Five Forbidden Marketing/Ad trends for 2003:
“Powered by”: You’ll notice the Powered by Blogger icon on this page - quite a reasonable claim given that Blogger does provide the service that lets me organize and post these entries. But what in god’s name does it mean when radio stations are powered by AOL broadband?
People of the world Unite: Maybe it started with those IBM global networking TV ads, that seemed to find a televisual equivalent of It Takes a Village - intercutting between people of all ages and races; sound editing to make a sentence flow from multiple speakers’ words; feel-good, poeticist copy. Then it was health care providers. Now it’s everyone: Girls Club, prescription drug name brands, car models. Stop the violence. One person, one sentence.
Bearish investing: the most recent offender is the Merrill Lynch ad in which middle-class black couple talks about how diversified their portfolio is because M.L. advised them to invest in mortgage-backed securities. Funny, I don’t remember ads like these in 1999. If these firms were so on the ball they would have been pushing for diversification long before the bubble burst. And Merrill Lynch putting that bull in the living room seems an inadvertant irony given the talk of REITs.
Laddie ads: Now that Beck’s new TV ad campaign has taken its playbook from Maxim and FHM, it’s official - there are no beer brands that aren’t catering to the laddish crowd. Of course, they try to have it both ways, knowingly making fun of men’s enslavement to their libidos while simultaneously tapping into their libidos. As the negative reaction to the Bud Lite foxy-wrestling ad shows, they’re not terribly successful at it. Is it time for a post-post-New Male yet?
“Cool” pre-teens, especially those embarrassed when their parents try to be cool: The list of offenders is too long, but Hood Milk annoys me more than others. Look, even when parents are square, pre-teens just aren’t cool. They’re kids. And twenty years ago, they didn’t care a bit about being cool. I guess they get more allowance now?
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