This Landing Page is a Joke

This experience hurts Toyota’s brand in so many ways and it is a case study in poor landing page optimization.

I have no problem with funny ads. Humor can create interest and attention — a very hard thing to do in this day and age. However, if you want to play a joke on consumers in an online ad you should keep the joke running on the landing page. Ads set expectations. Landing pages need to meet or exceed them – no matter what. So it’s not the silly ads that hurt this campaign, it is the landing page.

Here are some of the ads:

Here is the landing page for every ad:

So now you’ve pranked me because this is not a page about animal lingerie, ham radio or pub fighting. How could I have been so stupid? What makes me feel better though is that Toyota will facilitate my pranking a friend in exchange for some personal info. Oh, what a feeling!

It takes 6 seconds for the page to load and while doing so lets me know that it is taking some personal information. Once loaded it blares annoying music and sounds –and good luck finding the mute button. If I happen to be interested in the Toyota Matrix neither the image or the text description of it are clickable. In fact, there is no clear navigation or call to action on the landing page other than the prank.

Is this experience cool? Does it sell cars? Does it create the right kind of attention? Is it targeted? Is there any delivery of relevance? Experience the joke that is this page yourself.

Bottom line, there is no intelligence built into this experience at all so none will be collected. The next time Toyota does an ad and landing page they will have learned nothing from the millions spent on this. What a waste. The irony as someone pointed out in the following posts is that the Ad Agency and Toyota will probably see this as a success because of high CTR in the ads.

More thoughts on this ad campaign <a href="
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/i-hate-the-advertising-baitandswitch-but-theres-a-lesson-here
“>here and here.