Yes, I wrote something longer than a headline
No one asked for it to be “fluffed”, either.
Visit the new blog at ControlYourCash.com. Thank you for your interest in this blog, which was rapidly becoming less relevant as advertising : communication :: UFC : sports. You’ll like the new one better.
Because this exists.
2 months after we disparaged Microsoft for an embarrassing* web spot, Anheuser-Busch has set the bar so high, Sergei Bubka couldn’t clear it.**
See if you can spot the joke!!! (It’s REALLY subtle so you might need to watch it several times!!!!)
The most discouraging about this video is that YouTube commenters gave it 4.5 stars. Not out of a billion, out of 5. And the one commenter who said something insightful (“Great to see they’re hiring 13 year olds to write their ads”) received unanimous thumbs-down for his comments.
Thanks for reading. And to the creative directors and clients whose brainchild this is, may your future sons and daughters be born with some heretofore undiscovered strain of lupus.
I hate you all, especially since you just forced me to finally break down and use the first-person singular pronoun.
Here, read this as it comes true. And try not to move your lips while doing so.
*Embarrassing to the viewer. Apparently for the creative team and the client, it’s the Taj Mahal, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Bach’s Mass in B Minor all rolled into one.
**ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick used this in his Baseball America column, circa 1994. If this is going to be the last McFarlane USA post, it was important to record that brilliant pre-internet line for posterity’s sake.
George Reeves and Christopher Reeve each think this is an ignominious end
With its latest advertising, Microsoft is positioning itself to successfully defend its 2008 Worst Ad Of The Year title (Decently Sized Ad Budget Division).
If you haven’t seen Microsoft’s new web-only spot (first in a series!), enjoy.
Give an advertising creative team a shiny new toy, and they’ll abuse it as surely as a hyperkinetic child will. Bradley and Montgomery, a New York/Indianapolis agency, created this disjointed piece of cinema nauseé available only to those of us with online access. Which means that Crispin Porter + Bogusky, Microsoft’s agency of record and the force behind the infamously unfocused Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld spot, escapes our derision for the second consecutive post.
You see, this isn’t your conventional TV ad. This appears on something called the Inter-net. It’s a series of tubes, outside the jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission. If you want to fill your Inter-net spot with sex, violence, or people actually drinking beer instead of just raising it to their lips, you can.
When Marshall McLuhan said the medium is the message, he had something of a point. The corollary to his observation is that the actual message itself, in this case that of a vomiting woman illustrating the need for private browsing, becomes secondary to the naughty things the spot’s creators can do with the medium.
Everything about this ad is wrong.
a) Just because you’re using an unfamiliar medium with fewer rules, you don’t have to break all the rules of the previous, more familiar medium just for the sake of doing so. Bradley and Montgomery apparently thought, “All those years of being forbidden from showing emesis, and now we can! So let’s!”
To really test the limitations of the new medium, why not show urine? Or better yet, feces?
For a similar illustration of “medium creep”, listen to the rock and hip-hop stations on satellite radio. For several of the jocks, the novelty of using profanity and neither getting fired nor suspended for it has yet to wear off – which leads to awkwardly placed swear words denuded of their original purpose, that of adding emphasis for especially appropriate occasions. Or read Matt Taibbi, who has all of H.L. Mencken’s disdain for the human species but none of Mencken’s talent. Yet because Taibbi’s lucky enough to live in an era when profanity doesn’t cause people to fall supine with the vapors, he can cuss his way to something approaching notoriety.
b) The premise of the spot, while feasible, progresses in a nonsensical direction.
The woman shares breakfast, and presumably her life, with the man. He’s comfortable enough with her that he thinks nothing of handing his laptop over to her with the web browser open to HairyVaginasWithHerpes.com. (That appears to be the URL, after several attempts to read spokesmercenary Dean Cain’s lips.)
Which brings up the question of why the edgy creative team bleeped out the name of the offending website. Why not mention it, and throw in a profanity to boot? Better still, why not make it HairyPreschoolersVaginasWithHerpesContractedFromTheirUncles.com? Anything goes in cyberspace, right?
The woman feels no disgust toward the man, managing to somehow compartmentalize his personality from the offending website he visited. If anything, she seems remarkably composed and forgiving for someone who lives with a guy who starts off his morning with cereal, milk and images of infected genitalia.
