I had written earlier about Amazon picking an intentionally self-deprecating hashtag to attract attention. It was literally a call-to-action to people to go, “Hey look, they made a blunder!”.
See: .
Here’s another brand using the same tactic really well!
Visible, a Denver, Colorado-based telecommunications company recently went to town with its new campaign that consisted of about 150 billboards.
The communication in almost all of them was a standard, “Unlimited messages, minutes, and data on Visible’s $40/mo phone service”.
A handful of those billboards had a typo. Instead of ‘messages’, it said, ‘massages’! Now, this was intentional, of course.
As expected, the social media messages started trickling in almost immediately. Various opinions were offered – #fail, fire your copywriter, who is your agency? and so on.
Right off the start, Visible was taking on everyone who pointed out the ‘typo’ with witty responses.
A week later, they made good on the promise! They actually had a day of free massages (September 21) and that included massages for pets too!
For a new, small brand, this is a remarkably clever way to attract attention.
PS: This is not the first time ‘message’ has been converted into a ‘massage’. The most famous instance of ‘message’ becoming ‘massage’ was for the cover of Marshall McLuhan’s iconic book, “The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects”.
Yes, you read that right! It was a typo. And this is what about it.
