The ad riffs on the infamous six degrees of Kevin Bacon concept and sees the actor telling the audience how he's linked to people from all over the world, including Tom Hanks, Frank Carson and Ken Barlow from Coronation Street. The key message being, you can also be just like him by joining a connected network.
You can view the ad here. At one point, Kev wanders into a pub and tells us that in the future we'll be able to pay for pork scratchings by simply tapping our mobiles on terminals. 'Contactless launching in 2013' then appears on screen in very, very small writing for two seconds. The ad is mildly amusing, I'll give it that, but one thing bugs me. As I watched it, I could picture a bunch of ad execs in a flashy office somewhere in Soho, high fiving eachother, pleased at how terribly clever they are. I know contactless is only part of the proposition but it's a potentially significant part. And this ad does little to communicate the benefits to the man and woman in the street.
Last week at the 2012 FStech/Retail Systems Payments Technology Conference, the chairman, Vendorcom’s Paul Rodgers, commented: “99.9 per cent of the general public don’t know what a digital wallet is. They also think that the contactless logo is a hearing loop sign. A lot needs to be done in terms of education and communication.”
I absolutely agree. Unfortunately, the industry as a whole continues to be stuck in expensive vanity project mode (remember the 'all style, no substance' contactless rollercoaster ad from a couple of years ago?)
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