Can you write a better headline for this terrible SUBWAY poster?
There’s no doubt that digital marketing and social media have transformed advertising. They’ve opened up whole new channels, new ways to engage, build relationships, tell brand stories and encourage interaction and purchase.
They’re undoubtedly a good thing.
But there are two aspects to this paradigm shift in our industry that both annoy and alarm me.
Digital Dictators
The first is the way that the Digital Dictators spearheading and propagating the revolution adopt a kind of fanatical Year Zero approach to Digital Marketing. Year Zero is when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in April 1975. Anything before then never happened.
They are constantly telling us that everything BI (before the internet) is now obsolete, bankrupt, useless – and doesn’t work any more. It’s now Digital and Social or nothing.
This is despite the fact that plenty of businesses, industry experts and global brands are saying that an integrated approach works better than using digital or traditional advertising on its’ own.
It’s not either or
It wasn’t so long ago that Pepsi took a massive step. They binned all forms of traditional media from their marketing plan, and threw their entire budget behind social media to engage with their customers and position themselves against their biggest rival, Coca-Cola.
It was a disaster.
Shortly afterwards, Coca Cola showed them how it should be done. In 2013, they launched their ‘Share a Coke’ campaign that was a perfect blend of traditional and digital techniques which was extremely effective at increasing brand engagement and product sales.
You can read more about this and the different ways that a variety of businesses are combining traditional and digital marketing channels here.
Nosedive
So what’s the second aspect?
It’s the drop in creative standards over the past 15 to 20 years. Not the big stuff like big budget TV campaigns or the high street retailers’ Christmas TV spots every year.
No, it’s the everyday stuff like newspaper ads. DPS magazine ads. 48-sheet posters. Adshels. Brochures. Even many run-of-the-mill TV ads are badly scripted, poorly acted and loosely directed.
Of course, the entire advertising industry has changed. Commissioned photography was the first to go, replaced by Mac visuals and stock shots.
Typography quickly followed because Macs can lay out the type for you. And that’s just what it looks like. Type by computer.
And now copywriting is slowly vanishing to be replaced by content.
These days, creative teams have grown up shooting viral videos, writing social posts on every conceivable platform and telling stories. These are all great at building engagement online.
But clients still want newspaper ads. DPS magazine ads. 48-sheet posters. Adshels. Brochures. Flyers. Direct mail packs.
As the industry is coming to realise, combining offline media like these with online marketing works better than either one on its own.
We’ve got a problem
But many young creatives haven’t learnt how to produce this kind of work; haven’t been trained in these disciplines or in many cases, even want to do them.
So when they do an Adshel poster, this is what you get.
No idea. Far too many words. Boring art direction.
(And the person who came up with IF YOU’RE DONE WITH THE SAME OLD LUNCH CHOICES clearly never had a creative director or head of copy breathing down his or her neck.)
It’s basic copywriting. Nine words is too many.
It’s BORED WITH LUNCH?
(Obviously, there are far more creative ways to express that thought – it just needs thinking about.)
Worse still, buried right at the bottom of the poster is what it should be all about.
NEWS!
News is good. People like news. And if you’re a fan of SUBWAY this is great news.
SUBWAY HAVE A NEW IMPROVED MENU WITH 21 NEW INGREDIENTS
That’s your message right there. More choice. More flavours. More tastes. More unique combinations. More to enjoy at SUBWAY.
In fact, when you think about it those 21 new ingredients can be combined in millions of different ways – especially when you throw in all the old favourites too.
In its most basic form, the headline message is:
BORED WITH LUNCH?
WE HAVE 979,035 NEW ONES FOR YOU
How about listing the new ingredients? That would be interesting and engaging. Because when you tell people news, it’s funny, but they usually want to be told more.
They might actually want to try a SUB containing a few of those new ingredients.
So go on, make them curious, tease them with the new ingredients, make them want to pop in to SUBWAY and sample them. That’s easy to do. Just do your job…
SELL SUBWAY AND THEIR NEW INGREDIENTS AND GET PEOPLE TO GO IN AND TRY THEM
It’s called advertising and it’s what clients want their offline advertising to do. It’s what they want their hard-earned budget to do.
So how would you do this SUBWAY Adshel poster? What would your headline be?