August 5, 2008

Imbecility 101...

Picture the scene: You're an executive in an Ad Agency. Your uber-famous client with the beaucoup bucks wants a flashy new campaign for their latest over-priced cat-pee that makes you smell like every other perfume in history, and you've got to achieve world domination while staying way under budget or he may stand really close and yell at you, enabling you to enjoy his own personal perfume that can shred knotted pine at 500 yards.

Do you...

A) Create a cinematic masterpiece of such life-altering power it could make even Spielberg weep, then play it 24/7 on every station in the world until the merest hint of its arrival leaves sane people chewing razor blades to try and ease the pain...?

...or...

B) Produce a mildly expensive yet tasteful ad, but slide in one 'artistic' shot that will render it utter unplayable on anything so anal as an American Network, then bathe in the endless publicity while watching sales of the malodorous concoction bore holes in the stratosphere on their way to the Sun?

If your client's Calvin Klein, the answer is known. Cal's agency has just produced an ad for his latest forgettable odor, featuring Eva Mendes. It was immediately and predictably banned from every TV station in the country.

Result? Cal's factories can't make it fast enough.

The "Creative Director" guilty of this adolescent insult is maintaining a facade of self-righteous outrage, but this puerile exercise in inspirational bankruptcy is yet another example of creating controversy to gain free publicity...Which begs the question, just how 'creative' is your Director if he finds such a cliché attractive?

To assuage the firestorm of public indignation - for which they so eagerly supplied the fuel - the company will air a G-rated version instead. Meanwhile, the "Directors Cut" will crash You-Tube six times a day, the scent will break records on a budget of $50, the "Creative" Director will get a new Porsche [and a far hotter girlfriend,] and the "star" will raise her fee for her next forgettable film.

This is a tired and brainless assault on our collective intelligence, perpetrated by people with nine-inch pony-tails and the IQ of a Latte, and has been inflicted and enjoyed, in one form or other by every talentless vapidity from Madonna to Mary-Kate Olson.

And the really sad part is, you want to see that ad now...don't you?

Dear reader...you have my sympathy.

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This blog is written by Michael J. Austin.
Created in Linux, with Open-Source software.
Contact me at: HarlequinMail @ GMail.com