Skip to content

Outdoor advertising campaign works (sort of)

2010 January 11
by Barry

Quick update on the Britain Thinks campaign, which was a £1.25 outdoor advertising campaign launched last week.

The campaign was billed to demonstrate the power of outdoor advertising as a direct response medium with the ability to drive people online, which I guess it did – by causing outrage on popular mothers discussion forum Mumsnet.

Justine Roberts, co-founder and managing director of Mumsnet, said: “Mumsnetters thought the campaign to be ill-conceived, crass and stupid and the reaction on Mumsnet was a mixture of annoyance, contempt and despair in fairly equal measure.”

The ad below has now being pulled for fear of pissing off the angry mammies any more.

career women make bad mothers Outdoor advertising campaign works (sort of)

I think this is exactly the reaction intended as it’s got people talking and taps into the idea of finding out what Britain thinks, throw a controversial statement out there, and watch as it splits the nations opinion and drives website traffic.

Now, here’s the thing, blowing the big wad for an offline campaign to drive people online may not seem like the most efficient way to spend the budget and I’d thought they might be doing some other cool stuff online but it looks like they’ve done the agency checklist of a blog, twitter and facebook page. So perhaps not engaging that much on social media despite the conversation basis of the website that they’re advertising.

from → Advertising

  • curlydena

    Beyond the nature of what the Britain Thinks campaign is about, have they really demonstrated that outdoor works at directing traffic though? Or have they just demonstrated that inflammatory statements used on outdoor media work at driving traffic?

  • http://twitter.com/BarryHand Barry Hand

    I think the jury will be out until the traffic stats come in, the other 2 statements used where:

    ‘Educashun Isn’t Working’
    ‘1966. It Won’t Happen This Year’

    I think it's difficult to view the campaign outside the nature of the websites purpose, as those statements are at the core of what the website is all about, but it's no surprise that it has caused a reaction.

  • curlydena

    Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what the splits are like. Keep us posted!

    It's a shame that they can only “Get Britain Thinking” with provocative statements. Though, that's a WHOLE other issue really :)