Most of you will know of my angst at brands spuffing superficially pointless participative ideas all over their disinterested consumers. In fact, I wrote a post all about it - Over-Participation. Well, it did stir up a bit of interest, so I think it only fair to continue the debate by highlighting some of those campaigns that fall into the category of over-participation.
First up. Subway, with their suspiciously-looking-like-a-creative-campaign-that-their-media-agency-gave-them, over-participative idea - Subway Karaoke.
Seems that Subway now has "value worth singing about". So much so they even made that their 'easy' to remember URL. And seeing as it is also the spuriously significant "40th anniversary of karaoke" - why not combine the two into a pointless radio and YouTube campaign? Hmmm.
They have willfully murdered Sweet Home Alabama, so that the lyrics of the song read:
"Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki
And an ice cold Coke too.
You know it only cost £2.99
My, that price makes it taste super fine."
("You know it only cost €3.99" if you live in the ROI, of course)
Then punters are asked to film their personal humiliation at having to sing this, upload it to a site, and then sit back as DOZENS of people (close friends, family, account execs, marketing directors, pissed off people searching mistakenly for a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, me) subject themselves to this UGC atrocity. All for the chance to win a grand and have their warbling rendition fed back into the next radio ad in some kind of perpetual shit machine.
I hope this man never has children who may see this.
Not that is much of a worry for him. Only 82 people have watched it so far.
The biggest concern Subway should have is about just *who* they are getting to participate. This YouTube comment from the one person who still likes the Halifax ads says it all:
You should let the entrants write their own Subsongs; we can relive the glory days of the Halifax adverts. colintron 3 weeks ago
Whoever executed this idea, really didn't give much of a fuck about people finding it either. The unmemorable-client-proposition-as-web-address URL aside, it is impossible to find this bastard in Google. "Subway Karaoke" search brings 1.22 million responses. And this website is on page 3 of them (this blog post is already on page one). Better than that, they didn't bother with meta-tagging or writing the website description. Hence the site appears as "Gallery - Web Hosting, Reseller Hosting & Domain Names from Heart...". Genius.
File under: Too much effort, too little reward, impossible to find, why the fuck would anyone want to watch, contrived nonsense
When in doubt use every crayon in the box and hope you get one color right? I was thinking the same thing (i.e., this is Subway?) when I saw this ad tonight, which looks to be blatantly riffing off Virgin... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5bSjAPkDvw
Posted by: toastedhostess | February 04, 2011 at 06:10 AM