What Was PBS Thinking When It Ran This Ad?

Puzzling headline and picture, followed by vapid copy that has little to say – this is our beloved PBS?

My file of clipped ads crying out for makeover is too big for a file folder, so as they come in I just throw them into a deep drawer. And every month, as the time draws near to the deadline for my column, I go to the drawer vowing to sift to the bottom and pick the most likely candidate. But somehow I never manage to keep my vow. The first or second or third ad I come to is so awful and has such potential that it grips me and won’t let go.

But some day I really am going to get to the bottom of that drawer. In any case, I hope my confession won’t discourage you from sending in your choice for a makeover. Besides, you might get lucky and have your nominee land on top of the pile just before I go to the drawer to gather material for a new column.

This issue’s object lesson is an embarrassingly bad ad by PBS trying to encourage viewers to visit and use its Web site.

Absent is PBS’ mellifluous, dignified on-air tone of voice (although it has been getting a little strident at times lately). Instead, we’re treated to a sophomoric joke that’s completely out of character, followed by a few lines of vague, uninformative copy. Pathetic!

Actually, I don’t know whether the headline and picture are a bad joke or not, because I couldn’t figure them out. It’s like one of those enigmatic New Yorker covers or cartoons that you puzzle over with friends, trying to guess what the point is.

We see a man standing on some kind of box. The top half of his body is dressed in a dinner jacket, but for pants he’s wearing jeans. Cool. Behind him is what I thought was a grand piano but then realized was a car with the hood raised.

At first glance it seemed as if the gentleman was screaming in pain. Had he somehow injured himself while working on his car? I thought the darkened hands and the rag he was holding might be blood.

I studied it some more. No, that couldn’t be it. Now, let’s see. “I went in for a tune-up and came out a tenor.” OK, he visited the PBS Web site looking for auto repair advice from the MotorWeek pages but while he was there he got sidetracked by their Great Performances pages on great music and was so enthralled that he began singing along and suddenly discovered he had a great operatic tenor voice. About as credible as a bizarre “Seinfeld” episode, but not as funny.

But if he “went in” for a tune-up, why are his hands dirty? If you go in to your local car repair shop for a tune-up, you don’t get your hands dirty – your mechanic does.

But maybe I’m just too dumb or square to get the joke Anybody out there got a better explanation? If so, please let me know. I will award an autographed copy of “The New MaxiMarketing” to the best explanation I receive by Aug. 12 at [email protected], or fax: 718-884-4665.

Then the few lines of indifferent body copy say, in effect, “Hey, we’ve got a lot of stuff on our Web site, from MotorWeek to Great Performances.” What would you think of a retail merchant who advertised, “Hey, come see us. We have a lot of swell bargains on all kinds of things, from hammers to topcoats.” And, oh, by the way, Great Performances is not about music – when I did a search, the only Great Performances programming I could find was a comedy special by Alan King. (Maybe he wrote their ad.)

In my makeover, I start with a visual reminder of the kinds of programming that draws us to our local public television station, with a hint of three-dimensionality in the way the screens are displayed.

The headline announces the theme of the ad: that the Web site of a television station or network represents a kind of third dimension of viewing enjoyment , that PBS has it, and it’s doing a better job of this than anyone else. (Incorporating the name of the product or service being advertised was a shrewd print ad strategy used and advocated by David Ogilvy. Then the reader is less likely to say later, “That was an interesting promise, but I can’t remember who made it.”)

A very long subhead – what the editors of U.S. News & World Report used to call a “precede” – gives an instant flash impression of the wealth of content on the Web site, with a hot button there for everybody. So even if you don’t read the body copy, you’ll be tempted to visit the site.

Then my body copy starts out by doing what my first boss, the great Victor O. Schwab, taught me: “Start where the reader is” – in this case, the common experience of watching a great television program and wanting to extend the pleasure it provided. The copy then supplies more detail about the site contents, with more hot buttons – for example, an appeal to teachers and educators with a mention of the Teacher Service pages.

Not very funny, but I think it would pull a whole lot more viewers to PBS’ Web site.