pantene shampoo thailand - ad that did not shine

this is a tv ad that asks a lot from the viewers for you to like it. it asks you to like it both in obvious and not at all obvious ways.

its easy to like the ad - there is a story and its a very dramatic story. everyone likes a story of triumph where the unlikely overcomes barriers and succeeds. this is also told in a very graphic way - there is a protagonist we love to hate and a heroine we love to love.

i forgot - this is a tv ad for pantene, a shampoo brand. yes, shampoo for the hair. but lets not get into that. its not that important.

the other part that this ad is asking us is what science fiction movies asks us to do and it is the only way we can appreciate this tv ad. we all know what science fiction movies are - they are make believe, the exact meaning of the word "fiction". the only way we can appreciate a science fiction movie is for us to suspend logic, throw away common sense, ignore truth and yes forget about science. there is much irony there - to enjoy a science fiction movie, we need to forget science.

that is the only way to do it. in a science fiction movie, we need to believe super heroes are real. humans in human life forms can fly and women have super powers. if we don't do it that way, there is no point in watching the movie as none of it will make sense.

that is what you need to do in this ad. you need to believe that a person who does not have the sense of hearing can learn to play a musical instrument and that a beaten up violin put together only by crude industrial tape can still sound beautiful when played, of concert quality no less.

if you don't treat those like you treat elements of a science fiction movie, you won't be able to appreciate all 4 minutes of this commercial. it is one of the longest tv ads i have seen. we don't think the ad was aired a lot of times in thailand given the length and the cost involved in airing it but even that we are willing to suspend logic for.

its a long ad because of many repeated scenes, over-extended sequences, unneeded scenes and subplots. we think the editing was very bad as many of the scenes specially those repeated were unnecessary to repeat. many of the scenes could have been taken out, specially the repeated ones and the story will still be intact.

the scene with the cocoon transforming into a butterfly then in flight we thought was unnecessary. the story itself of the little girl growing up then learning how to play was enough and actually very obvious that we did not need to see the cocoon to butterfly transformation. besides, in the first place that is not the point of the story. the story is about a girl who has dreams of playing a violin overcome adversity both her physical inability and the other girl protagonist. this is a story of overcoming adverssity, not of birth to adulthood or fulfillment.

before we forget, this is an ad for a shampoo brand. that is one more weakness of the ad. the ad forgot what it is supposed to do. it even missed the part of showing glorious hair at the end pay-off sequence. they tried to do it with the flowing and flying long hair but the shot was very poorly done. the hair was not shiny at all and the lighting was over-exposed that you are unable to see good volume of the hair. having poor cinematography at this sequence we think is a mortal sin and a huge opportunity loss in making a great sale for the brand.

ironic that the tagline at the end is "you can shine". we think its a WAWAM!

    

you know, manny pacquiao is a loser!

i don't get this tv ad of manny pacquiao. i just didn't shake my head when i first saw this ad, i shook it many times and every time i see the ad on tv. i also end up talking to myself, why the hell did they make this ad this way. and at the end of the 30s ad, i get my cellphone out and my ipod touch and key in a to-do note for myself : "DO NOT BUY VITWATER!". i don't use caps even in my cellphone, i use caps on this one. ooops, i had entered that already the last time i saw the ad. geez, i must have tried to key that in to my gadgets a hundred times already, the same number of times i had seen this ad.

yes! this ad is being aired at very heavy weight! the pacquiao - hutton fight is a few days from now, they are making the most of torturing me! this vitwater ad is one more strong reason why i don't watch local shows on tv!

i usually say this at the end of the discussion. but for this one i like to say it on the 3rd paragraph - this manny pacquiao ad of vitwater is a WAWAM! and has ADS Sindrome! and all other acronyms i am yet to invent in this blog!





whew! we will take this slow now...

water with vitamins which is what vitwater is a product for the AB upper C target market. the mass market, broad C and the DE will not bother with this product. the price will keep the mass market away from this product. to expect the mass market even as an intentional occasional user is water under the bridge of marketing possibilities.

the AB and upper C target market know pacquaio, most likely 100% of them. some of them even pay P600.00 for pay per view venues, have cable in their homes and most watches his fights. there is no question that pacquiao has an appeal to the target market.

it is also VERY safe to assume the AB upper C target market is an english speaking target market. here's the part i don't get and the major reason i want to get my cellphone and touch to key in "DO NOT BUY VITWATER" all over again - why in the world did they make pacquiao speak in english?!!!

what the f_ck is that?

pacquiao is obviously not a an english language speaker. let me say it first, i don't take that against him, i take it against vitwater for making pacquaio speak in english! the accent drives me crazy. this ad does not make pacquiao endearing to its target market. it makes pacquiao a joke, a caricature to make fun of. in this ad, vitwater rapes pacquiao of his hero status among filipinos.

