Crabby Humorless Entitled White guys or the stupid Spyder ETF commercial

A determined, strong jawed, humorless white guy stomps across his lawn toting small bushes and various garden tools. Looking at his totally passive wife and his growing son, the viewer should infer that time is passing while he grumpily hauls tools back and forth in front of his huge white frame house. Towards the end of the commercial he trims a tall hedge into a perfectly flat top. He finally cracks a smug smile at the end of the commercial. He has dragged a chair and small table onto the lawn and about three feet away from the hedge. He sits down, stares into the dense bushes and gloats. The camera pulls away and points out over the hedge--there is a brightly painted Victorian house and stylized hills and fields. I guess we are supposed like the guy for his ingenuity and stick-to-it-ness for keeping his world bland. I just want to slap his smug mug.

Resurrection and the Cadillac campaign is a hot mess

I have not posted on this blog since 2011. I didn't recall that I made 18 posts. I was sure there was only one and it was the one about methiolate. Probably because it was painful. I have been driven to start posting again. Although I am gainfully employed and have been for several years, I still watch a ton of TV--mostly cable news and true crime with a little PBS thrown in for balance. My current job is over 200 miles from my home. I commute on a weekly basis. I have a rathole apartment in the city I work in and I don't have a TV down there. This is important since it means my TV watching is limited and there are still commercials that drive me crazy. So, the Cadillac dare to be great commercials are a hot mess. Before I get into the details, I want say I LOVED the Chrysler/Detroit commercials. I know who Jason Wu is and that is a heart warming anecdote he tells about his mom buying him a sewing machine, but what is the connection to Cadillacs? The Woz (I can't spell his name)looks like he is paralyzed or at least using a paralytic drug and what is the point of the turntable? The woman talking about quitting a corporate job to do something not mentioned just goes over my head. All these commercials make me think that way back in the planning process, somebody had a germ of an interesting plan for this campaign. But then the committee work started and groups of managers started demanding changes and making the ads shorter and they have ended up with a choppy, disconnected, garbled narrative. And why in god's name did they film it in NYC?

The Regretsy 2010 Christmas Special

Even if you don't follow regretsy.com, I hope you enjoy this clip. I think it is brilliant. Full disclosure: I grew up in the 60s right along with the original Rudolph show.


The Regretsy 2010 Christmas Special

Whining Ninnies and Special Snowflakes selling Hondas and Kias

My current "most annoying" commercial is the Holiday Honda commercial. According to my rigorous research (a one-minute google search) the song is by a band called Vampire Weekend. A whiny male voice repeats the word holiday over and over interspersed with lyrics I can't understand, while people and cardboard objects move herky jerky all over the set. I am guessing that the stop action is supposed cute and hand-crafted. Just annoying. It reminds me of the Kia christmas commercial. The hipster couple wearing long underwear and ironic christmas accesories drives me crazy. This is what happens when children are raised to think everything they do is special--insipid and unremarkable crap.

WWHP YEEHAW It's the whip!!! Best Radio EVAR!!!!!!

Every two months or so, I have been driving from Indy to my ancestral home in Wisconsin and back. Usually I drive through Chicago because the route is direct, and I love driving in the city. Occasionally, because of weather or traffic, I take the longer, boring route through Bloomington IL. My Luddite confession is that I don't have an ipod (and I only have one song on my iphone--it took me 45 minutes figure out how to download it), or satellite radio. Instead I listen to the car radio. Primitive, I know. And increasingly more generic. Same narrow list of songs, and if the station even has live DJs, the patter is all the same.

I had a vague recollection that when I drove between Leroy and Bloomington I heard some good radio--I assumed that it was a ephemeral student station.

There were no DJs, just a couple of farm market reports, and commercials for a local harley dealer, Farm Credit Bureau and a bbq joint called Porgy's. It's a throwback to a more idiosyncratic time in radio.

