Take note of two late-April television campaigns before you flip the calendar page: The first commercial is an extremely unfortunate ad for a Dodge Caravan minivan. Place your order before April 30 and the good folks at Dodge will include a built-in DVD player for the passengers in the back seat. The second spot –
Well, let's hold off on that for a moment, because the Dodge ad deserves a close look.
The commercial starts off by showing school kids, hopped up after a full day's learning and lunchtime Twinkies, bouncing off the walls of a school bus. A rather distressed looking adult enters the bus, assesses the situation and reacts by pulling down a tiny television monitor, at which point the kids fall into a zombie-like stupor.
A voiceover intones "When the kids get what they want, you'll get what you want." Great lesson, Dodge – and one that's repeated a few seconds later in the interior of a Caravan. In this vehicle, two children smile emptily in the back seat while mommy and daddy (or perhaps a pair of Yuppie kidnappers – the ad doesn't elaborate one way or another) exchange we-put-one-over-on-the-seven-year-olds-again grins.
"The kids will thank you, and you'll thank us," says the voiceover, who has apparently misunderstood Benjamin Spock's writings on indulging children. Acquiescing to children's demands in return for their docileness is an unfortunate concept – and it's the underlying message of this commercial.
The Caravan spot is slickly produced, and I'm sure this will sell minivans… but God help the parents who believe this is an appropriate parenting tactic. They deserve, if nothing else, to be trapped in the minivan during a cross-country drive while being endlessly exposed to the most annoying children's programming available, whether "Barney" or "The McLaughlin Group."
As for the second ad: In a moment of serendipitous timing, a commercial from Adbusters Media Foundation is touting April 23-29 – the last week of the Dodge Caravan DVD promotion – as "TV Turn Off Week." The Adbusters spot shows a series of heavy-lidded cherubic young 'uns, who are assumedly watching a television screen right in front of them, staring glassily and open mouthed at the viewer.
They look strikingly similar to the kids in the Caravan commercial.
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