Wednesday, August 09, 2006

A Simply Terrible Campaign

What would you consider to be your perfect online campaign? Pete Lerma over at ClickZ can't seem to get enough of himself and his campaign called SimplyPerfect.com

Peter boasts about this "exciting" campaign that "allows visitors to post text, audio, and video messages to weigh in on the question, 'What is perfection?'". My response is simply: not this site, not by a longshot. I found this website simply impossible to use at first and by the time I found out what it did I didn't care. Most web surfers would have left long before that time in any case.

When I go to the webpage it asks me to enter my year of birth. What is the point? I entered 1233 which means I'm almost 800 years old (crap, where have the years gone?). What teenager dosn't realize that they need to be over 21 - why bother, really?

I then get into the site and I have no idea what to do. There are no instructions on what you should be doing on this site, no help features or an explanation of what the point of this site is. Even Pete admits that it has "less-than-typical (but, we hope, intuitional) navigation cues". Sorry - it just didn't cut it. Here are just a few of my complaints:
  • The debate boxes and bottles are so small that you can't read them unless you scroll over them.
  • If you able to figure out that you need to click on the boxes that say something like "The Comic, The Movie" this will actually disable the rest of the bottom navigation. If you clicked on these boxes by mistake, then you'll probably be even more confused.
  • Voting - this took a while for me to get. Why not have a subtitle underneath "Perfection is Debatble" like "Vote for your version of perfection". I still missed what the debate has to do with "Simply perfect" and alcohol. To help the user out, I would have added a most popular debate, most recently added debate or best audio or video submitted.
All that work that your team did I think was a waste. It was a good idea and may win some awards and some guest speaking spots but good luck getting any real conversions that will result in sales.

Chad H.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know. I liked the site. From a Flash perspective, it's pretty f'ing amazing. The data integration alone is impressive, not to mention the physics involved with the nav. But that's all nerd talk...

Chad said...

Thanks for your comment. It's funny. I was in New York today and I saw a huge wall ad for this campaign. I have to say that I agree that the overall campaign is done well in the way that it mixes online and online and offline marketing. In addition, I agree that the technolgy behind the website is fantastic (coming from someone who has helped create many flash campaigns), but the usability and the idea of matching onlines debates to the campaign just didn't work for me. It seemed like the marketing people came up with the online idea speerately from teh message of the campaign and tried to fuse them together which just didn't work for me. Howeveer, you are right - congrats on the great use of Flash. Chad H.

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