I took a pop at a poster for breakfast cereal Shreddies a while back. If you think I spend a lot of time looking at posters, you’re right.
This one caught my eye today.
It’s a nice line. Well-played, TUI. Wait, is it an ad for TUI or London Gatwick? A bit of both, actually. Co-funded. They want you to book a TUI holiday and fly from Gatwick instead of choosing a competitor’s holiday and flying from somewhere else. Heathrow, maybe. But Heathrow isn’t hundreds of miles away, it’s about 12, or roughly half the distance of Gatwick. Heathrow is THE local airport as far as anyone reading this particular poster is concerned.
They must mean Luton and Stanstead, where competitors like RyanAir and EasyJet fly from. So I guess the ad is saying ‘Don’t fly from Luton or Stanstead, either of which involves a drive of hundreds of miles.’ (They’re basically ignoring LHR altogether. The two have history.) But if that’s the case they have a very shaky grasp of geography, because neither of those airports is much more than 50 miles away from this poster. A there-and-back trip to Stanstead clocks in at a shade over 104 miles. Does that qualify as ‘hundreds of miles’? I think not, the same as a man owning 15 books can’t be said to have a collection of ‘dozens’. So the headline is being disingenuous at best.
Hang on, you might think. The poster’s surely aimed at people who really do live hundreds of miles from an airport that isn’t Gatwick (or Heathrow). If so, why place it at this spot? This is where it gets a bit strange, because the poster isn’t 4 sheets of paper like in the old days. It’s digital, and an example of programmatic advertising. That means (if you didn’t already know) that its location and the time and duration of its appearance can be controlled remotely. So the media agency could have placed it in areas that are genuinely a hundred miles or more from Luton or Stanstead. Or maybe they just thought fuck it, let’s stick the ad everywhere and hope there aren’t too many people around who’ll, you know, read it.
For what it’s worth, I think Gatwick’s strapline ‘YOUR LONDON AIRPORT’ is easily on the same level as Tui’s ‘DISCOVER YOUR SMILE’ 😉
Here’s one for Specsavers:
I was going to criticise it as a poster (who he? why the silly photo-related name?), but then did a bit of rudimentary research and discovered that it’s part of a not-at-all bad campaign by Specsavers’ in-house team. Take a look here. The performances are a tad David Brent and perhaps could have been more subtle without losing anything, but it’s still a campaign I’d be happy to have been involved in. Although I’d have chosen a different surname. ‘Shutter’ doesn’t help the idea.
BraveNewMalden 