The man wakes up to realise the babe he carried last night is not on the bed with him. Where is she? She’s somewhere in the house watching the TV. Meanwhile, the man can’t believe what he’s seeing as the lady has transformed from ‘ordinary to extraordinary’. This isn’t shown but told in the video.
The viewers are also told, not through any of the characters but through distracting texts shown on the screen, the man had the previous day furnished his home with Moto Mart. The one minute thirty-one seconds video simply says nothing and communicate nothing about the product being advertised – MotoMart.
@pengmanmodel never expered what he got when he furnished his home from Motomart ?
Transforming spaces from ordinary to extraordinary is what we do best @motomartnig
Motomart is your one stop shop for Luxury and Affordable Furniture, Sanitary wares and Building materials. pic.twitter.com/QnQLR9isip
— MotomartNg (@motomartnig) December 2, 2020
The only advertisement in the video is the accompanying text which reads:
“@pengmanmodel never experred (sic!) what he got when he furnished his home from Motomart. Transforming spaces from ordinary to extraordinary is what we do best @motomartnig. Motomart is your one-stop-shop for Luxury and Affordable Furniture, Sanitary wares and Building materials.”
While the accompanying text says Motomart’s speciality is ‘transforming spaces from ordinary to extraordinary’, the transformation the viewers read (not see) in the video is not of spaces but of a certain lady.
The business of advertising is to woo customers and clients to a product or service. In doing so, the advertiser must employ a series of creative and artistic energy to convince the target audience.
This should be the case for every advertising medium whether print, or radio, or television, or digital. Invariably, all good advertisers are artists just like every good advertisement is a product of art. This underlines the relevance of art to advertising. But there are artists and there are pretend-artists.
Every work of art – poem, fiction, drama, video skit, movie, photography, painting, sculpture, etc. – is a form of argument. Argument? Yes! And such argument must be complete in itself such that captions, accompanying texts, author’s notes, etc. become really unnecessary.
The same goes for advertisement whether it is a billboard, a handbill, a video skit, a radio jingle, a newspaper or magazine ad, etc. A billboard advertising an amala restaurant, for instance, should not need anybody standing beside it telling passers-by about the same service being advertised by the board.
The message (the argument) on the billboard must be able to convince the prospective patron of the restaurant that they would get the best service from the restaurant being advertised. The same should be for the video ad or any other kind of advertisement.
So, one is inclined to ask what and where is the argument in the Peng Man’s MotoMart’s ad? It is a very poor example of how not to advertise.
Or, maybe not. There is no such thing as bad publicity, as the popular saying goes.
The video ad in spite of the poor reception it gets on Twitter has 21 thousand views, 590 retweets, 149 likes and 113 comments. In context, the most engaged post of MotoMart before this got 84 views, one comment, one like, and no retweet.
It is safe to conclude that the advertisement achieves its aim, after all, as it takes the advertised product and service to the people. Whether the advertisement has convinced the people about the MotoMart furniture is the question MotoMart itself will answer after the company has taken stock of the rate of patronage following the Peng Man’s advertisement.
