There’s
a few ads I’d like to talk about today.
Tube ads are remarkably diverse,
ranging from high quality, agency driven campaigns, to some pretty sleazy fare
which come off as the creepy uncle to those banner ads you find on news
websites.
(You
know the ones, about the 55 year old mom who confounds doctors with skin
treatments and/or makes random exciting dollar amounts per month. From home!
And it’s all about the shocking truth about one little trick, possibly from
China.)
So
on that note, our first contender. This is a group of ads from the same company
about their various products, including Pregnacare and Wellbaby. They hawk
vitamin supplements to (expecting) mothers, which is one of those areas where I
think it’s pretty hard to justify advertising.
But
quite apart from the ethics of the ads, they just aren’t good. Sure they nail
the implied fear about not doing enough for your baby, but simple comparison
with the ads around them makes them look scuzzy and untrustworthy just from
their low production values.
Plus
the names just don’t inspire confidence, mostly because they seem so open and
desperate. Pregnacare. For caring for you when you’re pregnant. Wellbaby.
Because you want your baby to be well, right? Right? You get what we’ve saying?
It’s
just creepy as shit.
Next
on the list is an interesting example, British Military Fitness – it’s all
about those fitness programmes with military instructors that you see in the
park and make you very glad that you’re not doing them. And then you go home
and try to do some pushups.
The
ad itself is quite fun and playful. It’s all about convincing you that their
programme can be fun as well as a good work out. What’s interesting about it
though is that it is very time conscious. It knows that its core aim has to be
to engage and inform you about its merits in as little as the time between one
Tube stop and the next.
In
fact it explicitly says that that’s what it’s doing. Which is at the least
eye-catching. But it doesn’t scrimp on copy. Quite the opposite, it makes a
clear, informative, but concise sell. And then lets you on your way.
And
all in all it works.
I’m
saving my current favourite for last. Audible is probably the best funded of
the three I’m talking about here – it’s a subsidiary of Amazon. It’s a
subscription service for audiobooks, which I confess I wasn’t aware of as a
thing until these ads came out.
In
a way that’s great, because the ads for Audible are great at selling the
concept – which is key to growing the market.
What
works about them is a simple art direction choice – showing the listener, and
showing them surrounded by the words of the book. It really illustrates simply
and effectively the joy of audiobooks – to be surrounded by the voice,
thoughts, feelings of a book. And the copy does the rest of the job, describing
how you can carry books around you easily in the crush of the train, and how
easily you can get new material, only paying monthly rather than for every
book. And the people in the ads are realistic – they look happy, attractive,
but realistic. People you can identify with, enjoying books – and enjoying them
on the train. It’s a very apt bit of targeting.
So
that’s it. Tube ads from high to low.
