Ordinary Advertising

GE stopped making small appliances quite some time ago, but in the irony department the company’s latest advertising effort cannot be beat. If you opened today’s New York Times or Wall Street Journal, you saw what I’m talking about. You also probably saw it if you looked at USA Today or the Los Angeles Times since according to his week’s AdAge the ads are running in “four major national newspapers” and commanding a “substantial portion of GE’s $90 million ad budget.”

What “it” is is a) too big for my scanner, so you’ll have to put up with my description, and b) an 8-page magnum opus of corporate navel-gazing the likes of which I haven’t seen in a long time. On the first page, there’s a single-word headline: “ecomagination”. (That thud you just heard was my head hitting the desk as I was overcome with the need to sleep.) This is followed by a spread that uses the same word as a call-out to a patch of grass growing out of a plastic head labeled like an old-fashioned phrenology chart. (Odd choice that, for a company that makes MRI devices.) Next is a spread featuring a GE locomotive looming over a sunflower. (Huh?) Followed by one with a squirrel on the mast of a wind turbine. And finally, on the last page that clever coinage “ecomagination” again, this time against a blue sky with one puffy, little white cloud.

Pretty ho-hum, eh? But where’s the irony, you ask?

The irony stems from the fact that this supremely ordinary advertising effort–designed to showcase GE’s new focus on ecology of all things–consumed a vast amount of paper in the process. How much? Well, each 8-page unit utilizes 8.28 square feet of newsprint, which multiplied by the daily circulation of the country’s four largest newspapers, 7.8 million, yields a figure of 64,584,000 square feet of flattened forestry. How many trees that comes to I have no idea, but if it’s any number greater than one, it’s too many.

I have nothing against big units, mind you, just big units that deliver little if anything of interest. But then, print advertising has never been GE’s forte, so perhaps the TV component of this effort will be better. Even if it isn’t, at least it will only be a waste of time instead of trees.