Every morning, I take the tube to go to work, and I usually always keep a look on the advertising inside the trains. This is purely OFFline marketing and I realized that finally, more & more people are using vanity Urls to track the impact of their offline campaign. I found 2 different ads which I think are interesting to review (sorry for the quality – it’s taken with a 1.5 megapixel mobile phone camera).
SpareRoom (www.spareroom.co.uk)
and Paypal (www.paypal.co.uk)
Let’s look in details now
Spareroom
Creative: I’m not a very visual person, and I have to be honnest with you and admit that I actually saw the message “What would you do with a year’s free rent” only when I was uploading the pic on my computer. (it’s a cut a little on the right – sorry for that). I’m not a big fan of the creative but I have bad taste for this. I doubt that everyone saw the message (I did not at all).
Incentive: In pink, it “explains” the marvellous incentive with a year’s free rent to win (wow cool). I have not seen the big hidden message but the message is pretty clear in that very tiny pink square. Don’t you guys realize that we are on the Tube, usually sat probably 2 meters away from the ad????? The pink square is the Key of the Ad and this is the information which should be used to attract the eyes. Have you heard about “Call to Action”?
Vanity Url: This one is interesting: Have you not realized that a lot of advertising on the tube are using vanity urls just adding “/tube” after their domain name? If there is no incentive to visit that specific url, why would a visitor would add those 5 characters when they reach their browser? A lot of advertisers are using it, but do not create a real incentive to use the url advertised. Spareroom have a real incentive here: there is value added for the prospect to remember that SPECIFIC url. Maybe, the url could have been elaborated a bit more with a simple “/FreeRent”, allthough TUBE is a very easy word to remember.
I typed the url http://www.spareroom.co.uk/tube. The landing page seems to be good. However, I’m very surprised that it actually does not redirect to another page. The big advantage of the vanity url is that you can advertise one url which will 301 redirect to a new url with all the tracking parameters you ideally need.
They did not do aything like that.
To conclude about spareroom, I would have done things completely different and instead of “creating” something trendy, I would have gone straight to the point. The incentive is the key of the Ad. A simple “Win a year’s free of Rent – Visit SpareRoom.co.uk/FreeRent”. BLAM, big message, straight to the point, no “chichi” or creative blah blah. You got the outcome in 1 second and as someone interesting to not pay rent for a year, I’ll probaly have a look next time I reach a computer.
Let’s have a look at Paypal now:
Creative: One more time, I’m not a creative person so I won’t tell you if it looks good or not. However, I can tell if I get the message quickly, and this is very clear what Paypal is about on this ad. Very informative and persuasive ad in my opinion.
Incentive: “£10,000 a week!” highlighted in yellow. Great incentive (wow I can earn a lot of money). We can actually see the incentive. The quality of the pic is not good but we can still read the message, which means we can read it from our seat in the train. This is the point.
Vanity Url: I like it a lot too. www.paypal.co.uk/win10k is a good url to advertise. It pushes the prospects to specifically remember that Url. It is very good.
Regarding Paypal, I don’t have much to say, I just think it’s good work.
Conclusion
Here are 5 rules for good practice for promoting your service and track impact of your advertising in the tube:
- Large characters – We are minimum 2 meters away from the ad.
- CALL TO ACTION!!!!!
- Highlight the important information.
- Vanity Url easy to remember.
- Must have an incentive so the user type the full vanity url.
If you think of other rules to apply, and have different opinions regarding the above advertisement, please share on the comments.
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