Their website says:

"Somewhere between Memphis and Chicago. . the Whip

Playing the best in blues, bluegrass, alternative and traditional country, rock, gospel and American Roots music"

Lots of Levon Helm, Steve Earle and a lot of stuff I wasn't familiar with but loved. Angry political screeds, plaintive wails and just for the hell of it songs. And the coolest thing is the station ID--call letters followed by the sound of whip cracking!! I wanted to stop the car, find out what I listening and get some of that music for myself. I haven't been that excited about a radio station since I was in high school listening to progressive FM stations. The playlists were huge and they rarely repeated songs. Once I got past Bloomington, the Whip started getting staticky, so I switched to WXRT-one of my favorite stations, but a big corporate player with lots repeats in the relatively narrow playlist.

Carlos and Maria: Using her butt to sell Ricola cough drops

I know that the Carlos and Maria Ricola commercial is at least a year old, but I finally hit my breaking point. Initially, I just hated his smarmy shrug and request for a cough drop and then I grew to loathe the shot of her butt on his shoulder. So the shot of her smooth butt could be considered mildly titillating, but does it really sell more cough drops? The premise of the European dance competition really has nothing to do with cough drops, but it does create a lame venue for views of Maria's butt. I can't believe some marketing team thinks this is good idea.

Calling out the marketers: another reason I love Michelle Obama

Today, I saw an excerpt of Michelle Obama's address about fighting childhood obesity to the Grocery Manufacturer's Association. The thrust of her argument was two pronged: first, healthy food needs to be easily available and affordable, and second, nutritional information must be intelligble for parents making family food decisions. I was half listenting to the television and half reading my email. Then I heard her say:

But what it doesn't mean is taking out one problematic ingredient, only to replace it with another. While decreasing fat is certainly a good thing, replacing it with sugar and salt isn't. And it doesn't mean compensating for high amounts of problematic ingredients with small amounts of beneficial ones -- for example, adding a little bit of Vitamin C to a product with lots of sugar, or a gram of fiber to a product with tons of fat doesn't suddenly make those products good for our kids.

This isn't about finding creative ways to market products as healthy. As you know, it's about producing products that actually are healthy -- products that can help shape the health habits of an entire generation.

Did I just hear her slam marketers and marketing in the solar plexus? I found this so refreshing because she was talking about something serious and substantial--she was not dancing around an issue with talking points, avoiding talking about something or letting her opponents define the discourse. And she did it in a civil, charming, "as parents, grandparents and humans we certainly all care about this issue" tone. But there was no mistake that she was advocating for a seismic shift in the grocery manufacturing industry.

And she goes on to say:

So today I want to challenge each and every one of you to go back to your companies, take a look at your marketing budgets and ask some questions. For example, when you put money into reformulating a product to make it healthier, do you then invest enough in marketing that product to kids and parents? Or is most of the marketing budget still going to the less healthy versions? In other words, which products are you really selling? And what kinds of messages are your advertisements sending?

Continuing to call out the 800 lbs gorilla in the room! Throughout the speech she talks about how children (using her own children as examples) respond to marketing the difficulty busy parents have evaluating requests for this or that type of food. She acknowledges how effective marketing campaigns are and then calls out marketers doing their jobs well with unhealthy products. By insisting that that the discussion include all aspects of the childhood obesity morass, she is attempting to circumvent a marketing campaign that forgets/limits information about nutritional value.

I used to think that marketing was fluff. It certianly wasn't anything I was interested in. At various points in my professional life I have had to deal with marketing, marketers and market research. Personally, I think it is all a house of cards, a fantasy world and, recently I have decided, an obtuse type of communication. Messaging becomes more important than discussion. Each group focuses only on their agenda, ignoring aspects of the issues that are uncomfortable, don't fit into the message and are complicated.

Also on the local news they ran a feature on the reaction of local people who are undecided about the healthcare issue to the advertising barrage. One woman complained that the issue was too complicated and she didn't understand commercials for either side--she wanted the simple version. Sometimes stuff isn't simple and people have to think about stuff. This made me sad and frustrated. I know that I could dismiss the woman as lazy and ignorant (which she probably was), but it made me realize people are now trained to expect the simple version of anything. What if there isn't a simple version? What if it is complicated, difficult and fluid?