I saw this press ad last week:
There was another version of this press ad, but with Katie Price and Piers Morgan. Same hashtag and endline: #PleaseNotThem / Play Makes It Possible.
I saw these press ads in isolation: I’d seen nothing else from this Lotto ad campaign. My first thought was; I get not wanting the already wealthy (and irritating) to add to their millions… but I don’t believe that Vinnie Jones/Katie Price/Noel Edmonds actually play the lottery. It’s not like they need to … and I don’t believe my one ticket is the thing that would stop them winning, re; ‘Play Makes It Possible’.
However, I’d missed something: there are TV ads, as part of this campaign, which explain the whole #PleaseNotThem concept. The ads show crazy ideas these celebs want to come up with, if they get hold of extra cash. They’re actually quite funny. Here’s the Vinnie Jones one:
So, working backwards, the press ads then made sense to me… but brands / agencies can’t control the order in which you see a campaign, so, to be truly integrated, each part of the campaign (across the different media channels) has to make sense in its own right.
In this case, the press ads didn’t make sense on their own – they were simply a replication of the TV ads in the form of press ads.
Creating an integrated campaign, does not mean simply taking a still image from the TV ad and plonking it on a press ad in the hope that people see each part of the campaign in the correct order: ‘Ta-da! We can call this campaign integrated’
It seems to be a pattern though. The current Just Eat ads (‘I need a Balti!’) use exactly the same script across both TV and radio ads.
Think of the truly integrated ad campaigns of the past; Mastercard ‘Priceless’, Carslberg ‘Probably the best in the world’, KitKat ‘Have a break’.
All of these campaigns showed that they could be represented in different ways, across different media channels, but still stay true to the original concept.
Plonking the TV ad straight into a press ad does not constitute an integrated campaign.