Entrepreneur Dick Smith’s ad to promote his Australian made products has been banned from broadcast, just shy of its intended Australia Day launch.
A few questions spring to mind.
The first of which is: is it a good ad?
Well, it’s effective in that you’ll remember it. But, I’m not 100% sure it will make you buy his products, despite the fact that we should so that Australian farmers and our hard earned cash stays in Australia.
Complete with a burning refugee boat, constant referrals to ‘loving Dick’ and, too many Australian jingoist references to mention, it’s certainly an interesting piece of advertising.
But, is he doing a “Kogan”? You may remember that back in 2010, Ruslan Kogan created an ad that mocked the Harvey Norman ads that do not much else but shout at you.
At the time it was claimed that a commercial television network refused to run the ad because Harvey Norman threatened to pull its significant advertising budgets if it did. The television network denied everything. The truth behind the whole saga remains murky to this day.
So, while Kogan’s ad didn’t run, it did become PR gold. Some industry pundits said that the Kogan ad was never designed to run but was planned to become a major PR story. And, that the media coverage it generated was worth vastly more than any media spend that Kogan would have been able to afford in 2010.
Thus, the question remains. Did Dick Smith really make his Australia Day ad for television or, is it a cunningly planned PR stunt in disguise?
