Slicecast

Poor AT&T in the US, it seems that they have been talking the talk but not walking the walk. And the blogging world is not impressed. Let me explain what has happened. I read on Sean Coon's blog via AdRants that SBC have recently bought AT&T (might be old news but to me its new, but I live in Asia..) and the new outdoor campaign claims that "Blogging. Delivered." - a fair thing to say, and similar to the old "Internet. Powered by Cisco" campaign.

But the blogging community have picked up that a search on the AT&T corporate site for "Blog" does not yield any results. Oh dear.

This is bad for a two reasons as I see it, let me explain:

1. Integrated Marketing failure. At the very least AT&T should have put some kind of digital content in place to tie the atl into their brandsite, for most brands this would be the minimum requirement of a big brand campaign such as this.
2. Look at your target audience and realise what you're talking about. Blogging right now is still fairly niche, it's cool, but niche. Those involved in blogging are early adopters, which means they are more likely to be online, digitally savvy and ready to voice an opinion. Lets say for example the campaign had suggested "Email. Delivered." - the same comments would have applied, but would have largely been ignored, because hey - everyone sends email right? Caveat: of course this campaign may be multi pronged, and this message might exist..

Of course it's difficult for an agency to pick up on something like this in the planning stage - most likely for the atl agency it sounded brilliant - think of the conversations: "hey, brief was to demonstrate AT&T deliver internet traffic, how can we crystalise that?" "dude, blogging is cool right now!" "yeah, blogging powered by at&t" "nah, cisco did powered, how about delivered?" "agreed". It's another example where what may seem like a small mistake in the campaign strategy could well lead into a PR disaster for AT&T - from most likely an innocent mistake in the planning..

Still - think about the fun that could come from this - vis a vis the Mastercard ad parodies:

Creating the billboard campaign - $25m

Forgetting to add website content - $0

Getting flamed by bloggers - Priceless

Feeling a bit evil today!