Episode 69 - Vienna Tourist Board Ad Reviewed by Reckitt and Tesco
This week’s Advertisers Watching Ads shines a light on a campaign by Vienna Tourist Board, promoting their OnlyFans account. Chosen by our partners Contagious, the ad is certainly intriguing and toes the line between edgy and philosophical, but does it do enough to attract an audience?
What would long-term customers of Vienna’s art museums make of it? Does it cheapen the art or does it open it up to a new generation?
Watch the latest episode to see what our guests Cicero Hennemann (Marketing Technology Lead - Western Europe at Reckitt) and Richard Hall (Head of Value, Membership & Loyalty at Tesco) made of it all.
Transcription
The following is an automated transcript of the file, which is not 100% accurate but will give you a good idea of what was discussed.
Tom Ollerton 0:06
Hello and welcome to Advertisers Watching Ads. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of Automated Creative, and this is a weekly show where brands watch other brands ads and discuss what's good and bad about them. We are brought to you this week as ever by our friends at Contagious, who have helped choose the ad this week, so please go and check those guys out after the show. But before we get to this week's ad, let's meet this week's guests.
Cicero Hennemann 0:30
I'm Cicero. I'm the Marketing Technology Lead at Reckitt.
Richard Hall 0:34
And hello, my name is Richard Hall. I work at Tesco. I'm the Head of Campaign for Membership, Loyalty, and General Merchandise.
Tom Ollerton 0:41
Fantastic, guys. Thanks for joining us today. Let's see this week's ad.
Richard Hall 1:13
So we just watched a piece of content produced by the Vienna Tourist Board promoting a, access only site of OnlyFans, which is a website you can sign up to to access content through restricted, restricted space. And they are promoting essentially a suite of nudes through the ages, which at the moment are unable to be promoted on social media platforms.
Tom Ollerton 1:42
And Cicero. What was your first response when you saw this campaign?
Cicero Hennemann 1:46
So I was at The Louvre this weekend, so I was thinking, "Why should this museum associate themselves with OnlyFans?" I think it, you know, it's very edgy to come in and try to appeal to, to that younger audience. People, probably on the 25-34 bracket that would be interested and overlap between OnlyFans, and art. And I think also probably they wanted to do something beyond promoting just the art, is to get a lot of PR out of it. And I think they succeeded.
Tom Ollerton 2:27
And so, Richard, was that your view of it, that this was a clever bit of PR? Or do you think this is their attempt at a legitimate way of sharing some of their galleries content that they can't show elsewhere?
Richard Hall 2:42
With COVID and the restrictions that's placed on country, in the city, and clearly tourism act as a major factor. They are doing two things here. One, they're trying to promote the best that Vienna has to offer. Two, but two, I think they're trying to tell some really sort of pertinent sort of philosophical questions, in fact, that people and not just asked now, but through the ages on who has the right to censor, who makes the decision around, what we do, and don't see where that content is a fantastic, beautiful painting or whether it's a piece of content created today.
Tom Ollerton 3:14
And so, Cicero, this is interesting to know that you've been at The Louvre recently. Did you feel that this was a, a clever bit of marketing for the gallery itself? Or is it a bit of a dad joke or is this a bit cheap? Is it cheapening their own brand in some way?
Cicero Hennemann 3:30
Associating art to that brand, I do find that uninspiring, right? Because it caters to a different audience, and I think it was pretty pragmatic from the Vienna Board. Obviously, they're not The Louvre, so their brand might not suffer the same damage, right? I don't think other institutions would, you know, put themselves out there and associate themselves with such a, I think it can be borderline controversial company.
Tom Ollerton 4:00
The art gallery itself is fundamentally a relatively small business, and they have all of their content already pre-made for them. So they're in a unique position to do this, right? Because of the nature of the business, because of the nature of the content and the size of their business. But is there anything for brands to learn here, Cicero?
