Yellow Chocolate - Sour Taste

Ok, am I the only one who has a sour taste left in my mouth having witnessed all the AMAZING things that Yellow are doing with their most recent advertising campaign?

So the TreeHouse thing didn't go down that well with me either, the whole thing was very Auckland and I felt like there was minimal advertising of the whole thing and was more of an award entry than a campaign.

So now we have Josh and his yellow chocolate. Awesome.

So I have seen a couple of television ads on this one and I get the impression that this one might be a slightly more integrated campaign than the last. So, when I read that they had created a billboard that was going to display this guys tweets, I though, CHOICE! What a completely rad idea. That's amazing!

This twitpic of the billboard was via @kenfreer and was originally put up by @hamishhaldane:

Then Stoppress wrote an article which had this image:

Then I started following Josh's tweets, and my excitement very quickly disappeared. Quite happy to be corrected on this one, but his tweets reeks of something that has been planned, semi-scripted and is being 'tweeted' by some intern or account exec. Happy to be told otherwise, but unfortunately, that is how it reads, to me anyway. The beauty of Twitter is that it is real time, immediate information/commenting/responding, and I have not yet seen this. All I have seen is a campaign start to unfold.

I got a little excited again when I saw that their banner on the Herald, thinking that they were going to have a real time Twitter updated banner - again, I think that the tweets that are being sent are average, it was more the technology that I was excited about, but alas...

They do not seem to be real time to me, these screen shots are part of a 3 roll banner, unless perhaps they are picking up the last 3 tweets then maybe that is cool, but I don't think this is what is happening AND this also kinda starts to back up my theory on the fact the tweets are scripted... Maybe? Maybe I am cynical, but its my opinion, so there.

What really irked me about about the banner ads, and the reason this gets to me is that it is not hard to do, is that I clicked on the part of the banner which says 'Follow Josh on Twitter or ..." I clicked directly on the 'Twitter' logo and what do you know, I go through to this:

That's a FAIL. I didn't want to go to your website, I wanted to go to your Twitter feed. Come on. Its a flash file, you can link things to different URLs. This is not that difficult.

The website is pretty cool though, it is nicely put together, I like the background video, very clever.

Before I go on - Ideas = amazing. Execution = not sold. I don't buy that the tweets are not scripted and the banner ads are a fail all round.

So now I am going to go on.

I am sorry Yellow, but perhaps, instead of spending a BUCKET load of money on an advertising campaign (you kinda have things covered when it comes to big fat books that have lots of phone numbers in it - market share, tick) hows about you spend some freaking money on making your website work properly? Yellow.co.nz cannot think for itself and surely you realise that the general population is not that smart, they need your site to think for them.

For example, I want to check out Savemart in Masterton as I have been told it is something of an untapped area when it comes to op-shops. So I search 'Save Mart' as in my mind, this is how I see the sign. Results displayed:

Yeah, needless to say, I was not looking for butchers. So I put the words together and ta da!

Now, this is a pretty average example, however so frequently I can't spell the name of the place I am looking for, but I know what city it is in so I try Yellow or White pages. All too often, my there will be no results for whatever I have searched for, so naturally I turn to Google and ask them, because Google loves me, even though I can't spell, and suggests that maybe I was looking for something else? "Here you go, this is what I think you want." "Thanks Google, you're the best."

What was my point? Fix your end product. I'm not trying to say that I think it would be an easy thing to do, not by any stretch of the imagination, however I do think that your advertising budget would be better spent in R&D so that when you do advertise, users don't get pissy with you.