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
‘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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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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