Enough with the candy sex

Why does this keep happening?



At least this isn't people having sex with candy. But just like those repugnant Dairy Queen ads from a while back, it goes out of its way to imply that the product you'll be consuming was the result of filthy, filthy sex between two other food products. It'd be one thing to see a chocolate bunny nuzzling a jar of peanut butter fondly - but no, we just haaaad to work "Let's Get It On" in there, didn't we, Reese's? Was grossing out viewers really worth what you had to pay for that song?

The Art of Predictable Headlines

Warning: I'm about to get a little pedantic here. The reason? This Sargento cheese ad, which commits so many advertising sins that it's a veritable compendium of lessons on how not to write an ad:


Let's just go down the list of the features of this magazine ad:
- Lazy headline that was cool back in 1981? Check.
- Image and signature of woefully unattractive owner? Check.
- Excruciating paragraph of boilerplate food copy? Check.
- Shots of, presumably, entire line of products? Check.
- Online call-out? Check.
- Overall busy layout? Check.
- Retarded slogan? Oh, God, check.

How, exactly, did this ad come to be? Were the Sargento people just thinking, "Nice ad. We like the three different backgrounds all frankensteined together like that. Wait, let's add the picture of the owner. Wait! And make sure the fake-looking grapes make it back in. And, wait!! How will they know it's hand-crafted? Let's add in a huge, scripted 'handcrafted' in the middle of that landscape. Perfect."

What part of this ad does Sargento think makes me want to buy cheese? No single component of this ad is that unforgivable, but the fact that it's effectively 8 different print ads compiled into one overall piece of excrement makes the whole far, far more painful than the sum of its parts.

The headline in particular, "Experience the Art of Cheese" is pathetic. "The Art of blank" is one of the most obvious and overplayed creative devices in all of advertising. Copywriters everywhere simply need to retire this line for the next hundred years.

And then there's the slogan --

Persnickety People. Exceptional Cheese.

Okay, I get the feeling that it was Lou Gentine, second generation owner of Sargento Cheese, who dreamed this baby up. Or at least I hope it was him, and not someone who gets paid to write. The first definition of "Persnickety" is, "overparticular; fussy," and the second definition is, "snobbish or having the aloof attitude of a snob." Awesome. It might as well just be:

Snobby Dicks. Exceptional... Who the Fuck Cares.

It really doesn't matter what you say after you use the word "persnickety" in a 21st century ad -- you've already convinced me I don't want your product.

If anyone else hates this ad, I encourage you to write to Sargento. The one catch is that you'll have to spell out their obnoxious address: 1 Persnickety Pl, Plymouth, WI. I'm not even kidding about that. They took that slogan and just ran with it, didn't they? I guess Sargento just loves overdoing things, whether it's packing every last bit of selling copy into an ad until it looks like a third grader's random magazine collage, or actually naming a street "Persnickety." I sure hope that cheese really is exceptional, for their sake.

Can we please stop doing this?

Please, Milky Way. I'm begging you.



Just to annoy everyone, here's the full text of that awful little poem:

"This is no impulse
My yearning for your comfort began hours ago
But for the cashier's sake, let's be coy
Let's pretend like this was all spontaneous
'Oh, pleasure to meet you, caramel'"

FUCK. OFF.

This is the second of these ads I'm aware of - i.e., ads where Sally Kellerman is apparently twenty seconds from cramming a Milky Way into her vagina - and it's also the second one to refer to Milky Ways as "comfort." Buy a fucking thesaurus. Then hit yourselves over the head with it and forget you ever thought it was a good idea to make a series of commercials comparing your candy product to a lover. It's horrifying.

Alternately, maybe every food product should try this.

Milk
You do a body good
If you were a person, I bet you'd do my body good
I mean that in a sexual way
Like we'd have really hot sex
I think I'm going to stick my dick into the carton right now
Milk.

No, I'm going to stick with "horrifying."

Free junk mail!

Some people out there don't understand how the internet works. Witness this web banner ad:

Okay, so maybe just old white people don't understand how the internet works. Who would be genuinely intrigued by a "free" weekly email? "You mean to tell me I can get conservative claptrap delivered to my inbox at no charge at all? Can I also opt in to receive free spam from partner businesses?!"

