communication is essential to business making and it involves more than the ability to name your product, write a tag line or a press release. It's an intricate, rational and scalable effort and, let's face it, not anyone can do it.

9/18/2008

Orange gone bad

I twitted briefly about Orange's new corporate campaign, I am, which is now being run in full blast on Romanian TV and plastered all over Romanian OOH. And I was preparing this post for a while because, briefly: I HATE IT. There is no magic, no fun, no immediate connection. The communication is bland, indiscriminate, boring. The commercials are like corporate presentation movies, featuring expressionless and uninteresting people. The OOH are stupid, uninsightful, lost in the noise. I HATE IT.

This was the emotional part of the post. Now to explain why the hate and the whining: Orange Romania is the one brand that has managed to open our eyes onto a different type of communication since their faithful encounter with W+K London. I had previously not seen consistency and creativity at work for such a long time. Romanian advertising is a lot about bouts of indiscriminate creative, never coherent, because we grow executions not brand platforms. But Orange was different: they made platforms seamlessly, and proved that creativity was possible with slinkies, string, paper, paints, scissors and socks.

And I assume it all stemmed from this



because it says a lot. It says freedom, it says community, it says friends, it says breaking free. It also says telecom: it speaks about restrictions, groups, communication. And it does all of this with 1 fish in a bowl. It's good.

This one



says nothing using all the people in the world.
I HATE IT.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

True, I can't understand the funeral of the previous brand platform. It made sense. Now we get this all-the-way plain and overused Together we can do it. Boring. Orange was about optimism.

Anonymous said...

This sucks. I didn't got it from the first time and it confused me.

Anonymous said...

i am a pc...

Bogdana Butnar said...

@twotimesbaby LOLOLOLOLOOLOLOLOLOLOL you poor PC ....

Anonymous said...

I don't hate the commercial! Hate would mean getting too involved...
The new communication platoform is global. This year, Leo Burnett lost the Orange account which was taken by Publicis (the agency Orange works with globally)...and we have all seen the results...This is what happens when companies replicate their communication campaigns without taking into account the target, the characteristics of the people they are addressing to...
Romanians aren't moved by concepts like "you are the sum of your experiences", especially when they are poorly executed and...hard to understand...More that that, what's in it for me? A new life philosophy! Wow! I never had one before this campaign! Thank you Orange, what would I have done without you?
I have alwyas considered that maybe Orange should invest less in communication and more in services...now I know they should give up advertising and invest only in services...Money thrown out the window!