During a brief, but ultimately successful, shave this morning, I had the radio on as usual. Listening to XFM as I sometimes do, you get the horror of radio ads.
I heard one today for the FSA and specifically Money Made Clear. It was an expensive ad, known names doing the voice-overs, that comedian bloke that often gets naked on TV and Kevin Whateley. They paid a lot for it.
When it came to the end, they clearly want you to go the website to find out more. In the not so distant past, this would have meant the ad trotting out the usual hamfisted “double-u, double-u, double-u, dot, blah-di-blah, forward slash banana-pants*”. But this ad didn’t do this, they just said search for “Money made clear”.
Now, this is maybe to save ad time (and therefore money) but I suspect advertisers may have discovered that no one ever remembers the URL from such a spiel.
Trouble is, its a little open to exploitation. The poor sods at the FSA spend a fortune on radio ads to get search terms into all our heads and all you have to do is beat them at SEO for “Money made clear” and collect the hits. Isn’t that right you clever people at two unnamed building societies (try it, you’ll see what I mean!). Not to mention the cheapo loan company that appears to have paid for a sponsored link for that search term.
Does suggest that more work is required to integrate traditional ad media with the web.
* copyright, my daughter