Days after taking to YouTube with an ad marking the halfway point of the national broadband network rollout, and not long after we cheekily pointed out the speedtest result in the ad, NBN Co has pulled its own ad.
Earlier this week we noted that the ad had a closeup shot of what most Australians would consider a rather unspectacular speedtest result: a ping of 598ms, and a fairly unspectacular download/upload speed to match. There was an explanation: the customer was serviced by the Sky Muster satellite service, and the ping and download speeds are fairly standard for that service.
[referenced url=”https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2017/07/how-not-to-advertise-the-nbn/” thumb=”https://www.kotaku.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2017/07/oh-dear-nbn.jpg” title=”How Not To Advertise The NBN” excerpt=”One of the most well known tenets of advertising is to “underpromise and overdeliver”. NBN Co appears to have taken this concept to the extreme. The latest advertisement for the NBN proudly shows a ping rate of 598 milliseconds. The future is not gamer friendly.”]
But the vast majority of Australian households aren’t, and won’t, get their internet through satellite. They’ll get it from a hardline connection, or some form of wireless (fixed or mobile). And for those people, seeing NBN show off nearly 600 ping and download speeds comparable to ADSL2+ isn’t something to be proud about. A lot of people already get that, if not better, now, and were angry that the NBN was so proud about its achievement.
So that explains in part why people were annoyed by the NBN’s latest ad. And perhaps because of that, NBN Co has pulled the ad from YouTube. I’ve reached out to the company for an explanation as to why the ad – which had comments disabled from the outset – is no longer online.
Here’s the uploads for the nbn Australia YouTube account:
And the latest NBN Co ad is, well, substantially different.
If NBN Co gets back to us with an explanation as to what happened, we’ll let you know.
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