Playlist App Toilet Paper Ad Strikes Key Demographic
The people who made the app Playlist hired someone very smart to create for them a real-life ad campaign. In this campaign, they've released a custom roll of toilet paper. The toilet paper is printed with messages about the app. While printed toilet paper is generally a joke about disliking whatever's printed, this print is both part of the joke AND avoids being the punchline. This toilet paper advertisement targets every person who uses their iPhone whilst doing their business... that means everybody.
The Playlist app is out for iOS, and it seems to be doing pretty OK right this minute. It's a music app supported by advertisements, and it's free. So obviously their biggest competitor is going to be Spotify, so they went ahead and embraced that fact right out the gate. They've printed "Wipe out Spotify" on the toilet paper.
On the toilet paper, the designer of this Playlist-aimed campaign also printed "Music is better with friends... even your sh*tty ones," which isn't great grammatically, but for this situation it's just fine. While there seems to be more messages on the roll, we've been unable to get anyone in photo distance to unroll the roll – and the designer hasn't yet showed themselves publicly, so we're waiting for that email for the full story.
There's also a QR code – which isn't always a great idea since your average smartphone user outside heavy tech-savvy areas of the world don't know what one even does with such a graphic. The placement of the URL for the brand is the saving grace of the QR-Code nonsense.
The toilet paper will likely do more for their adoption numbers than their long abandoned Twitter account. What better way to get people to like your app than to abandon your Twitter account? One wonders if this is a sign of success or a sign that all Playlist needs is a social media specialist on staff?
Regardless of their mixed message in social networking, Playlist struck gold with this toilet paper campaign. Even if they printed JUST these few rolls, the idea's great enough to spread across these internets like wildfire. Both the internet and the toilet are the places where smartphone users go most often, of that you can be sure. As such, I call this print a win.
The photo of this toilet paper was first spotted on a Reddit post on r/Pics. There's a chance it was posted there by the same guy whose job it was to promote the paper in the first place, but the chance is slim. In the end it doesn't much matter – the paper exists, and it was a newsworthy and/or innovative enough idea that it became our duty to share. Heh, duty.