I love it when ad agencies either doff their hats to their creative colleagues or take a dip at them by gently poking fun.
It’s a bit of both in the latest print ad for Klipdrift, which talks about taking the “eish” out of taxation – in a clear nod to the SA Revenue Service’s ongoing campaign about tax returns.
However, the people at Draftfcb Cape Town would clearly like the taxman to know they came up with the idea of “eish” first… in the well-liked original Klippies “met eish” ads.
It all works nicely, it’s uniquely South African and it gets my first Orchid.
All of us have been there at some stage: you realise your car is a heap of junk and you’d just like to set fire to it. That’s the motif in the latest Renault TV ad for its new Fluence sedan. A man stands beside the road after his car runs out of petrol. He gets a lift to the nearest petrol station and back in a new Fluence. He looks around in envy at the Renault and, as the Fluence drives away, he realises he is driving rubbish. So he pours the petrol over it and sets it alight.
It makes the point that the Fluence is something new – and the ad works well with the other promotions Renault is doing around that model and others in their range. So it gets an Orchid from me.
Telemarketing may seem like a clever idea, but as South Africans become less polite, and more demanding – to say nothing of being guarded about their privacy – it’s going to become less and less effective.
Not only that, but intrusive telemarketing can have the opposite effect and damage your brand.
Someone punting something from Standard Bank phoned one evening last week while my wife was making supper. Asked by her where she got the number from, the call centre person glibly replied “the national database”. Oh, it’s irritating to hear that particular lie again.
Asked if she was not breaking the stipulations of the Consumer Protection Act, the caller said she was allowed to call anyone “during our business hours”. (Sadly, we found out later that this is true: telemarketers can harass you up to 9pm on a weeknight and midday on Saturday in your own private space.)
In this case, no deal, no business for Standard Bank. And an Onion because this must be losing you way more customers than you gain. – Brendan Seery