Filed under: Brands & Marketing | Tags: advertising, BA, bad, Barcelona, celebrity, Digital, football, Konica Minolta, marketing, online, responsive, Ronaldinho, soccer, sponsorship, star, T5, Ternial 5, ugly people, waste of money
Konica Minolta ad with Ronaldinho
One of the great things about online and digital advertising/ marketing is how responsive it can be. The fairly recent BA T5 ads were great as they streamed almost live images of the queues at the airport to show you that things were back to normal (or not). There was also a lot of effort to make these ads appear in relevant places both online and offline. Well done BA marketing team and agency. Which leads me to the Konica Minolta marketing team and/or agency…
The other morning I saw this new(?) ad campaign, a £1.4m ad campaign that clearly shows bad advertising is bad regardless of media. The ads are for the print machine manufacturers Konica Minolta and dedicates approx. 80% of the media to the less than pretty face of footballing maestro Ronaldinho. The lone statement reads ‘Ronaldinho brings dramatic improvements to football. KM brings dramatic improvements to colour output’. A little more research in to the campaign shows that maybe this is not totally bad advertising but more out of touch. It appears the campaign was masterminded in Japan and handed down to territories. Now, maybe in the Land of the Rising Sun, Ronaldinho is still seen as something special but for anyone who actually keeps up with football (which is surely a large part of the target audience for this ad?) then they would know Ronaldinho has been struggling with his football game, weight and lifestyle for about 18 months or more. Famously dumped from Barcelona for being unfit, unmotivated and a little petulant, why on Earth would you think this is a good image for your product? So the ad campaign was launch exactly a year ago but he was struggling with all these issues back then.
Importantly, why keep running the ads now? This billboard went up a matter of days ago and highlights the issues of advertising offline. At least if this was online, the banners/ MPU/ whatever could be updated with new content or even a new tagline, maybe something like ‘KM printers stay in their prime long after others have lost theirs’
