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Basecamp Ad Somewhat Confusing

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Basecamp ad somewhat confusing

Base­camp is a web-based tool that lets you man­age and track projects (or sim­ply ideas) and quick­ly cre­ate client/project extranets.

“NO RISK FREE TRIAL?” I don’t know. Maybe it’s just me. But this thing is mak­ing me bug out. Maybe its the hand­ful of hours I spent doing ads with this kin­da copy/text on it. I know them mar­keters are real­ly cru­cial in word­ing their babies.

I mean, “Con­tent is king” to them. Even if it looks out of place, or out of pro­por­tion, they don’t care where it goes as long as its big and right on the audi­ences’ face. Oth­er than that, they just churn their rolodex and make calls to their con­tacts. I guess its all about the commission—they get bank.

Mean­while, back to the word-play in the Base­camp ad. I saw this ad in a site I fre­quent for design news and oth­er stuff. It did­n’t hit me at first till I took a clos­er look at it. I could­n’t just shake it off, you know?

Its like hav­ing the TP on back­wards so that it would­n’t “water­fall” the right way. I just hate see­ing it any­where that I lit­er­al­ly change it the way it should’ve been in the first place. Just a pet peeve of mine amongst oth­er small stuff. Any­one else have this on their list?

Any­ways, I got a cou­ple of things when I saw this copy: “NO RISK FREE TRIAL.” First, it can mean “NO RISK-FREE TRIAL”—which sounds real­ly evil. Its like, try our prod­uct that I’m sell­ing and oh BTW, if you get some growth on your neck we’re not to blame. I mean c’mon, just a major sales deter­rent that can just close a busi­ness out.

The sec­ond mean­ing that I get sounds right. “NO-RISK FREE TRIAL.” Sounds bet­ter don’t it? Not only are you get­ting a free tri­al, there’s also no-risk to doing it. Two major sell­ing point that can bring the dough from rolling in.

I guess it was just an over­sight by some­one over at the Mar­ket­ing depart­ment. With the suc­cess­ful prod­ucts that 37Signals have been rolling out late­ly (i.e. Base­camp, Back­pack and Ta-da List) to com­ple­ment the next ver­sion of the Web (aka. Web 2.0), this might just have been a freak of nature. Either that, or the design­er just did his/her thing—design. I prob­a­bly have done some­thing like this in that past, to make things look “right”. After all, “beau­ty lies in the eyes of the behold­er.”