Uhh Hi Phil

This week I’m bringing you yet another Revlon nail polish ad. This one, however, is all wrong. Like the Parfumerie ad, Revlon stepped out of the box and did something different, they featured a man in a nail polish ad. Unfortunately, it was poorly executed.

I need to start off with the big, awkward elephant in the room. This poor, scruffy man in the ad being shrouded by a woman’s hands just looks confused. I’m not sure why he’s there and he doesn’t seem to know either. The text in the bottom left hand corner says “’Divine’ disarms Phil. Find out more at youtube.com/Phil”. Divine being the name of the nail polish being worn by the hands smothering Phil’s face. Of course I wanted to learn more about Phil and what on earth is going on in this photo so I found the clip they were referring to on YouTube. The 15 second video features Phil describing himself as shy, British, awkward, and embarrassing, all the while these same hands are rubbing all over his face, awkward is right. That’s all, no explanation as to why Phil is in this video or the ad for that matter, he doesn’t even mention the nail polish nor does the video offer any information on the product. In case you want to watch the video for yourself, here’s the link http://youtu.be/cpU0LAOUbwY?list=UUXGVsie-SIk3e3wJmUTyEhw

Aside from perplexed Phil, the right page doesn’t have much going for it either. They’ve gone for the obvious pun in the headline, “64 shades that nail the trends” not very clever or witty, they could’ve polished the headline a little more.  The copy at the bottom is also a little perplexing. They say, “Others may try to imitate our innovation.” They don’t, however, explain what innovation they’re speaking of, it looks like a pretty standard bottle of nail polish if you ask me. The next sentence puts the nail in the coffin “But the power of originality has always been in our hands.” And there you have it, another pun. And again, what originality are they referring to?

This ad is just so odd to me. It did intrigue me enough to send me to their YouTube page albeit the video only left me more puzzled. Sorry Revlon, you can’t win ‘em all.

Stop and smell the rose scented nail polish

Revlon has created a clever magazine ad for their new scented nail polish line. The line is called Revlon Parfumerie so it’s completely fitting that in this ad they’ve featured scent testers like you would see in a perfume ad.

Personally, I love it when perfume ads feature the scent testers, it gets the reader involved in the ad, so when I saw that Revlon did this for their nail polish I thought it was genius.

As for the overall look of the ad, it’s nice, nothing spectacular. I know that they’re trying to display their colour range but the colours that they’ve chosen to showcase clash with each other, making it look a little tacky and according to the ad they have 24 colour choices so I’m sure they could’ve made a better choice. I do like though, that they’ve set it on a black background, it makes the polishes pop and the positioning of the bottles creates visual interest rather than just lining them up in a row. Also, the tiny detail of the drip falling from one of the bottles also adds visual interest; they clearly paid attention to detail.

The copy in this ad is again nothing special, although I never expect much from drugstore makeup brands in terms of copy, as it’s usually pretty mundane.  They’ve incorporated as many adjectives as they could fit into the short paragraph, there’s also quite a bit of repetition, but again, it’s to be expected.

I rather liked the scents from the ad and I’ll probably even go pick one up. I know I seemed a little harsh on the ad but it really did intrigue me, and hey, they sold me on the product.