let’s talk about advertisements.
i have this strange fascination with advertisements that
express a sentiment or ethos that is/are seemingly opposed to the ethos or identity of the thing being advertised.
banks, for example.
banks serve a pretty simple purpose for most people.
you give them money and they hold on to it for you, or
they give you money and you pay them a fee to use
the money that they’ve given you.
which is why i love advertisements that make
banks seem warm and cuddly, or advertisements
that make banks seem like someone you’d want to go out for dinner with.
many bank ad’s almost seem to disparage money, which
is odd, right?
one long running series of bank ad’s in the states goes on and on about the virtues of not caring too much about money.
‘has your money ever run down the stairs to greet you when you come home from work?’
that sort of thing.
this is akin to mcdonalds having an ad campaign saying, ‘do you really need to eat here? we don’t actually care so much about food.’
personally i like the idea of a bank that cares about money and will, in turn, take it’s depositors seriously.
i saw a royal bank of scotland ad that said, ‘talk less, say more’ and showed two women hugging.
i mean, call me crazy, but i’m not necessarily looking for a financial services company made up of laconic women who embrace each other soulfully instead of actually working.
i’d rather have a financial services company made up of people who are constantly talking about how good they are at their jobs and figuring out new ways of being better bankers.
it reminds me of the simpsons where homer hired an esoteric ad agency for a ‘mr plow’ ad. the esoteric ad featured black and white images and opera, and when the ad was over lisa asked homer:
‘was that your ad?’
to which homer replied:
‘i don’t know…’
i’m also fascinated by steak houses that have pictures of happy cows on their ad’s, and meat processing places showing smiling chickens, etc.
if you sell broccoli you can have a cartoon picture of a smiling piece of broccoli.
that’s creative license.
but if you sell meat you should at least have the decency to acknowledge that the animal that provided the meat probably wasn’t too thrilled about any aspect of the process leading to parts of it’s body ending up in a steak house or meat processing plant.
i’m not saying that steak houses and butchers should have cartoon images of terrified animals being anally electrocuted, but to have cartoon images at a steak house of happy smiling cows in a field seems a bit of a stretch.
i like the japanese approach to advertising, where the advertising really seems to bear absolutely no relationship to the thing being advertised.
for example: you want to sell toothpaste? well why not show dancing hippo’s?
you want to sell breakfast cereal? oh, that would require a space monkey, right?
tampons? frogs flying airplanes.
etc.
ok, 4 a.m in london(11pm in nyc, thus my being wide awake), so i guess i should go lie down in bed and stare at the ceiling and think about possible ad’s for japanese consumer products(crickets playing soccer, dachsunds in lab coats decoding the genome of a bagel, you know, that sort of thing).
-moby
p.s-the japanese ad examples were made up, although i’m sure that actual japanese ad’s have been a lot stranger.