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...
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.
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."
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.
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.
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?
Flavored, vitamin-enhanced waters are all the rage, in spite of the fact that it's pretty easy to argue they have no compelling reason to exist. You may not want to hint at this, even as a part of a knock on your competition.
So, Vitamin Water has 125 calories and Propel only has 25. Advantage Propel, I suppose. But guess what has zero calories? Normal water, which can frequently be obtained without even having to pay for it! I know, I know - shocking. And if you have to do 500 sit-ups to burn off a bottle of Vitamin Water, you're still stuck doing 100 sit-ups to burn off Propel. Burning off actual water? Zero sit-ups!
Of course, actual water doesn't have vitamins - not that you couldn't take a supplement which would also add no calories to your diet - nor does it have a kind of gross, artificial fruit flavor to it like Propel does. So there's that, I guess. But this ad just plays like a luxury car ad where some $40,000 model talks about how their $50,000 competitor is too expensive. "Propel: When you want unnecessary calories, but just not too many."
Have you ever heard the name "Millard Fillmore"? Perhaps in a high school American History class where you were browsing the names of various presidents, his name might have caught your eye. He was the president sandwiched between Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce -- an unremarkable trio of minor American leaders, to be sure, but I really thought I knew the identity of Millard Fillmore -- that was, of course, until Kia had the good sense to tell me otherwise:
President Millard Fillmore...
Right! I knew it. He was president.
... best remembered as the first president to have a running water bathtub...
Wrong. Kia -- listen to me, you have to know this is fucking apocryphal. A tiny iota of research will prove this to be true. I mean, aren't there factcheckers you can hire to take a look at your shitty ads? Or maybe this is a "joke"? But, you just look stupid if it's a joke because you make this myth sound real.
The funny thing is, there's a large amount of comedic material about Millard Fillmore that isn't fake. For starters, he was a Whig. Just that very word is funny. Also, he was born in a log cabin. His first job was as a clothmaker. He started the White House library (he was a nerd! That's funny!) He had a third nipple and named it "Professor Milkington" (I just made this up, but it's funnier than the bath tub joke, and that's just a joke stolen from H.L. Mencken.)
The other stupid part about this concept is that there are plenty of more obscure presidents out there they could have used -- presidents that don't have well-known comic strips named after them. William Henry Harrison was president for 31 days. John Tyler didn't do a whole lot, and he was a "Democrat-Republican" (make up your mind for Pete's sake! Am I right?). Zachary Taylor wasn't in office for much more than a year, being the guy who died right before the ever-unheard-of Fillmore.
... he's unheard-of....
See, you say that, but I distinctly recall his name, and something about his being a goddam American president. We're anonymous here at the Ad Wizards, but I will go on record now as saying that my profession is not that of Presidential Historian. And yet, somehow, I'd heard of this guy. I'll grant you that he's an order of magnitude less famous than, say, George Washington, but can we agree that he's not exactly some small town Vermont Alderman from the early 19th century who died of typhus at age 58?
So we're honoring him during Kia's Unheard Of Presidents' Day Sale
Look, it's not that I'm some huge Millard Fillmore fan. Dude signed the Fugitive Slave Act -- that's bad juju. It's just that I think the people who made these ads are really, really stupid, and they've made the terrible assumption, like many advertisers sadly do, that Americans are as dumb as they are. Hey Kia? We're just not that retarded. Sorry.
To commemorate Millard's bathtime, we've created this Millard Fillmore soap-on-a-rope.
Can someone explain to me why this is funny? This simply appears to be more stupid pandering. We're not dumb enough to believe that an American President can truly be "unheard of," and we're not dumb enough to find that kind of goofy, punny humor funny. I can't wait for this to go off the air next week.
Inventing new words doesn't appear to have worked for Comcast, so they're on to the next tactic: borrowing old ideas.
Setting aside the fact that people opening their mouths and having song lyrics come out is not nearly as hilarious as Comcast thinks it is, we've seen this before. (Warning: the volume on the following ad is much higher than on the Comcast ad.)
Keep in mind: it wasn't funny when Avis did it, either.
One thing Avis didn't do was use a song recorded by a porn star, one that's pretty clearly about sexual activity, and have a mother sing it to her son. Way to gross me the fuck out, Comcast. It's not like they tried very hard to make it fit within the commercial - they even have the son seem confused as to why these particular lyrics make sense in context. So why, exactly, did we think this was a good idea?
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?!"
