19 Jan 10

Were OAA right to court controversy?

Dan Sear, Account Director, offers his view.

Any regular reader of the trade press will have noticed that the Outdoor Advertising Association (OAA) has been running a campaign on buses and posters to try and prove that outdoor can spark a response. On one level, you can’t question that the campaign (created by start-up agency Beta) has succeeded – the creative stating ‘career women make bad mothers’ has provoked vitriol across the internet community. This has been centred on the mumsnet site, which has seen some outraged users arranging a boycott of Beta’s other clients.

Although the ad has now been pulled, I’m sure that Beta and the OAA are quietly satisfied with the response. Expressions of surprise at the offence caused strike one as disingenuous. However it does raise broader questions on the use of controversial or borderline offensive content in advertising, and whether this will convince the OAA’s target audience (agency folk and marketers) to use outdoor in a new way.

The fact is that it’s pretty easy to court controversy through advertising, and for a brand that is young or edgy there’s no doubt that it can be a successful strategy (see FCUK, WKD, Irn Bru). However I’m not sure what the OAA campaign has demonstrated. The target audience of sophisticated marketing practitioners will see straight through the strategy, and whilst it’s clearly possible to generate a response to outdoor by putting up controversial slogans, that doesn’t help very much if you’re trying to drive response for your risk-averse client. I fear the OAA has succeeded in offending thousands of working women, whilst doing little to make the case for outdoor as a driver of response for more conventional advertisers.