Advertising agencies are “streamlining” their creative staffs. That’s a transparent euphemism for laying people off. It’s logical enough, with the dot-com demises slashing bottom-line expectations.
But the word that should be in quotation marks isn’t “streamlining.” In too many cases, it should be “creative.” The television-oriented agencies, especially those with automobile accounts, seem to be dealing in the kind of desperation we usually associate with individuals battling an incurable disease.
So when advertising trade publications comment wryly on a Land Rover television spot aired in South Africa, who are we to chuckle? (The commercial showed a semi-nude African woman with synthetically elongated breasts being blown sideways as a Land Rover raced by.)
What do our commercials show? Cars smashing into a barrier. Now, don’t jump all over me, complaining I’m anti-safety. Safety is a factor, all right...but you show me a person who would rather buy a car because a crash test shows the front end smashed in instead of because of luxury and style.
Here’s a commercial for BMW. Ka-bloom! What a mess. Oh, the dummy in the driver’s seat (a genuine dummy, not the one who wrote the commercial) wasn’t damaged. That’s encouraging. Let’s all head for the nearest brick wall and gun into it. The dummy probably is suing for whiplash, and we can join him, collecting at least enough to buy another car.
Uh...can this be? Here’s another SUV blasting its way into a barrier. Oh, this one is a Mercedes-Benz M-Class? I get it: “Our car can crash better than yours can, nyaaah nyaaah.”
The disease is epidemic! Saturn, whose advertising itself seems to have crashed, shows its car following the path of its marketing, except that the action stops just as a pile of iron is about to hit the side panel. And here is Toyota and its big brother Lexus. Gee, this sounds like fun. I wish I’d invested in some of these body shops, because if automobile advertising follows the pattern set by hair coloring and prescription drug advertising, millions of people are going to bash in the front ends of their cars. Better yet: That will be part of the test drive at the dealerships.
What? Subaru has joined the smash-and-bash parade? Now, that’s guts, for a brave little car.
If you remember back when Wendy’s had its “Where’s the beef?” campaign, you also remember the conclusion many people drew: Wendy’s was the hamburger with no beef. Now project that out to these commercials: BMW and Mercedes are the cars that crash.
Even assuming we understand the rationale behind this kind of exposition, in my opinion it just isn’t smart advertising. Safety is fine and admirable and sought-after and all that stuff...but to sell a car, safety should be implicit, not explicit.
Then there’s a commercial for Cadillac’s Escalade, whose image seems to be in free fall. Have you seen this one? A science-fiction monster attacks an Escalade, but the car escapes. Now that’s the way to sell a car! The only current commercial more repulsive is one on cable for Smirnoff vodka, in which two guys are fishing. A bear wanders into their camp. One man smears the other with honey, and the poor sap runs with the bear chasing him. As a denouement, the first fisherman is sitting with some pretty girls, enjoying fish and vodka, and one of the girls asks, “Didn’t you have a friend with you?”
Sidesplitting, isn’t it?
Here’s a commercial for I-forget-what. A father tries to blow-dry his kids’ hair. The dryer won’t work, so he deposits them in the back seat of an open convertible and races down the highway, the wind blowing their hair. They arrive at the airport, picking up Mom, who’s a bit nonplused at the appearance of the kids’ hair, a cross between an Afro and a wheat field. Great image, fellows. We don’t expect those people out there to be experts in our business. But we’re supposed to be experts. A trained psychiatrist doesn’t say to a new patient, “You’re a nut-case or you wouldn’t be here.” A trained doctor doesn’t shrug and tell his patient, “What the hell, you’d have died someday anyway.” A trained salesclerk doesn’t say to a customer, “That shirt makes you look as stupid as you really are.” This so-called “reality” in advertising misses the point of what advertising is supposed to do—cause people to perform a positive act, not just nod and say, “That’s right.”
Way back in the antediluvian era, when the primary focus of Advertising agencies was generating business for their clients instead of bottom-line numbers for their conglomerate parent, a man named Rosser Reeves (who ran the Ted Bates agency) came up with a sure-fire way to sell: the Unique Selling Proposition. How far we’ve come from Rosser Reeves and his USP!
Advertisers used to struggle to answer the question, “What do people want?”—and created messages that uniquely satisfied that want. Today, they look for a gimmick or “cute” incident, then try to tie that into what they’re selling. Entertainment has seized the prime position away from Information.
It’s metastasizing. Here’s a commercial by the New York Life Insurance Co. It emphasizes their building. A little girl walks in; then a full-frown woman walks out, gets into a space-cab, and whirls away through the air. Yeah, that’ll sell a lot of life insurance.
The gap widens. But agencies shouldn’t be nailed with all the blame. Somebody at the client company approved their storyboards.
Herschell Gordon Lewis is the principal of Lewis Enterprises in Fort Lauderdale, FL. He consults with and writes direct response copy for clients worldwide. He’s currently working on his 25th book, “E-mail Marketing.” Among his others is “On the Art of Writing Copy.”
