There are two things I noticed recently, both related to television commercials, that I was wondering about. Feel free to comment on either or both (or neither!).
Observation#1: The Verizon “can you hear me now?” guy now plugging for Sprint? Has there every been another case of a well-known spokesperson jumping ship to a competitor? And he directly references his work for Verizon, its not just “hey, I got another job”. It seems weird to me, as if Sprint is desperate or something but I can also see how they could see it as a “coup” to have “converted” the spokesperson.
Observation #2: I recently saw a commercial for Febreeze, where a mother is telling her teenage son that they need to “wash” his room because it stinks and he has company coming over. But it is the exact same situation, exact SAME DIALOGUE, as a Febreeze commercial that first aired a couple years ago, just with different actors. Why “recast” and re-film a commercial and not add or change anything otherwise?
Just wondering if anyone had any thoughts on either of these observations of mine.
Commercials are frequently shot in blocks, sometimes on the same set or location, with different actors. The usual reason was race: P&G, for example, didn’t want to be accused of racism by using only white actors, so they’d shoot a black version of the same commercial, and in recent years, Latino or other variations. Time was that the black-actor commercials wouldn’t be shown in the south. These days, it can come down to different regional accents - while California would giggle at a commercial with Nwingland accents, Nwinglanders would feel recognized by it.
For a long time, major advertisers stood on their white/black/your-race-here commercial blocking to prove they were multicultural. Then someone noticed that there was never a mix of races in a commercial, so they cut together commercials that showed one white family and one black family… but still not interacting. It’s quite a recent thing to have mixed races interacting in major ads, and they still shoot multiple versions both for regionalizing/market targeting and to keep the basic campaign fresh by not seeing exactly the same commercial as many times.
Just to note that it’s been five years since Verizon ran the “Can You Hear Me Now?” campaign, or used him in any of their ads. So, while Sprint clearly is employing him for his recognizability, and his former role, it’s not like he’s jumped directly from Verizon to Sprint.
Assuming that it’s 100% identical, it could be any of a number of reasons. Off the top of my head:
The actors’ contracts with the advertiser (and the ad agency) are usually not open-ended; many such contracts are in force for a limited amount of time (perhaps only a year or two), since very few ads air for very long. If an advertiser wants to continue to run a spot after the contracts with the actors lapse, they need to re-negotiate, and one of the actors might have refused to re-up the contract.
Typically, an actor’s contract includes a clause preventing them from making an ad for the advertiser’s competition. It’s possible that, after the contract for the Febreze ad lapsed, one of the actors may have gone on to make an ad for a competitor.
One of the actors might have had some sort of personal issue (such as being arrested, or saying something very stupid on social media), and the advertiser no longer wanted that person to be associated with their brand.
It’s also possible that the ads are similar, but not 100% identical – they may have changed a claim in the ad, or wanted to say something slightly differently (or even shown a new version of the package), which would have required a re-shoot.
I would never have noticed if he didn’t mention it himself in the ad. All phone commercials are the same blahblahblah to me.
I’ve noticed the same thing with this Symbicort ad, it used to star a little boy. Now it has little girls, but other than that, I don’t think they’ve changed one single word.
They had an article in the Kansas City paper a while back about Sprint snapping up the Verizon guy. (Sprint is based in KC.) They had a quote from someone at Sprint expressing surprise that Verizon hadn’t contractually locked this guy up for life, and decided to hire him when they found out he was available. I agree though that it does feel like a desperation move.
Well, yes, because if you’re the market leader, you don’t generally have to make competitive claims like those.
Claims like those are fairly uncommon, and are usually made when the “second place” brand actually can make a superiority claim (i.e., “consumers prefer our product”). Uninformed consumers will tend to assume that the “leading brand” is probably also the best brand, and if another brand actually has a better product, a claim like that can actually be pretty powerful.
Such claims also need to be backed up by fairly stringent consumer research, which is another reason why you so rarely see a brand make a direct, named comparison against a competitor. If Burger King makes a claim like “4 out of 5 people prefer our fries over McDonalds” *, McDonalds would immediately file a claim with the regulatory authorities (likely the Federal Trade Commission), and Burger King would need to either provide substantiation, in the form of the research study which demonstrated this result, or they would need to pull the ads.
This is not a value judgement or anything, just an observation: I’ve noticed lots more commercials showing what strikes me as the token friends. For example, a party full of white people with one black couple, or three women lunching together - one white, one black, one Asian, or a black family having a cookout with their one white friend.
These ads make me shake my head - they seem so blatantly manipulative to me. On the other hand, my husband was surprised when I pointed it out to him - he’d never noticed. To be fair, tho, he generally reaches for the remote when a commercial comes on.
I’ve also noticed more mixed-race families and same-sex couples in ads. I think I’m more aware of them because I noticed the demographics once, and now it’s just glaringly obvious. I’d love to know what went on in the planning meetings for these commercials.
And for the most part, these ads fail with me because I have no idea what they’re selling - the messengers distract me from the message.
Well, Marlboro cigarettes had a series of ads featuring the Marlboro Man (there were several). At least one of them did PSA on the dangers of smoking after he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
From Snopes: at least two “Marlboro Men” (neither of them Tom Selleck, clearly ) later participated in anti-smoking efforts once they were diagnosed with smoking-related diseases.
I was wondering about the Febreese commercial myself. They played the hell out of the first version so I was very familiar with it, then suddenly I see the same commercial shot word-for-word with entirely different actors. I said something to my wife, but she didn’t notice any difference. Very twilight zone-esque.
I buy the contract dispute theory over shooting for different ethnicities/demographics, since if I recall correctly both sets of actors were all lily-white. Still, it seems strange- if you could no longer show a certain commercial because of a contract dispute, you’d think you’d start with a new script and fresh approach. Maybe the commercial did so well they didn’t want to change a thing.
What about the Realtor.com commercials that use Ty Burrell as their spokesman, but he’s in character as Phil Dunphy from Modern Family?
Has there ever been a case where a brand used an actual character from a TV show or movie (not the actor wink-wink, nudge-nudgeing to their character) as a spokesperson?
That’d be my guess. P&G would undoubtedly have done copy testing (market research) on the original spot; I would guess that they were very happy with it, and wanted to keep the new version as close to the original as possible.
I haven’t been able to find it in a few minutes of Googling, but Tony Randall and Jack Klugman did at least one commercial for the board game Yahtzee, on the Odd Couple set ( or a reasonable fascimile). I don’t recall if they actually called each other Felix and Oscar, but the implication was certainly there.
The two of them also did a series of ads for Eagle Snacks (a line of chips and pretzels originally introduced by Anheuser-Busch). While Tony calls Jack by name in the ad, their demeanor and outfits clearly are meant to represent Felix and Oscar.
An amusing thing I noticed when visiting Ivy League universities: At Yale, people were always telling me about the many wonderful advantages that Yale has over Harvard. At Harvard, no one ever mentioned Yale.
) later participated in anti-smoking efforts once they were diagnosed with smoking-related diseases.