The Broadband Inquision: Website marketing
Lately, I've been doing a fair bit of research on broadband. And through my bounteous search for the best Naked DSL deal, I came across a couple of nefarious websites that were eagerly plastered with bulky, overly hyped and questionable 'youth gabble babble' advertising, the style I feel is a direct link to the types of overly caffeinated marketers who high five each other at those late afternoon brainstorming sessions. I can imagine a bunch of marketers gushing over presentations, while they seemingly come up with the answer to customer's broadband problems, one energy drink at a time.
You might be one of those viewers perplexed to have watched some of those perplexing advertising campaigns where the actual product is never revealed. It's a case of smoke and mirrors, where unfortunately the general public are the ones mislead under the illusion. Often these neon hipsters get it wrong: In the case of the Optus website I reviewed in my research, they got it very wrong.
If you're in the market for a home wireless internet connection, you might expect a website to be clear and concise. The smaller ISPs are great at this. Just check the Internode and iinet website for justification of what works best. Those company pages are well linked and very fast to access the prices.
But, for what doesn’t work….jump onto the Optus website. Next, click on the big 'broadband unplugged' advertisement in the middle of the page. Sure, there are prices and and products buried at the bottom of the page…but that’s beside the point. Most people will be pointed towards the big bold advertisement at the top of the page that promises to spill the beans about the miracle of Optus wireless. So you click on the page and at this point, you're probably anticipating a second or two for the page to load and then the prices and products to be clearly displayed. Right?
Wait a second….just a second more…just a little longer. Okay, really, really longer. Good, now I'm starting to sound like one of the hipster marketers. Poking fun at you is an overly cute raccoon in a lavish top hat who proceeds to make you wait even longer, while the page tries to load to 100%. Depending on your connection, most people would have given up by now and the thus, the potential sales to Optus are lost.
Once the page loads, we follow a little yellow van as it races around a virtual city I shall name, "Blingtel'. It later pulls up to a series of those hipster billboards I was telling you about earlier. They're hard to avoid, even in virtual cities. You click one of the signs and the shiny yellow van (obviously inspired by the Beatles yellow submarine) spins around the block, shoots down a couple of more city blocks and towards a large wall, where a secret door pops out and sucks you deep inside a dark tunnel. There, (I'm seriously not making this up!), you are propelled around and around the bat cave, until you gladly relinquish their credit card just and your sanity.
This kind of website campaign is not intuitive. It lacks simplicity. And it's a mess. It can't decide whether it wants to be a Saturday morning cartoon or a serious broadband commercial. There is an obvious grab for the youth market, but it sadly misfires. It took me a few twists and turns following the little yellow van until I found the information I wanted. If you're spending millions to sell your broadband product, I really don't think navigating through virtual cities and batcaves are the best ways to do it.
If you have an interesting broadband story that you think should be covered, feel free to write me or leave a comment.
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