Originally Posted by
BlaRo 
As a marketing student then you should understand why it's important to mask the unpleasant details and hidden contracts with services such as these. The whole point of a campaign like this is to lure people in by announcing their features in a satirical manner; whether they can deal with the hidden expenses later comes later. And what's wrong with it? It's campy and cheesy but it still gets their services across. The customer's already been suckered into the stores, and anything from there is the salesmen's job.
As a marketing student I also know that cellphone services is a "shopping" type of service, in that most if not all people will do a lot of homework before they reach the decision of which one they'll choose. They will go to their websites, they will read every bottom line, they will ask friends, they will read magazine reviews and they will look at reference groups before they reach their decision. Somewhere along the way, they will find out all the advantages and disadvantages, regardless of what the promotion campaign says. Mind you, the promotion campaign still plays a huge role on the company's image and the purchasing decision, even if not as much as the quality/price ratio.
EDIT:
Mind you, right now we're talking about promotion for a "shopping" service. The point of that is to get their services into your considerations list so that when you do the research, they're one of the companies you will research. But the point here is not just to make themselves noticed, but to put across why their services are better than that of the competition. They fail at that through this campaign. There's a few steps that go into promoting a product, which is especially true for advertising: 1. The source (company) encodes the message it tries to get across. 2. The message is transmitted through a channel of communication. 3. The message is decoded by the receiver (potential customer).
The flaw lies in how they encoded the message and how the audience decodes it can be quite different. The way they did that was they hid their messages inside this sattire which mocks the fitness infomercials one might see on TV. The reason I say they "hid" the messages is because until the end of the commercial, they don't make these messages apparent. They hid their most important messges, such as "no more access fee" in a context where people pay little attention to what the "show host" is saying, but rather the way he behaves, the way he says it, the way he's dressed, the way he presents it ... etc. The problem comes that, at the decoding point, people don't hear the message that Koodo wants to get across. They laugh at the commercial, they pay attention to all the the wrong things, because that's what sticks out and at the end all they hear is that there's a new cell provider in town named Koodo, but they hear no reason whatsoever to include Koodo in their considerations list.
Last edited by toma_alimosh; May 11th, 2008 at 7:30 PM.
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Jesus Christ toma, you're looking into this ad way too much. It's a tongue-in-cheek spoof of late night informercials, and unlike you it's not taking itself too seriously. I don't know anything about the company or its services itself but the ad is a cheesy spoof of something that's genuinely cheesy, and has nothing to do with "overweight people". The fact that you took that bit so seriously is why you rail against it so much.
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