SFGate Experiments with Branding (and Fails)
March 16, 2010
When the sfgate.com (website of the San Francisco Chronicle) home page loaded I thought I must have entered the wrong URL. It was obviously a travel site with a whole lot of text on it. Was that an advertisement on the top right for SFGate?
Nope.
A good proportion of their home page was given over to a Hawaii promotion, and I found it visually arresting. It made me think about a Hawaii vacation (and a Twitter background).
Problem is, this isn’t a travel agency site, it’s a news site. These are tough times and this approach smacks of desperation. Like those cable TV channels with their logos that consume the bottom right corner– and then rotating ads on top of it, all while you’re trying to watch a movie. It seems so insulting and disrespectful (I always wonder what the filmmakers think). Your movie is nothing more than a place for us to hang our logo.
This SFGate home page feels the same. All that news stuff, it’s really gets in the way of the advertisement. I applaud them for the experiment. I hope they don’t repeat it.
Harelips and Haute Couture: NYTimes Brings You the World
March 8, 2010
Style and substance collide in an unfortunate combination of high fashion, birth defects and rotating ads.
I’ve never been accused of being a fashion plate but the other day visiting the nytimes.com homepage I was inspired to click on photos from the Paris 2010 Fall Collections.
I was shocked by what I saw. It wasn’t just the emaciated stick figure wearing what looked to my cretinous eye like thrift shop finds. It was the advertisement showing a young boy with a cleft palette.
The sad pair of big brown eyes stare out from the right side of the page in silent protest. A click of a mouse can save his life, but the cost of the handbag alone would pay for his corrective surgery. Yet it’s the model whose life force seems precarious if she doesn’t eat something soon.
This bizarre juxtaposition of images and the resulting mixed messages would never happen in the print publication. Unless The Times is suggesting that cleft palette is a fashion trend maybe somebody (other than me) needs to start paying attention to the rotating ads.
