O O O....O Brien

By the fact that I wrote that in the title would suggest that potentially the advertising campaign has worked. The incessant call from the jingle has lodged itself firmly in my head and convinced me that should I ever get a chip in my windscreen, I will know where to go.

So job done. Let's just keep repeating the same ad and eventually have everyone in Australia humming the tune while they lay in bed at night.

Except I would suggest that the advert itself is self-destructive in its communication. Let's look at the reasons:

1) It's a long advert for radio. The 30 seconds actually SEEMS like 30 seconds. It seems like a lifetime. Two jingles and a bloke talking trying to scare you into getting your chip fixed is not engaging me.

2) The guy they have voicing it is one of two things: an actual O'Brien employee or the worst voice over person in the world. Either way, he is doing the brand NO favours by sounding tedious and boring. By the end of the advert, you're so depressed from listening to him, you want to top yourself because your windscreen has a crack in it.

DO NOT USE EMPLOYEES - EVER - unless they have such a strong personality or some USP that makes them stand-out above everyone else - think the speccy bloke from the Good Guys.

3) As mentioned before, the jingle. Think Crazy Frog for windscreen repairs. You want to take a nail gun to your own head to try and rid yourself of the obsession.

The long and the short of it is the advert has done what no radio network wants any advert to do, it has made me switch channels. Coupled with the AMI adverts, the O'Brien adverts and the nails-down-a-blackboard advert that is Diamonds International (which I will dissect at a later date), the state of radio media advertising is currently appalling.

How do you improve then?

Running a bad advert over and over again isn't the answer. Creating a full ATL and BTL promotion which incorporates web, radio, TV, magazines and so on and targeting it at your specific demographic is the proper way to do these things. Analyse the message you're trying to get across and look at your target market, and find out where these people like to be talked to.

Sure O'Brien have probably got it right in that their target market - car owners with chips in the windscreen - are probably sitting in their cars, listening to the radio and looking at the chip, but there are a million other ways to make this stand out more.

Messages without a creative approach are just messages. The average consumer gets hit with 300 of these a day. O'Brien is just number 216.