Considering the low quality of TV commercials these days, I have this vision of contemporary life at a big ad agency.
Creative Director: So you want to be a copywriter. Where did you go to school, and what was your major?
Applicant: I was majoring in phys ed at State, but I flunked out.
Creative Director: Do you do much reading?
Applicant: I look through People magazine every now and then. The pictures, mostly.
Creative Director: What qualifications do you have for a job in advertising?
Applicant: My uncle is a VP at your biggest client. He said I could get a job here.
Creative Director: Great! We’ll start you off writing TV commercials aimed for the teen-age, drop-out demographic.
We live in the age of inane commercials, in which desks and chairs disappear, cars fly over the highway, and cows parachute onto a football field. The guiding principle seems to be that if we give them enough computer graphics, maybe they won’t notice that the ads don’t make sense.
To be fair, a few commercials – one out of 20, maybe – are clever and witty. One of my favorites shows a mother telling a TV mobster that she’s going to block his program because it’s too violent for her kids, whereupon the hood offers to give her the watch of his last victim. (“I want you to have Vinnie’s watch, because you deserve it.”) No computer graphics, just a writer with a good sense of humor and a perfect group of actors.
And no one can complain about the commercials from big pharma, which include disclosures of the terrible things that can happen to you if you use their product. “Possible side effects,” the announcer tells us matter-of-factly, “may include nausea, shortness of breath, chest pains, dizzy spells, internal bleeding, irregular heart beat, or, in rare cases, death.” These are arguably the best commercials of them all, because they are truthful to a fault. (And if you take the pill and live, you will feel triumphant.) If brokerage firms were held to the same standards, the announcer would say, “Possible side effects may include loss of all your money, the break-up of your marriage, the loss of your job, and a nervous breakdown.”
Not all pharma companies are blameless, however. Scenes of elderly people gamboling through the fields like Julie Andrews, with the voice-over suggesting that you “ask your doctor if ---- is right for you,” are borderline deceptive. Then there are the faux-medical commercials, like the one showing a white-jacketed announcer, meant to look like a doctor, telling you that a certain brand of mattress will enhance every aspect of your life.
To say that the humor in today's commercials is sophomoric would be to insult sophomores everywhere. I try hard to give the benefit of the doubt to the young (make that immature) copywriters responsible for this rubbish, but it is no use. They should not be copywriters; they should be highway toll collectors or mail sorters or chicken pluckers. If they insist on writing humor, they could create material for some hard-up comic, like John Kerry. But they should not be writing TV network commercials for Fortune 500 companies.
The worst offenders are the fast food and beer producers (aiming at that teen-age, drop-out demographic) and, ironically, financial services firms (aiming at fools with money). Budweiser once produced some classy commercials, like the Clidesdales clopping home at Christmas, but today they are joining their competitors scraping the bottom of the keg. Other big spenders are the automobile makers, whose ads seem to be irresponsibly encouraging reckless driving, warding off lawsuits by cautioning that we are watching a professional driver on a closed course. Oh.
The prize for the dumbest commercial currently running goes to the brokerage firm that tries to make the doubtful point that investors are changing their behavior – by showing office workers behaving like wild monkeys when their boss isn’t looking. I don’t remember the name of the advertiser, which is just as well.
The Capital One commercials, obviously expensive, seize on one doubtful point: people will choose a credit card based on the chance to gain unrestricted air miles. I’m sure that Capital One has market research to support its campaign, but I’m skeptical. These days, most folks I know would rather not fly at all, period.
Lawyers’ commercials are both irritating and unprofessional. A Portland law firm shows us three grim-faced attorneys walking toward the camera, obviously ready to file suit against the cameraman. They try hard to look tough, but whenever I see them I think of the trio as Dewey, Cheatem, and Howe.
The lame commercials are especially annoying during sporting events. Baseball games come with a large supply of gaps for advertisers to fill – a gap every three outs, plus a gap when a team changes pitchers, and even gaps between pitches, if the pitcher is deliberate enough. It’s even worse in football, where commercials are stacked up until there is a break in the action, then unleashed in a nonstop stream of idiocy. An injured player, a time out, a call being reviewed in the replay booth – all these stoppages ring the cash register for the advertisers, or at least for their agencies.
The basic problem, I suspect, is that too little creative talent is chasing too many available minutes of TV time. The proliferation of cable channels hasn’t helped, providing an outlet for the worst of the lot: the home-made commercials for the local furniture stores and car dealers. These I can forgive, because they operate on tiny budgets. But the appalling quality of the network commercials, prepared by major corporations at obscene expense, is inexcusable. No wonder that so many eyeballs are fleeing to the Internet – as you so wisely have.
