Diablogue (a new find on the blog trail; thanks Russell) pointed me in the direction of a new online Visa campaign produced by AKQA. Life Takes Visa
As the Diablogue guys say there’s some sweet moments in there. But I can’t help but feel that this is just a load of nice little ads glued together into a website.
For the money that was spent on this piece of interactive advertising, I’d have thought they might have taken the opportunity to do something, well… ‘interactive’? Instead it’s just a load of nicely produced FakeReal scenarios, which support the offline advertising brilliantly. It’s a really nice piece of ‘online advertising’ in that sense. But it left me wanting more.
The thing that really puzzled me though was the copyright notice at the bottom of the page:
How come an advertising website is copyright Microsoft?
I did a bit of digging around and found that there’s a version of the site that you can get to via http://lifetakesvisa.msn.com/visa.asp which has an MSN frame at the top. Not sure how ‘exclusive’ the deal is, and how it came about.
From where I’m sitting I see a lot of the big online media owners trying to get closer to ‘creative agencies’ so that they can deliver richer, more extensive, online advertising that’s exclusive to their network. It’s almost like good online advertising could be considered content. Imagine that ;-)