Making me hate your brand
I got my copy of the Boston Business Journal yesterday, which is a paper I normally enjoy reading, as it’s got decent coverage of the Boston business scene. Yesterday’s issue came with something new:
The paper, looking to maximize advertising revenues I suppose, has now permitted an advertiser to slap an ad over its content. Not with it, not alongside it, but over it, obscuring the usefulness of the content with an unhelpful ad. I figured okay, annoying, I’ll just remove it and throw it away, maybe write a blog post about how interruption advertising smells more desperate lately.
Unfortunately for both the paper and the advertiser, their ad destroyed the medium it was on, tearing off chunks of the paper and rendering its useless. Now instead of an ad being an annoying interruption, it’s actively destroying the reason I bought the paper in the first place.
For advertisers: before you make a media buy, ask about how your brand will be used, and please try to put some common sense thinking into your campaigns. An ad that annoys and irritates only harms your brand and decreases the likelihood that someone will buy your product or service.
For media producers, old and new media alike: Yes, I know times are tough. Yes, I know every dollar counts, and squeezing the most value out of your media efforts is important. I work at a college student marketing company. I know how tough the market is. However, if you’re not actively serving your audience – especially if said audience is paying the bills – you’re going to be out of business, period. Use some common sense when determining ad inventory.
What would I have done differently? At the very least, put the sticker over the logo of the paper instead of over the content. However, if I wanted to be more creative, I would have instead had pre-printed band-aids on the paper, perhaps on the logo or even still enclosed in their sterile paper wrappers, with copy like, our health care plan is so generous, we can give you this for free.
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