Care less Wispa

Does anyone else think the following – one an honest-to-goodness advertising campaign (from Fallon no less) and one a piss-take of the world without computers – look suprisingly similar?

(And yes, that is Rolf Harris).

The entire cracked photoshop contest is a lot of fun, imagining what the world would be like if the internet disappeared tomorrow. Particularly good is the theatre audience watching a cat doing something cute (a la YouTube) and the real life Rick-rolling.

The Wispa campaign basically says: people like sharing this crap on the internet, now let’s take some pap and shove it on a billboard sign. There’s something interesting in the idea from the point of view of creating salient advertising – each poster will be unusual and might make the passerby wonder what on earth it is about? But – of course – it will also be meaningless to most people.

Salience is important, but… erm… what the hell has it got to do with chocolate bars.

The site explains:

“We’ve decided to give our advertising space to you guys as a thank you for all the love you’ve shown to Wispa.”

“We have bought thousands of billboards all over the UK and Ireland so that you can share your special messages with the world. Yes, that’s right, you let us know your special message and if it gets selected we will post it on a real billboard in the location of your choice.

“So if your mum lives in Birmingham you could post her a special message, say a poem, and we’ll try to give you a site as near to her as possible.”

Here’s one:

(It’s for a dog!)

All of them are up on the site. There’s also the ‘gold panel’ of ‘normal’ (there needs to be about five sets of inverted commas around this freak show) people like Cara Stripp. Does anyone older than Cluster (see above), really think that these profiles aren’t made up?

As you have probably guessed I love Wispa, and was really keen for Cadbury to bring it back. So a few years ago I got involved with the bring back Wispa facebook group, and even though it is now back, I still spend lots of time on the site chatting to other Wispa fans and getting involved wherever I can.

I love Wispa because it’s something that I grew up with and it holds good memories for me. Everyone remembers their favourite sweet as a kid and for me it’s never changed. I like the special texture and just the fact that it tastes so gooooood!

My love of Wispa has become infamous and I often receive Wispas as parts of presents from friends and family. I even have Wispa earrings and a necklace which were specially made for me!

The thought process seems to go along these lines: People are really motivated by social media. People follow recommendations from real people. So if we make up some ‘real people’ and have them recommend us, and then get a sort of weird implied (but not really obvious) recommendation in return for some free poster sites, then everyone will love us.

We’ve said it before but we’ll say it again. The term ‘social media’ is a bit misleading for the advertising types. It is media, but not in the sense of ‘media buying’. You can’t purchase a chunk of it.

It’s certainly a truthful observation that there is a phenomonen around social media that people like it and respond to it, but it does not imply that it can be used for commercial messages. Good commercial messages can be amplified by social media. But that will happen if they’re good, interesting etc; not because they appear to be social in nature. Fallon must know this… it’s the point of the Gorilla.

I find this whole stage of advertising evolution really embarrassing to watch. It’s like a Wispa sponsored X-Factor at Sunderland townhall: “People love X-Factor, let’s get us one of those…. obviously on a smaller scale though, cause we’ve only got a 100k budget”.