Trevor Noah is really big. Really popular. Cell C, not so much. Kinda annoying actually - the clever jokes and branding don't compensate for the really shit service.
I admit I fell for it, ok. But I haven't then gotten on my high horse to try and show just how morally outraged I am at being duped, like many Twitterers have done, apparently.
What am I talking about? Cell C's new marketing campaign/rebranding exercise/boadroom group-wank.
A few days ago a YouTube clip of a small part of one of Trevor's shows - where he lambastes Cell C - started to become very popular. So much so that, a few days later, Cell C took out full page ads in the dailies apologising to all Sef Efrikens, and promising big new things in the near future. A victory for social media. All hail God Trevor!
Turns out.... they were working together all along! Cell C and ol' Trev had the whole thing planned, and all was revealed at something called a media junket (press conference? Glad I didn't study marketing) yesterday. Cell C also revealed their shiny new investments, and made lots of promises, apparently.
I think that's great - good on both of them - PROVIDED it does actually improve Cell C's service, and maybe bring prices down a bit. Trevor's routines could do with some freshening up too, now that I think about it.
Quite why everyone is so upset that Trevor has 'sold out' is a little beyond me.
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4 comments:
I think people (me included) dont like the hijacking of mainstream media for marketing purposes. That, and we dont like being duped, especially over something so dumb.
A similar thing happened here a few years back... some impossibly hot blonde appeared in all the papers and on the news one day in the 'human interest' section trying to find the hot guy she met on a train. Said dude apparently left his jacket on the train and now she was trying to find him to give it back, and maybe fall in love. She had also 'set up' a blog that looked like a professional website trying to be an amateur website.
I am some kind of genius, so i never fell for it, but thousands did, and there was a huge uproar when she was shown to be an actress working for an ad agency working for some kak mens clothing brand (if you wear their jackets, hot chicks will fall in love with you on hot, smelly, filthy trains). The issue was that they used mainstream media (TV, papers) to get the story out, not youtube. The media companies may have made the outcry look bigger than it was (because they had actually lost out on revenue and were clearly pissed), but people were really angry, and a similar thing has not happened since. I think it's bullshit, but at the end of the day there was a public backlash which seems to have kept the idea in check.
it's just lank effective marketing, and will also provide strong incentives for every cell c employee to try and live up to the new promises made.
if anyone will lose out it's trevor noah himself, because people seem weirdly upset that he's leveraging his fame to make some good corporate dosh. more power to him I say. And I also say, stupid Saffers, stop being so righteous.
I think it was a clever campaign, but they really should never have revealed it.
The impact of the campaign came because there was an unexpected level of sincerity in the promises made by Cell C. This made the promises seem more credible than your average marketing campaign for corporate change.
This unusual level of sincerity led to the large exposure of the campaign. So it was a success on two levels; exposure and effect (how believable it was).
When they admitted that it was contrived, they completely lost the benefit of the latter level. It is suddenly reduced in the mind of the public to just another ad campaign of potentially empty promises. Even worse actually, because the public see the campaign as a lie, and thus expect that all the promises are lies too. They still keep the influence of the exposure, but that's it.
They should have rather kept it a secret, run the risk of it getting leaked, and only exposed the campaign once certain operating targets were met.
The fundamental premise of using social media to run a marketing campaign is to be genuine. Cell C and Trevor failed to be genuine and that is the key mistake they made (besides choosing a new logo that is direct infringement of the international copyright logo). Okay - I have been to enough conferences etc discussing this... Peace out.
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