Not only does this advert irritate me beyond all reason, but I honestly don’t see what they’re trying to achieve. Do they honestly think this is going to sell product?
I am talking about the advert currently being shown on British TV for some sort of headache pill. The fact I can’t recall the name is telling enough. It features an odd woman who speaks as if she is deaf (but isn’t) and in a permanent shout, and her rather overweight mother, who wants to strip to her underwear at her window to impress the next door neighbour, who for some unexplained reason is standing in his underwear in his garden.
This is not done humourously. It isn’t funny nor is it attempting to be funny. It has weird atmospheric music and I think they’re trying to be kind of David Lynch, or something. Either way, it annoys the hell out of me and cerainly doesn’t make me want to buy the product. Maybe I’m being overly sensitive, but it appears to me to be bordering on: “Aren’t people who have speech difficulties and fat, lonely people really odd?”
Can anyone explain what the advertisers are trying to do here, or am I missing the hidden charm in this? Are they trying to drum up more business by causing headaches through sheer annoyance?
I find it entertaining enough. At least, for a painkiller advert, it’s a bit different. I don’t think she was supposed to be deaf (that’s surely a whole dodgy area to be poking fun at), but shouting (because she wasn’t in the same room) and in a German accent (I suppose to be, ugh, ‘quirky’).
There’s certainly an element of ‘laugh at the fat woman stripping’, which is pretty unnecessary, but no more offensive than half of the banal crap advertisers insult us with.
The USP (unique selling point) of the product is that it now works twice as fast as it used to, or twice as fast as comparable headache cures.
The older woman is in the habit of annoying and irritating the younger woman so that she will develop a headache and then go off to lie down for a while and get over it. The older woman can then indulge her fantasy about titillating the man in the garden.
However, because the product now works so damn fast, the younger woman comes back down more quickly than the older woman was expecting, and catches her.
Yep, it’s a real thigh-slapper.
It’s meant to be funny. It’s meant to be a novel and interesting way of making the point about the product. It probably cost about 25 grand to make and a lot more to actually broadcast. And it’s pure crap. Typical of the advertising industry’s pathetically uncreative snake-oil sales twits who choose this ‘career’, and their all-too-deserving clients.
If you want to find a moron, go to an ad agency. If you want to be a moron, actually hire one.