Corona billboard

While returning from work yesterday, I also saw a billboard for Corona. It had an image a beach scene, looking at the shoreline between two palm trees with two sets of swimsuits hanging on a line between them, drying. The only text on the board read "Online" which sent me in three different directions over my 10 minute taxi home.

First, because Corona is losing share of market and consumption is going down for the first time in ages, I know they've been pushing their AOR Cramer-Krasselt to get going with interactive and online communications. So my first thought was that it was an awareness campaign, telling people that you can find Corona online and being "cute" with the juxtaposition of the brand and all its beautiful beachy images making its way to your screens.

For quite a while I thought about how it's really lame, and it basically takes the idea that Dentyne recently came up with about using the insight of how attached we are to communicating through technology and convinces us to "make face time," a cute way to tell you to chew some gum because a real kiss is much better than that smoochy face on AIM.

But then I realized that I probably went there because of the "curse of knowledge," and I came up with some other interpretation of the ad. I can't really remember it, probably because I was fishing for strategy and distracted.

Then suddenly I realized it was just a really really really BAD play on words. Corona has always been really great at simple image ads, but I've seen some great simple text ads from them, too. I really liked the somewhat similar Dentyne campaign, but this was a huge disappointment, and here's why:

When I first saw the Dentyne hug ad with the text "Friend Request Accepted," I thought it was a really awful classic case of men in suits thinking if they talk the talk, we'll think they're hip. Well, my problem was I was on BART in SF and couldn't read the rest of the text behind the other commuters, and thus completely missed the quick lines about "log off, turn on" and all those little pieces, as well as the "make face time" slogan. As soon as I saw it all, I thought they were really cute, and based in a very real consumer insight.

The Corona ad, on the other hand, is just a play on words, and it's a bit of a stretch if they hoped it would convey their message. Yes, I get that they're trying to say there's "a better way to be online" or whatever, but it felt weak, an almost knee-jerk reaction to the basic idea.

I'm sure there are lots of people who enjoyed this, and perhaps at other times it would have worked, but I think when another category used a similar strategy in a more meaningful way in such a close proximity of time, you look to be lacking a bit.

Cheers to McCann Erickson NY for the Dentyne campaign.