The outdoor industry stirs it up – But is it actually proving anything?
In an attempt to demonstrate how highly responsive OOH advertising is, the Outdoor Advertising Bureau (OAA) has posted a range of controversial slogans across a variety of outdoor formats. These include ‘Educashun isn’t working’, ‘1966 it won’t happen this year’ and ‘Career women make bad mothers’. Due to outraged responses from the public, the latter is being taken down, which I assume the OAA have taken as confirmation that they have proved their point.
However, I’d argue that the British public would have had equal issue with any such statement, whether it was displayed online, on radio, on TV or indeed just shouted out by Jonathan Ross. Of course a statement like this will warrant response, but this is not comparable to a regular advertising campaign so I struggle to understand what constructive gain has been achieved by this exercise. All they seem to have proved is that some people physically look at buses and that a strong message is key to garnering response.
January 7th, 2010 at 11:20 am
I agree, the campaign has proved nothing apart from the fact that a controversial/offensive message upsets people!
January 7th, 2010 at 11:35 am
I agree – Career women do make bad mothers (joking!).
I think this is quite an arrogant experiment from the OAA, in which they could have said absolutely anything controversial and therefore ‘proven their point’. I think it highlights the growing intrusiveness of some advertising and I would argue is breaking down the ‘relationship’ between advertising as a medium and the consumer.
January 7th, 2010 at 11:36 am
I broadly agree; I think it superficially proved that people do look at buses and process advertising massages, so two pluses for the that medium and our industry, but also two concerns; 1) this might only be a reaction to a controversial message, not a message per se and 2) the campaign has had PR, so how many people saw the buses, and how many simply heard about it elsewhere…?
January 7th, 2010 at 11:38 am
Also, the main body of angry commentary has appeared on parenting sites like mums.net rather than the “official” site – so yes if you put out a big controversial message it can start debate but you cant hope to control where and how people spread it
In fairness, it has temporarily raised awareness of outdoor advertising, but so did the atheist campaigns last year. For the advertising industry I dont think this has achieved anything new.
January 8th, 2010 at 10:44 am
This campaign has received some criticism from groups including working mothers, upset by the line used on one of the executions ”career women make bad mothers”. The OAA’s response was to pull this creative from the campaign.
Our view is to broadly support the initiative as the purpose is to seek to demonstrate Out of Home can generate immediate response, including via the website http://www.BritainThinks.com. The success of the exercise will be in its ability to generate response ultimately, rather than in its controversy or shock tactics.
Whilst we feel the reaction (on all sides) was a bit over the top, the execution itself and the tagline could have initially been phrased more sensitively or could even have been changed in response to some of the criticism (“Britain has spoken – career women do not make bad mothers” is one suggestion) in order to demonstrate the real flexibility of the medium. In addition, some of the other executions could perhaps have been a bit more impactful.
It should not automatically generate negativity around the medium. The OAA represents just the interests of the media owners and none of the Out of Home agencies had any direct input into this initiative. If anything, this demonstrates that getting the creative right in Out of Home is essential. Meanwhile, Mumsnet seems to be gathering momentum as a pressure group; they recently managed to create a national news story about Gordon Brown not answering a question about biscuits…