I DON’T LIKE SMUGNESS. I don’t like smug advertising messages. I don’t like smug people who smugly deliver smug advertising messages.
So I admit, with no shame whatever: I don’t like Dennis Miller as a spokesman for anything.
Dennis Miller typifies the in-your-face smugness that’s too common in today’s TV-dominated marketing ambiance: Celebrities are allowed to glorify themselves more than what they’re supposed to be hawking. A few years ago, for reasons known only to some obscure deity, he became spokesman for a chain of pizza restaurants. I’ve forgotten which one (mercifully for both me and the pizza chain); I do remember eliminating that brand from any buying consideration.
Now Dennis Miller is pitching a long-distance phone service. While I can’t blame him for the execrable copy, I certainly can blame him for the know-it-all delivery. He hasn’t mellowed. Neither have I.
Oh, Dennis Miller is a flea in the ear, and I really can’t justify on logical grounds devoting such negative attention to him. But you see, it isn’t Dennis Miller who’s the target. It’s what he represents.
We’re seeing an epidemic of advertising that even a couple of years ago wouldn’t have been accepted by the media in which the ads run. A whiskey refers to itself as “The best damned Scotch.” Analyze the shift in marketing philosophy behind this in-your-face verbalism for what traditionally has been the most sedate of all drunkenness drinks.
A societal change? So what? Let movies, not ads and mailers, be the mirrors (had my friend John Waters produced a movie titled “Pecker” a few years ago, most newspapers would have rejected the ads…which today caused not even a stir).
How many ads have you seen lately that proudly tout a product as the one that “kicks butt”? See my point? This isn’t dumbing-down; it’s devolving-down, an early indicator of social deterioration.
Last year Miller Lite beer suffered-deservedly-because of a totally stupid and ineffective campaign centered around a troglodytic nerd named Dick. Sales plummeted, as they certainly deserved to do. The advertising agency took the blame, although somebody at Miller had approved the asinine concept.
The Miller campaign is peripheral to the next example. I may be giving more credit than is actually due to PointCast, which in a series of full-page ads, had this as the selling copy:
They gave you Dick.
We give you Richard.
The subhead: “That’s the senior VP. Richard lives in L.A., drives a BMW and wants to buy a DVD player and a kayak.”
Oh, we understand the demographic intention. But if you aren’t jarred by that first line, I salute you for having been insulated from low-level schoolyard epithets. If you are jarred, you may wonder, as I do, not only about both this marketer’s degenerated dignity, but also about the damage to all our futures as force-communicators if in-your-face messages become total replacements for salesmanship.
PointCast isn’t alone in schoolyard smirk-humor. DirectorSearch, a company in the peculiar business of supplying directors for TV commercials, has this huge heading on its full-page ad:
Is that a hard drive in your pocket or are you just happy to see us?
An ad for Glenfiddich Scotch has this heading:
Made the same damn way since 1887.
I can envision a bartender saying that; as an ad in The New Yorker, it may be a stopper…today, but probably not two years from now if it’s indicative of future in-your-face messages.
Glenfiddich is mild (at least its message is comparatively mild) compared with Smirnoff vodka:
“This Himalayan vodka is supposed to make me fashionable, hip and on the cutting edge. What does your Smirnoff make you?”
“A kick-ass martini.”
So we’re unsurprised on two levels by:
“I’ve played so much guitar it’d make your ass hurt.”
Why two levels? First, it’s for Winston cigarettes; second, it’s in Yahoo! magazine, which also has a semi-impenetrable ad for an online company called Bluefly.com:
Your fly is open.
A space ad in a computer magazine:
Should we call it E*TRADE 98? E*TRADE 2.0? Or E*TRADE kicks butt?
The posterior seems to be the current target as this type of ad bottoms out and its exponents ass-ess its effectiveness. National Telecommunications Services says:
Democrats! If you want to kick some Republican butt, we’re your phone firm.
Lincoln, one of the more sober automobile advertisers, shows a full-page photograph of its SUV with this heading:
Kick derriere.
OK, Lincoln’s ad is mildly charming. But it’s mildly charming only because we can relate it to the other ads we’re now seeing. Would it have appeared at all if we weren’t midway through a transition?
That last question isn’t as rhetorical as it might seem at first glance. If you listen to radio talk-show hosts you may be hearing language that would have had them kicked off the air five years ago. Heck, make that three.
And what sea-change have we witnessed over the last three years? Emergence of an Internet “kultur,” that’s what.
You might say, “If we can accept ‘architect’ as a verb we can accept butt-kicking as an advertising exercise.” OK, we’re doubly infected.
It’s your call whether you think the Internet deserves a large part of the responsibility or a large part of the credit for these ads. Are they advances or aberrations? Please, though: Think carefully before embracing them as “New Age.” The last two cultures to enjoy a New Age were the Roman Empire and Nazi Germany, and look what happened to them.
Yes, we’re the logical and designated mirrors of society. And here are our professional representatives, playing a game of “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest one of all?”…without considering that what the mirror shows might be warts.
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