I woke up to an uproar on Twitter. The Nigerian Twitter was in chaos. Cowrywise, a prominent savings app, has committed a grievous offense. What was this offense? They ran a billboard ad without a CTA! I know it’s cliche to say this – but this was not on my bingo card for 2024. I don’t even have a bingo card, but that’s not the point. It was unexpected that such a harmless ad would cause a controversy.
Cue the evidence – Exhibit 001:
Let’s dial it back and get into the bone of contention, shall we? When you look at the backlash surrounding this straightforward ad, they mostly fall into two key questions that I will seek to address in this blog:
- Is the copy a CTA?
- If not, why does it not have one?
Is cowrywise.com a CTA?
To answer this, let’s break down what a CTA is. I asked Gemini Advanced and ensured it didn’t hallucinate this answer: “A Call to Action (CTA) is a directive statement designed to elicit an immediate response from your target audience.”
A CTA is typically a direction. Marketers often say customers don’t know what to do, so you must guide them. Common examples of CTAs include Buy Now, Read More, etc. They can be a button on a banner ad or a short sentence on a text ad. One constant thing is that they typically include an action word – because they are supposed to evoke an action on the user’s part.
We can all agree that a website link on a billboard ad is not a CTA.
Yes, you can argue that seeing something like that will get curious minds to check out what the URL is about. That doesn’t make it a CTA. It’s like seeing the picture of a Nike shoe that looks so beautiful on a billboard and walking into the store to feel it because I’m a shoe nerd. The shoe caught my attention, but that picture is not a CTA.
Why does it not have a CTA?
Another group argued that the billboard is a waste of marketing naira because it doesn’t have a CTA. That’s just flat-out wrong. Remember the marketing funnel? There’s a reason we have that. There are stages to the customer journey, and our job as marketers is to think through how we connect with them through these stages. When was the last time you saw a CTA on the billboard and immediately bought the product?
Billboards are part of a type of marketing called Out-of-Home (OOH). For OOH ads, the goal is typically top of the funnel – to drive awareness and/or consideration. When marketers run ads like this, they don’t expect you to take action immediately. They just want you to be aware of the brand/product. Sometimes, they also want the ad to spark conversation. That’s the job of creating demand for the product.
Direct Response (DR), on the other hand, is the marketing tactic employed to capture the demand. This is primarily online advertising, and it’s typically targeted with a clear call-to-action (CTA). You run the DR some time after the OOH campaign for some campaigns. For others, especially for established brands, you can run them in parallel.
In conclusion
I’ll be honest here. I probably would not have approved that ad if I was Cowrywise’s Head of Marketing, as it goes against many best practices in the marketing world. It’s possible that someone would’ve been able to convince me otherwise. That’s why you hire talented people on your team. To listen to them and sometimes do something you are not 100% comfortable with. This is what some call “disagree and commit.”
It’s also important to acknowledge that the campaign seems to have landed well. The goal is most likely to drive awareness. One way to measure that is “share of voice.” And here we are talking about it. That’s a win.