Behind the Buzz - digital and interactive advertising and marketing

GHD a new religion in hair care

by Rachel on December 15th, 2007

When I was in the UK last month, this ad from GHD caught my eye. It was richly created, the different languages made you take a look and the payoff was fun (if shallow). I liked the creative, so had to take a look at what else they are doing.

To be honest I’m disappointed. The website itself, ghdhair.com, reflects the same richness in design but it’s all flash, the UI is poor in trying to work out what to click to move around. First impressions are good but as I dig deeper, my favourable impression goes away.

Website Comments

• I can’t share the video from their site. There’s no obvious YT account, so grabbed it from another poster.
• The content on the site is too fragmented, too many clicks and as it’s all flash, too slow to be presented. To answer a product question takes 3-6 clicks, with flash loads between each and then having to scroll up and answer as they only show about 5 lines.
• Going to the shop means you lose all the navigation. In fact, navigation is inconsistent throughout the site, with order changing, with footers changing, with at least 3 different pages showing how to contact them with different designs.
• They do have persistent internal links, which can often be forgotten with flash. They also have a text only version for accessibility. It’s a pity the same design ethic was not applied to that section!

Other Digital Activity

• As I said previously, there’s no obvious YouTube channel. There does appear to be a MySpace TV Channel though.
• There’s a sponsored MySpace page, which has a lot of the stuff I would expect to see on the main site s well, with style guide downloads etc. There’s no link out that I could find, so it’s not easy to find the good content from the main site, which appears pretty high on search results, unlike the MySpace page.
• There’s a lot of appreciation on the social networks, with groups on MySpace, Facebook and Bebo just for starters. But what I don;t see is much activity by the brand or their agencies these spaces. There’s a lot of passion for the products, I believe that the brand can get far more involved with the community than just broadcasting advertising, even if some of the content they provide is useful.

Have I missed anything? From a great commercial I expected more than I have found about the brand, especially when I saw how many evangelists there are for the product. Any GHD fans out there that want to comment about how they would like to interact with the brand?

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POSTED IN: Advertisments, Branding, Consumer Packaged Goods