Campaign Falling Flat? Replace Attitude with Altitude

This ad has been running in my local paper lately.

It speaks of a Secret place with golf balls, attractive people who eat outside and race cars. I would like to go to this place. Oh look, it’s the Central Counties! The what? I’ve never heard of the Central Counties. That must be why it’s (they’re?) a Secret.

Or maybe they’re new. Maybe Ontario annexed them from Michigan or Quebec. No, that’s silly. It must be a rebrand.

But a rebrand of what? And why? There are plenty of reasons to rebrand something, usually involving needing some distance from a less-than-optimal brand experience. Union Carbide and ValuJet are good examples of brands quietly discarded by new owners wanting to hang out with a better crowd. But what could these lakes and shopping bags possibly have done to deserve not only a rebrand but also no actual explanation in their marketing materials?

Oh, I get it: the Secret is the gimmick here. I need to enter a contest to find out where this place is. To the Web!

Oh dear. More mysteries! Where’s Nancy Drew when you need her? The map banner above is not helpful. Neither are the images that scroll in after it, including pleasant shots of hiking trails and potters but not one suggests where the heck this place is.

These people can have my contest entry when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I’m scrolling down.

Golf. Water. Food. Dolls. Got it. Still don’t know where it is. Starting not to care a lot.

Oh, an ad for something near Orangeville. So is that a Central County? Is that all of them? Is that even a county? The Twitter thing on the right helpfully asks if I live in the Central Counties and invites me to enter that damn contest again. I’m fairly sure I don’t live in them or it. My tax bill indicates this is the case.  Apparently there are 5,700 Facebook users who are happy to like what I’m suspecting is a subdivision of townhouses in Narnia. Let’s click.

The Events page is chock full of things to do and lots of places to do them but still doesn’t tell us anything about the counties. The Experiences tab offers lots of great weekend and golf packages in lots of places but doesn’t tell me anything about the counties.

Well thank goodness for the About page. It reveals, at long last, that Central Counties is the marketing name for Durham and York Regions and something called The Hills of Headwaters, which is in turn a marketing name for some other places that probably don’t know they’re the Central Counties.

This is where the agency that came up with this gem ought to give the Central Counties some of their money back. The concept is sound enough: Ontario’s Best Kept Secret (which I had always thought had to do with why the bars close so early).  Clever, catchy, all the right things.

But when it takes a print ad, a website and four clicks to find out something as basic as the definition of the product, we have a failure to communicate. And that failure is born of a lack of perspective. Had the marketers or their agency zoomed on up to 50,000 feet where the rest of us are as we sip our tea and peer at the paper, they might have caught the fact that they were over-working the concept.

Or they might not have. That’s why we have focus groups. In addition to keeping bad Thai restaurants in business, focus groups catch things like forgetting to include basic information, making it difficult to find basic information and alienating your target market by hiding said information behind a contest wall.

Now that I know I live in the Central Counties, I’m off to find those attractive people eating their dinner outside. I just can’t be bothered cooking after all that work.

Bizmarketer is Elizabeth Williams
Follow me on Twitter @bizmkter
or email escwilliams@gmail.com