Well-known skincare brand Simple recently launched its ‘Kind
to City Skin’ campaign, with the aim of educating consumers about the
detrimental effects urban living can have on our skin.
It’s an interesting push for the brand, eschewing the usual skin-type-based
advertising in favour of products tailored to lifestyle. Based on the amount of
on- and off-line discussion generated, the campaign has so far been performing
well.
Simple has set up an ‘Advisory Board’ on their website,
consisting of dermatologists, nutritionists and psychiatrists, and is shedding
articles providing skin-care advice. This is combined with considerable
paid-for media presence on TV and in
print, as well as various outdoor formats, with ads and content videos also
running on social media.
The campaign has been targeted geographically, with a
presence at core high footfall commuter hot-spots, running in free-sheets and across
multi-format key placement outdoor sites. It highlights the skin detriments
which can result from daily commuting – or, as Simple call it, ‘commuter skin’.
With an estimated cool £7m laid down for this campaign, this appears to be a
well-rounded strategy, thoroughly considered from all angles.
Which makes it simply confusing to see that, having chosen
to take over the huge 40x3m digital motion site at Waterloo Station, Simple
have then decided to run with 4 consecutive copies of the same ad.
Given the size and advertising power of this giant digital
surface – and the 17-minute average dwell time of its captive audiences – it
seems a real waste to feature 4 repeated consecutive creatives. There is so much
that can be done here!
This is even more a pity given generic content of these
particular ads in the first place. The irony of using a highly-polished digital
surface to advertise a ‘city skin’ campaign could have been used to great
effect here, but it appears lost to the advertisers. Lazy, Simple, lazy!
Or was it, perhaps, a touch… over-Simplified?
#PurePoint