what gets me here is that vitwater and the ad agency knew what they were making pacquiao do and what they were turning him in to. everybody knows pacquiao sounds funny when he talks in english. he sounds a little funny when he talks in filipino as he has a mindanao accent but that is not a turn off. in fact his mindanao accent makes it endearing. he is a man from mindanao from humble beginnings doing well for himself and his country, having this mindanao accent to his pilipino is a good thing. but having an accent when he speaks in english in a tv ad makes him a joke. all of that vitwater and the ad agency must have known.

the AB upper C target market do understand pilipino well. there is no reason for vitwater not to make him speak in pilipino. it could have been as understandable as english but with the added benefit of making manny look real and yes endearing.

the copy or script of this ad to me is a mystery. who wrote the script? the copy is so sparse, lacks a sale and sounds very amateurish. how could an ad agency write copy like this and how can they have presented copy like that to the client?

the other half of the mystery - was this a scriptless tv ad? like they just asked manny to say whatever he wanted and they just rolled the camera? manny is a champion fighter, not a copywriter, surely they cannot expect manny to come up with gems in copy?

the copy is just too one-dimensional and too shallow. this vitamins in water product is pioneering. it's a new product concept that has a lot of potential for a compelling story that can be matched with a hero who also has a multi-dimensional persona around him. a new product and pioneering product concept plus pacquiao could have been a match made in heaven, but vitwater did not cease the day. the ad does not at all feel like its introducing a pioneering product.

and we have not yet mentioned the fact that it is really bad english. the english used in this ad, and we assume this was written by the ad agency is english of a 5 year old who is just learning to speak it - stocatto, few words, few thoughts, few vocabulary and bad construction.

there are many other things that went wrong in this ad. but the biggest among the small things is a directorial and editorial snafu. at frame 0:06 as pacquaio on voice over was saying "...but for me, there is something better, you know", the commercial cuts to pacquiao looking at someone off camera then goes into a laugh. the scene before and after the pacquiao on a laugh scene showed pacquiao in a serious mood, not to mention the background music had the same serious atmosphere and tone.

in audio, manny was delivering a key selling point for the product - vitwater is better than just water, a serious thing and yet the visual showed manny laughing like he was laughing at the line, losing all credibility and believability.

that is just the tip of the failure of this ad. the biggest error of this ad is the use of english for manny's speaking lines and the one-dimensional, shallow and zero sale in the copy. the bigger error is that this ad has completely mis-read its target market, the AB upper C. we love manny, but we learned to hate vitwater. (note to self: key in entry into cellphone and touch "DO NOT BUY VITWATER").

i feel bad for pacquiao. i don't think any of this is pacquiao's fault. the ad agency and vitwater made pacquiao, our hero, look really bad.

okay, okay, before we end - i know that you know and that you want to know what i know. i know you have been waiting for me to mention it --- manny said "you know..." a total of 4 times in the 30 second ad. that means there were 4 irritants in that ad, you know?

this is a WAWAM!, has ADS Sindrome and all the other acronyms i am yet to think of in the future.

view the vitwater tv spot here: http://tinyurl.com/c7tzcp or scroll down.

why put manny pacquiao in a bad light? a caricature of pinoy weakness?

in ads, a lot of effort is put into making the talents, most specially celebrities to look in the best possible light. ad agencies hire professional make up artists, costume designers and the best cameramen to make sure the talents look good on screen. directors are very particular to make sure that aside from making sure the storyboard is delivered, the talent should also look good. some celebrities even make it part of the their contract that their preferred make-up artist are hired for tv ads they appear in.


clients choose talents in their ads, specially celebrities, because they bring something good to the ad and the product. use a well loved celebrity and they expect sales to go up.

so why did vitwater make manny pacquiao look bad in their ad?

whisper sanitary pad's eww image that won't go away

is there a woman out there who would do what kim chiu did to her bf - ride on the shoulder of a man when you have your menstruation and wearing a pad?

this ad says whisper sanitary pad is so good that the bf's shoulders will not have a menstrual stain after moving up and down on his shoulder. and the bf will not smell mesnstrual odor even if his nose is just a few inches away.

really?

