So there's this idea that's been floating around the past number of years about the collapse of media, the increasing irrelevance of advertising and the consequent death of the agency business.
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| EVOLUTION: Bob Garfield circa 1995 on the left vs. Garfield today. |
How are you feeling about your vagina these days?
Like, are you cool with it? Are you mildly discontented? Disgusted? Smitten? Vaginawise, would you say you are satisfied with the way it is treating you, and you it? Are you even giving your vagina any thought at all, or perhaps taking it for granted, in the way that many of us take for granted, for example, our bile ducts?
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Next month, after 25 years as the ad industry's preeminent critic, Bob Garfield will retire his weekly ad reviews in Advertising Age to take on two new enterprises.
Yellow is an innovation? Really?
All this time, we'd assumed the three prime colors of the TV holy trinity were the three primary colors: blue, red and yellow. Nope, turns out that it was blue, red and green. Who knew?
If adding a blade to the Quattro razor makes for a smoother shave, it stands to reason that adding yellow to the video palette would make TV more colorful, bright and lifelike. Enter, then, Quattron, from Sharp, which outdoes the status quo to the tune of 33%. Whether this results in a noticeable improvement, however, we are in no position to judge. The slogan is, "You have to see it to see it," and the slogan is true.
A correction has been made in this story. See below for details.
This is about a funny, knowing and smart direct-to-consumer drug campaign now being tested in Baltimore. But first, just a quick reminder that pharma marketing is a cesspool.
Negative clinical data are suppressed. "Thought leaders" are suborned into attaching their names to pharma-authored studies, and to promoting unauthorized off-label uses. Medical journals are co-opted by advertising and reprint sales. Practicing physicians are bribed to write prescriptions by pretty pharma detailers with free samples and long legs.
Is it even advertising? Who the hell knows? But it is so cool and funny and wicked and surprising and surprisingly restrained and postmodern in the best sense. In short: so Devo.
Devo, of course, is the band/ongoing performance-art project that you might call industrial new wave, if you were determined to label a moving genre target. They've been nationally prominent for 30 years, since they appeared on ABC's "Fridays" in hazmat jump-suits and "energy domes," which were terraced red plastic hats resembling upside-down flower pots.
 Marketer: Devo Agency: Mother, Los Angeles |
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OK, it's a little derivative. A lot derivative. Basically, it's a mash-up of two enormously popular, enormously successful TV campaigns. "The World's Greatest Spokesperson in the World," for Nationwide Insurance, is exactly 50% Flo, the Progressive insurance store clerk, and 50% the Dos Equis' "Most Interesting Man in the World."
So what? Us, we wouldn't borrow so heavily from other sources, on grounds of journalistic ethics and simple self-respect. But advertising isn't journalism, and it certainly isn't art. Advertising is permitted to mate a donkey with a horse and sell the client a mule, because the client just wants to sell stuff to folks and doesn't much care how. Nor do the folks, who have bigger things to worry about -- like health care and Tiger Woods. If it's a nice mule, believe you us, all is forgiven.
Bob, please watch the Google spot. And then make up some creative excuse why it didn't make your list among the very top spots of the game. Or better still, devote a whole column to its charm. It was absolutely one of the standouts in what was a lackluster year.
Ad Age does its best to identify and obtain every Super Bowl spot well in advance of the game. But this advertiser was never on our radar. And I file my review on the Friday before the game. I have a number of skills, such as parallel parking and jar-opening. But altering time and space is not one of them.
But you could have added the Google spot to your column after the game, right?
The USA Today Ad Meter says the Betty White football-game spot for Snickers was the best. You gave it two stars. Doesn't this prove you don't know what you're talking about?
The Ad Meter has the rare quality of being a statistically unsound measure of irrelevant data. Let's keep an eye on Snickers sales, why don't we?
For reasons explained elsewhere in this issue, AdReview never saw the Super Bowl. We did see almost all of the commercials beforehand, however, having received most from willing advertisers and extracted some, like wisdom teeth, from others.
 Marketer: Google Agency: Google Creative Lab, New York |
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