WAR! O2 CAN POO.

Looks like O2 have shot themselves in the foot with their new marketing campaign supposed to promote a new product named O2O. Let’s hope their efforts result in demotion and leave the brand in shambles. Because that is what they deserve after declaring war on several German cities.

The beginning of the campaign had already caught my eye. Once again, somebody was occupying advertising space with unbranded, this time round illustrative art posters in a modern, urban art style. Immediately I was suspicious and wanted to know who in hell after so many of these thought to be guerilla or secret teaser campaigns was daring copying this method once again. What really grinded my gears, me being a lover of urban arts, was the misuse of some creative codes familiar and dear to me for advertising purposes. You did get the feeling, someone was desperately trying to appeal to a young, confident, style concious target group.

It’s one of the disadvantages of standardized advertising that the follow up comes way too long after the recipient’s feeling of curiosity has been triggered and normally has already expired again by the time the conclusion arrives. Advertising does not stimulate long lasting, sustainable effects, as marketeers should know by now. Basically, the follow up would have to arrive one to two days after the teaser but town walls, billboards etc. have to be booked in flights of several days or weeks so you just can’t make them work for multi-phase campaigning, let alone the amount of paper they waste and how much rubbish these heavy penetration ad wars produce.

Any rate, it was only after another 10 days or a fortnight or so, that the initiatinf brand behind this superfluous and superficial campaign revealed itself to the public. And for all the advertising presence they created by plastering entire cities with their motives, the outcome was disappointing. Oh, it’s just another telecommunication company promoting a new tarif system? What the fuck was all the fuss about then? You’d have thought somebody was raffling off free flights to Jupiter with all the kerfuffle they were causing.

I won’t deny the campaign had an effect on me, even if it probably wasn’t what the brand behind it wanted to achieve. I’ve spoken about it before. In my view, brands are annexing public space with their advertising and the space it takes up. And O2 have slightly overdone it. They have recommended themselves not as a likeable brand, but as a detestable aggressor.

Normally, I don’t really notice advertising. It just bores me and I have become immune to it over the years. It gives me nothing. But O2 actually managed to catch my attention, unsurprisingly though, if you look what they did to one of our local cinemas (compare picture) or several underground stations in major German cities. I felt like being attacked by a fast moving, almost invisible Ninja army and raised my fists to be prepared just in case I had already run into a trap. I got very angry.

Dear brands, dear advertisers. Here’s some advice for you. And heed my words or suffer our retaliation! If you insist on changing the faces of our cities, if you really have to decorate our urban surroundings, you can’t just go along branding surfaces! Are logos all you have to show? What would you say if I was to set out on a national tagging tour spraying my name all over your shop windows?

If you have the money it takes to do what you did, why didn’t you try to do everybody a favour and change our surroundings for the better, instead of the worse? With your branded omnipresence, you have gone so far as to rob some districts of their characteristic appearance, albeit only for a couple of weeks. Our hometowns are a lot uglier, since your assault. You’re making our habitat your battlefield!

After taking the photo you can see in this article, I went home and terminated my O2 online and mobile contracts. I felt ashamed to be giving a part of my money to a brand that in return shed war on my hometown. They leave me with no other option other than to try to dry their ressources up and motivate others to do likewise.

O2 can poo. Fuck you very much.

Yours

Brian B. Ashes