Orange: Turning down sound

Underuse of the medium undermines a message.

The Site

Orange, a French-owned mobile phone operator, has a technology-driven corporate site that uses only still photographs to illustrate its sponsorship of music events and activities.

Sponsorship is a main section of the Orange site, with ‘music’ as one of its three sub-sections (the others are ‘film’ and ‘sport’). This consists of a page of marketing copy which includes the information that Orange’s music and entertainment services “are now widely and immediately accessible across all of our multi-media platforms including internet, mobile and tv”. Visitors are invited to see “what we’ve been up to” in “celebrating the central part music plays in our customers’ lives” by clicking on the two images of performers on the right of the page.

Doing so reveals extended captions about, respectively, ‘Madonna on your mobile’ (ring tones, video clips and full-track downloads were available to customers in France) and ‘Orange Music Live, Slovakia’. There are no soundtracks or samples to accompany the pictures.

The Takeaway

Orange clearly thinks of its corporate website as an extension of its marketing operations but equally clearly doesn’t appear to have thought through how its use of the medium can undermine its message just as easily as reinforce it. For a company that is grounded in the use of sound – and proclaims its “key role in developing music and entertainment services” – the invitation to find out more about its music sponsorship by reading a picture caption which has no supporting links to related audio material is so far off-message as to defy explanation.

Digital rights concerns can hardly be the issue – Orange’s country sites make ring tones and music downloads available, as did the Madonna offer in France. And the obsessively Flash-driven site suggests familiarity with online technology and no aversion to using it. Could it be a failure of the marketing team, which obviously holds sway over the site, to look at the web as a medium in its own right rather than as an additional space for its established practices?

First published on 20 November, 2007