is unbelievable enough, I would have honestly thought most sites would reject the creative as many of them do not accept flashing or strobing creative, but the fact that after a large amount of complaints have been made there is still no action is terrible.
I am sure both Razor and US do fantastic work. Unfortunately this time they have missed the mark.
*thanks for correcting me Tim
The reason agencies should monitor social media…
For the recent Australian free to air premiere of Mad Men agency Razor and creative offshoot US released some far from subtle banner which featured, off all things a strobing “CLICK ON A VICE” message. Had this creative just taken up residence across large broad-reaching site (ninemsn, yahoo, fairfax etc etc) it may have gone relatively unnoticed. However Razor opted for a buyout across Mumbrella (a great placement for Mad Men) which puts this banner immediately in front of the most aware audience on earth. Ad folk.
A brief look through the comments of various articles on the mumbrella site will lead one to find a variety of posts taking a stab at the creative and making various references to epileptic fits. A glance at Twitter brings up much further discussion regarding the banners in question. In addition to this Tim from Mumbrella has been passing back the reader feedback (according to a comment he left on mumbrella).
If the only feedback noticed by the agency is the direct email(s) from Tim(I don’t know what level of detail he has passed back to them), then it is potentially feasible they believed it was a few sensitive ad folk having a dig. However had they been present on Twitter, or active users/browsers of the comments section they would have surely seen the level of negativity these ads have generated.
This ad has been running for
2 weeks5 days* and the conversations surrounding it have all been negative. One would think that an agency, knowing the power of the social web would amend the creative to meet the demands of viewers, or at the very least post some type of response to this criticism explaining their stance.The fact that this creative got made and approved is unbelievable enough, I would have honestly thought most sites would reject the creative as many of them do not accept flashing or strobing creative, but the fact that after a large amount of complaints have been made there is still no action is terrible.
I am sure both Razor and US do fantastic work. Unfortunately this time they have missed the mark.
*thanks for correcting me Tim
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