Monday 3 December 2007

Infinite Patience

Today's newstabulous Gulf News came shrouded in a four-page wraparound for new company Dubai Infinity Holdings. As, in fact, did a number of today's papers. With little information beyond the usual breathless focus-group mumbo-jumbo that is becoming so popular these days ("an innovative investments enterprise that empowers partners and communities to excel", for instance. Or how about "Our value add is anchored in sharing innovative insights, knowledge, creativity, human capital and strategic direction."), including a tagline of 'Empowering you to excel'.

The company, according to the ad, was 'Born on the 2nd December 2007', but there's nothing I can find in the papers to reflect a launch announcement yesterday.

Curious to learn more, I went to the website given in the ad - given that there's little more information given in the four page advertisement than that I have quoted above, one would be forgiven for perhaps wanting to find out more about quite who it is making all this noise.

The website, brilliantly, consists of a flash animation of the company's logo and the message 'Coming soon'.

The only call to action possible from the advertisement was the move to the website to find out more. By not having more on the website the morning the ad broke the company, whoever it is, has effectively wasted that money by ensuring that those answering its call to action were disappointed.

This, I humbly submit, is not terribly clever marketing. Particularly when even the most stubbornly Luddite marketers are having to recognise the absolute criticality of the Internet.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I got the exact same reaction from the advertisment this morning. Could it be, that this is just a "teaser?"

Alexander said...

It could be, but then we do hear quite a lot from companies whose advertising is simply inadequate justifying it as a 'teaser'. The job of a teaser is to tease. This didn't tease me, it just failed to deliver information or a reason for me to be pleased that I was called to action. If it was a teaser, its job would be to pique the consumer in clicking for more information on the website. Which also failed to carry any information.
More a 'frustrater' than a 'teaser' then...

Seabee said...

It's all about meaningless jargon these days Alexander. The days of actually telling people what you're selling and where they can buy it are long gone I'm afraid.

On websites, I get more and more frustrated at the smartarse ones that take forever to load (thanks Etisalat) and then the fancy flash intro has an 'Enter Site' button - so you have to go through the whole waiting-to-load exercise again. If they make it difficult for me to find out about them I don't bother.

I see they included the appalling 'human capital' too - I posted about that earlier.

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