Regardless of how you feel about Newt Gingrich's views, you have to acknowledge that there's clearly some demand for it out there. But when has anyone ever had to pay cash to hear what he has to say? Newt Gingrich's opinions are unavoidable. Even if you didn't get the free weekly email, there's plenty of opportunity to catch him blabbing on talk radio or Fox News or whatever.

I also like the headline "Free Newt!" Not exactly the clearest. At first I thought it meant, "Free Newt from jail!" or maybe, "Free Newt from the prejudiced censorship of the liberal media!" It could also be read, if you were scrolling down and didn't yet see Gingrich's sunny grin, as, "Free Salamander!"

Now, I'm going to go see if I can sign up for some free blogs somewhere...

Just a very brief note to say...

You're next, SkyMall.

The only sad part will be the loss of printed ads to mock.

Give 'em a real Bronx cheer!

Normally I don't much care for the FCC's censorship tactics, but I think we need to thank them for preventing Bud Light from inflicting the following ad on us during the Super Bowl.



Oh my God. Do you guys get it? It's about farting! Ha ha ha! Cut the cheese! Pull my finger! Girls don't do it! Hi-larious! I can't stop laughing! Let's all congratulate the marketing execs at Bud Light who pitched this one:



I almost wonder if the FCC banned this ad because of its really-not-veiled-at-all fart/poop jokes, or because based on the level of the humor they assumed that Bud Light was trying to sell beer to fourth-graders. Do people above the age of 14 still say "cutting the cheese," anyway?

Also, someone please explain to me why this ad needed to be a minute long. A minute long? Really? It's the same one joke over and over again! "'Cutting the cheese' refers to farting! But it can also, in unrelated scenarios, refer to actually slicing a blade through cheese, thereby cutting it! Did you catch that? No? By 'it' I meant the actual dairy product, cheese, there. Now? Still not sure? Well, here, let's do the exact same joke fifteen more times. Maybe you'll figure it out eventually. For good measure, we'll throw in 'pinch a loaf,' which I don't think anyone under the age of 80 says anymore and which doesn't really make sense as something one would do at work, even if bread is shown. Riotous!"

Bud Light: Either we're total morons or we think you are. I'm looking forward to whoopee cushions featuring prominently in their next spot.

Forget about make sense

In the spirit of Windier's SalesGenie.com write-up yesterday, I'd like to add on to the list of advertisers who value "cuteness" and "presentation" over "being clear" and "grammar." Behold a print ad from Quaker Oats that will confound the ages:


"Forget about use your words.
I know he likes it."

First of all, what the fuck are you trying to say. This is the opposite of a "quick read," which is what you'd want if you're trying to grab the attention of someone thumbing through ads in Real Simple magazine. I'm thinking maybe this ad was originally made in Finnish, and the Quaker US team just Babelfished the copy into English and ran with it. Is this ad truly comprehensible without someone walking you through it?

Let me take a shot at rewriting this ad to what I think Quaker was trying to say:

Forget about "use your words."
I know he likes it.

Here's a free lesson on quotation marks: they don't go around every headline. It's so much clearer when you just use them around a colloquialism or phrase, like "use your words." Now, you can argue whether or not "use your words" is still a common phrase. I know my mother never said it to me. I guess the concept here is that this oatmeal is so good, a child can communicate his preference with the elegant gesture of holding up an empty bowl. It's a weak, tired idea as is, but when it's veiled in an ungrammatical clusterfuck of quoted words, it's damn near impossible to understand.

The visuals aren't stimulating, either. What is appetizing, I ask you, about an empty, dirty cereal bowl that takes up half the page? What about that makes me want to buy oatmeal? And, is that little boy wearing eye shadow?

Quaker, you get an "F" on this one-- "F" as in, "Forget about make ads. I know you're ignorant clods."

There's a reason it's not called SenseGenie

SalesGenie's spots have been, at various times, stupid, manipulative and even borderline racist. But until now, at least they generally worked around the product they were selling and, you know, kind of made sense.



What in the hell does this have to do with anything SalesGenie does? Who is this military guy and why on earth would he give a shit about SalesGenie? Apparently he's supposed to be a competitor... right? I mean, that's the only way it makes sense. But I don't think SalesGenie competes with the military. Does SalesGenie even have competitors who might "mess" with them?

