Advertising from Outer Space

Let me state up front that I’m not a advertising specialist; I’ve done some time as a salesman and spent a few years helping people figure out how to position a new product and what marketing channels would be most effective in reaching their key demographic segment or segments, but I don’t write copy or design ads. Nevertheless, I find myself wondering more and more often what planet the people writing some of these ads are coming from. Because on my planet, Earth, it doesn’t work this way…

Let’s take a few recent television ads. I’m not going to comment on the fact that on some cable channels you can see the same 30-second spot up to 8 times per hour (15 times if you are watching sports), but I can’t understand why the ads themselves have to be so annoying to watch. For example, one of the cell phone companies is running a series of ads in which the call drops at a critical moment during the conversation, and one of the people on the phone begins reacting as if the other person (who has been disconnected) is still on the line, but just refuses to say anything.

If you’ve had a cell phone for more than, say, a minute or two, you have experienced a dropped call. The idea that any adult user, no matter how stupid, would fail to notice that the call has ended and fly off the handle isn’t even funny the first time; after four or five hundred rotations in a single week, the urge to slap the actor (or better yet, the writer responsible for this crap) becomes overpowering.

Even worse, as far as I’m concerned, is a beer ad in which a guy arriving at a party grabs a large container of beer from another arriving guest (under the guise of “helping” him get through a door) and starts carrying on as if he’s the one who brought the beer. In most circles, if you behave like that even one time, you’re probably not getting invited to any future parties. Assuming, of course, that the person whose beer you’re taking credit for bringing does not beat you senseless for doing so. If you did something like that back when we were in college, you’d be lucky to make it out alive…

And I’m not even going to discuss the idea that showing up at a party with several liters of (stolen) beer in a special new container would make all of the women present want to sleep with you…

Let’s just move on to a series of commercials for what are described as “natural male enhancement” products, whatever that means. For reasons unexplained (and probably inexplicable) these ads all seem to feature men who use these products picking up (and presumably having sex with) some of the least appealing women on the planet. They also feature people discussing sex aids in public, but after twenty years of ads featuring women discussing feminine hygiene products in public, this is not actually remarkable. Nor is the message of “buy our product and women will sleep with you,” which is, after all, the central message of car ads, clothing ads, furniture ads, grooming product ads, housing ads, oral hygiene ads, food ads, travel ads, and every beer commercial ever produced – at least, where these products are targeting a male demographic.

What is remarkable is that even if you find the cast of these spots attractive (there’s no accounting for taste, after all), I can’t think of a more tasteless way of presenting the product. It’s not funny or sexy; it’s just annoying. And the more times you see the spot, the worse it gets. In fact, that goes for the cell phones and beer products noted above. I have to ask if the people who wrote these spots even considered that their potential customer would have to sit through dozens or hundreds or viewings before making a purchasing decision.

For a good contrast, let’s consider the ”Happy Cow” ads put on by our California Dairy boosters. These were/are genuinely funny, they were visually interesting and made good use of the “talking animals” gimmick, the advertisers made a large number of different spots and rotated them regularly, and made sure the ads were never put on anything like an “every six minutes” rotation. Or, for that matter, consider the ”Most Interesting Man in the World” series being used by another beer advertiser. Funny, droll, and the basis for an entire integrated campaign, they seem to have created a whole new marketing figure out of thin air – and creative thinking.

“Why does he tell me this?” I hear some of you asking. Because local cable advertising can be invaluable to a new business; because national cable advertising can put an emerging business on the map; because national television advertising can make or break a company. But most of all, because you can do better – and because someday, you might have to…