Summary
It is getting tougher and tougher to break-through with marketing messaging and agencies must be creative and think differently. But does breaking the law and spraying graffiti properly target an audience, or get the message out in an effective way? Or is the message lost altogether? In this case, the question has to be asked if the effect was more damage than good, or is any publicity, good publicity?
Analysis
Building brand is key for any business. A big part of that process is recognition. However, a brand must have attributes and to a great extent personalty. In fact, key to building brand is making a promise and most experts would say at minimum living up to that promise. In the article, the agency is said to comment on a blog about the graffiti approach that “[i]t is time for change and for clients to get more from their communications; it is time for frankness about what is really working and what isn’t. We fuse audience motivation, brand truth and communications experience to create the perfect connection.” This is a promise, and one they do not appear to live up to. In fact, it appears to be what gives rise to much of the anger and ridicule that ensues.
The agency is positioning itself as a new kind of agency, a rebel agency - a cool, hip agency that will fuse audience motivation with a brand truth and communication. But they have not. There is no truth in what they did.
Like it or not - graffiti is a true art form. While illegal in most places, it is created by those who are expressing themselves - a message that is clear to its audience, one that is very clear to the intended. There is no need for those that created it to announce that they created art or why.
The fact that the agency chose graffiti in itself could have been an interesting marketing approach used metaphorically. Using it literally appears to have backfired by breaking the very promise they made to create a brand truth in communications, fused with audience motivation. Instead they made the audience (a very broad one) annoyed at best and possibly angry, and the agency appeared silly and ineffective in the end. There is an old saying that any publicity is good publicity - that does not hold true when building brand.
