[col-sect][column]Why is this ad ineffective? Note that I’m not asking why it’s stupid or why it sucks, but specifically, why is it ineffective? Because it is relying on an intermediate and unrelated (and therefore off-message) mental leap to make what should be a simple and direct association. The direct association is simply that the BlackBerry Bold on AT&T is fast; in this case the focus is on non-business consumer use: fast surfing, fast downloading, fast sharing. That’s it. That’s all. That’s the core message. Everything in this ad outside of this extremely straight-forward core message is an unnecessary  distraction which is coming at the cost of using ad time effectively to hammer home the core message. So why then am I left with a mental image of a sprinter with cartoon legs? Even if the intent was to tie-in with the Olympics five months ago, the real point (the fast… and by deduction, how/why the device and/or the network is fast) is left unsupported. The sprinter is fluff. He is dead air contributing nothing to the message and yet the message is left half told. 

The idea is so bush-league. It’s embarrassing. It’s like what some cluster-fuck college marketing class would come up with. The mental leap supposedly works like this: “Hmm, well the BlackBerry Bold and the AT&T network are fast. Hmm, what else is fast? How about a sprinter? Yeah, he’s fast. And the phone is fast… so there you go! There’s your hook.” But it’s so weak. The association the ad is intending between ‘download speed’ and ‘fast’ hinge on an abstraction. The sprinter is indirect. It’s an intermediate association and also a verbal dependence on the word fast for two things for which speed is conceived of completely differently. People’s brains don’t work like that; it’s too far a leap and too abstract for an audience that is not actively playing word association along at home with 30 second spots between segments of Gossip Girl. [/column][column]If the phone’s data flow is fast, just show the fucking fast phone doing something fast. Show me how it’s fast. Show internet downloads. Show stuff zipping around on the phone. Show how quick it is to attach a file to an email to forward to somebody. Keep it straight-forward and clean. But at least do that. You have to actually show the phone doing something fast. But no. We have less than four seconds of actual BlackBerry use shown at a scale too small to actually see what’s happening. And yet we have Mr Unknown Sprinter with the funky legs and some lame dialogue, but no real demo of the phone being fast; no evidence at all that it’s fast other than his user-experience testimonial.

The sprinter is less than useless; he’s an unintentional negative association. When I think of data flowing I think of something that’s moving a hell of a lot faster than any sprinter on Earth. I think of something that travels like light or at least like electricity. Like fast. Like current through cable. Like radio waves. Something faster than I can actually see. A sprinter is very slow when compared to my existing mental image of data flow. So the sprinter works against the core message by planting a slower image in my head than I had before watching the ad. Not only is it an unrelated and very weak distraction, it’s actually counter-message. Nice. Very clever.[/column][/col-sect]

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