Advertising. The same mistakes again and again.

It has always been a fact in Hollywood - and therefore in the America it mirrors - that it was okay to show someone getting blown to bits but it was not okay to show someone getting blown.

Pardon the pun but it's true.

Oddly enough car advertising has gone in the opposite direction. Once upon a time Detroit led the world in the attitude that sex sells.

Even the movie Crazy People - in which insane asylum inmates write ads - suggested that a sports car (I forget which) was "too small to get laid in but you get laid the minute you get out".

But then of course this became politically incorrect. Even the less blatant form that actually made it into ads not just movies.

So, in a reversal of Hollywood, Detroit turned to violence.

In reality I think it turned to video games, which had already made driving a violent, unrealistic, fantasy in which all crashes were survivable or, rather, just the signal that the game was over and the driver got to start over.

Some brands have been taken in by this crap that you would expect to rise above it. The latest is Mercedes Benz. They have two completely different TV commercials running in the US right now for the beautifully designed E-Class Coupe. One speaks of its heritage, its connection to other beautifully designed marvels of engineering from Mercedes-Benz's past. 

Then there's the video game disaster. Amazingly well filmed (or digitally created) but a communication disaster none-the-less. 

The car is shown hurtling along a country road - at one point getting all four wheels off the ground - while we see, intercut, calm shots of people walking around a museum of older Mercedes cars.

The speeding E-Coupe makes a turn and heads straight for a building. Presumably the building we've been seeing. And sure enough it does not brake at the huge plate glass window but bursts through it like some over-exaggerated scene in a James Bond movie. Or a video game.

Glass flies everywhere and people run from the maniac behind the wheel.

And while the suitably serious announcer delivers some chest-beating drivel about the car "taking its rightful place" we are left with a stunning reminder of the fact that video games have always ignored (or maybe exploited): CARS KILL.

This would be bad advertising for any car manufacturer. From Mercedes Benz - with such a valid history of innovation and design - it is a sad reminder of how the same kids who play the games are now writing the ads.

And it's all made acceptable, the marketer and ad agency think, by the tiny type at the bottom of the screen:

Professional driver on closed circuit - do not attempt.

Possibly the most dangerous eight words ever written in the advertising world.

***

Then there's the other, almost as ubiquitous, advertising crime. Cleverness.

Meaningless, pointless, waste-of-money cleverness.

The kind of cleverness only writers can conceive. And this truth is obvious to anyone in the business because these are the ads where the visual geniuses, the art directors, are given nowhere to go but headlong into cliche-land.

The king of this type of ad campaign right now is the one being run by HSBC Bank. That last word may be expendable since I think the B of HSBC stands for Bank! But whatever.

A copywriter somewhere - and I use the title somewhat reluctantly as I don't believe he or she deserves it - came up with the monumental piece of rubbish: "Un is in".

The argument goes, according to the announcer (who incidentally sounds to me like he knew he was reading crap), that in this new post-meltdown banking era we all want our financial dealings to be UN complicated, Un-this, Un-that etc etc etc to the point of absurdity.

It's all completed with the ridiculous "un is in".

The ads are forgotten the second after you see them. Why? Two reasons. What we need in these troubled times is clear English, not some juvenile inventiveness. And because the ads have no real idea, the images that accompany the verbal bullshit are simply every banking, hand-shaking, happy-family -playing cliche ever invented strung together. These ads were clearly sold to the client as a written script, bought as a script with precious little attention, if any, given to the uniqueness of the visual message. 

TV may be a dying medium but until the day it finally dies it will be a VISUAL medium. The general rule in my day was 80% in the eyes, 20% in the ears. That's how we humans remember. We are far more influenced by what we see than by what we hear.

Which is why HSBC needs to scrap this out-of-step-with-the-times idea and start over. Unless they mean to confirm every last bad thought we have had about the banking world's lack of ideas in recent months. Uninspiring. Unhelpful. Unimaginative. Unbelievable.

Oddly enough I just saw this same "Un" idea used by a fast feeder (as someone hilariously called fast food providers). It didn't even work there! And if the same idea can span Banks and Burgers it's a good bet it'll work for nobody. But believe me, a couple of major ad agencies are claiming to have recognized a "trend" and right now are selling Un-ideas to unsuspecting clients.

***

Unsuspecting? Or just unaware?

The first ad campaign for the newly conjoined Morgan Stanley Smith Barney just hit the air. Almost comically described in the voiceover copy as a coming together of two great names. Two companies maybe but I count four names.

Be that as it may, the commercial - all based on the visual of a question mark turning up in unexpected places (at least they don't say that!) - features a cute little bakery called Vesuvio.

Pretty much everyone who lives in New York knows that Vesuvio was once a landmark in Greenwich Village that closed. It couldn't pay the rent the landlord was asking during the real estate boom or so the legend has it. For a while someone maintained the smaller bakery in SoHo and turned it into a coffee shop to try to add to the money coming in. But it too failed. And the old-fashioned little store has stood empty ever since.

Which is why it was available for this investment firm to use in its commercial!

The Morgan Stanley Smith Barney ads may claim to have answers for your questions (when you think about it, another trite advertising cliche) but the one question they don't ask is why did an old, beloved business like Vesuvio - and so many more like it - have to die while Wall Street and others got rich?

And did nobody point out to the company paying for this advertising this most unfortunate of location choices?

 

Comments

[anon]

I'm writing ads for a bank right now. It's awful. They spend countless meetings talking about their service and customer satisfaction surveys and, worst of all, their commitment to "relationship" banking.

Worst of all, they think their customers actually think these things mean something. Just to ensure no-one in the world will notice their ads, they also pair these trite and cliche-ridden ideas with happy smiling people which they've convinced themselves are "real" and "honest."

And so, at a time when people might actually want to hear something from a bank about what's useful about a bank, what a bank actually does for them and their communities, the bank does nothing but blather on like usual, snagging "shifters" who move money on the first hint of a give-away $100 gift card or whatever.

And the bank CEO is happy because his ads look like the ads his golf buddies make at their banks.

So, to the guy who said that he knew he was wasting at least half his money on advertising but he just didn't know which half, I can tell you, if he works at bank, he's wasting both halfs.

[Dave]

"And the bank CEO is happy because his ads look like the ads his golf buddies make at their banks."

What a common problem! Nothing different or challenging or informative, because his golf buddies will think he's not 'one of them'. I wrote a post some time ago about the pressure to become 'one of them' in advertising management. The pressure to be just like all your peers in banking must be huge. Come hell or high water Wall Street supports its own.

Let's face it, if they can convince themselves they truly deserve those huge bonuses they can certainly convince themselves that idea-free advertising works.

ps it's "halves"

[Jeff]

Great post.

This post should be required reading for all in advertising. Which, of course, means adlanders will avoid it like the plague, if they can. After all, who wants to look in the mirror and see Medusa when one could be staring into a martini and pontificating on the importance of awards shows or some other drivel?

To me, advertising is simple (if hard, as so many simple things are): Find the product benefit you think is most meaningful to your target, then dramatize the benefit in the most persuasive way you can think of. Clever ain't got nothin' do with it. You want to be clear, and if cleverness serves clarity great, if not, you're better off just saying what you mean (although, if this is the best you can do, you should consider a different career).

And don't lie. You will be found out, and then have to spend double your ad budget on PR to fix your tattered reputation.

Jeff