Stupidity> Tech> Vonage woes

I rant a lot on this blog. Here's one of my favorites from my massive backlog of rants.

Vonage seems to be screwed. Alright. About a year ago, looking at them beat their chest and burn through the raised capital on some of the worst advertising ever, I thought they must have been trapped in some sort of a time capsule where it was still 1999.

"It's very hard to see what their competitive advantage is," said Richard Greenfield, an analyst at Pali Research.

I haven't followed the business fundamentals closely enough to rant about them, so I'll focus on a more specific area to rant about. About a month ago, Vonage finally changed their logo. I don't like the new one, but I sure didn't like the previous one either - only because I'm a bit of a typography nazi. The three things that were wrong with Vonage's past marcomms:

1) Use of a Millennium-family font in all-caps with a little kerning (around 40%). Millennium was cool around the time when the millennium was cool - in 1998 or so (by 1999 all my friends had those Fuck the Millennium t-shirts already). I saw this font in kebab-restaurant logos, Finnish Police recruiting videos, and our Army Yearbook. I used it myself, too, in the 90's.

2) Use of a stock font in general. Anyone can reproduce your logo in 5 minutes. This can be beneficial if you're a two-person company starting up, without actual letterhead papers yet, but not when you're trying to conquer the world, as was (is?) the case with Vonage.

3) Blowing tens of millions in absolutely appalling advertising using this same font everywhere, stupid layouts and too much copy for a blocky, impact-oriented font. The web ads were also terrible, and it was actually seeing them on the Register that drove me for the first time to block advertising other than pop-ups on my browsers.

These guys seem to be Vonage's creative agency. I'd really like to find out what the hell happened there, since Arnold has actually produced some good ads in the past. I don't know if they were behind the concept of the Jack Daniel's print ads, but they've worked with them, and some of those are damn good.

PS. I was thinking of starting a category called Rants, but then I thought that just calling it Stupidity would rile people up more.