The ESPN ads featuring couples making out in extreme detail, and then saying this is disgusting and shows that they’re wearing rival college sweatshirts.
I am NOT a prude, but come on! I was working in a bar at the time and it totally reminded me of yelling at customers to get a room.
Oddly dogs doing that doesnt bother me.
Shooting food so it looks appetizing is hard – that’s why the big outfits have their own studio kitchens. A lot of times the food you see on TV that looks delicious is barely edible in real life because it’s prepared to look great, not taste great. Conversely, food that tastes fantastic and looks good in person can look like shit on TV if it’s not lit and filmed exactly right. Smaller chains and restaurants try to do food videography on the cheap and it’s usually a bad idea.
Back in the days when they showed a midnight creature feature on a Saturday night, a local pizza place advertised - flashing only a phone number and a shot of their pizza. Under an autopsy bright light, it was brilliant bloody red with white gummy wads of semi-melted cheese on top, looked awful! (didn’t stop us for begging one, Mom always said no way!)
This wasn’t some one or two location local shop - this was a national brand. They have the budget, so the greaseball was a willful decision.
Food photography is an insane field with all the crazy stand-ins like lard for ice cream, and applying perfect grill marks by hand. Technically edible but beautiful is the guiding principle.
Not so much the ads as the actual brand, but there’s a protein shake that keeps showing up in my Facebook ads called “Huel,” which is a protmanteau of “human” and “fuel,” and also the sound effect I would use if I were writing a comic in which someone where vomiting.
Pretty sure this used to be illegal. I read an article about food styling like in the 80s, and it was mostly about how difficult it was to make food look good without using trickery. The specific example I remember was that when a bowl of soup just sits there, all the chunky bits go to the bottom. So since they weren’t allowed to fill the bowl halfway with marbles first, they had to stir the soup vigorously and snap the shot before the goodies sank.
The “steam” coming off food is usually cigarette smoke. or at least it used to be.
It gets really weird. The food item being promoted has to be that item. So a photo shoot for corn flakes can use white glue in place of milk because they’re selling cereal, not milk. On the flip side, an ad for milk would have to use real milk, but could use plastic bits that look like cereal. For things like cheeseburgers, it’s OK to push all the toppings to the front to make it look nice and big, but you can’t put a quarter-pound patty on the bun unless you’re selling quarter pound burgers.
Using lard to represent ice cream is fine if you’re not selling ice cream. So it won’t fly in an ad for Baskin Robbins, but as an incidental or background item it’s OK.
The ad agency where my gf works shies away from tobacco companies. Not because smoking is unhealthy, but because ads for tobacco are regulated so severely.
If a cigarette ad is placed in a publication, the size, shape, location, font, etc of the warning has to be perfect. It varies internationally as well.
They have paid big fines when the original ad is resized for a different use and at the new size/orientation of the warning is no longer acceptable.
I swear I spent half my time in advertising trying to convince lower budget clients NOT to show off their food (unless we could hire serious Food Stylists)… and to NOT show the founder of the company. Or his talentless hellspawn grandchildren.
C’mon, you’ve seen those ads:
“My Grampie sez to never not stop sweating and buy you a air connitioner from McRamble.”
Grampie (reading laboriously off cue cards to left of camera): “That’s right, little Gerald McRamble the Third, folks in the Tri-County Area should ‘Ramble on down to McRamble’ for our awwwwwesome Arbor Day Two for One and A Half Air Conditioner Sale! Just take a look at this illegibly tiny map I made the ad people put in our commercial.”
(McRamble grandchildren join hands, sing company jingle)
At my first agency (back in the 90s) we actually had a job code for “talking clients out of terrible ideas.”
I saw an interview years ago with Alex Winters, the other guy from Bill & Ted. He talked about being a child actor in a commercial with the original, quite elderly Colonel Sanders, who was pretty much out of it at that point. Since regular coleslaw would wilt instantly under studio lights, they used this concoction that was basically library paste with bits of paper mixed in. Between takes, Winters saw the Colonel look around to make sure no one was watching, then start scarfing down the fauxslaw as fast as he could.
When I was in freelance marketing and graphic design, I learned early on to submit my best idea second. That way the client could feel in control by rejecting the first–which they always did–and then my leading questions made them feel like the second idea was aaaaall theirs.
I assume you also included the proverbial “helicopter”.
Oh gosh, local ads. I know exactly what you’re talking about, because I’ve been called in to redo them after Grampie McRamble and his grandchildren do them. Nobody wants to hear Grampie McRamble or his grandchildren. They want to hear a professional announcer (like me). Grampie may not like it, and his grandchildren may not like not being on TV, but Grampie’s business will do better if he leaves his advertising to the professionals.
In the same vein as the local ads, how about car and truck dealerships? There must be a script on how these work because they are all the same…
No wonder Carmax exists.
I still see ads for Coca-Cola from time-to-time. And you don’t get much more successful than Coca-Cola.
You forgot “Yelling at the top of their voice the whole time.”
There’s a real art to making the client believe they came up with the idea themselves – and the real payoff when you do is that they’ll come up with extra funding for it, too.