Ordinary Advertising

It probably seems like I single out the advertising done by Kraft Foods for more than its fair share of obloquy. And that may, in fact, be statistically true. But it’s not because I have any sort of vendetta going with those well-meaning folks out in Northbrook. I’m just more intimately familiar with the addle-pated ways they go about developing advertising. And have been given to understand, their methodologies differ very little from those employed by most of the other major packaged goods, (car, cosmetics, financial institutions, retailers, consumer goods, liquor et cetera, ad nauseum) advertisers around the country.

Which is how we end up with ads like this one. A tragi-comical example of ordinary, or maybe worse, advertising that by sheer coincidence happened to run about a month before The Wall Street Journal published its annual “Survey of CEO Compensation” wherein it was revealed that by virtue of her current occupancy of the catbird seat at Kraft, Irene Rosenfeld was blessed with emoluments including $1.375MM in annual salary, $2.625MM in annual incentives, $1.779MM in stock option grants, $5MM in restricted stock grants and $6.416MM in cash, performance-based grants for a grand total of $17.196MM in total direct compensation while she and her marketing minions managed to eke out a Total Shareholder Return for the year of -5.7%. Nice work, if you can get it, as the saying goes. Continue reading ‘$17 Million Ought To Do It’

Until the cows came home, if not longer, before running the ordinary television commercial being used by former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection. I might have also attempted to restrain the outpouring of hot air that heralded this $300MM media blitz insofar as it’s probably contributed more to global warming in the last couple weeks than every unscrubbed smokestack in Guangzhou.

But that’s just me. And since I truly believe that mass communications can be used with extraordinary effect to galvanize people into action, I get positively apoplectic when I see it being executed in such an ordinary manner. Especially by an agency I once had such respect for. But what can you expect when the advertising is being directed by a bunch of politicians, scientists, do-gooders and political operatives such as Cathy Zoi and Brian Hardwick (late of Penn, Schoen, surprise, surprise)? If ever there was a consortium of individuals more highly susceptible to getting sideways with the old “we judge ourselves by our intentions, others by their behavior” dictum, I don’t know what it would be.

I could post the spot here, but with 300 large behind it, it’s hard to imagine you haven’t seen it by now. It opens with a series of stock images (so at least we know the organization isn’t squandering its funds on production costs) of the landing at D-Day, a civil rights march and man landing on the Moon. All in an attempt to drive home the point that since “we didn’t wait for someone else to storm the beaches at Normandy…guarantee civil rights or put a man on the Moon,” we sure as hell can’t wait for someone else to solve the global climate crisis.

And a better example of sleepwalking through history or specious reasoning you’d be hard pressed to find. What are they talking about–”we didn’t wait”? Aside from the obvious fact that most of us weren’t alive back then or were just kids, the “we” who were alive waited plenty. In the first instance, for Roosevelt, Churchill, SHAEF and a host of others to figure out how to get a bunch of kids into some flimsy boats, across the English Channel and onto the shore with at least a few of them living to tell about it. Then we waited for what might be considered an even braver group of people (since they actually knew what they were getting themselves in for) to march, get attacked by dogs, sprayed with fire hoses, beaten with clubs and otherwise subjected to the democratic process as it existed in that era to achieve civil rights. And finally, we more or less sat around on our collective asses or crouched under our classroom desks until a President got riled up enough about the Russians running laps around us in the space race that he was able to persuade Congress to turn its attention briefly from underwriting the construction of breakwaters near members’ beach houses and put some serious dough into NASA.

But what this advertising would have us believe is that all we have to do (aside from staying awake for the duration of the commercial) is rise up, band together and what? Uh, well, go to www.wecansolveit.org. And? And sign up. And? Uh, learn more. And? And watch a bunch of dull-ass video segments. And pretty much the rest of the YouTube school of passive resistance: view, vent, forward to a friend. Not exactly the stuff from which zealots are made. And nothing close to suggesting we do anything crazy like exposing ourselves to getting gutshot by a stormtrooper, catching buckshot from a state trooper or shot into the troposphere at the end of an over-sized Roman candle.

But maybe that’s asking too much of people. So would it be too much to ask that at least the caliber of this advertising be commensurate with the scale of the problem it’s trying to tackle? Clearly, this organization has nothing but good intentions. In other words, the macadam with which the road to you-know-where is paved. Which explains why all I see right now is a new 8-lane tollway with an EZ Pass lane marked: www.itwillmakeyoufeelbetter.org.

I know, I’ve been remiss in the posting department lately. Sorry. I got caught up in the annual exercise of figuring out exactly what I need to “render unto Caesar” (rounded to the nearest denarii) and other mundanities of commercial existence. But, fool that I am, I haven’t completely lost interest in this business of ours.

In fact, I just finished a wonderful little book called “Up The Agency” by Peter Mayle. At first I bridled at that title thinking it was a direct lift from Robert Townsend’s “Up The Organization”. But closer scrutiny revealed the two books were published twenty years apart and in an industry where anything in an awards annual more than two years old is considered ripe for the purloining, I guess that would count as a reasonable interregnum. Besides, Mayle’s book is a smart, fast read and paints a picture of the business as agonizingly accurate today as it was when he wrote the fucking thing. Continue reading ‘AWOL’

According to Wall Street lore, bears and bulls can both make money, it’s the pigs that get slaughtered. A taxonomic litany to which I would add one more species: And the chickens that squawk. Mainly because it’s chickens, like yours truly, who sometimes fail to act on the courage of their convictions and end up bitching about the great opportunities they missed.

Case in point, I’ve been ragging on Google for nearly a year now, claiming among other things that its understanding of advertising was limited at best and that the Ponzi scheme otherwise known as the “greater fool” theory was going to run out of suckers sooner or later resulting in what’s disingenuously referred to as a “correction” to its vertiginous stock price. Continue reading ‘Investors Dally’

No matter how long you’ve been around the ad-making business, you’re bound to be familiar with the injunction to “keep it simple.” People don’t have a lot of time to look at ads. And they sure as hell don’t have the spare bandwidth to figure out what the fuck it is you (or the sponsor) are trying to tell them. Sounds simple enough, right?

Except it isn’t. Because as these two ads demonstrate, there’s a line (and it ain’t that fine, if you ask me) between an ad that’s simply brilliant and one that’s simply stupid. Take a look and see what you think. Continue reading ‘A Simple Lesson’