The Photographic Adventures of Nick Turpin.com – I don’t get it
I’ve been looking at the new website to promote the Samsung Pixon for ten minutes now and I can’t figure out what it does. Apparently it’s some kind of way to promote the features of the new Pixon phone but to me it looks like a photo of somebody doing a delivery to the Coop.
The URL is quite long but that’s OK because I just clicked on a link and didn’t have to type it in. According to NMA the site “will also be promoted by an international ad campaign” so it will be interesting to see how many people actually take the time to type all 40 letters of the domain name.
The site doesn’t really tell me much about Nick Turpin or why we should be interested in him (edit: I just found the page, perhaps tiny blue text on a black background isn’t the best choice for a menu?). A quick Google search tells me that he is a fairly well known street photographer.
Why such a complicated campaign? Have they not read Don’t Make Me Think?
Post category: Marketing Tweet
Patrick Altoft is Director of Search at Branded3, a Leeds SEO & Digital Agency specialising in SEO, Web Design, Development & Social Media.
Comments
Read the 6 comments below, or add your own!
I kind of get it, although I’m a keen photographer so maybe I’m more within the target demographic. Also it took me a little while before it clicked, so it could be more obvious – I maybe wouldn’t have looked so long if you haven’t piqued my interest! The remit was clearly “we’ve got a new phone and we need to use social media to promote it to make us look funky” – they’ve tried to plug every different service into the mashup. I think by doing that they’ve spread themselves too thin and made it too complex, leaving out the basic stuff like “why am I here” and “what am I”?
To me it’s a Web 2.0 way of saying you can take pictures with our phone of anything, anywhere at anytime. It’s fair to say that’s true of any camera phone, but the quirkiness of the campaign should ensure some viral success.
Of course, the quality and style of the pictures are enhanced by the fact they’re taken by a street photographer and no doubt in reality 99% of pictures taken on a similar phone will be slightly blurred and contain the odd finger and thumb in the corner of them.
Funnily enough I spotted that ad on Hotmail last night, and being a keen photographer myself I actually clicked it (rare event!)
Well, what can I say, it’s a pretty lame photo, I wanted to see more, but that’s it, one solitary, poorly framed and bland photograph. There weren’t any others there at all which was disappointing. Could it be a nice bit of link bait! Big advertising campaign, everyone links to it saying ‘look at this crap!’
I’m glad I’m not alone when I was informed about this site with like you say,quite possibly the longest URL ever!
I suppose at they are trying something different, however it goes and what it means!
Hello
I am the chap that wrote this idea for Samsung. It is quite enlightening to hear your comments as we have tried very hard to make it really clear. But there you go, you are right we have tried to get everything in there and maybe the first photo is not the strongest picture ever taken but hopefully it will get better and better.
To make it clear this is a photographic experiment, the public can click anywhere on Nick’s latest photo and the area with the most clicks at the end of a 2 hour voting period will then become his next subject. He will then travel to try and capture a shot about that subject – the first results turned out that people just clicked on the blokes arse in the shot, surprise surprise – so Nick flew to Montcuq in France (translates to ‘My ass’ ) to get his next shot. For a big company like Samsung to sign off an idea that is pretty much unknown each day was a result for us. But it is too late for me to incorporate any of your feedback now as we are ‘live’ so to speak. Maybe you will give it another go and send him somewhere dire to get your own back.
cheers
dave
Hi Dave.
Fantastic to see your comments – glad to see Samsung are keeping an eye on this.
Your comment has explained the concept to me better than the website did and it seems like an interesting idea.