Buy.com Unveils New Ad Campaign
On the heels of serious market woes, online retailer buy.com took thewraps off its new marketing and advertising campaign Wednesday.
On the heels of serious market woes, online retailer buy.com took the wraps off its new marketing and advertising campaign Wednesday.
The Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based company said its campaign is focused on “mission-oriented” shoppers, who desire a fast, no-nonsense shopping experience.
“We didn’t set out to reinvent shopping, but rather to give our customers what they want — an easy, no-nonsense shopping experience and our new campaign reinforces that,” said buy.com chairman and chief executive officer Greg Hawkins.
The “Get in. Get Out” campaign is designed to position buy.com as a quick and efficient place to get great deals online. Campaign creatives humorously portray the pitfalls of shopping both in the mall and on other, unnamed e-tailers.
One of the campaign’s thirty-second television executions pokes fun at mall shopping, as chock full of frivolous items and a waste of time. Another spot shows shoppers professing their “excitement” about being led astray by confusing e-commerce sites, or about being redirected to irrelevant chat rooms or to entirely different sites.
Buy.com said its new tagline, “Get in. Get out,” serves to reinforce its offer of a no-nonsense buying experience.
Created by Santa Monica-based Rubin Postaer and Associates, the television campaign breaks Wednesday in key domestic markets. A national online advertising program will support the television campaign.
Previous buy.com campaigns included last year’s “Why buy anywhere else?” and this year’s earlier “Colors” spots, designed to help the e-tailer stand out in cluttered competitive landscape.
The $50 million buy.com account has been in flux for more than a year, since parting ways with San Francisco’s Black Rocket, which handled print creative. It also worked with New York’s Gotham on a portion of its TV campaign late last year.
The company has been working for some time to rebrand itself, last month commissioning a survey of men’s shopping habits to boost its online value proposition as an alternative to long lines and sore feet in the mall.
The effort isn’t a moment too soon, as the e-tail industry is coming under increasing fire from the investing public. Tuesday, shares of Buy.com reached a 52-week low at $1.40, 96 percent off its high of $35.44. Last week, Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget cut buy.com’s rating to Neutral, citing several recent failures by peers.
Critics of e-tail pure-plays often cited exorbitant marketing budgets as a hindrance to profitability. Buy.com didn’t disclose spending on the “Get in. Get out” campaign, but it did vaguely suggest that its media buys were “leading a trend of more strategic and targeted advertising spending in the Internet arena.”
“Buy.com knows today that the best way to reach its core customer is through a targeted advertising campaign,” Hawkins said.
Company representatives did not return calls by press time seeking clarification.
