I love a good advert, and when I remember one, it’s usually because it triggers some kind of emotion in me.
The advert that I saw made me laugh, but not for the right reasons, sadly!
Picture this, I was at King’s Cross underground station waiting for the tube, and I noticed the huge advert for Adobe Express.
It was selling it’s quick and easy app to create anything, absolutely free! It was a brilliant ad. It had a man, potentially a fellow marketer, looking incredibly smug because of the beautiful advert that he obviously created using Adobe Express.
The advert also showed his creation. And at first glance, it looked fine. It included the copy “Campaigns in a Click” Brilliant. Clear, concise message and obvious that it was selling software.
But then I took a closer look, and it didn’t quite say “Click”. It read as “Clck”. The I and the L in the word click were practically overlapping. At first, you’d think it was a deliberate mistake, but then you look a little closer and you see the candle image that they had used wasn’t quite aligned.
Someone hadn’t thought about the printing of this wonderful ad and it was all of a sudden very obvious that the poster sections hadn’t been lined up correctly, it looked like a bad wallpaper job! The letters in the word Click blended themselves together. For most ads, it isn’t not a major issue, but when you’re selling the ability to create an ad, someone really should have checked the finished version.
The worst thing is, everything else was pretty much spot on. The message was right. The images were clear. The placement of the ad was perfect. I noticed it because it was aimed at marketers looking for a quick win, but this teeny tiny mistake at the end of their user journey through no fault of Adobe’s makes me think twice.
Can you imagine all that hard work, all that effort that would have gone into building the right ad, and then the person that stuck the ad to the wall made an error that wasn’t noticed?
Now it might just be me. I know I’m a critic of all things marketing, but it did make me smile, and I wanted to share. Here’s the picture for anyone that’s interested:
Am I being way too harsh?
