Friday, May 22, 2009

No 'Call To Action' Display Ad

This is a first for me. Sprint ran the below ad for an extended 8 week campaign. It does not feature a 'Call To Action' - there's no clickthrough. I have never seen anyone do this before. Is it the stupidest idea ever or perhaps brilliant. It certainly has the potential for massive engagement times and huge amounts of offline and online conversation, but could it achieve real results?

Let me know what you think.

5 comments:

nicola-t said...

I like it. It's fun. Though it took me a few tries to get it into the bin and I don't know if that many people would actually realise you can play with it. I have to admit, coming from... traditional media I suppose - I wonder about engagement in digital display ads. There's a lot of potenial but I think the creative has to work hard for it to be realised. Either that or you have to go for strong word of mouth - I guess with an 8 week campaign that's what they are hoping for.

Can you play it on their website? How can the consumer pass it on?

Paul Dervan said...

hi, what context is it shown in? I missed any instruction to do anything. I suspect most people will miss this and it will be pretty useless if aim is to drive any sales. I'm afraid I'd wouldn't have put my money behind this ad.

Nick McGivney said...

Does seem like throwing money away. Unless there's sth we're missing here? Maybe there's a brand campaign elsewhere for it. As we're in a non-Sprint market (true?) maybe there's other stuff that makes this more relevant. It probably does a half decent job of brand memorability, but it does seem a tad pointless.

Christian Hughes said...

This was the grand sum of the campaign - no microsite, no instruction, no above the line. Admittedly this 'campaign' only came to an end 3 weeks ago, so perhaps there is more still to come?

I'll keep my eyes open and if there is more to this I'll definitely post it.

nicola-t said...

Hi Paul. Yes, this is what I wonder about. I clicked on the money and it crumpled up so I thought I'd see if I could do anything else with it. However this is what I worry about in terms of engagement - the visual itself doesn't actually grasp the user so I assume they were relying on people who did realise it was a game to tell their friends. 8 weeks would allow for this but on it's own I can't imagine that that high a % of people would actually give it a poke.

Also, since it's not on their website I don't see how they expect others to point at it to be able to tell people about it.

Plus... it's not THAT fun... maybe if it had a score in the corner it would help... also it would indicate to people that it is a game in the first place...