Wellmade Inc.'s Speed Babad piolo pascual "musical" tv spot is, well, not well made

we see this tv spot of speed babad (soak) often on tv. they got the media money, but how we wish they took some of it to make a good TVC ad?

this is one more of those no-brains celebrity endorser tv ad where they think all it takes to make a good ad is to simply shove a celebrity's face into the ad and it will generate business for the brand. with so many of these types of celebrity endorser ads in philippine advertising, the conclusion is that the whole industry has lost it's sense of purpose and has forgotten what makes celebrity endorser ads work versus other types of ad formats.

this one has piolo pascual, the country's celebrity matinee idol. yes, that is the first question you ask yourself - what has piolo pascual, a male, got to do with washing clothes. we are not even talking about the washing machine type, we are talking of hand-washing. probably anywhere from 99.0% to 99.99% of clothes washing in this country are done by females.

obviously, this ad has just violated one of the most important principles of celebrity endorser ads by putting a celebrity endorser who do not hold any sort of authority and even experience on the product the ad is selling. the reason they put piolo in that ad has nothing to do with enhancing the brand image or product efficacy, but rather he is in that commercial because he is famous among women. it's using a celebrity endorser for the sake of using one.

this ad fails a second time, please view the ad.

the location of the ad is on a river by the mountains. what???

we see piolo on a raft going to where the women where and throughout the commercial we see mountains and trees on the background. this is not comedy, but the location of the ad made me laugh.

are we to believe piolo travelled miles upon miles on that river on a raft to reach the women? and are women who wash clothes on the river really look like that and dress that way? not only that, they had swimming pool lounge chairs and orange juice with ice up in the river of a mountainous area.

it makes sense that they situate the brand in clothes washing by the river. based on research, a certain percentage of clothes washed in the rural areas are actually done by the river using the water from the river. so from a marketing stand point, that can make sense.

but that legitimate marketing thinking is all thrown out down the river by using piolo pascual and those women looking like that in this commercial. the women all looked liked commercial models or celebrities themselves, something like maybe less than 0.5% of actual women who do hand washing by the river look like.

they also can't expect us to believe that women who look like that, dress like that and most likely belong to the AB socio-eco class actually do hand washing of their clothes (they have washing machines); and that they do it themselves (they have maids to do the machine washing of clothes), and that they do it by the river in the mountains (they rarely go there, to pass through it on their way to their vacation house in baguio)???

this ad has lost all semblance of believability and credibility.

that has been totally lost that i did not want to bother to listen to the copy in the ad. but i had to.

it positions speed babad as the better alternative to hand-washing, to do soaking instead to allow the women to relax and get out of the losyang (frump). they use a common term, "power whitener" as reason why. we are sure that has been used by other detergents in the past, perhaps in the 60s and 70s. (hahaha)

they also use a very common product freight - a magnifying glass showing "dirt" being removed from the microscopic meshes of the cloth. again a device that has been most likely used in the 60s and 70s.

what do we have here? let me count the ways on why we think this is a WAWAM!

• the use of a celebrity endorser who does not contribute to the sale
• the use of women talents who do not at all look like the actual target users, who most unlikely do not hand wash clothes and certainly not do so by the river in the mountains
• the use of a non-original reason why, circa 60s and 70s
• the use of a non-original product demo, circa 60s and 70s

we don't know how and where this ad connects with its target consumers. what a waste of advertising money!

holistic dog food's promo got holes - fine example of tHe idiOts proMo

end of last year, holistic dog food ran out of stock from metro manila pet food shops. it was not available for a long time, like 3 to 4 months. stocks were made available again sometime end december, so that means there were no stocks from september to december.

3 to 4 months of not having stocks in pet food stores i think is suicide for any food product, most specially for pet food. pets do tend to eat the same thing over and over again. getting them to switch to another brand is quite difficult and takes a bit of doing.

but with that length of time that holistic dog food was not available, all pet owners must have been forced to switch to other brands. not feeding your dogs anything for 3 to 4 months will mean your pet dog will die.

from a marketing and sales standpoint, that means from whatever market share they had, it would be like zero by the end of december.

for the holistic company and the distributor of holistic dog food it means its crisis of biggest proportions that any company will face. not only have they lost market share and now to zero, they have lost all kinds of goodwill or affinity dog owners have for their brand.

selling holistic again in december is not only just like launching the brand for the first time in the philippine market, its much worse than that as they are re-launching with a lot of ill-feelings towards the brand

they obviously need to go back to the market with a lot of effort to win back previous buyers of the dog food. doing a consumer promo is the thing to do. promos is one excellent way of getting consumers back into purchaing your brand. advertising actually is probably the most potent, but if budgets don't allow for advertising, then a promo is the next best thing.

this is the market situation that holistic dog food was facing - 0% market share and 1,000% ill-will of previous buyers towards the brand. the common sensical thing to do, even for non marketing people, is to go into a gang bang promo, give an offer buyers cannot refuse.

and yes, holistic dog food did launch a promo when they re-stocked their product in the stores. they did a consumer premium. they give you this premium for every bag of holistic dog food which cost anywhere from P500.00 to P1,900.00

we have a pictures of the premium. please when you see the premium, tell us how you reacted in seeing the pictures of the premium.





