Welcome to Ad Review, a new series I’ll be doing on my Blog and LinkedIn either weekly, monthly, or maybe just whenever I see an advert that really annoys me. My goal is to cover good and bad advertising principles by looking at and reviewing real-life adverts and discussing what I think they did right, or wrong. 

I do this because:

A. I’ve got strong opinions about a lot of things and have a tendency to make that other peoples problems and

B. I think it’s important for new marketers and people in the industry to learn that there can be such thing as bad press, and that in our roles we have a responsibility to provide a good job for our customers and clients while also treating them with respect. 

The Advert: “Seize the Holiday - Flights" by Kayak

Here's the advert below, feel free to check it out if you'd like more context before reading further.

The advert starts with our main character, quickly identified as Sandra using the Kayak app on her phone to decide whether she should book a holiday to Barcelona. A voice from the app says "Do it, Sandra” and we see a look of surprise on Sandras face as the view deal button transforms into an anthropomorphised cartoon mouth and continues “you’ve talked about going to barcelona for years”. I think we’d all be a little surprised if our phone apps started calling out to us while fully sober, so don’t worry Sandra I’m with you.

The creepy talking buy button continues. “You weren’t that indecisive about that dolphin tattoo” and we watch Sandra turn to view the small dolphin tattooed on the back of her right shoulder blade. Sandra looks, maybe disappointed? As if she regrets the tattoo potentially? So far we’re 10 seconds in and the horror-movie buy button has managed to demand action, comment on her buying decisions and make our character question her body-mod choices. What an age we live in.

“Don’t let this be another highschool prom moment Sandra! What do you think Greg's doing now? Yup, probably on holiday” our monster-app continues as it directs Sandra’s attention to a folded over fridge mounted picture of what we must assume is a failed past relationship. 

“But Wendy says it’s a bit hot this time of year?” Sandra objects, a perfectly reasonable objection to an important factor in travel. I don’t know who Wendy is, but seeing as I started seeing this ad in July 2023 and google tells me the temperature was up to 29 degrees celsius at the time in Barcelona, it sounds like Wendy has her head screwed on straight. “Wendy believes in astrology Sandra” the sleep paralysis demon replies dismissively, managing to insult another woman’s choices who we haven’t even met.

“Do it, press the button” whisper-screams the button, in its best Draco Malfoy impression. “Think of the paella, go see for yourself” the demogorgon continues as we see Sandra’s finger begin to approach the button. We shout for her to stop, but she can no longer hear us. Sandra has been taken by the beast. 

“YES SANDRA” the snake exclaims, overjoyed that it has convinced another victim to take a bite of the forbidden fruit, or, I guess, Paella? 

We cut to Sandra on the beach, we must assume in Barcelona, her mouth smiles, her sunglasses pulled down to cover the sadness in her eyes, as she turns and in the very last moment says one last word, “greg?”. All becomes clear as Cerberus has played its last trick, and our protagonist is fated to spend eternity overheating with an Ex she didn’t want to see, in Barcelona… or somewhere far hotter?

The Review

Okay so obviously this is all in good fun and fingers crossed brands don’t sue people for calling their mascot 17 varieties of unholy demon, but there are some legitimate problems with this campaign we need to address. 

Some might see this as harmless, and maybe to some it is. You can see the cogs turning at the creative agency that came up with this, I’m sure someone said something about how they want it to feel like the holidays are literally calling out to people, someone else responded 'yea, like a literal call to action' and £100k, 6 months and 13 revisions later the creature I see every time I close my eyes was born. 

But I want us to really think about this. I believe our job in marketing is to demonstrate the products we were hired to work on. To show off their good, work around their bad and make a pinky swear promise to do no harm to those we compete against. Above all else though, our job is to help our customers. 

We need to provide them with a solution to a problem, and sometimes in B2B software and services like I specialise in that’s about making and saving money/time, and in B2C that’s about providing a product that solves the problem they had, etcetera etcetera etcetera. The markets may change but the goal is the same, to let people know we’re an option and then let them know why we’re the best one. 

Now obviously I could criticise the pushiness of this advert, or the AWS-hosted Andrew Tate impersonating hell spawn creature that manages to insult the body, love life and spirituality of two different women in 18 seconds flat, or even mention the fact that in every other ad in this campaign as well as every shortened variant of it the female protagonist doesn’t speak once.

But truthfully my problem with this ad is that it takes no steps to relay ‘why’ I’d want to use Kayak. Yes, Kayak helps you find flights, that’s fine, but it gives no context on what Kayak does that others don’t, what it’s app is able to do, why I’d choose it for my flight to Barcelona that I’ve been thinking about for years.

Truthfully, as Kayak is a well-known brand already, I’m not sure it does anything for branding, I’m not convinced it serves much of a purpose for engagement and as far as customer awareness goes, I know nothing more about Kayak than I did before watching this ad other than the fact that I might finally know what the creature lurking under children's beds is.

The Verdict

Some might disagree with my review and use the old 'if you're talking about it, it's working' argument, but personally If the purpose of advertising and marketing is to help and inform, then unfortunately I don’t think that “Seize the holiday - Flights'' does the job. It’s a miss for me, and If I ever find enough time away from my laptop to go on a holiday, I’ll probably just use booking.com instead.