Having come from Boston myself, the Boston accent is something very familiar to my ears. Though I don’t really have a Boston accent (parents weren’t from Boston), I have an ear for it and can spot all those fake Boston accents in movies from a mile away.
When DISH launched its recent campaign featuring the Boston Guys talking about the service’s Hopper (Hoppa), I was pleasantly thrilled to see the Boston accent done right. The Boston Guys campaign, created by Barton F. Graf 9000 (or Baaahton F. Graaahf 9000 as AdWeek’s David Gianatasio once called them), began about a year ago and was so loved the agency kept giving us more and more.
The latest entry in the Boston Guys campaign is Talk Boston, a site on which one can learn howe to properly pronounce certain words in the Boston accent. The campaign also includes a series of videos entitled Boston as a Second Language which educates viewers how to properly pronounce car keys or khakis (Kahkeez), Bar Harbor (Bah Habah), Hopper (Hoppa), Offer (Awfa) and Escalator (Escalayta).
The true Boston accent, like many accents, is not easy to replicate if you aren’t native to the area. And even though some of the words used in the campaign are “stretched” a bit for hilarity’s sake, the pronunciation, for the most part, is genuine.
Another element of the Talk Boston site tests your ability to “speak” the Boston accent by showing you phonetic spellings of words spoken in the Boston accent which you then translate into “correct” English. The test gives you one minute. I scored a 65% which is wicked bad. (Catch that?)
Talk Boston is a wonderful extension of a long-running, successful campaign that has helped DISH achieved significant notoriety. Though it doesn’t seem to have done much for revenue recently.
