bye bye awful txt abbreviations

So by now it is not news, but I think it is interesting to have a little look at what happened with TVNZ's attempt to redesign their station promos with what is being referred to as "text speak" - which I put in quotation marks as I don't know if they fully captured this sentiment.

Visual reference c/o Stuff to the left.

So, about a fortnight ago (maybe more?) TV2 changed their on-air promo branding to abbreviations. I have not been a fan of these, nor has anyone else in our office, to the point that our poor tvnz rep got the brunt of our complaints. I believe one member of our office emailed through an opinion which was forwarded to the people that count, however after that we heard nothing more.

Our biggest issue was that we thought they were alienating their audience. TV2's core demographic is 18-39, we're talking a decent chunk of Generation X, who did not grow up with cell phones, and text speak is not something that they necessarily associate with. Perhaps with a younger skewed audience, C4 could have worked something like this, but let's be fair, C4 wouldn't be that patronising to their audience.

As it turned out we were not alone in our opinion. Throng started a poll, it looked a little something like this:FAIL

There was even a Facebook page started called "I hate TV2's new abbreviations!" on June the 1st. As of right now there are 7,117 fans of this page and growing by the minute.

Some classic comments from this page include:
"did they run out of funding?"
"tvnz have obviously hired a bunch of 12 year olds..."
"sx rs"
"'TON' of crap."

I do feel a little sorry for tvnz, as I think they would have thought they were doing the right thing, they just missed the mark, significantly.

Not to worry, they are pulling the creative. The suggestion from our office was that if they were going to do something like this, then perhaps utilising the 2 may have been better what to go. 2day, 2moro, 2night? Personally I think they should leave it alone. Go back to something more classic.

Try again.