When you see a particularly painful headline out there, it’s easy to blame the writer.
However, every ad — good or bad — has a long list of accomplices, without whom it could never, ever see the light of day.
The bad headline I focus on today is the one that RIM has proudly wrapped around their new PlayBook tablet: Amateur hour is over.
Let us first admire the irony of it.
Just Google “PlayBook review” and pick a review at random. There’s an 80% chance it’ll be a negative one. Clearly, the overall sense is that PlayBook is missing too many important features to be a serious choice — especially for business people, for whom it was supposedly designed.
The fact that Playbook is incapable of doing email without connecting to a BlackBerry is a shortcoming beyond imagination.
The inappropriateness of a half-finished tablet being released under the banner Amateur hour is over is obvious. What fascinates me is how things like this come to be.
Like the good ol’ U.S. Constitution, agencies are built on a system of checks and balances. While creative people are encouraged to go wild and break all the rules, they’re rarely trusted with the keys to the car. There is a system in place to ensure that an ad can’t run if it is (a) bad, (b) off-strategy or (c) legally risky.
The approvals process varies by agency, but a major ad campaign normally must navigate quite an obstacle course. It would have to get by at least one creative director, the account director, strategy people and probably a senior agency executive as well. That’s before it even gets to the client, who has their own winding road of approvals leading up to the VP of Marketing and CEO.
Given this, it’s nothing less than mind-boggling that a campaign can make it out into the world when it’s carrying a flashing neon sign that says “please kill me.”
Against a nearly perfect competitor — a slick, polished, 2.0 iPad — and lacking basic business functionality, RIM positions PlayBook as a business device under the theme Amateur hour is over.
Stunning.
It’s also damning. Because the entire conga line of approvers who had to sign off on this should have known better. It’s as much a lapse in common sense as it is a lapse of strategy.
So I leap to defend my fellow writer, the person who came up with these unfortunate words. Maybe it was just a bad hangover. A sprawling organization of marketing people, agency and client, can take credit for RIM’s latest black eye.
That having been said, the whole bunch of them should send a note down to RIM’s engineering department with the message: “please don’t do that again.”
