After a long day at the office last night, my friend and I settled in for our weekly Bachelor fix…. (did I just admit that?) During this 2 hours of awesome, we happened upon this painfully obnoxious JC Penny Commercial that literally had my pal covering her ears. I of course, took one look at the call to action – “2.1 facebook.com/jcp” and had to rewind and photograph. She looked at me and said, “good god Nicole.. at least mute it first“…that’s how bad it is.
Now mind you, I’ll never get that 60 seconds of my life back… and my ears are pissed about it- but I’m fairly sure we’ll know what all the hoopla is about tomorrow. I googled the concept to see what other people thought and instead of finding intrigued marketing minds… I found really really pissed consumers. Like really.
On one site, 24 comments were posted today and it’s not even 9am. One another, a whopping 240 comments were put up… none of them favorable. People are not digging this spot but it makes me wonder… does JCP have a method to their madness? Let’s hope so …. If I were to make a hopefully optimistic guess I’d say that they anticipated a boat load of intrigue following a nonsensical commercial and what they thought was a strong call to action. Turns out it wasn’t strong enough as no one … except me.. is talking about tomorrow. It’s either that or they watched the damn commercial so many times it magically became not the most annoying thing ever to them.
Either way, it will be interesting to see what they have up their sleeve on the target day- Feb 1… it better be good. Maybe it’ll be a big Banana Republic esque Facebook sale (the 50% off for facebook fans one they did a few months back) or something totally new and innovative. Including a social call to action to what is probably a more traditional demographic is a bold move. In this first phase of this promotion, they have successfully alienated their core demographic in favor of a new, younger, tech savvy one. Let’s hope they make magic happen and win back this super obnoxious blunder.
In case you want to watch it… turn down your volume first…