Other SalesGenie ads, while hideously low-budget and usually poorly thought out, at least show salesmen becoming successful after using the service. This one invents a bizarre competitor, brings in an actual genie character - which would make way more sense if they'd ever used one before - and has SalesGenie "win" by draping its logo over this random competitor. All that and it looks like it cost about twelve bucks to make. Do you think that SalesGenie would get more bang for their buck if they hired an actual ad agency and just stopped running ads during the Super Bowl and the Oscars? There's something to be said for having the biggest audience possible, sure, but there's also something to be said for not embarrassing yourself in front of said audience.

Bad things come in threes

So, you're "the new AT&T" (i.e. the old AT&T plus Cingular). You've made two really, really stupid commercials that encourage purchasing an unlimited text messaging plan by pointing out that kids text message a whole hell of a lot and often make no sense as a result. What's your next move? If you said "Making an ad that basically calls people who text a bunch of illiterate morons," you're right!



This concept was stupid the first time out; the second time, it was just painful. But this? I don't even know what to say about this one. First of all, everyone knows what "ROTFL" stands for at this point. It's not 2002 anymore. Second of all, thanks for translating "8 points," in case we weren't sure if that was more "crazy talk!" Also, among the other words on that board is something ending in -YL. Really? Basically the only common English word ending in -YL is "vinyl," but that doesn't look like an N above the Y. In fact, it sort of looks like someone already played "TTYL." Which, if so, the mom has some nerve getting upset about ROTFL when she's apparently been willing to let whatever shit springs to her daughter's head make it to the board up until this point.

At least in this ad, AT&T restricted themselves to terms in common use - as stupid as ONUD sounds, a Google search will confirm that it's actually in use in places other than the heads of the people at AT&T's agency. But the kicker for the ad is when the mother says to the daughter, "I have completely failed you as a parent." What? That's kind of an odd thing to go out on, isn't it? Especially when followed by the daughter's shit-eating grin - "Hooray, Mom can't understand us and thinks we're borderline retarded - isn't this great?" The exaggeration of the generation gap in these ads is so huge I'm surprised they don't show the grandmother screaming about pictures coming to life when someone turns on the TV.

But what's the point behind this ad, anyway? The initial ones were a family where the kids texted all the time, which frustrated the mother because the cell phone bill was huge. So now, I guess, everyone has the unlimited texting plan... which has just encouraged their English to fall even further into a shambles and oddly distanced them from any family gathering. (Would you play Scrabble with three people who were just sitting there texting their friends during the whole game?) I'm confused. Is this a good thing? Is this something I want to strive for? This ad doesn't make me want to get unlimited texting, it makes me want to curl up into the fetal position and cry for the future of humanity, then go get a vasectomy. There's only two ways this ad can go - either AT&T sides with the daughter and it's just making fun of how out of touch the mother is, or (more likely) they side with the mother. Which means the message of this ad is, "We think people who need this plan are drooling imbeciles, but we'd still like their money, or at least the money of whoever makes the household's communication decisions." Nice.

Please not this guy again...

Some guys just get all the national TV work -- like this doofball, who I talked about in a post last year. Here are shots of the same terrible, talent-less actor in two concurrent spots:





Same guy, right? Well, I happened upon Holiday Inn Express's new commercial offering, and he's once again made his slack-jawed mark on another piece of advertising. Here's a screen grab:


Um, can we vary it up a little, advertisers? Wouldn't some idiot off the street be better than this chump, not to mention cheaper? I'm really tired of seeing this guy continue to pop up. Let's all just give America like a year off from this dude, and if we need to dip back into the "vacant look of astonishment" talent pool after that, we can.

By the way, the new Holilday Inn Express commercial isn't anywhere on YouTube, but if you're desperate to watch it you can go here and download a version. It's a fairly confounding piece of advertising. Basically, there's a "hot breakfast bar" at the Holiday Inn Express, and this actor starts scooping scrambled eggs onto his plate. His friends remind him that he's the "designated driver" that morning, and he puts down the foods and says "I don't have to have a hot breakfast to have a good time." So there's your concept -- breakfast food is like booze, and you shouldn't drive after you've eaten it. Hey, do lawyers ever watch ads before they hit the air?