i bet your reaction to the gang buster premium offer is the same reaction i gave : "what the f**k is this?".

not only was i disgusted and angry, i honestly felt insulted by the premium they gave. after 3 to 4 months of not having the brand and gallant efforts by pet owners to drive to all the pet food stores in metro manila for weeks - they give you a freaking bone-shaped ball pen that not only is super cheap, it looks freaking ugly!

how in the world will that kind of premium encourage angry consumers to buy holistic again? promos are supposed to be offers that consumers can't refuse. this one is the number 1 premium consumers will confuse. this particular promo is supposed to nullify the significant ill-will people felt when holistic was not available in stores, this one does not do any of that, in fact this adds to the injury by insulting the buyers with such a cheap and ugly premium.

the only reason i bought holisitic again is my dog has an allergy and this is the brand that gave my dog the least allergy. that purchase will be last that i will make of holistic while i look for other brands. getting that premium from holistic solidifies my distaste of the holistic brand.

holistic did not even bother to give me or post a letter of apology to buyers in the pet stores. that would have been the least that they could have done.

clearly, this holistic dog food promo is tHe idiOts proMo!

smart buddy's "me na me" is who na who?

the philippines is the mobile phone texting capital in the world, sending an average of 600 million texts a day. that is impressive not only because of the sheer number of the texts, but consider that the philippine population is only at 80 million. at 600 million a day, it means on average, including babies who were just born, filipinos sent 7.5 texts to each other.

the country reached that phenomenon through the brilliant marketing effort of the telcos in the country, the top two, smart and globe. smart is the dominant leader and could largely be credited for making what the mobile industry is in the country now. they pioneered best value texting, costing only P1.00 per text (US$0.02).

at that price, sending text easily became very pervasive so much so that a new form of written, err, texting language evolved, to the horror of the country's english and filipino professors. from the written, that has jumped into the spoken language as well.

one of that is this smart telco ad campaign where they use the tagline "me na me" ("it's very much me"). the english word "me" is being substituted to the pilipino word "ako" (same meaning as the english "me"). you say "tulog na me" ("i will already sleep") rather than "tulog na ako". it's youth-speak, the slang that teen-agers and young people use. it's not yet as pervasive in the spoken language, but it is used often in text speak or when you send text.

smart is the dominant leader among the mobile phone service brands. their consumer base is truly across the board and among the competing telcos, probably is the closest to the general profile of the philippine population where a large portion belongs to the lower socio-eco class.




being the dominant leader and having a consumer base with a large mass base, smart can rightfully use and own a tagline like "me na me" ("it's very much me"). smart is the cellphone of the masses, and that is a compliment to their marketing savvy.

the only problem is the commercial that they aired uses that tagline.

the ad uses 4 of the country's hottest celebrities - piolo pascual, the present matinee idol and heartthrob; angel locsin, one of the most beautiful and most popular actress and also a heartthrob; and gerald alcantara and kim chiu the new and up and coming superstars on the footsteps of piolo and angel. aside from being extremely famous and top on the list, they are also extremely rich.

and that is where the disconnect begins. the target market is the broad based consumers, the masa. the tagline, "me na me", is being expressed in the actual language they use in their texting lives. that means that will pull in empathy and will ring very true among their target market.

while these very popular and very rich celebrities in the ads are their idols, these celebrities are not who the target audience are. they idolize them, they can even aspire and dream to be like them, but they cannot truthfully say these celebrities are "me na me". they know the lifestyles these celebrities have is not their lifestyle. they know they live in two very different worlds. aspiration and reality are two very different things and one of the two often times do not become a reality.

it might look cute, but come on, piolo pascual will not use a pre-paid card for his cellphone service as it is depicted in the tv ad. he has a post paid subscription where he probably pays on a monthly basis the amount equivalent to two to three month's salary of an average wage earner in the country.

the use of not 1 but actually 4 celebrities is one heck of a thrill when the ads were conceptualized and developed. the crafting of the line "me na me" could have been really exciting. but merging the two into one ad without even trying to bridge the inherent problems each one had puts into play believability issues and makes this ad campaign a WAWAM!

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Text messages soar in June–NTC
By Darwin G. Amojelar, Reporter

DESPITE soaring consumer prices, the average number of text messages sent per day rose by a fifth as of June, the National Telecommunications Commission said Friday.
Edgardo Cabarios, NTC director for common carrier and authorization, said the agency estimated about 600 million texts per day as of June this year, higher by 20 percent than the average of 500 million texts per day in 2006.

“The system is processing 600 million texts a day,” Cabarios told reporters and calculated that a subscriber sent 10 texts per day from only seven texts two to three years ago.

article parsed, read in full here : http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2008/aug/30/yehey/business/20080830bus6.html