Any commercial which uses “We Won’t be Fooled Again” as music just doesn’t get it.
When an advert at least used some creativity and originality in composing a tune like the Coke "Teach the world to sing" which became a single that is to be commended but I hate the usual lazy approach of buying up an exisitng tune and just usually just changing the lyrics .
I don’t see what’s wrong with a lot of those photos.
Similarly, the use of Roman P by Psychic TV in a Volkswagen commercial. Decent song, but do you really wanna buy what it’s selling?
I know. that’s why I said hit and miss. Some are much worse. Read the site comments for each entry and it often then becomes more obvious.
Most of them are unattached limbs, hands, fingers or oddly distended/shortened limbs or else limbs at horrible angles. Throw in a smattering of reflections on tables, windows, or TV screens and you have a blog
Advertising and marketing is an advanced science - I don’t believe there are any accidents. All innuendo and double entendre are completely intended, in my opinion.
Not so bad at the time (for hawking amphetamines), but the Ayds commercials seem in poor taste now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDqIDqY-wsQ
Reminds me of this commercial, only it’s full of win.
Heh, in the UK in the early '90s, there was a Pork Marketing Board ad that had the slogan “Lean on British pork” - i.e. you can rely on it to cook with, and it doesn’t have much fat.
My girlfriend’s nickname at the time was Leen. And I’m British. You can guess when I decided to use the slogan - which resulted in a slap.
That muesli ad is shockingly bad. Particularly in the punctuation.
Actually not. A whole lot of stuff goes out the door with the copy (including headlines) having been revised within the hour.
I’ve caught headlines that were open to misinterpretation that had already been approved by a dozen people. These were less blatant than beating off the competition… more along the lines of “You’ll be happy you came!” but still needlessly ambiguous.
Nothing involving people is an exact science. Half the people in every profession are below the median intelligence in that profession. That anything ever works at all is the real miracle.
Yes, I’ve written advertising and public relations and press releases and all the stuff in that field. My guess is that 99% of stuff starts with somebody saying “we need something here, go do it.” “What would you like?” “I’ll know it when I see it.”
But they don’t know anything. And that’s what they get.
It’s accidents all the way down.
If they ever make a Kevin Bacon movie called The Hollow Woodsman, they can use this ad:
(Semi-NSFW; no nudity, but you may have as difficult a time explaining this as I’m sure the ad agency must have. But hey, they got it approved.)
http://www.hookedonads.com/anti-pedophilia-social-ad-campaign-by-cerca/
The intended paranoia incitement is bad enough, but the tag, “help Annie overcome her fear of the dark” is seriously disturbing considering what happens.
Clean your glasses, Mr. Magoo!
The second one (Glamour): Look at the woman’s hair. The open spaces between curls and such should, if they had used a Green or Blue Screen, have blended into the background color and the words “Glamour”. They do not. Someone took a photo and tried to “cut around” it as much as possible before pasting it onto the background.
First-year Photoshopper: C-
World Famous Magazine: F
Woman’s World: The lady has an extra long arm…yeowch!
No, it’s a quicky pass-around print that was never supposed to be released. The final cover doesn’t look that way. Just some idiots who tried to make themselves look good in a snarky blog and got caught. Read the comments.
This week I saw a commercial for Cheetos, taking place on an airplane. A woman is seated next to a snoring man. Chester Cheetah tells the annoyed woman, “you know what to do.” Close-up of woman stuffing two Cheetos up the guy’s nostrils.
End result: me being grossed out by the thought of eating Cheetos.
I usually love those things, and now I associate them with nostril-stuffers. Good work, ad agency.
Maybe I’m over-sensitive. Does this sound icky to anyone else?
For that matter, Microsoft used the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” to advertise the launch a new Windows OS. (Windows 98 maybe?) “Start me up and I’ll never stop.” They cut off before it got to, “You make a grown man cry.”
They also left out, “You make a dead man come.”
A classic one I remember from the early 1970’s.
Heinz decided to really take on Campbell’s in the canned soup market, with their Great American Soups brand. They packaged them in blue & white cans (vs. Campbell’s red & white), had most of the same flavors, and worked hard to get grocery stores to dedicate an equal amount of shelf space to Heinz soups.
And they made an incredible commercial for their soup. Featuring Ann Miller, a whole Busby Berkley style chorus line, dancing atop a giant can of soup rising from the stage, etc. Supposedly the most expensive commercial ever made up to that time (and maybe ever). See it here.
But it was a major flop.
The commercial did inspire housewives to buy more canned soup when grocery shopping, but they didn’t remember the Heinz name – they bought their usual Campbell’s soup. So every time Heinz paid to show the commercial, it led to increased sales for their competitor. Pretty much the worst possible result from a commercial!
(Probably not helped by the fact that they spent so much making the commercial that they allegedly couldn’t afford to buy the time to show it as often as they had planned. Possibly showing it more often might have got the Heinz Great American Soups name into buyers minds, instead of Campbell’s soup. We’ll never know.)
Heinz eventually conceded defeat, and dropped out of the retail market for canned soup. (They are still a big supplier of soup for restaurant & institutional buyers, but not retail.)
I remember a few years back driving along the south luzon expressway back into Manila when a lot of the 30’ tall billboards were showing some middle aged male actor holding a glass of some spirits. But the extremely large print was querying “When was the last time you tried a 15 yr old?”
I’ll need to see if google still has some images, though I can’t remember the name of the alcohol at the moment.