UKNM: Easynet Advert

[Sajid Mohammed]

I was on the Heathrow Express the other day (as you do) and they have

these way-cool flat-screen TV's on the train that show

horrible-looking compressed digital videos*. As well as a gentle

introduction to Heathrow Express from a Harriet Harman lookalike, they

also show adverts. One was for...Easynet!


Hello, I thought to myself. Internet must be becoming a serious

industry sector if Easynet are lavishing money on advertising of this

sort - it had high production values IMHO. It's a little hard to

describe an advert to you that I've only seen once (those reviewers at

Campaign get a handy showreel, which helps) but it didn't strike me as

particularly effective.


Basically, it was lots of nice graphics accompanying key phrases like

'firewall' or whatever, with soothing music and a soothing voiceover.

In the genre of adverts for an airlines' new Business Class offering,

in other words.


Now I ain't a planner (yet), but to me an advert of that kind

can/should do four things.


1. It can be an exercise in brand-building - people watch this thing

enough times and start to associate Easynet with ISP in the same way

that people might associate IBM with e-business or Hoover with vacuum

cleaners. Orange were considered underdogs when they came to market,

but succeeded through great branding amongst other things.


2. It addresses a sector of the audience who think that ISP is an

enzyme essential to health. In simple terms, it delineates the nature

of the Internet and it's benefits and advantages - and glosses over

the cost, if possible. BT's 'Why?' campaign that touted ISDN as a

teleworking solution was IMHO a good example of this. You know, the TV

advert with the forest and the little girl bleating 'Why?' a lot.


3. It flogs tenner-a-month accounts to people who are cheesed off with

BT/Demon/Freeserve/Dircon/Virgin.Net/etc. I doubt this is worth doing

for economic reasons ie there's not that much money in that market

yet, surely?


4. It addresses the audience who not only know what an ISP is, but

control buying for large companies and will want to know where the

value-add is in the offering: 'What do Easynet do

better/cheaper/faster that the competition?'


Personally, I think the advert succeeds in addressing point 1 to some

extent - but I haven't seen their campaign anywhere else, on TV, in

print or on the Web.


Anyone from Easynet care to illuminate us as to what they are up to?

Also, would anyone care to speculate as to whether consumer Internet

is getting to the stage where it is going to be mass-marketed via TV


etc?


Sajid Mohammed



*For those that care (multimedia types): the reason (I think) it

looked so bad was that it used a fixed 256 colour palette. The end

result being that flat areas of colour looked fine, but people's faces

looked terrible - the video codec itself wasn't bad at all. Having

said that, there was a whopping 15 minutes of FMV and the sound was

crystal-clear, so I guess the trade-off was poor colour.

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