The spot could have been salvaged, even enhanced, had it shown something approaching a reasonable reaction from the woman. She could have walked off in a huff and left the husband/boyfriend pleading for clemency. Or she could have told the man how disgusting he is and then proceeded to hurl (with her hands) projectiles at him. Exaggerate it to make it entertaining, show the man curling up to avoid getting attacked. That at least makes sense, more than gratuitous vomiting does.
c) The most offensive second of this spot comes at the :35 mark. Upon being vomited upon – for the second time – the guy counters the deluge with a disapproving hand gesture and the one-word comeback, “Really?” Yes, because when your wife vomits on you because of something you did, the natural response is act as if she just told you her brother’s coming to visit for a month.
d) The product is being sold as a groundbreaker, which it’s anything but. You don’t have to own a Mac – you only have to know someone who owns a Mac – to know that Apple introduced private browsing with OS X Safari 4 years ago.
Microsoft is almost proud to be playing catch-up to Apple at this point – consider Microsoft’s recent “I’m a PC” campaign, which violates yet another fundamental precept of advertising – only acknowledge the competition if you’re attacking an indefensible weakness of theirs.
The vomit spot is not part of a campaign foisted upon the public by an upstart startup desperate for recognition. It’s from the second-largest company in all of commerce, whose book value is approaching a quarter-trillion dollars.
Microsoft’s current vomit-free TV campaign shows a series of thrifty computer shoppers saving money at Best Buy by taking home Microsoft laptops. Yes, the company that was founded as the exemplar of modernity and technological sophistication is now selling itself as
-the budget alternative, and
-4 years behind the curve.
This post was written using a MacBook Pro, by a writer who’d used Windows for 6 years, and therefore had accepted crashing, freezing and restarting as unavoidable facts of life.
Meet Burger King's new creative director
The first objective of advertising isn’t to be clever, to shock, to inspire, to get people talking, nor even to be clear. (Although that last one is the second objective.) The first objective is to move product.
Which is why it’s been impressed upon McFarlane Media several times that the ultimate ad is the hand-painted billboard that reads “Hot Dogs $2”. What the product is, and why you should buy it – in this case, presumably because it’s cheap enough that the sign painter thought its price was worth mentioning.
Of course, adding subtlety or even a datum of information requires a more complex ad. Otherwise we never would have advanced as a species from cave paintings to Principia Mathematica. A proper ad for a MacBook Pro or a Lexus GX470 needs more than just a product mention and a single selling feature to make its point.
For a relatively involved product, some sober illustration or demonstration of its benefits will help. For a stylish or trendy product, an advertiser needs maybe a more subjective feeling of tone and color to position said product to a fickle customer base.
And for a fast-food sandwich, you clearly need pre-adolescent sex jokes.
(Body copy: “Fill your desire for something long, juicy,…etc.)
Behold the latest brilliance from a Singaporean agency that Burger King is so proud of doing business with that the company refuses to mention them by name in press releases. (The ad runs only in Singapore, a nation where spitting on the sidewalk can result in corporal punishment.) Burger King’s American agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky, isn’t responsible for it. CP+B might have devised that hideously disturbing king mannequin measuring women’s posteriors with a ruler, not to mention Darius Rucker serenading a scene that apparently came from one of Steven Adler’s dreams, but the agency can wash their hands of any involvement with this one.
There’s nothing wrong with ribald humor. We’re not an agency of nuns and eunuchs. But Good Lord.
And don’t think that there’s some inherent value in the campaign simply because “Well, look at you. You’re talking about it.” Several newspaper column inches, filmstrips, magazine articles, books and conversations were devoted to World War II. Just because something gets people talking doesn’t mean that it’s of value.
Detroit City Council recently took time away from watching its miserable excuse for a metropolis crumble into oblivion to claim that racial stereotyping in billboards is “killing (their) community”. Do people of Nordic descent have a legitimate gripe over the depiction of a blonde, blue-eyed woman as someone who needs her cravings satisfied by 7 thick inches of juicy meat? Are Singaporean ad agencies that racist? Or are Singaporean women just naturally content with less impressive sandwiches?
Does the Burger King campaign move product? Not if its American counterpart is any indication. Does it force Singaporean mothers into uncomfortable conversations with their kids? Probably. Does it compel? No. It simply gives an unimaginative creative department a chance to justify its existence via the inexact mensuration of “buzz”. They can do better. And as consumers, we can do better.
