I am having a hard time finding advertisements worth watching lately. Most are uneventful at the least and down right stupid at their worst. What is really surprising to me is that someone actually thought up the idea, it was approved by a supervisor, it was approved by a client, it was produced, and then someone paid to put this on the air. How come it got this far? Did no one have the courage to stand up and say, “Hey, wait a minute, this is awful”?
I am going to start taking notes of the particularly bad ones and good ones if I can find any to share with you my thoughts on the matter. You may agree or may not agree but that is what opinions are all about.
The first ones that come to mind are the food and diet commercials. I have had my fill of them. If you take careful notice you will find yourself asking important questions such as why does it take two hands to hold that portion of food? If the typical actor is relatively small then the portion on display in those two hands must be incredibly small, and that means that there is no way on earth that one of those dinky things will ever come close to filling me up. Thanks to macro photography, subject food may appear larger than in real life. Beside the camera adds 10 pounds. You can find examples of this in most NutriSystem ads as well as Taco Bell and any dollar menu item ads.
I am very weary of anything that has fine print. Especially when the fine print is so small that you need to have an 80 inch HD screen to be able to make it out, and even then you need to freeze frame it. Hint: Most all diet ads say that results are not typical. At least they are honest about that.
It is hard to imagine how Toyota became so popular with the advertisements they use. Theirs are the most boring and useless in the car industry. They don’t inspire imagination, they never discuss numbers when they are having a ‘sale’, and the latest attempt at being politically correct with a car that is put together with sticks and leaves and then gets blown away by the wind makes me wonder if the car I buy would last about that long as well. It is a good thing they have a great word of mouth reputation to going for them.
Most ads are thankfully forgettable. This is the one thing that keeps us sane. I count on the fact that I will not take notice of most ads out there. There are so many ways to get inundated with ads that I think I have reached a saturation point. This means that it is going to take something special to get through to me and then it will have to work extra hard to get through the cynical filters. Also if the advert is really bad I tend to go out of my way to avoid the product. I tend to associate a really bad advertisement with a really bad product. Think of the internet is hiding ads of AT&T and you just know this is something to avoid.
We will watch and report more as we go. I’m sure you have noticed them yourself. Maybe we can laugh at the truly awful ones together.
This is Ed Nef with a view from the Farr West.
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