(almost) always thinking

an Ocado ad that doesn’t deliver

24 January, 2013 at 8:28 pm Leave a comment

Have you seen Ocado’s new ad? It launched a couple of weeks ago across video-on-demand, outdoor, press and digital (wot, no TV budget?) and according to the agency ‘aims to recruit new customers by creating awareness of the quality of Ocado’s products and its service’.  Nice visuals, very “can we have a Honda Grrr or Innocent ad please?”, but the voiceover just has me confused:

“Welcome to Ocado.com. We’re proud to be different to other supermarkets, we don’t have any shops, so all our attention is on delivering you what we like to call our life changing service.

Enjoy the freshest groceries, biggest brands and all your home essentials. Shop online and we’ll personally pick and cheerfully deliver it straight to your kitchen table at a time that suits you.

Experience the difference for yourself and change the way you live.”

So…solely based on this can anyone explain in what way shopping with Ocado is any better to shopping with Tesco.com?

I dug around the Ocado website and compared it with Tesco’s to discover that Ocado colour code bags for fridge/freezer/cupboard, pick from a warehouse not from a store for better freshness and are very enthusiastic about delivering come-what-may, with snow tyres on all their vans.  If they were going after the customers of their online grocery competitors surely they’d have been heavily pushing those benefits instead of half-heartedly mentioning just one of them.

So I have to assume that the ad is aimed at online grocery shopping newbies, which is quite a tough sell – Start ordering your groceries online! And not from the supermarket you usually visit!  Which means you’d need a properly engaging, disrupting, brand-equity-building, Honda-ish piece of work.  Which sadly this isn’t.  Perhaps Mr Rose will help them do a better job next time?

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Entry filed under: advertising, Campaigns. Tags: Ocado.