Prompt's TechBlog
Tech Marketing for Chimps
05 July 2006
Posted by Lance Concannon
On the way to the office the other day I was flicking through the pages of Metro on the train when I saw something exciting: A cryptic teaser advert for a website, featuring a picture of a monkey wearing headphones and a slogan asking if I was an 'iChimp'. Am I an iChimp? I don't know, but I certainly needed to find out. So being a sucker for any kind of product endorsed by a monkey (or great ape) I ripped the ad out of the paper and took a look at the site, www.idont.com, just as soon as I got to the office.
The site has all the hallmarks of a 1998 dotcom disaster in waiting. Pointless animated intro movie that you can't click through, excessive and unnecessary use of Flash throughout the site, pages of meaningless content which carefully avoid explaining what all this is actually about.
Underneath all the faux-counter-culture nonsense, dismal attempts at humour and general pointlessness, there's a page which finally gets to the point, which is this: It's an MP3 player. It kind of looks like an iPod, but it's not, no, this is different from an iPod. If you buy an iPod, you're a sheep, but if you buy this MP3 player, you're cool, free-thinking and independent, apparently. Yawn.
Are we going to start doing this sort of thing again in tech marketing? Really? We all know what happened last time people started spending buckets of cash on flashy websites that bury any useful content they might have under a pile of painfully hip new-meeja garbage.
On top of everything else, I find it hard to believe that this kind of site will actually work for the client. I can't imagine many people looking at this site and rushing out to buy one of Sanddisk's Sansa e200 players off the back of it - I think they'd sell a lot more by using the ad-space in Metro for a straightforward advert extolling the many undeniable virtues of their product.
I shudder to think just how miniscule the hit rate for this campaign must be, when you look at the number of barriers it places between the consumer who first notices the advert and any real information about the product. And if the buzz on the blogosphere is anything to go by, there are a lot of people out there who are positively offended by this 'marketing poorly dressed up as anti-conformity' nonsense.
The site has all the hallmarks of a 1998 dotcom disaster in waiting. Pointless animated intro movie that you can't click through, excessive and unnecessary use of Flash throughout the site, pages of meaningless content which carefully avoid explaining what all this is actually about.
Underneath all the faux-counter-culture nonsense, dismal attempts at humour and general pointlessness, there's a page which finally gets to the point, which is this: It's an MP3 player. It kind of looks like an iPod, but it's not, no, this is different from an iPod. If you buy an iPod, you're a sheep, but if you buy this MP3 player, you're cool, free-thinking and independent, apparently. Yawn.
Are we going to start doing this sort of thing again in tech marketing? Really? We all know what happened last time people started spending buckets of cash on flashy websites that bury any useful content they might have under a pile of painfully hip new-meeja garbage.
On top of everything else, I find it hard to believe that this kind of site will actually work for the client. I can't imagine many people looking at this site and rushing out to buy one of Sanddisk's Sansa e200 players off the back of it - I think they'd sell a lot more by using the ad-space in Metro for a straightforward advert extolling the many undeniable virtues of their product.
I shudder to think just how miniscule the hit rate for this campaign must be, when you look at the number of barriers it places between the consumer who first notices the advert and any real information about the product. And if the buzz on the blogosphere is anything to go by, there are a lot of people out there who are positively offended by this 'marketing poorly dressed up as anti-conformity' nonsense.
# posted by Lance Concannon at 5:42 PM 
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