Cicero Hennemann 4:19
For a big brand, is, is not a great territory to put yourself in, but if you are a smaller brand or if you have less to lose on then you had, when you had got that PR out of it, right? I don't think for, for big brands, you know that edginess would pay off. And I think also the type of artists that lend itself to the association with it are probably more modern. So you are able to, you know, in their own viewpoints to associate themselves, whereas you probably wouldn't put David from Michelangelo in the same space, right. So it's also more, probably more obscure, a more modern artist that went into that more crude aspects of the topic.
Richard Hall 5:09
I'm not sure I agree because I think that, you know, when I think about what art's, role art plays in our world, I think it does, hopefully two things, it helps to make you feel an emotion and it makes you ask questions. And you know, in that context, when you think about Vienna and the Vienna Tourism brand, what relevance and what role do they have to play here? Well, they probably think that they are trying to do exactly that. Trying to get people to ask questions and feel emotion about a really, really important topic and say, "You know, as a brands, what can we learn?" By first making sure that we're, we're relevant in the space that we're playing with. A brand is to be relevant to the consumer context in which it's operating in.
Tom Ollerton 5:49
So what would have made this better?
Richard Hall 5:51
Put some form of audio track to this just to make it more engaging as a piece of content. And then secondly, something I just read about actually, that those people that did subscribe to Vienna's 18+ content on OnlyFans then received a Vienna kind of city card or admission ticket to see one of the art pieces of artwork. And I think that the lesson there is they could have made it better with a much clearer call to action and connecting that kind of online experience with a real life physical payback is something that I'm a big fan of. So that definitely could have made it better. So a bit more engaging, really means the senses, and also connected to the real world.
Cicero Hennemann 6:26
I'll echo what Richard said. It wasn't clear, "what do I do next?" Kind of thing, is like, and people might not feel super comfortable on logging into the platform of OnlyFans and so on, right? So I think it does the awareness piece, but I would be interested to understand what is the actual element that actually drive people to know the place or see the art, right? And I think it might have had that initial bang effect, but you know, people will not really go and see it, right. So knowing what you could do about it or visit or something else would, would definitely, you know, done that the whole funnel approach. I think what Richard was alluding to, right? So how do you do that with the big bang and then actually bring footfall no matter when right after pandemic and so on.
Tom Ollerton 7:20
And do you think there's any chance that they may alienate their core audience or the audience that already love them? I'm going to make some assumptions here, but a gallery visitor of a certain age picks up on a link to OnlyFans, and then, "Oh, I wonder what that is." And then they arrive at the website without really understanding it and maybe not even arriving at their at their page, or even if they do over their page, "Oh, that's interesting. I wonder what else is here?" Is there a potential backlash here? Is there? Are they being in any way insensitive?
Richard Hall 7:52
Well, I don't think so. I don't think that's the intention. If someone's a passionate art lover and an appreciate that medium, then you would hope that they would see beyond just the the platform they've used to engage it, like the fact that they're trying to engage a wider audience around those two things. A response to the art world, but also asking some pretty important questions around how we can and can't view different types of content in all its glorious form. I would hope they'd appreciate the effort on behalf of the tourism board at the end.
Tom Ollerton 8:23
How about you, Cicero? Do you think a conservative audience are going to forgive them for what they've done here?
Cicero Hennemann 8:27
I think, I think it's a false association that OnlyFans is only for pornography, right? And I've been into the platform and I see that there's regular content creators. But obviously, what catches the headlines for OnlyFans is that, right? I think it's a it's a fine line. But I do think people who are into arts and especially nudity art, don't, wont get too bothered about it. It's, I think it's more so over the long term effect. If they really wanted to acquire, you know, people who would be coming again and again to, to the gallery in itself might be an issue, but I think to drive people in to visit Vienna in general, right? And I think that's the role that the tourist, tourist board wants to drive is just like people come to Vienna, right? I think it was pretty successful.
Tom Ollerton 9:22
So we're at the end of the episode now and we need to vote on how good this campaign was. So I'm going to ask you to vote and give it a score out of five. So three, two, one.
Three and a four. That is a high-scoring ad. Congratulations, Vienna. And guys, Richard, Cicero, thanks so much for your time.
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