We all know that marketing can put a spin on a company's products and services, sometimes making them seem more useful or easier to use. But what if companies took a different approach? What if the display copy on tech brands' homepages was completely, utterly frank.
Well, someone's decided to take a look at what that might look like. The Taiwan-based writer Jovian Gautama has cheekily mocked up the website designs of a bunch of companies, reworking them to include refreshingly honest taglines. And he shared the hilarious results in the Twitter feed below.
Tech companies honest headlines: a thread1. Calendly pic.twitter.com/FYuUfir8RbApril 5, 2023
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'Good luck trying to figure out our pricing,' Webflow says. 'Start a Twitter flame war with your opinion,' is the suggested tagline for Substack. Netflix? 'Here's another show with Ricky Gervais'.
Wordpress is made to proclaim, 'We own the goddam internet', Readwise aims to 'Let people know you read books' and Coinbase reaches out to the crypto bros with 'WAGMI... right guys? Right?' (we are all going to make it, for the uninitiated). Hyperfury is 'the Twitter tool that didn't get banned', and OpenAI, the company behind DALL-E 2, simply exclaims 'Oh s**t, oh f**k, what have we done?'
Others have joined in the fun with web design mockups of their own, and some have shared real-world examples of surprisingly honest copy.
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Some of the examples of 'honest marketing copy' on the Twitter thread (click right for more)(Image credit: Jovian Gautama on Twitter)
This could be said of many providers(Image credit: Jovian Gautama on Twitter)
A frank approach for Substack(Image credit: Jovian Gautama on Twitter)
Ouch!(Image credit: Brian L Dunn on Twitter)
It's interesting to compare how this looks to the excruciating examples of intentionally bad marketing that we've seen, in which companies affect a faux-honest (or even sarcastic) voice to try to come across as rebellious. Gautama's examples are a lot more amusing because in many cases they're totally true.
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Joe is a regular freelance journalist and editor at Creative Bloq. He writes news, features and buying guides and keeps track of the best equipment and software for creatives, from video editing programs to monitors and accessories. A veteran news writer and photographer, he now works as a project manager at the London and Buenos Aires-based design, production and branding agency Hermana Creatives. There he manages a team of designers, photographers and video editors who specialise in producing visual content and design assets for the hospitality sector. He also dances Argentine tango.
