Wednesday 19 August 2009

But of course I will promote Virgin Broadband for free on my blog.

It seems like Virgin UK broadband's ad agency spammed the blogosphere with its new ad and asked for feedback on it. Where feedback means; "could you please post it on your blog and be nice about it". James Enck already put a review up: "Cute, but pointless, and it does nothing to convey the sort of message this company should be telling regarding its competitive strengths." I can only say that I am glad that I got an e-mail explaining the ad, as otherwise I would never have known that:

We’ve recently been working on a new video to promote Virgin’s 50Mb broadband service, following on with the ‘Powerful Stuff’ idea. For the video, we’ve recreated the famous ‘When Harry Met Sally’ diner orgasm scene, but with a slight twist!

The video was shot with all the men in the diner thinking they were just extras in an advert. The reactions are genuine, which hopefully gives it a funny edge.

Unfortunately for Virgin I don't like When Harry met Sally, it makes me cringe everytime it is on TV. This ad, though more original than UPC's ad for Fiber Power makes me want to switch away as quickly as possible. Imagine this coming on tv, when you're on the phone with a friend. Nope, if they want funny, they should go to Hong Kong and see how real fiber is promoted.

Virgin's ad agency should have a look at what KPN does with its commercials. The current series of Generation KPN are quite good in promoting KPN.

WARNING: Virgin's ad is Not Safe For Work (with audio on)




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1 comment:

  1. Melanie Seasons26 August 2009 at 10:58

    I'm sorry that you construed our e-mail as spam. It's our policy to have an opt-out clause on every single one of our messages. As the PR agency (not the ad agency, though that video is our creative concept), we choose the blogs we think are relevant to the campaign. You work in broadband, you don't seem to have any anti-PR posts on your blog and you supply your e-mail - that's why you heard from us.

    As for feedback, as hard as it may be to believe, yes - we are actually interested in what people think, regardless of whether they post about the video. It's is a very important part of the process. There have been plenty of people who have e-mailed back with thoughts without posting about it. We take every single one of those comments back to Virgin Media.

    The fact of the matter is people love this video or hate it (have you seen the comments on YouTube?!), and that helps us the next time we want to do something similar. I couldn't give a hoot if people are nice about the video or not - they're talking about it and anything that elicits that strong of a reaction works for me.

    Melanie
    (social media strategist at onlinefire)

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