How Is a Honda Element Like a Platypus?
On our way to drop Julian off at school, Julian notices a new billboard that asks the question
What does a Honda Element and a platypus have in common?
Julian is now reading omnivorously, kind of like a platypus, whose food (not reading) diet consists of platypus insect larvae, snails, yabbies, worms, tadpoles and other fauna and shellfish.
Platypi also occasionally eat small frogs, small fish and fish eggs. Yes, "platypi" is a valid plural of platypus, along with "platypuses." A "yabby" is a kind of Australian crayfish.
To get back to my story, like any newly literate second grader, Julian has to read the advertising gambit about the Honda Element and the Platypus over and over again to us.
Julian also notices that the billboard says that if we tune to a certain AM radio frequency (AM 1660 I think) we will get the answer to the Element-Platypus conundrum.
So we dutifully tune our rather powerful car radio to AM 1660 and get nothing, nada, zippo. No signal at the specified frequency.
Julian, who likes order in life even though he knows it often doesn't exist, is upset. We are bemused: how like old-school Madison Avenue to buy an expensive ad placement that doesn't deliver to prospects. What's the point of the billboard if the "call to action" is a dud? How can this possibly compete with the efficiency to advertisers and ease of process of CPC advertising?
"Don't worry," I say to Julian, "I'll Google it and find out how an Element is like a platypus."
Interestingly, when I do Google Honda Element platypus, I don't find what I'm looking for at the top of the natural search results. Instead, I get a bunch of advertising trade rags boasting about how clever an ad campaign the Honda Element and platypus routine is.
Maybe it is a clever campaign if you make your living from brick-and-mortar ad commissions, or if your goal in life is to have your buddies in the ad business think you are swell. But if the goal is to both target a market and to deliver a message, then the Honda Element platypus ads should be on the endangered species list.
According to the Madison Ave accounts of the ads, the radio station is supposed to broadcast a cocktail party conversation between the Honda and the platypus.
But none of these articles tell me the actual content of the cocktail banter. To find out, I needed to visit the Element and Friends site Honda set up.
Fortunately, a CPC ad displayed by Google along side my search results directs me to the right site.
The campaign may not have been such a good idea period as a way to stop the sinking Honda Element sales from further deteriorating. But if it was to exist at all, it should have been online, and highly targeted using CPC—where a call to action can readily be pursued.
It may be a little anticlimactic, but after all this you'd probably like to know what the car and the animal do have in common.
Both the Element and the platypus are "hodgepodges": the car is "part van, part suv, part surf wagon," while the beast has the "bill of a duck and the tail of a beaver."
I can think of a few other commonalties myself: both have numbers that are on the decline, and both are peculiar looking to the point of ugliness. Well, maybe not to the parents of platypi.
Posted by Harold Davis at March 24, 2006 3:12 PM