As a real agency with actual writers, McFarlane Media can do better still. Email us today for work far better than what you see here. info@McFarlaneUSA.com
M'm! M'm! Repetitive!
Harry Selfridge, a Wisconsinite, moved to the United Kingdom after amassing a fortune in retail. He then founded the chain of stores that bears his name, currently in its second century of clothing and accessorizing stylish Brits. However, he’s best known for uttering the most misunderstood phrase in the history of commerce:
“The customer is always right.”
There are two common ways to react to Selfridge’s aphorism: ignoring it (like most customer service people do), or obeying it mindlessly (which is often worse).
Here’s the problem: Selfridge didn’t mean to be taken literally.
If you put Ferran Adria, Wolfgang Puck, Joël Robuchon, and Nobuyuki Matsuhisa in the same kitchen, they’re probably not going to spoil the broth. An assailant armed with a sword is going to be a tougher matchup than someone wielding a Bic extra fine. Which brings us to those frequent instances when the client is dead wrong.
McFarlane Media’s clients don’t buy ads from us, so much as they buy our expertise. If they want ads, they can go to the freshman class at the Art Institute. Or write them themselves.
But that’s just it: they’re buying our expertise, because they don’t have any – at least not in our area of specialization. If the customer is always right, then the customer can demand that our work be twisted, recalibrated, augmented, diminished, reconditioned or otherwise weakened.
When you buy an airline ticket, you’re paying a sliver of the captain’s salary and by some measure become his temporary “boss”. But that doesn’t give you the right to offer tips on cruising altitudes and angles of approach.
If you’re a client, and think the killer headline crafted for you would work better with an exclamation point in place of a period, you are wrong. As wrong as you’d be if you suggested to your anesthesiologist that maybe she’d like to administer the methohexital during your surgery instead of the lorazepam. Exclamation points have only two legitimate purposes:
-irony, which few clients understand;
-factorials, which no clients understand.
One particularly illustrative example of a client neutering a message is in one of the most elegant campaigns to appear on TV in the last few years. Campbell’s has been brewing soup for 7 generations, positioning itself to the point where it’s synonymous with an unexciting if ubiquitous product. In the mid-90s, agency BBDO New York positioned Campbell’s with a fantastic line that works on every level:
Never underestimate the power of soup.
Rarely have six words resonated so strongly in the framework of an ad campaign.
Nellie McClung rallied woman’s suffrage with the line’s antecedent, “Never underestimate the power of a woman.” Rudy Tomjanovich provided one of the all-time NBA soundbites after his Houston Rockets squeaked into the 1995 playoffs and somehow successfully defended their title: “Never underestimate the heart of a champion.” Campbell’s took most of an inspiring, heartfelt line, and closed it with a curveball of a flourish. The idea of soup as powerful, or something not to be belittled, was so incongruous as to be unforgettable.
The campaign ran for a few years, until a Campbell’s middle manager got a hold of it and rechristened it with:
Never underestimate the power of Campbell’s.
Clank.
Why would you underestimate “the power of Campbell’s”? Why would you even gauge the power of Campbell’s? Why would you even think about the power of Campbell’s?
This is one of the darkened paths down which corporate overthought can lead. The objecting middle manager’s plaint is clear: “Uh, yeah. That’s not going to work. That line focuses on the market, rather than the company. We want people to think ‘Campbell’s’, rather than ‘soup’.”
As if they didn’t anyway. As if Campbell’s hadn’t already been synonymous with soup since the childhood of everyone alive except Robert Byrd and Jamie Moyer. Soup is lukewarm, often literally. It’s smooth, it simply sits there – heck, it’s not even solid. Its name even sounds faintly funny. Positioning soup as powerful is brilliant and somewhat hilarious.
But “never underestimate the power of Campbell’s” says nothing. If anything, it casts doubts on Campbell’s as a legitimate business entity. “Never underestimate the power of Microsoft”? You wouldn’t, it’s the market leader. Nor would you underestimate the power of Wal-Mart or ExxonMobil. But for Campbell’s, a company as dominant in soup as ExxonMobil is in petroleum, to remind you not to underestimate it almost defines weakness and neediness. Not a characteristic you’d want in your soup. Or your Campbell’s.
That’s just one example. Trust the agency. Trust the copywriter. Trust your own area of expertise, and let the agency do what it does. Or find another agency.
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